Yearly Archives: 2017
Apr 5, 2017 Asanga WelikalaInternational & Comparative Law
In recent years, the cornucopia of academic commentary on dialogic constitutionalism (or cognate terms like democratic dialogue) has been one of the richest and most creative in constitutional theory and comparative constitutional law. The debate has benefited from celebrated contributions from some of the world’s best-known constitutional thinkers, as much as from fresh thinking by younger scholars. The current debate began as a response to the institutional innovation, and later as a theoretical discourse, within some Commonwealth countries that adopted parliamentary bills of rights, although arguably the embryo of the model has an older pedigree in the Commonwealth tradition (e.g., the “manner and form” provisions of s.5 of the Government of Ireland Act 1920 or s.29 of the Ceylon (Constitution) Order in Council 1946). The development of the dialogic model has since also engaged distinctive practical challenges of different global regions, from North and South America, to Europe, Africa, and Asia. Within its broad rubric therefore it has not only embraced both common law and civilian systems as well as the developed and developing worlds, but also found diverse theoretical articulations serving a wide range of quite different constitutional challenges and contexts. Professor Alison L. Young’s recent book, Democratic Dialogue and the Constitution, is the latest and one of the most rigorous contributions to this already highly sophisticated debate over dialogic constitutionalism.
For those for whom at least the more extreme claims of the two counterposed models of legal and political constitutionalism hold little attraction and practical utility, dialogic constitutionalism has an almost intuitive appeal as a modus vivendi. In forcing institutional parity and dialogue between the judiciary and the political branches—rather than the supremacy of one or the other—it seems to both meet the requirements of representative democracy and the protection of normative principles, when societies are confronted with legitimate and reasonable but deep disagreements over matters of constitutional significance. It empowers the judiciary adequately to make authoritative statements about the scope of constitutional rights, while simultaneously maintaining the role of legislatures as forums of democratic deliberation and decision-making. The dialogic model also enhances the scrutiny of elected executives, by demanding equal emphasis on parliamentary as well as judicial forms of accountability. In eschewing strong-form judicial review, it addresses the democratic deficit of legal constitutionalism (the counter-majoritarian difficulty), and in abjuring the untrammelled parliamentary supremacy of political constitutionalism, it accommodates liberalism’s counter-majoritarian principles in the protection of individuals and minorities. In short, it sets to work the ideal institutional model for the principled negotiation of constitutional disputes in democracies, whether over rights or questions of a more general nature. Continue reading "Dynamic Democratic Dialogue"
Apr 4, 2017 James E. PfanderCourts Law
Michael T. Morley,
The Federal Equity Power (March 1, 2017), available at
SSRN.
Michael Morley has many skills we admire in a scholar: he is doggedly productive; he has an easy command of the established authorities; and he typically identifies sources that shed new light on the problem he has chosen to tackle. Perhaps best of all, Morley has a canny eye for the kind of project that has become ripe for careful exploration. His new article on the federal equity power confirms this.
We have enjoyed something of an equity renaissance in recent years. The Supreme Court has been busy, fashioning a body of federal equity law for application to a diverse array of problems. To be sure, the Court’s handiwork has drawn its share of criticisms, perhaps most pointedly from John Langbein. But it also has its share of defenders. In an elegant piece of writing (reviewed in JOTWELL), Sam Bray celebrated the Court’s new equity jurisprudence as a flexible body of principles drawn from the days of the divided bench. While Bray recognized that the Court’s equity might not pass muster as good history, he argued that it might nonetheless provide the foundation for a supple body of law. Continue reading "Erie and Equity"
Apr 3, 2017 Donna CokerCriminal Law
Michael Tonry,
Making American Sentencing Just, Humane, and Effective, 46
Crime & Justice: A Review of Research (forthcoming 2017), available at
SSRN.
The US incarcerates a greater percentage of its people than any other country in the world—by a wide margin. Even though we have heard the statistics enough to have become inured, they still manage to shock us: more than 2 million people are behind bars and more than 5 million more live under the daily supervision of the criminal justice (on parole, probation, etc.). There have been some promising events in recent years: bi-partisan Congressional support for sentencing reform, though still no enacted legislation; state voter referendums such as California’s Proposition 47 that roll back sentences for low-level non-violent offenses; former Attorney General Holder’s directives on federal charging; both the liberal Soros Foundation and the conservative Koch Industries are funding sentencing reform initiatives.
But still, as Michael Tonry argues in his detailed and sobering policy article, these reforms are mere “nibbles at the edges” of mass incarceration and will not make a significant difference in our outrageously high prison rates. While prison rates have dipped, much of that decline is not because of meaningful sentencing reform, but rather because of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Plata requiring California to release 35,000 prisoners to remedy overcrowding. Continue reading "Dismantling Mass Incarceration"
Mar 31, 2017 Mary ZieglerLegal History
Marie-Amélie George,
The Custody Crucible: The Development of Scientific Authority About Gay and Lesbian Parents, 34
Law & Hist. Rev. 487 (2016), available at
SSRN.
Marie-Amélie George’s meticulously researched, provocative study of early gay-and-lesbian custody cases focuses on the power of social science research to reshape both the law and the larger society. George takes us inside the courtroom fights, landmark parenting studies, and conservative strategies that have defined debates about the meaning and origins of homosexuality. Using published opinions, rare trial records, oral histories, personal correspondence, and social-movement records, The Custody Crucible describes how social-science arguments made the difference to gay and lesbian parents seeking to prove that their sexual orientation in no way harmed their children.
But the relationship between scientific research and litigation that George excavates is complex. She convincingly argues that courtroom battles sparked new research about the impact of gay or lesbian parenting on the sexual orientation and gender identity of children. As importantly, the progress made by gay and lesbian parents helped set the agenda of conservative organizations intent on demonstrating that homosexual parents were often sexually abusive, impoverished, and unable to stop their children from becoming deviant. Nuanced and thoughtful, The Custody Crucible contributes to a rich literature on the relationship between cause-lawyering and social change. However, George breaks out of the framework often governing these studies, looking beyond the overall benefit a movement can expect from winning or losing in court. The Custody Crucible illuminates how litigation can help frame scientific questions that resonate well beyond the courtroom. Continue reading "The Science of Sexuality"
Mar 30, 2017 Sean CoyleJurisprudence
In this interesting and clearly argued article, Kimberley Brownlee investigates the extent to which the law can serve as a model of virtue. She rightly points out that many ethicists understand law deontologically, as a set of principles that determine rights and duties: in other words, that for law to embody a morality, this morality must be essentially law-like. The article observes that the law’s various concerns cannot be entirely reduced to deontology (P. 5), but there is in any case room for dissatisfaction with the idea that deontology and “virtue ethics” are opposing conceptions of morality. Aquinas, for example, devotes the entire secunda-secundae of the Summa Theologiae to a discussion of the virtues, but does not hesitate to identify duties to be performed (including the human being’s duties to God).
One interesting observation at the outset of the article is that the law “tends toward injustice.” This is a very arresting comment, and it is a shame that there is no discussion of it. For one thing, it runs contrary to the much-repeated idea of Lon Fuller that the law “works itself pure,” that is, tends toward justice over time, or to the classical common law philosophies of writers such as Hale or Coke, which regarded the law as the accumulation of reason. One could also point to the natural law content of positive law: the suppression and punishment of criminality, maintenance of the inner tranquility of the state, the restraint of fraud, sexual crimes and civil wrongs, regulation of contracts and so forth. In all such cases the tendency of the law seems to be toward justice rather than its contrary. Continue reading "Law and Virtue"
Mar 29, 2017 Andres GuadamuzIntellectual Property Law
Emma Steel, Original Sin: Reconciling Originality in Copyright with Music as an Evolutionary Art Form, 37 Eur. Intell. Prop. Rev. 66 (2015).
Copyright often makes little sense, particularly when you explain it to people who are not familiar with its concepts. Jessica Litman expresses this problem well in her book Digital Copyright by stating that people “find it very hard to believe that there’s really a law out there that says the stuff the copyright law says.” Anyone who has had to talk to members of the public about copyright will have similar experiences.
One area of copyright that has been receiving quite a lot of coverage recently is originality of music, especially in various high profile cases in which famous artists have been sued for copyright infringement. The most visible perhaps is the recent case of Williams v. Bridgeport Music, Inc, in which the estate of Marvin Gaye sued Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams for copyright infringement in the hit song “Blurred Lines,” alleging that the music was too similar to that of Gaye’s famous “Got to Give It Up.” The jury decided in favour of Gaye, and the estate was awarded $7.4 million in damages. That ruling is on appeal at the time of writing, and it has proven controversial amongst copyright experts and music industry insiders. Some have argued that the ruling could have a negative effect on musicians trying to explore music from previous eras, incorporating sounds and styles from famous artists. Similarly, over 200 musicians have supported the ongoing appeal, arguing that the decision could have a chilling effect on creativity.
In Original Sin: Reconciling Originality in Copyright with Music as an Evolutionary Art Form, Emma Steel does not address the case of Williams v. Bridgeport Music as such, but she explores the question of originality in music in an interesting and noteworthy manner that is relevant to that litigation. Steel first describes the evolution of music’s component elements, paying special attention to the evolution of rhythm and melody as the basic building blocks of musical creations. Rhythm takes the form of tempo, metre, and rhythmic pattern. These provide a repetition of timing that tends to be common in various styles and genres. For example, the 4/4 metre is the most popular timing, while 3/4 is found in waltzes and country music. Melody, on the other hand, is where most of the originality in music is manifest, and it is “the relationship between musical tones of various pitch and duration.” Steel comments that in Western musical traditions melodies tend to be repetitive in nature and shared across music genres. Continue reading "Is It Time to Examine the Concept of Originality in Musical Works?"
Mar 28, 2017 Nicolas TerryHealth Law
The intersection of healthcare information goods, resulting products, and the legal system is frequently reduced to unhelpful binary generalizations such as “regulation (particularly drug safety and data laws) impedes innovation.” Eisenberg and Price helpfully consign such caricatures to the past, substituting far more nuanced (and a lot more interesting) reflections on healthcare and innovation.
Their primary contribution is to describe a different idea of innovation; one based on the demand side rather than the supply side. This is to be contrasted with the “Innovation Law Beyond Intellectual Property (IP)” literature which has examined non-IP mechanisms such as grants, prizes, or insurance to incentivize innovation without utilizing exclusionary patent rights. Those approaches, while they may have been shaped on the demand side, are executed on the supply side (such as a government subsidy paid to a drug company to encourage production of an unprofitable drug). In contrast, Eisenberg and Price are interested in true demand-side innovation based on the data accessible to payers; providers or insurers and, optimally, vertically integrated stakeholders such as large HMOs. These payers, the authors argue, could leverage the enormous clinical and prescribing data sets they can access “to develop new information about drug toxicity, comparative effectiveness, precision medicine, and to perform other forms of innovation.” If successful, “[t]he incentives of payers to cut costs… could be a corrective counterweight to the incentives of product sellers to maximize their own patent-protected profits.” Continue reading "An Opportunity for Demand Side Innovation"
Mar 27, 2017 Katharine BartlettFamily Law
Why are employees who sue to obtain workplace leave under the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) almost twice as likely to win their cases as those who bring discrimination cases under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII)? The title of Kate Webber’s intriguing article reflects an intuition many feminists and family law scholars already bring to the table: courts find women more sympathetic when they make claims that conform to their appropriate gender roles (as they do when they ask for family leaves) than when they challenge those norms in the workplace (as they do when they make a claim that the workplace is discriminatory). Webber unpacks this intuition, first by identifying differences in the statutory schemes that might help to explain the gap in success rates between the two statutes, and then by examining the ways in which the content of the legal protections each statute provides might understandably trigger different ideological and cognitive responses by judges. The analysis is both cautious and compelling. It is also surprisingly optimistic, concluding that family leave laws provide a legislative model that may actually be more effective than Title VII in reducing institutional workplace inequality.
Other scholars have noted the differences between Title VII and the FMLA. The most important of these differences for Webber’s purposes is that the FMLA, though motivated by the desire to relieve work-family conflicts especially among women, is a gender-neutral employee benefit, much like minimum wage laws and OSHA regulation. To win an FMLA claim, a claimant need only show that she was entitled to the benefit and did not get it. In contrast, Title VII creates a civil right available on the basis of membership in a protected class. A Title VII claimant must show both that she experienced an adverse employment action and that this action was caused or motivated by the claimant’s sex, race, religion, or other protected characteristic. The difference is structural: the former defines the status quo; the latter challenges it. Continue reading "When Less is More"
Mar 24, 2017 Herbert BurkertTechnology Law
Judging from its title, Professor Michael Buckland‘s book seems to be yet another introduction into the relationship between information and society. Upon reading it you encounter a well-organized, simply but not simplistically written concise introduction enriched by historical references to what was once called library science and is now more often referred to as (non-mathematical) information science.
As such, it fits well into the MIT Press series that has brought us among others John Palfrey’s Intellectual Property Strategy or Samuel Greengard’s The Internet of Things. Continue reading "Back to the Essentials"
Mar 23, 2017 Sergio J. CamposCourts Law
Oftentimes when we call a thing someone’s “property,” we do so to invoke a very specific picture of the owner’s rights to that thing. To call something “property” often entails significant limits to what one can do to regulate the thing. The Due Process Clause and Takings Clause both enter the picture. Even outside of legal discourse, the term “property” has a rhetorical power that brings to mind what Blackstone called the “sole and despotic dominion” one can exercise over the thing. That is why “[m]ine is often one of the first words toddlers learn.” To quote an old American Express commercial, ownership, like membership, “has its privileges.”
So one would think that conceptualizing a thing as “property” would have an important effect on how we think about the thing. But what if it doesn’t? What if it actually leads to inconsistent, irreconcilable views in different contexts? What if it turns out that thinking about something as “property” does not provide much analytic clarity at all?
This is the bold thesis of J. Maria Glover’s A Regulatory Theory of Legal Claims, where Glover takes on longstanding debates about the conceptual status of the legal claim. Civil procedure scholars continue to debate whether the legal claim is a party’s “property,” as opposed to an aspect of procedure that is subject to the discretionary regulation of the court. Glover’s goal is not to resolve the debate but to dissolve it, as a debate that does not have the significance that the debaters give it. Continue reading "Do Claims About Claims to Claims Matter?"
