Yearly Archives: 2019
Feb 7, 2019 Amy SalyzynLegal Profession
For legal ethics scholars, in-house lawyers are an irresistible and enduring subject of study. As lawyers who derive their living solely from one client and who are embedded in the culture and incentive structures internal to that client, in-house lawyers bring several “classic” legal ethics concerns into sharp focus: What does lawyer independence require? How should lawyers balance client and public interests? When should a lawyer say “no” to a client? There is also, of course, the fact that in-house lawyers have been the subject of multiple front-page scandals in recent decades. Although the query “where were the lawyers?” was first used, as I understand it, in the 1980s in relation to outside counsel in the U.S. savings and loan scandal, the question is being increasingly trained on in-house lawyers, who have risen significantly in number and status.
With In-House Lawyers’ Ethics, Moorhead, Vaughan, and Godinho add their own deft, distinct, and deep contribution to the literature on in-house lawyers. At the centre of their book is ambitious new empirical research on the role of in-house lawyers, drawing on interviews with 67 in-house lawyers and compliance personnel and surveys of 400 in-house lawyers. To be sure, thoughtful empirical research on in-house lawyers has been conducted by others before. However, Moorhead, Vaughan, and Godinho break fresh ground with their focus on legal risk management and their use of quantitative methods to explore concepts previously examined mostly in qualitative terms. Continue reading "Heroic Work on the Legal Profession’s “Quiet Heroes”"
Feb 6, 2019 Mary ZieglerLegal History
The law plays a sometimes-contradictory role in the stories of female antiabortion activists described in Karissa Haugeberg’s richly researched Women Against Abortion. Haugeberg meticulously studies how gender informs the work of many of the women who have dominated the antiabortion movement in recent decades. However, Women Against Abortion also captures the complex role played by the law in a social movement only ever partly convinced that legal strategies could deliver meaningful social change. Haugeberg’s characters struggle to define a law-free space in which to fight against abortion, and some of the most skeptical find themselves drawn into policy-making. Yet legal solutions deliver far less than Haugeberg’s subjects demand. Her compelling and original study suggests that even if legal strategies inevitably pull in some pro-life activists, frustration at the pace of legal change can have a profound radicalizing effect on others.
The fascinating women who populate the world of Women Against Abortion viewed the role of legal reform with particular skepticism. These activists struggled at times to justify their careers in the pro-life movement, especially since antiabortion groups often insisted that women should prioritize motherhood. To reconcile their work, family commitments, and ideology, the women of Women Against Abortion sought to carve out roles in the movement that reflected their unique experiences as women and as mothers. Rather than prioritizing litigation or legislation, the female activists Haugeberg studies worked in crisis pregnancy centers or participated in clinic blockades. With varying degrees of success, these female activists justified their work by carving out a uniquely female form of pro-life activism, one that resembled motherhood. But as Haugeberg shows, these grassroots activists often found themselves drawn to legal change. Continue reading "The Boundary Between Law and Lawlessness"
Feb 5, 2019 Pamela SamuelsonIntellectual Property Law
Joseph P. Fishman & Deepa Varadarajan,
Similar Secrets,
167 U Penn. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2019), available at
SSRN.
When an employee has had lawful access to her firm’s trade secrets and later uses them when working for a new employer or when starting her own firm, the former employer may well sue her for trade secret misappropriation. Disputes in such cases routinely focus on identifying the secrets at issue, examining the process by which the alleged misappropriation occurred, and assessing what advantages the employee may have gotten from use of those secrets.
Should courts also consider how much similarity exists between the plaintiff’s and the defendant’s products, processes, or services? And should courts also consider whether the defendant’s new firm and the old firm directly compete or operate in different and arguably unforeseen markets? Similar Secrets says the answer to both questions should be yes. Its thesis is that defendants should not be liable for misappropriation of lawfully acquired trade secrets unless later-developed products or methods incorporate material elements from those secrets and use those elements in the same market in which the plaintiff firm competes, or in an adjacent market into which it is reasonably foreseeable that the plaintiff firm might enter. Continue reading "What Copyright Might Teach Trade Secrecy"
Feb 4, 2019 Jessica Lind MantelHealth Law
Although federalism rhetoric has played a central role in debates over the Affordable Care Act (ACA), there has been little research on whether the ACA’s implementation reinforced or stymied federalism values, including state autonomy, cooperation, experimentation, and variation. Professors Abbe Gluck and Nicole Huberfeld fill this void in their article What is Federalism in Healthcare For?. Extrapolating from data on the implementation of ACA’s Medicaid expansion and health insurance exchanges, the authors challenge a longstanding assumption among federalism scholarship—that particular structural arrangements best serve federalism goals and values. They instead argue that federalism goals and values are not dependent on any particular architecture of state-federal separation or entanglement but find expression across a range of governance models.
Traditional theories of federalism view state power as derived from separation from the federal government, with federal authority negating state power. Modern federalism scholars characterize any state activity occurring within federal frameworks as subservient. Gluck and Huberfeld, however, find that the ACA’s implementation supports neither view. Instead, they argue that ACA implementation is a story of states exerting power that checked federal authority from within the statute, not from outside it. Furthermore, this dynamic has resulted in extensive policy variation and experimentation within the ACA’s national framework. Continue reading "Rethinking Federalism: ACA as a Case Study"
Feb 1, 2019 Ezra RosserLexPoverty Law
Andrew Hammond,
Pleading Poverty in Federal Court,
Yale L. J. (forthcoming). Available at
SSRN.
In United States v. Kras, the Court rejected the argument that a poor person petitioning for protection from creditors should not have to pay a filing fee in order to access the bankruptcy system. The majority held that an able-bodied person could make the payment because the $50 fee was only $1.92 per week if spread over six months and $1.28 if spread over nine months. Justice Blackburn noted that such a fee at the time was “less than the price of a movie and little more than the cost of a pack or two of cigarettes.” Justice Thurgood Marshall’s dissented, observing:
It may be easy for some people to think that weekly savings of less than $2 are no burden. But no one who has had close contact with poor people can fail to understand how close to the margin of survival many of them are….A pack or two of cigarettes may be, for them, not a routine purchase but a luxury indulged in only rarely. The desperately poor almost never go to see a movie, which the majority seems to believe is an almost weekly activity. They have more important things to do with what little money they have….
For the poor, fees, even supposedly “nominal” fees, matter. In the civil law context, Congress has established a $350 filing fee to access the federal courts and the Judicial Conference tagged an additional $50 administrative fee onto that. (P. 12.) While the non-poor may be able to treat the combined $400 fee as a mere inconvenience, such an amount can serve to bar poor civil litigants from the federal courts.
Andrew Hammond’s article, Pleading Poverty in Federal Court, shows that there is considerable variation in how federal courts consider requests by the poor for fee waivers in civil litigation. Courts not only use different forms to collect ability-to-pay information but they also apply different standards when determining whether fees should be waived. By focusing attention on federal court in forma pauperis motion practices, Hammond’s article sheds light on how the poor can be negatively impacted by routine court practices that might ordinarily be treated as merely administrative. Hammond makes a convincing argument that federal courts should have uniform standards for what information is collected and for the level of need that is associated with a fee waiver. Blending empirical work—a significant contribution of the article is that it catalogues the in forma pauperis forms used by all 94 federal district courts—with an appreciation for the struggles faced by poor litigants, Pleading Poverty in Federal Court is a well-written, targeted intervention that hopefully will improve the ability of the poor to access the federal courts. Continue reading "Federal Courts and the Poor: Lack of Standards and Uniformity in Civil In Forma Pauperis Pleadings"
Jan 31, 2019 Angela FernandezLegal History
The rhetoric of a “marriage crisis” is a familiar one. William Kuby’s excellent new book gives us an incisive history of the way that a sense of crisis was invoked in debates about a variety of forms of marital misconduct and the backlash they inspired in the progressive era. Kuby expertly marches us through the way that late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American judges, state legislators, polemicists, and reformers of all stripes relied on ideas of common sense public policy and moral decency to police marriage in each of the five instances of marital misconduct he examines.
The first form of marital misconduct Kuby describes is the use of marital advertisements and state and church marriage bureaus that sought to match bachelors with single women. The latter were used in regions of the West to encourage the formation of stable family units (e.g. in Oklahoma to find wives for lonely farmers). The former, viewed as mercenary and inappropriately commercialized, were generally frowned upon by journalists and academics, such as sociologist and criminologist Arthur MacDonald who labelled the women who responded to them “abnormal.” Even though these advertisements often stated “objective marriage” and “no triflers” (see image on P. 26), they were strongly associated with indecent (and risky) sexual and moral behavior. Innovations in transportation and the wider circulation of newspapers created “new possibilities in courtship,” Kurby writes, “finding partners beyond one’s restricted geographical location – or outside one’s narrow class or racial designations.” (P. 67.) These “expanding geographic and demographic boundaries of mate selection” display what Kuby calls “a crucial feature of modern romance.” (P. 67.) Continue reading "The Marriage Crisis and its Many Backlashes in Twentieth-Century America"
Jan 30, 2019 James E. PfanderCourts Law
Jeffrey S. Sutton, 51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law (2018).
Jeffrey Sutton has much to teach us about the role of courts, state and federal, in making constitutional law. Sutton, well-known for his work as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, has drawn on years of experience and research in this book-length rumination on the way state courts (and constitutions) can contribute to constitutionalism more broadly. Sutton served for some years as the solicitor general of Ohio, and knows the joys and heart-breaks of state constitutionalism first hand. Indeed, among the many happy turns of phrase in the book, one finds Sutton (many years after the fact) wistfully pursuing motions to reconsider the adverse decisions that most set his teeth on edge.
Sutton approaches his task with a deep appreciation of modern constitutionalism and an eye and ear for storytelling keen enough to engage readers both learned and lay. In brief, Sutton, argues, we have mistakenly come to view federal or national constitutionalism as the only game in town and have slighted state constitutionalism as a source of rights. Sutton describes a world hungry for rights articulation and suggests that state courts might play a more active role in the process. Sutton encourages lawyers to mount more state constitutional challenges, thereby giving their clients an extra shot at success. He also encourages state courts to take their own constitutions more seriously, noting that these documents often contain provisions missing from their national counterpart. Continue reading "Enhancing the Role of States in Making Constitutional Law"
Jan 29, 2019 Anna GelpernCorporate Law
Usha Rodrigues’s article on the firm as a nexus of “smart” contracts made me think of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Maybe it is her use of “contracts made flesh,” the images of digital organisms mimicking their “corporeal” prototypes (creepy, if confusing), or the all-encompassing, oozing smartness of code. Victor Frankenstein was smart. He endowed his creature with formidable capacity to learn: within days, it had processed Goethe, Plutarch, and Milton. Then Victor freaked out and lost control.
Shelley’s story reads by turns as Don’t-Mess-with-Creation and Don’t-Abandon-Your-Children. I saw abandonment everywhere in Law and the Blockchain. Continue reading "Abandoned at the Nexus of Contracts"
Jan 28, 2019 Kathryn WattsAdministrative Law
Kent H. Barnett,
Some Kind of Hearing Officer, 94
Wash. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2019), available at
SSRN.
When Congress enacted the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) in 1946, it expected that what we now call Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) would preside over most federal agency evidentiary hearings. Over time, however, the number of so-called “non-ALJ” adjudicators has ballooned. As a result, non-ALJ adjudicators vastly outnumber ALJs today by a ratio of about 5:1. Yet despite the prominent role currently played by non-ALJs, very little is known about them. In a forthcoming article titled Some Kind of Hearing Officer, Professor Kent Barnett seeks to change that.
Professor Barnett’s article does three important things. First, it begins by describing how existing due process jurisprudence has little to say about impartiality in the adjudicatory arena, leaving the task of designing optimal process largely in Congress’s hands. When Congress enacted the APA in 1946, it spelled out a fairly detailed scheme to promote impartiality in the context of formal adjudicatory hearings conducted by ALJs. For example, the APA makes clear that ALJs cannot engage in prosecutorial or investigative functions. In addition, the APA generally prohibits ALJs from engaging in ex parte communications. Yet when it comes to non-ALJs, Congress did not set forth similar constraints. The end result, as Professor Barnett points out, is that Congress effectively has delegated the task of determining optimal process in informal adjudications—and, more specifically, ensuring the impartiality of adjudicators—to individual agencies. And, as one might imagine, agencies have come up with all sorts of different ways of approaching the issue of impartiality in informal adjudications. Continue reading "Uncovering the Hidden Administrative Judiciary"
Jan 25, 2019 Matt BodieWork Law
Naomi R. Sunshine, Employees as Price-Takers, 22 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 105 (2018).
In Employees as Price-Takers, Naomi Sunshine defines employees as workers who lack “significant input into the prices charged to customers and their own pay rates.” (P. 110.) Sunshine’s proposal comes amidst a blizzard of articles, court cases, tribunal opinions, legal briefs, and white papers all examining this critical issue. It stands out amidst the snow drifts because of its simplicity, and because it provides a creative and intuitive insight. Her price-setting definition of employment has the potential to reorient current debates around this new metric.
There are several competing definitions of “employee,” and Sunshine carefully surveys the landscape. She discusses the dominant “control” test with its different variations, as well as the “economic realities” test, the “entrepreneurial opportunities” test, and the relatively new “ABC” test used in California and elsewhere. She illustrates these tests with the example of an HVAC worker as the paradigmatic independent contractor and examines how the test would categorize such a worker. Sunshine’s quiet unpacking of the entrepreneurial opportunities test is particularly deft, as she works her way down to the test’s foundational focus on the opportunity for profit or loss. She shows how the test renders the most vulnerable workers even more vulnerable, as it leaves them bereft of employment protections even when the potential for profits is merely illusory. Continue reading "Who Names the Price?"
