Yearly Archives: 2017
May 3, 2017 Donald KochanProperty
Taisu Zhang,
Cultural Paradigms in Property Institutions, 41
Yale J. Int’l L. 347 (2016), available at
SSRN.
Can we bring preferred legal norms to culture, asking culture to adapt, or do we bring culture to the formation of legal norms, asking law to adapt? This is not just a normative question causing consideration of moral or consequentialist choices. It is also an empirical one. Regardless of what we think we ought to do or might want to do, the real world may very well be constructed to preordain the sequence. Indeed, the embeddedness of culture in societal architecture may limit the bandwidth of available opportunities for law to act as an influence exogenous to culture.
To understand the interplay between culture and the law, it is useful to evaluate historical developments of legal doctrines from a comparative perspective. That is the eminently valuable project undertaken by Professor Taisu Zhang in his article, Cultural Paradigms in Property Institutions. Continue reading "Same Base, Different Taste: The Cultural Ingredient in Property Law"
May 2, 2017 Kristina NiedringhausLexLibrarianship and Legal Technology
Experiential learning is currently one of the buzz words of legal education. Recent changes to the ABA Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools have focused greater attention on learning outcomes and assessment and increasing opportunities for learning and practicing skills that students will use as attorneys. In fact, ABA Standard 303(a)(3) requires a minimum of 6 credit hours of experiential course work.
Traditionally, experiential learning was widely thought to be the domain of law school clinics and externships, or field placements. However, the increased credit hour requirement for experiential learning has caused law schools to review their curriculum and determine whether sufficient experiential learning opportunities exist to meet the minimum requirement. Accordingly, there is a push to design new courses, or redesign existing courses, to meet a third type of experiential learning termed simulation courses, as described in ABA Standard 304. In order to qualify as a simulation course under the standard, a course should provide an experience “reasonably similar” to client representation although the student is not working with a real client.
Professor Alyson M. Drake’s article calls for the creation or retooling of stand-alone research classes that will meet the requirements to be designated as experiential classes. An increase in the number of research classes categorized as experiential will provide two benefits. First, and most importantly, it can serve to provide additional legal research instruction beyond the first year of law school. It will also support the mission of law schools to expand course offerings that meet the experiential standard. Continue reading "A Call, and Roadmap, to Create Legal Research Classes that Meet the Experiential Standard"
May 1, 2017 Angela FernandezLegal History
Robert Deal is a historian at Marshall University. His book is a nuanced account of the nineteenth-century British and American whaling industry and how it was misunderstood by contemporary lawyers and judges and continues to be misunderstood by present-day legal scholars.
Herman Melville famously wrote in Moby-Dick that whalemen settled their disputes using “hard words and harder knocks – the Coke-Upon-Littleton of the fist” (Moby-Dick, Chapter 89). As Deal shows, however, little violence actually sprung up when the crews of two (or more) ships pursued a whale but only one took it. Continue reading "“Coke-Upon-Littleton of the Fist”: Law, Custom, and Complications"
Apr 28, 2017 Michael GreenJurisprudence
For too long the focus in philosophy of law has been the national legal system. As some have already observed, this ignores public international law. But it also ignores private international law, or (as Americans would call it) the conflict of laws. Private international law is less about creating laws and judgments that bind nations than it is about coordinating nations’ existing laws and judgments. Philosophers of law also tend to ignore similar coordination within a national legal order. Not much is said about federalism, subsidiarity, and administrative law.
The focus on the unitary national legal system extends to how philosophers of law use the concept of authority. As Joseph Raz has argued, an authority provides a service: those subject to the authority are better able to comply with their reasons for action by doing what the authority says than by considering the reasons directly. For example, a doctor will be an authority for me if I am better able to do the right thing medically by following the doctor’s orders than by acting on my own reasoning about medical matters. Simply because lawmakers are considered to be authorities does not mean they are. But because lawmakers claim authority, even if they may not have it, authority is considered essential to understanding the law. Because of the focus on the unitary national legal order, however, philosophers have concentrated on the relationship between a single authority and its subjects—how the authority mediates between its subjects and their reasons for action. Continue reading "Interauthority Relationships"
Apr 27, 2017 David OrentlicherHealth Law
While the Affordable Care Act has done much to improve access to care—20 million more Americans carry health care insurance as a result of ACA—the Act’s ability to contain health care spending is less clear. Accordingly, efforts to identify effective policies for limiting health care costs are critical.
Unfortunately, the experience with many cost-containment strategies has been disappointing. What seems promising in theory may not pan out in practice. That makes a recent review by Nelson Sabatini and colleagues especially worth reading. They highlight a model in Maryland that has shown very encouraging results so far. Continue reading "Cost Containment—Global Budget Caps"
Apr 26, 2017 Douglas NeJaimeFamily Law
For decades, same-sex couples have made claims—in both politics and law—to parenthood. Many of these claims relate to the regulation of assisted reproductive technologies (ART), as same-sex couples pursue modes of family formation made possible by ART and seek legal recognition of the parental ties that grow out of their use of ART. These claims have only grown more potent in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision granting same-sex couples access to marriage on both due process and equal protection grounds. The centrality of ART in contemporary claims to LGBT equality leads Michael Boucai to ask in a timely and fascinating new article, Is Assisted Procreation an LGBT Right?
In resisting the turn to ART as an LGBT political project, Boucai contrasts the primacy of biogenetic ties in organizing around ART with the role of nonbiological forms of kinship in the history and ethics of LGBT life. ART’s “appeal to American society’s pervasive biogeneticism, its deep-seated faith in the priority and superiority of biogenetic forms of relationship and identity,” Boucai asserts, runs against the LGBT community’s longstanding commitment to “a social and functionalist … conception of familial relationships.” Continue reading "Biological and Social Approaches to the LGBT Family"
Apr 25, 2017 Ann TweedyEquality
Andrés Reséndez,
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (2016), available at
Amazon.
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America is a devastating encyclopedic account of slavery in the Spanish colonial New World. For me, the ultimate effect was a surprising combination of a renewed sense of the intractability of old problems like racism and slavery and an acute sense of having awoken to a new historical reality that I previously knew next to nothing about.
As a professor of federal Indian law, I begin my class each semester with a brief overview of early colonialism, including the Requerimiento, a document that Spanish explorers read to Indigenous peoples before attacking them. Drafted in 1510, the Requerimiento threatened the original inhabitants of the Spanish colonies with slavery and war if they did not accept Christianity and the primacy of both the Pope and the Spanish monarchs. Despite my knowledge of the widespread use of this document, I had no idea of the breadth of the system of enslavement that Indians in the Spanish New World, ranging from New Mexico, California, Utah, and Florida down to Chile, were subject to. Author and UC Davis historian Andres Reséndez posits remarkably that Indigenous peoples’ precipitous population declines from the end of the fifteenth century through the mid-sixteenth century were due more to “slavery, overwork, and famine” than to disease. (P. 17.) While shocking given the prevalence of the disease theory, this idea makes intuitive sense to me because I can see the popularity of the disease hypothesis standing alone possibly being fueled by its resonance with old but unfortunately not quite extirpated Western ideas of the supposedly divinely ordained superiority of Europeans and European-Americans compared to their Indigenous counterparts. Given slavery’s overtly oppressive character, the idea that Indigenous populations were decimated through slavery (in addition to disease) is undoubtedly more difficult for European-Americans to reckon with. In short, the book pierced me and changed me, and I will never see American history or Latin American history the same way again. Continue reading "The Staying Power of Injustice and the Prolonged History of the Trafficking of Indian Children in The Other Slavery"
Apr 24, 2017 Elizabeth G. ThornburgCourts Law
I should start by putting my own bias on the table: I think the changes to pleading standards brought about by Twombly and (especially) Iqbal are a really bad idea. Procedural systems that turn on early pleading of factual detail have failed for centuries to provide either accurate or efficient results. Rather, gatekeeping based on pleadings encourages and rewards pleading disputes, leads to wasteful motion practice about degrees of particularity, and, worse, the dismissal of meritorious claims under conditions of information asymmetry. Even if I did not hold these views, however, I would find much to admire in Lonny Hoffman’s elegantly structured response to William H.J. Hubbard’s article, A Fresh Look at Plausibility Pleading, an article that doubts that “plausibility” analysis has much impact and suggests that plaintiffs with weak cases are better off losing quickly.
Hubbard’s piece is a fascinating thought experiment: what if there were no pleading standards, so that decisions about what cases to bring and how to plead them were entirely in the hands of plaintiff-side lawyers? It is generally agreed that lawyers play a gatekeeping role in litigation. In fact, lawyer gatekeeping itself represents only a tip of the no-lawsuit iceberg, since studies consistently show that most people with a potential justiciable claim do not even consult an attorney. (American Bar Association, Legal Needs and Civil Justice: A Survey of Americans, Major Findings of the Comprehensive Legal Needs Study (1994); Hazel Genn, Paths to Justice: What People Do and Think About Going to Law (1999).) Nevertheless, Hubbard’s article contributed to the discussion by updating and attempting to quantify this effect. Continue reading "A Well-Pleaded Argument"
Apr 21, 2017 James GrimmelmannTechnology Law
There is a theory that Donald Trump does not exist, and that the fictional character of “Donald Trump” was invented by Internet trolls in 2010 to make fun of American politics. At first “Trump” himself was the joke: a grotesque egomaniac with orange skin, a debilitating fear of stairs, and a tenuous grasp on reality. He was a rage face in human form. But then his creators realized that there was something even funnier than “Trump’s” vein-popping, bile-specked tirades against bad hombres and nasty women: the panicked and outraged denunciations he inspired from self-serious defenders of the status quo. “Trump’s” election was the greatest triumph of trolling in human history. It has reduced politics, news, and culture to a non-stop, deplorably epic reaction video.
There is no entry for “Donald Trump” in the index of Whitney Phillips’s 2015 book, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. But this playful, perceptive, and unsettling monograph is an outstanding guidebook to the post-Trump hellscape online trolling has made for us. Or perhaps I should say to the hellscape we have made for ourselves, because Phillips’s thesis is that trolling is inherently bound up with the audiences and antagonists who can’t stop feeding the trolls. Much like Trump, trolls “are born of and fueled by the mainstream world.” (Pp. 168-69.) Continue reading "Make America Troll Again"
Apr 20, 2017 Robert RosenCorporate Law
Students of organizations know that numbers can drive action and uncounted outcomes can get lost despite their mission centrality. The strategy of “Management by Objectives” was praised for providing a focus, preventing drift, and criticized for ignoring that which is difficult to count, misdirecting energies. Those of us in law schools know how rankings can help align us to serve students, but also can involve us in wasteful (or just less than optimum) activities to improve our rankings. More importantly, the rankings may deter our pursuing difficult but crucial pedagogies, whose importance may be unappreciated by students and the rankings.
Oren Perez’s The Green Economy Paradox is critical in the best sense. It digs deep into the numeracy problem, recognizing both the good and the bad. It is also comprehensive, in examining a broad range of indexes that might foster sustainable activities, by counting what corporations do in multiple ways. Rather than directing goals or processes, rankings “simply” count and hope that comparisons with others, and with previous years’ results, will move corporations toward sustainable activities. The numbers of rankings are increasing. This week, I learned that my university is joining the “Sustainability Tracking Rating System of the American Association for Sustainability in Higher Education.” One can hope that this Association ponders Perez’s fine article. Continue reading "“If you count it, it will count:” From Directives to Reports Refined"
