Yearly Archives: 2018
May 2, 2018 Nora Freeman EngstromLegal Profession
Deborah L. Rhode and Scott Cummings,
Access to Justice: Looking Back, Thinking Ahead, 30
Geo. J. Legal Ethics 485 (2017), available at
SSRN.
In Access to Justice: Looking Back, Thinking Ahead, Deborah L. Rhode and Scott Cummings—two giants in the field—take stock of where we are when it comes to access to civil justice in the United States. Not content merely to offer an anodyne retrospective, they then use the opportunity to outline a bold agenda for future progress.
Rhode and Cummings begin their inquiry by assessing the scope of the problem. But, in so doing, they confront the same dismal paucity of reliable data that’s afflicted this inquiry for decades. As Rebecca Sandefur has bluntly put it: “[A]t present, we have no idea of the actual volume of legal need, and no idea of the actual volume of unmet legal need.” While the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) reports that “over four-fifths of the legal needs of the poor remain unmet,” it is hard to know whether that is true, as even identifying what a “legal need” is or isn’t is surprisingly difficult. (P. 487.) Many situations raise legal issues, have legal consequences, or pose legal risks, but how do we know whether any given situation is one of true legal need that can only be handled by someone with bona fide legal expertise? Worse, how do we assess those situations based on lay people’s sometimes hazy recollections, often long after the fact? Continue reading "Minding the Gap: Access to Justice Over the Years"
May 1, 2018 Jedidiah KronckeLegal History
Scholars from a variety of disciplines have begun to explore what they see as the lost virtues of political economy. In its broadest conception, this term is meant to capture the basic truism that any study of politics or economics should reflect their mutually constitutive character. A renewed interest in political economy and the law further reflects the same mutuality among law, politics, and economics. Central to such renewal is a claim that analytically segregating these fields leads to analysis that is both descriptively inaccurate and has powerful and troubling normative consequences.
Sabeel Rahman’s Democracy Against Domination is a leading example of a new generation of scholarship that demonstrates both the descriptive and normative promise of law and political economy. Rahman’s mission in the book is to reinfuse debates on financial regulation with overt concern for democratic participation and to recover an ethos that sees American economic and political citizenship as inextricably intertwined. Rahman’s history traces how this ethos was lost over the course of the twentieth century, and in doing so produces a sustained historical inquiry about how we arrive at what is considered “normal” or inevitable about legal regulation. Domination’s chapters follow the pattern of presenting a modern problematic in regulation and then demonstrating how contemporary responses are both democratically impoverished and historically contingent. The aim of the endeavor is to argue that fields of law that have been exorcised of any referent to democratic values, notably antitrust and administrative law, need to be reopened and remade. The alternative is to face pressing issues of inequality with an ultimately ineffective set of regulatory responses. Continue reading "Recovering and Revitalizing Economic Citizenship in American Law"
Apr 30, 2018 Christopher J. BuccafuscoIntellectual Property Law
For more than a decade, intellectual property scholars have demonstrated how informal social norms can efficiently substitute for formal legal protections to promote creativity and innovation. Now come Stephanie Bair and Laura Pedraza-Fariña to show that social norms can have a less happy effect. In some instances, they argue, informal social norms may impede innovation. Their forthcoming article, Anti-Innovation Norms, explores a selection of these and what might be done about them.
According to the standard economic story, IP rights exist to solve a public goods problem. In the absence of IP rights, rampant copying would reduce the ability of creators to recoup their investments, and society would face underinvestment in new works and inventions. IP rights solve this problem by enabling creators to charge supramarginal prices for those works and inventions. Although IP rights are costly, they produce net benefits by encouraging creativity that we wouldn’t otherwise have. Continue reading "When Social Norms for Innovation Don’t Maximize Social Welfare"
Apr 27, 2018 Melissa MurrayFamily Law
The Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt has been widely heralded as a victory for reproductive rights. There, a 5-3 majority of the Court struck down two provisions of H.B. 2, the abortion bill that then-Senator Wendy Davis famously tried to filibuster in 2013. One of the challenged provisions required abortion providers to have admitting privileges at local hospitals, while the other required abortion clinics to be outfitted as ambulatory surgical centers. According to H.B. 2’s proponents, both measures were designed to protect women’s health. Opponents of the bill countered that the two measures would effectively shutter the majority of abortion clinics in Texas, which has roughly 5.4 million women of reproductive age.
In the end, Hellerstedt did not prevent the closure of the clinics. Indeed, when the admitting privileges provision went into effect, it caused more than half of the clinics in the state to close. Instead, Hellerstedt is seen as a victory because the Court affirmed a woman’s constitutional right to choose an abortion, and in so doing, provided more guidance for determining whether and how that right has been unconstitutionally infringed. Under the undue burden standard announced in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, lawmakers bear the burden of showing that a challenged abortion regulation does not unduly burden the right to abortion by placing a substantial obstacle in the path of women seeking to terminate their pregnancies. As the Court explained in Casey, “the means chosen by the State to further the interest in potential life must be calculated to inform the woman’s free choice, not hinder it.” Continue reading "Undoing Hellerstedt"
Apr 26, 2018 W.A. EdmundsonJurisprudence
This concise and lucid book “is a summary of our current collective understanding of the method by which some societies decide who would govern them.…” (P. VIII.) The author is a professor of politics and economics at NYU, and an esteemed authority in the field of political economy. The book could not be timelier: many of us simply cannot understand how elections got us to where we are now. Bafflement can beget both anger and apathy. Much of the collective social-scientific understanding Przeworski relates will be deflating even for those who have already cast aside illusions. Nonetheless, he urges us to keep on bothering.
The book begins with a reminder that “elections are a modern phenomenon.” (P. 13.) The first national legislative election was held in 1788, to the United States Congress. Since then, elections have become an almost universal norm: today, “all but a handful of countries have legislatures elected by universal [qualified] suffrage and chief executives either elected in popular elections or indirectly by elected parliaments.” (P. 17.) The elections boom was accompanied by, and surely to some degree motivated by, the Rousseavian aspiration to reconcile humankind’s innate freedom with the fact that coercive government is here to stay. This yearning for self-government finds its expression in the rituals of popular elections. Continue reading "It Can’t Happen Here, Has It?"
Apr 25, 2018 Maneesha DeckhaEquality
Mathilde Cohen,
Animal Colonialism: The Case of Milk, 111
Am. J. Int’l L. Unbound 267 (2017), available at
SSRN.
Many progressive scholars and advocates on the Left presume that the animal rights movement is culturally imperialist (at least in its American and Canadian iterations). This presumption holds steadfast in spite of the considerable scholarship, notably originating in ecofeminist thought, demonstrating the multiple ideological, discursive, and material links between human and nonhuman animal oppression advanced through dominant Western epistemologies and political, social, economic, and legal orders. Or, put differently, in many ways, arguments highlighting what is wrong with animal commodification and exploitation often indict Western worldviews on animals rather than seek to extend such worldviews elsewhere.
Why this presumption nonetheless persists is a complex issue. Certainly, one reason is the real and imagined whiteness of the movement (again, in its American and Canadian iterations). A further reason may be the related insufficient adoption of an intersectionalist ethic in high-profile animal rights campaigns where animal injustice is disconnected from human injustices. The perception can then flow that those who care about equality for animals do not care about vulnerable (often racialized and indigenous) humans.
Most legal scholarship on animals in the United States does not embrace an intersectionalist orientation when discussing injustice against animals. To the extent the dearth of intersectional analysis in animal law scholarship fuels the association of animal rights with cultural imperialism, Mathilde Cohen’s Animal Colonialism: The Case of Milk is a very welcome corrective. Her short yet informative analysis about milk’s global rise compellingly illustrates the transspecies nature of law’s violence and ensuing inequalities. Specifically, Cohen shows how Eurocentric international law and trade, European dietary and legal norms in relation to animals, and European and American modernist discourses championing cow’s milk over traditional breastfeeding and maternal care occasioned a global rise of the human consumption of cow’s milk that was pivotal to empire-building throughout the world. This entailed devastating harms for colonized peoples and animals both. Continue reading "Milk’s Global Rise: A Case Study to Illuminate the Transspecies Violence of Law and Colonialism"
Apr 24, 2018 Christopher SloboginCriminal Law
Anyone interested in American criminal justice has to wonder why we have so many more people in prison—in absolute as well as relative terms—than the western half of the European continent, the part of the world most readily comparable to us. This book, consisting of eleven chapters by eminent criminal law scholars, criminologists and political scientists, provides both a detailed look at how U.S. punishment is different and an insightful analysis of why that might be so. While many chapters in the book describe previously declared positions of the authors, there is also much that is new in the book, particularly with respect to non-prison sanctions; whether veterans of the field or newcomers to it, readers should find this collection of the area’s leading scholars extremely useful. As the primary Reporter for the recently complete revisions to the Model Penal Code’s sentencing provisions and director of the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at Minnesota Law School, editor Kevin Reitz is ideally situated to bring this impressive compendium of material together.
In the opening chapter, Reitz lays out the reason for the book, describing the well-known American mass punishment phenomenon in ways that present the problem in a new light. For instance, he notes that the U.S. would have to release 1.8 million inmates simply to achieve the same imprisonment rate as England and Wales, western Europe’s leader in per capita imprisonment. Whether the focus is long-term confinement, the use of probation and parole, or the imposition of collateral consequences, Reitz notes, we “beat” all western European countries hands-down. Continue reading "How and Why is the American Punishment System “Exceptional”?"
Apr 23, 2018 Lumen N. MulliganCourts Law
JOTWELL readers do not need me to tell them that Scott Dodson is a leading voice in jurisdiction and procedure. His most recent article, as we have come to expect, meaningfully contributes to the contemporary discussion concerning the proper, and perhaps competing, roles for the Supreme Court and the Civil Rules Advisory Committee in interpreting the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Dodson calls for the Rules Committee to take a more active amicus curiae role in Civil Rules cases, suggesting that such an approach can substantially improve the reasoning and resolution of such cases without marginalizing the Court’s adjudicatory role.
Dodson succinctly lays out the current state of affairs in which the Court is largely divorced from the Civil Rules promulgation process, despite nominally overseeing it. This state of affairs has led to the current situation in which the Rules Committee takes exclusive ownership over the Rules drafting process, while the Court takes exclusive ownership over interpreting the Rules. As a result, the Court and the Rules Committee engage in their respective tasks without consulting the other. Continue reading "More Amicus Briefing?"
Apr 20, 2018 Omari SimmonsCorporate Law
Elizabeth Pollman & Jordan M. Barry,
Regulatory Entrepreneurship, 90
S. Cal. L. Rev. 383 (2017), available at
SSRN.
Regulatory Entrepreneurship by Elizabeth Pollman and Jordan Barry provides a must-read thought provoking descriptive account of how certain companies influence and shape regulation in the modern economy. In short, “regulatory entrepreneurship” describes companies’ attempts to dismantle, weaken, and exploit gray areas in the preexisting regulatory architecture that impede a particular line of business. With clear illustrations the article sheds new light on the tactics employed by some of today’s fastest growing companies such as Uber and Airbnb to surmount regulatory obstacles.
Article’s Findings
The article distinguishes regulatory entrepreneurship (“RE”) from more reactive traditional modes of corporate political activism and lobbying where companies insulate themselves from competition and protect existing profit centers. In the traditional context, the article asserts that changing the law is not necessarily material to a company’s overarching business plan and usually constitutes a relatively small part of their overall operations and focus. By contrast “regulatory entrepreneurship” is more proactive and central to a company’s overarching business strategy and viability. Continue reading "Corporate Political Activism 5.0"
Apr 19, 2018 Mark KendeConstitutional Law
David Landau,
Legal Pragmatism and Comparative Constitutional Law, in
Elgar Handbook on Comparative Constitutional Theory (forthcoming 2018), available at
SSRN.
Law is a practical field. It resolves concrete disputes. Constitutional law, however, is often thought of as more theoretical than practical. For example, a common current debate in constitutional interpretation is between originalism and living constitutionalism. Both have been advocated and criticized to death. Thus, Thomas Colby and Peter Smith have argued that originalism does not consist of one overarching theory, and that it leaves many questions unanswered. Self-proclaimed originalists disagree on some major issues and acknowledge that courts must often “construct” the right answers. But William van Alstyne has emphasized that living constitutionalists also have “clashing visions.”
It is therefore a breath of fresh air to read David Landau’s forthcoming book chapter, “Legal Pragmatism and Comparative Constitutional Law.” Eschewing these sorts of rehearsed debates between theories that each contain their own brand of formalism, Landau argues that legal pragmatism is an especially useful approach to interpreting the United States Constitution. It requires judges to acknowledge the indeterminacy of constitutional interpretation, to appreciate the importance of focusing on the detailed factual, empirical, and other contextual elements of the constitutional issues presented, and to achieve the best result possible using the toolkit provided by the law, and other “eclectic” criteria. Landau also shows that pragmatism is useful in comparative constitutional law, rather than seeing it as a uniquely American approach. Continue reading "Pragmatist Constitutionalism in Comparative Perspective"
