Monthly Archives: January 2021
Jan 29, 2021 Saule T. OmarovaCorporate Law
History is the key to understanding U.S. banking law and regulation. History also repeats itself. Professor Art Wilmarth’s new book sheds new light on these oft-repeated propositions. It tells a multi-layered, richly textured story of how the rise of U.S. universal banks – diversified financial conglomerates clustered around publicly-backed banks – led both to the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of the post-2008 era. On that basis, it makes a case for breaking up today’s universal banks and shadow banks and reestablishing the legal wall separating banking from the capital markets.
The book has been eagerly anticipated by all of us in the banking law and financial regulation academic community. Professor Wilmarth has devoted much of his long and fruitful scholarly career to studying the dysfunctional effects of excessive conglomeration in the U.S. banking sector. His knowledge of the subject is unparalleled (as some of us often joke, Art has probably forgotten more banking law than we will ever manage to learn!). Taming the Megabanks brings all of that immense knowledge into a compelling narrative of a decades-long process that gave us today’s corporate behemoths: Citigroup, JPMorgan, Bank of America, and a few other familiar names. Continue reading "A Case for Breaking the Money Trust"
Jan 28, 2021 Zack BuckHealth Law
Health law is complicated, unruly, and maybe even incoherent. It lacks a simple universally understood narrative of what, exactly, it is. On top of this complicated foundation, legal and policy reforms have taken effect over recent years with dizzying speed, only to be challenged, carved back, or reversed in later years. Annually, it seems that the whole field of health law hinges on some major case or dramatic legislative effort. The previous year’s class syllabus is never reusable. And it has even humbled our president, as he recently told us what we all already knew: it is unbelievably complex. Seemingly in vain, health law scholars and legal academics search for a unifying theme. But maybe this so-called bug is truly a feature, and its disjointedness may present us with many open lines of scholarly inquiry, giving us all lots of room to run.
That’s why articles that are able to tell a story about the development of health law and about reasoned cause-and-effect of legal and policy development, are so helpful to the field and those of us who work within it. Drawing on historical analysis, interacting with a breadth of previous scholars’ work, and pulling together a simple but edifying story about the development of health law is The Dynamism of Health Law: Expanded Insurance Coverage As the Engine of Regulatory Reform, by Gabriel Scheffler. Continue reading "In Search of Health Law Coherence"
Jan 27, 2021 Christine BartholomewCourts Law
Bryan Lammon,
An Empirical Study of Class-Action Appeals (2020), available at
SSRN.
Modern class-action scholarship needs more myth-busting. Class-action narratives—for and against aggregate litigation—have spurred decades of procedural reform, from the 2005 Class Action Fairness Act to amendments to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23. Scholarship rarely interrogates whether the reality of class-action practice aligns with these narratives. This leaves a potential gulf between scholarship and practice. Bryan Lammon’s An Empirical Study of Class-Action Appeals contributes to the growing body of research aimed at bridging this gap.
In this work in progress, Lammon debunks myths about class-action appeals. The function of Rule 23(f) is clear enough: it permits interlocutory review of class-certification decisions, creating a carve out to the final judgment rule. Certification is a pivotal procedural point in the life of a class action. If a case is not certified, its value is limited to the damages sought by the named class representatives. If it is certified, the value of the case jumps to cover all potential class members.
Since its enactment in 1997, however, Rule 23(f) has been somewhat of an enigma. While the rule’s function and rationale are straightforward, its potential impact on certification is murkier. As Lammon details, Rule 23 engenders discontent from both plaintiffs and defendants. Plaintiffs fear the rule advantages defendants by increasing the reversal of certification decisions. On the other hand, “[d]efense-side interests contend that the courts are inconsistent in applying Rule 23(f) and that the rule insufficiently protects defendants from the pressure to settle.” Continue reading "The Reality of Class-Action Appeals"
Jan 26, 2021 Philomila TsoukalaFamily Law
The literature on surrogacy regulation has recently taken a turn towards a more pragmatic understanding of the field. Scholars have attempted to describe surrogacy regulation as it already exists and analyze the different interests involved, under conditions of legal fragmentation and uncertainty. Rachel Rebouché’s Contracting Pregnancy is an important contribution in this vein.
The article contributes several advances to our knowledge of surrogacy contracts in action. First, Rebouché analyzes statutory developments alongside standard terms included in surrogacy contracts. Doing so allows her to notice a tension between the law on the books and the law in action. The newest statutes attempt to balance the interests of intended parents and surrogates, recognizing parentage for the former, while safeguarding the surrogate’s autonomy interests, by emphasizing that decisions about termination ultimately reside with the surrogate. Lawyers involved in the drafting process, however, regularly include language “that contradicts state efforts to level the playing field for parties.” (P. 1596.) Rebouché finds this recurrent tension between state statutes and contractual language in the areas of pre-pregnancy genetic testing, prenatal screening and testing, lifestyle decisions during pregnancy, and abortion. In other words, the contracts that lawyers draft regularly try to vest intended parents with decision-making power over these areas, against the backdrop of a statutory (and constitutional) framework that vests that authority on the surrogate. Continue reading "Bargaining in the Shadow of (Confusing) Law: The Case of Surrogacy Contracts"
Jan 25, 2021 Kim BrooksEquality
If you’re having one of those days where you feel like change may never come; here’s a fabulous volume for you. This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society centres the lives of trans people, grapples with daily experiences of exclusion and discrimination, and claims new shared ground for legal change in ways that requires us to de-centre law. It is exciting work.
The collection of articles addresses all manner of cites of legal contest—from employment law to human rights, to education law, to health law. As a collection it is neither rigidly theorized nor staunchly pragmatic. Instead, the articles, many of them authored collaboratively, acknowledge theoretical foundations and legacies, and seek to build from those foundations while still keeping the real lives of trans people in sharp view. And while the collection is ground-breaking as a venue for a collective conversation about trans legal change, it makes no claims to be definitive or comprehensive. Each article both stands independently as a contribution rooted in a specific set of experiences and legal frames and weaves with the other contributions to form a coherent, but of course incomplete, whole. The collection is a conversational moment: it results from an effort to bring together a growing number of Canadian trans scholars, activists, and allies in dialogue and to let things unfold from there. Continue reading "A Lively Conversation on Trans Legal Change"
Jan 22, 2021 Daniel BarnhizerContracts
In this article, Jeffrey Harrison addresses the very real problem of contract law’s capacity to control wrongful conduct that deprives individuals of a meaningful ability to withhold consent. Specifically, for certain types of duress and undue influence, the remedies available under contract incentivize wrongful conduct against an apparently weaker party. Professor Harrison provides an insightful analysis of the situations in which contract promotes such absurd results and makes a convincing argument in favor of treating certain types of duress and undue influence as an independent tort in order to access the deterrence value of punitive damages.
Duress and undue influence are problematic for contract law in the sense that both defenses attempt to address the fundamental basis of contract in voluntary consent of both parties to the proposed bargain. Where there is no consent, there can be no contract. Continue reading "Treating Cognitive Harms in Contract Seriously"
Jan 21, 2021 Jonathan SimonCriminal Law
In a 2016 dissent, Justice Sonya Sotomayor described Americans becoming mere “subjects of a carceral state” as a result of repeated Supreme Court decisions broadening the power of the police to stop and to arrest people under the Fourth Amendment. In a powerful new empirical article, The Great Decoupling, Social scientist Vesla Weaver and coauthors have developed stunning empirical evidence of what it means exactly to be what they similarly call a “custodial citizen,” and who is likely to become one. In earlier work with Amy Lerman, Vesla Weaver defined the difference between being defined as a criminal offender by the state’s response to your “behavior” and simply being “‘defined by [your] relationship to the state;’ a relationship predicated more on who one is than what one has done.” In most criminal law and criminology work we presume that the institutions of justice are concerned with “criminal offenders” (a term I normally avoid myself) but Weaver and colleagues strongly suggest it is as “custodial citizens” that the police, and perhaps other justice agencies, look at young people, and especially young Black people.
The authors leverage a unique data source (the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth) that captures self-reported criminal behavior as well as criminal justice contact among advanced juveniles (generally considered by criminologists the most crime prone and most likely to be targeted by police) to examine a question shockingly understudied in both criminology and criminal law: what is the relationship between criminal behavior and criminal justice contact. With a few noteworthy exceptions (Elizabeth Hinton’s recent book being one), many, even critics of mass incarceration (like this one), have tended to assume that what varies in periods of punitive expansion (like the forty year long one that may have ended in the past decade) is the state’s response to criminal conduct (or at least suspect criminal conduct). Regardless of whether one supports aggressive enforcement and punishment policies, almost everyone assumes that there is at least a close relationship between crime and contact. Indeed, in a decently functioning justice system as the authors put it “contact should follow conduct” regardless of how aggressively so. But it turns out it ain’t so, and especially if you are Black. (Their data did not yield meaningful comparison of White-Latinx participants in the surveys.) Even more interestingly the authors leverage two waves of this study that capture similarly aged people in years that reflect the beginning (1979) and the peak of the great punitive turn of the late 20th century. Continue reading "Race, Generation and Custodial Citizenship: The Great Decoupling of Crime and Criminal Justice"
Jan 20, 2021 Pat GudridgeConstitutional Law
The moment is at hand. No longer self-consciously experimental, computational analysis now comes to constitutional law in an ambitious effort pursued by David Pozen, prominent in the field at Columbia; his Van Halen-like colleague Eric Talley, known especially perhaps for his law and economics theorizing and his corporate and contract law investigations – and Julian Nyarko, newly arrived at Stanford as a practicing computationalist interested first of all in contract law. Their project takes up the question of polarization and its pertinence constitutionally, an issue that has become more prominent in the past few years.
The effort at one level is straightforward. It turns out that all remarks made by members of Congress, on both the House and Senate side, dating from 1873 to 2016, now exist in a collected, computer analyzable form. What might we learn if we read all these speeches? We can’t, of course – too much to know, too much information to acquire and think through, even if we read quickly rather than carefully. Machines read too, assimilating many more documents much faster. But they read their way – sorting words, counting uses, noticing conjoint and disjoint patternings, and the like. We need to know what we know, therefore, when we read machine-reading results. Pozen, Talley, and Nyarko show us how they assembled their mechanism and the decisions they had to make in order to ready their computer for work. These decisions become a sort of pedigree. Continue reading "“I have seen the future…” “And it works?”"
Jan 19, 2021 Michael E HerzAdministrative Law
The nationwide injunction has seized the imagination of courts and law professors in recent years. Not surprisingly, JOTWELL’s pages screens have given it extensive attention. Recent jots have described important work by Samuel Bray (twice), Amanda Frost (also twice), Russell Weaver, and Alan Trammell that attacks, defends, or theorizes nationwide (or “universal”) injunctions. Jack Beermann, in praising Bray and Frost, did have one complaint: “As an administrative law nut, I wish they both grappled more with the meaning of the APA’s instruction that reviewing courts should ‘hold unlawful and set aside’ unlawful agency action.” Mila Sohoni has now filled that void. Sohoni convincingly shows that there just can be no question that in the Administrative Procedure Act Congress authorized—indeed, indicated a preference for and established a presumption in favor of—nationwide relief when a court finds a regulation defective. When APA § 706(2) authorizes a reviewing court to “set aside” an agency rule, it means exactly that.
In 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions distributed Litigation Guidelines instructing civil litigators in the Department of Justice (DOJ) to oppose universal injunctions always and everywhere. The memo’s seven sections gave seven reasons why such relief was beyond the pale, including the assertion that it was unconstitutional. Section VII was headed: “In APA Cases: Universal Vacatur is not Contemplated by the APA.” Sohoni’s article resoundingly contradicts this assertion. Continue reading "Defending “Universal Vacatur” — Nationwide Injunctions for Administrative Law Nuts"
Jan 18, 2021 Anne Marie LofasoWork Law
In their article, The Invisible Web at Work: Artificial Intelligence and Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace, Professors Bales and Stone argue that illegitimate employer uses of artificial intelligence (“AI”) in the workplace may largely outweigh legitimate uses, creating a potentially problematic, but not necessarily unlawful, encroachment on human workers’ rights. The article is divided into three main sections. First, it comprehensively describes the numerous ways in which employers are utilizing AI to transform traditional managerial prerogatives. Second, it analyzes possible workers’ rights violations, concluding that existing law is unlikely fully to protect those rights. Third, it presents areas for future reform. The article concludes with an ominous observation: “companies are collecting unfathomable quantities of data on workers that will significantly tilt the balance of workplace power in favor of employers at workers’ expense.” (P. 62.)
Section I comprehensively surveys employers’ ubiquitous use of AI to transform traditional managerial prerogatives. The authors note that employers “utilize a dizzying array of electronic mechanisms—including trackers, listening devices, surveillance cameras, metabolism monitors, and wearable technology—to watch their workers, measure their performance, avoid disruption, and identify shirking, theft, or waste.” (P. 4.) While these mechanisms may serve legitimate employer goals, they often allow managers to “observe each worker’s every movement, both inside and outside the workplace, and during and after working hours.” (Id.) Moreover, AI algorithms can transform collected data “into a permanent electronic resume that companies are using to track and assess current workers,” and which “could potentially be shared among companies as workers move around the boundaryless workplace from job to job.” (Id.) This “invisible electronic web threatens to invade worker privacy, deter unionization, enable subtle forms of employer blackballing, exacerbate employment discrimination, render unions ineffective, and obliterate the protections of the labor laws.” (Id.) Continue reading "Machine Monitoring of Workers: A Brave New Workplace"
