Jan 10, 2019 Catherine FiskWork Law
Ewan McGaughey,
Democracy in America at Work: The History of Labor’s Vote in Corporate Governance, 42
Seattle U. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2019), available at
SSRN.
Like everybody else, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about democracy. How can we nurture faith in democracy when significant segments of the working class feel so disempowered that they either don’t vote at all or turn to nihilist, xenophobic, racist, or hateful visions of American life offered by speakers who seem to have less interest in governance than in nurturing grievances? Although turn-out in the mid-terms was high, as mid-term elections go anyway, still many people who could have voted did not vote. This invites the question about what law can do to build institutional structures and a culture that convinces the disaffected that they can join together to build a better world. One of the very few things on which one can find agreement between the right and the left today is that a lot of poor people and working people have been left behind by the elites that seem increasingly to control their work lives, their economy, and politics. But the agreement stops there, and the sense of polarized stalemate only breeds cynicism and despair.
I found an antidote to despair in reading Ewan McGaughey’s forthcoming paper, Democracy in America at Work: The History of Labor’s Vote in Corporate Governance. It is a perceptive, broadly synthetic, and snappily-written account of the past and possible future of labor’s role in corporate democracy. The paper enriched my thinking about re-linking democracy in political life with democracy in work life. It bubbles over with ideas about how law could create a more accountable form of capitalism. Based on an admirably succinct survey of the history of labor involvement in corporate governance, McGaughey articulates a bold, provocative, and exciting thesis: “Democratic voice in the economy is embedded in American tradition, efficient, legitimate, and (even without federal law reform) could be written into state laws today.” (P. 3.) Continue reading "Labor Power and Industrial and Political Democracy"
Jan 9, 2019 Verity WinshipInternational & Comparative Law
Pamela Bookman,
The Arbitration-Litigation Paradox, __
Vand. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming), available at
SRRN.
Arbitration and litigation are often treated as opposites. Arbitration in its idealized version is sleek, fast, and endlessly adaptable. Litigation is its foil: clunky, inexpert, and sometimes captured. As a consequence, being pro-arbitration and anti-litigation are assumed to go hand-in-hand.
In The Arbitration-Litigation Paradox, Pamela Bookman challenges this account. With a focus on international commercial arbitration, Bookman suggests that hostility to litigation undermines the key role of courts in supporting arbitration. In other words, to be pro-arbitration, sometimes courts need to be pro-litigation as well. Continue reading "In Support of Arbitration"
Jan 8, 2019 Philomila TsoukalaFamily Law
Elizabeth Katz,
Criminal Law in a Civil Guise: The Evolution of Family Courts and Support Laws, __
U. Chi. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2019), available at
SSRN.
The question of the relationship between criminal law and family law has been amply explored in recent years, the seemingly neat separation between the fields coming under repeated challenge. Scholars have tackled the question from a variety of different perspectives: showing us how criminal law can function as family law for a specific section of the population, obliterating in the process basic family law assumptions about privacy and autonomy; or demonstrating the ways in which family law and criminal law have always operated in tandem to enforce specific sexual mores or ideals of intimacy. In Criminal Law in a Civil Guise: The Evolution of Family Courts and Support Laws, Elisabeth Katz contributes to this body of scholarship in a way that has the potential to unmoor contemporary assumptions about the civil nature of family court jurisdiction.
In this carefully researched and thoughtfully written piece of legal history, Katz concentrates on the history of family courts and their jurisdiction especially in the first half of the twentieth century. Adding a plethora of original sources to the historical literature on domestic relations courts, Katz highlights aspects of this history that had perhaps gone underappreciated inside family law. At their inception, some of the most influential domestic relations courts in the country focused heavily on the criminal prosecution of nonsupport cases and no one at the turn of the twentieth century would have thought of domestic relations courts as anything other than a branch of the criminal courts. More importantly, Katz argues that criminal jurisdiction over non-support cases continued to be at the core of family courts’ expansive jurisdiction, even as states strategically recharacterized the nature of these courts as civil in order to give judges more flexibility without the necessity of criminal law protections. Continue reading "Family Courts as Criminal Courts: A Story of Origins"
Jan 7, 2019 Cyra Akila ChoudhuryEquality
Feminism in the Global North began as a critical social movement emphasizing the societal oppression and exclusion of women and the inadequacies of the patriarchal state. Since the 1960s, it has evolved into a fragmented constellation of groups and theoretical positions often with deep divergences and seemingly intractable disagreements. One of these disagreements has been about feminism’s relationship to the state. Some feminists have traditionally been uncomfortable with and wary of institutional political power. And for good reason. Alliances with a patriarchal state produces only limited success with considerable costs. Other feminists have taken the position that we must take what we can get. In order to improve the lives of women, we must engage the state—become insiders and change the structure from within.
Regardless of how feminists orient to the state, most commonly recognize that state-alliances invariably result in mixed results often with unintended and undesired consequences. Often the gains benefit elite women at the expense of minorities. Furthermore, engagement with the state and the use of state power can present problems if one takes the position that generally feminism is a politics and a project that promotes liberation and equality. For example, the critical feminist literature on mass incarceration points out that the use of criminal law and state apparatus has resulted in the disproportionate incarceration of men of color. This has resulted in serious consequence for women by destroying many families and communities of color. Furthermore, gender neutral applications of criminal law have sometimes led to the policing of women themselves.
Darren Rosenblum’s essay, Sex Quotas and Burkini Bans, is part of this critical literature raising important questions about feminist alliances with and uses of state power in France. Rosenblum’s article adds to the literature by exploring state uses of and, indeed, promulgation of a “state feminism.” Rosenblum traces the feminist movement for equal political representation (Parité). With the passage of Parité giving women a 50% quota, the state absorbed the “feminist interest in sex difference and women’s equality” making it a core state value. And then, as Rosenblum shows, these ideas “disappear in plain sight.” (P. 470.) The state, having incorporated a feminist position on equality, used it to exclude certain categories of women. Continue reading "Exclusionary Equality: France’s State-Feminism and Its Other Women"
