Yearly Archives: 2021
Apr 5, 2021 Francesca BartlettLegal Profession
In studies of the legal profession, we examine what lawyers do within and to the justice system in which they work in specific and conceptual ways. We also consider what the work does to lawyers. And, as many have noted, these two are intertwined and bi-directional. Clare Gumby and Anna Carline provide a fascinating perspective on this relationship by applying affect theory to the results of their interviews with criminal attorneys working on rape cases in England. The study reports on findings from 39 interviews with barristers from across England who defend or prosecute rape cases (the vast majority of whom regularly act in both capacities).
Gumby and Carline explain the theory they use to understand their results:
Affect is used to describe emotions (e.g., anger and fear) but also encompasses bodily sensations (e.g., shame, guilt and excitement) and other ineffable feelings and senses. These may be positive or negative, fleeting or sustained, experienced consciously and unconsciously and may sit outside of language in terms of being able to articulate. Here, we use affect theory, with its focus on relationality and embodiment, to understand how barristers can be transformed by their work and aim to move jurors—recognizing the body’s capacity to affect and be affected.
Defending or prosecuting in criminal prosecutions alleging sexual violence evokes emotions in us all. “Outsiders think all of it sounds pretty awful,” says one barrister. Sociological studies of occupations “that society views as unpleasant, disgusting or morally questionable” have been considered against a socially constructed idea of “dirty work.” Gumby and Carline adopt this lens to understand criminal lawyers’ construction of their own work. Specifically, they consider acting in rape cases as dirty work for its association with predominantly female victims as sexually tainted according to persistent gendered conceptions, working with those accused of socially stigmatised offending, combative adversarial styles and getting “physically dirty” where there is a necessity of proximity to “blood, semen and vomit and in the most extreme cases, death and decay.” Continue reading "Feeling Dirty: Emotional Taint and Use of Emotion as an English Criminal Barrister"
Apr 2, 2021 Angela FernandezLegal History
Christopher Tomlins’s new book, In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History, is a tour de force. It retells the history of Nat Turner’s famous rebellion with a focus on Turner’s religious motivations. The book begins by explaining the shortcomings of previous accounts of Turner, attempting to reconstruct what might have motivated Turner to decide in August 1831 to lead a group of fellow slaves on a campaign in Southampton, Virginia, “to rise up and kill all the white people.” Tomlins’s book shows how historical speculation and conjecture can be done in a way that is nonetheless solidly grounded in biblical, philosophical, anthropological, and historical context. The book is about Turner, yes, but insofar as it demonstrates the approach—call it “grounded speculation”—it is also a reflection on history itself and what to do as a historian when the historical event you are interested in is simultaneously under-documented and over-interpreted.
Tomlins begins by outlining the problems with two widely-relied upon accounts of the Turner Rebellion, both titled The Confessions of Nat Turner, which co-opted Turner in the service of other agendas. First, there was the contemporary account given by white county lawyer Thomas Ruffin Gray to whom Turner confessed while in prison awaiting trial. Gray produced a very complicated text about which Tomlins writes, “[it] is undoubtedly evidentiary, but evidence of what?” (P. 31.) What follows is a very nuanced reading of the work and what can and cannot be inferred from it. Continue reading "A New and Challenging History of Nat Turner and His Rebellion"
Apr 1, 2021 Pamela SamuelsonIntellectual Property Law
Professor Carroll is not the first copyright scholar to have asserted that text and data mining (TDM) is and should be lawful as a matter of copyright law (and he probably won’t be the last). The hook that pulled me through the 72 pages of his excellent article was the introduction’s announced intention to explain why use of TDM tools to run searches on digital repositories of infringing copies of copyrighted works do not infringe, at least as a matter of U.S. copyright law.
Text and data mining is a multi-stage technical process by which researchers compile and refine large quantities of text and other data so that it can be processed with statistical software to detect patterns that would be difficult or impossible for a human to perceive without the aid of the machine. The article considers the legality of TDM using SciHub as an exemplar. SciHub is a well-known repository of vast quantities of the scientific journal literature. Many scientists want to do TDM research using SciHub, but courts have held that that database is infringing. Although SciHub has more than once been forced to shut down, it has re-emerged every time and can still be found on the Internet. Continue reading "A Bold Take on Copyright Implications of Text & Data Mining"
Mar 31, 2021 Verity WinshipInternational & Comparative Law
William J. Moon,
Delaware’s Global Competitiveness (Jan. 30, 2021), available at
SSRN.
Post-election headlines that Delaware is finally “on the map” after “centuries of obscurity” are anathema to corporate law scholars. Delaware has long been at the center of US corporate law. US corporations may choose where they organize, untethered to their physical location. This creates the tantalizing – and much-studied – possibility of a market for corporate law. In many accounts Delaware dominates that market, with the majority of Fortune 500 companies organized in the state. But the market for corporate charters is not just a domestic US market. It is also a global market. And in the context of that market, Delaware is not doing so well. In Delaware’s Global Competitiveness, Professor William Moon studies the place of Delaware corporate law in the world.
Moon steps into a crowded field, against the backdrop of decades of articles about the reasons for Delaware’s dominance, debunking or promoting or explaining the market for corporate law. But Delaware’s Global Competitiveness and Moon’s recent companion article Delaware’s New Competition fill a key gap. As Moon points out, the discussion of Delaware’s corporate dominance has almost entirely neglected the global scope. Continue reading "Delaware’s Place in the World"
Mar 30, 2021 Miriam SeifterAdministrative Law
Shelley Welton,
Rethinking Grid Governance for the Climate Change Era,
Calif. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2021),
available at SSRN.
Energy law today should be everyone’s concern, and especially the concern of administrative law scholars. Scientists report that we are in a climate emergency. Policymakers agree that the electricity sector will be vital to the clean energy transition. A functional electric grid is also a public good that cannot be taken for granted, as the recent disaster in Texas underscores. State and federal agencies, in partnership with their sibling branches, will play a pivotal role in administering the energy solutions the nation adopts. It is an administrative law problem for the ages.
Yet the field of energy law can be an impenetrable slog (I say this as a once and future teacher of the class). Really grappling with energy administration requires excavating dense layers of complex science and technology, unusual regulatory structures, and endless insiders’ terminology to reveal the important problems that lie beneath. Professor Shelley Welton is here to help. In a series of articles, she has elegantly translated the core dilemmas of the clean energy transition. Problems that seemed hyper-technical emerge as familiar administrative law issues of accountability, institutional design, and allocations of power among public and private entities. I’ll focus on one article, Rethinking Grid Governance for the Climate Change Era, but I recommend the entire series, available on SSRN. Continue reading "Illuminating The Problems of Electricity Regulation"
Mar 29, 2021 Nadia SawickiHealth Law
Govind Persad,
Allocating Medicine Fairly in an Unfair Pandemic, __
Illinois L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2021), available at
SSRN.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been significant public debate about how to fairly allocate scarce medical resources. Questions about resource allocation have become even more pressing now that vaccines are finally being distributed. This has resulted in important body of scholarly work arguing that the allocation of scarce resources for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 should prioritize groups that have been hardest-hit by the pandemic as a result of structural disadvantages like systemic racism.
Govind Persad’s article, Allocating Medicine Fairly in an Unfair Pandemic (forthcoming in the University of Illinois Law Review) is a welcome addition to these conversations. Persad’s article focuses on issues of racial justice in resource allocation, and applies a much-needed legal lens to the practicalities of distribution systems that are often addressed from a more theoretical perspective. Many commentators in the fields of medicine, medical ethics, and public health have proposed that racial disparities be taken into account in the criteria for resource distribution, but not all have the legal background to understand whether and how such criteria could actually be implemented. Persad’s work offers valuable suggestions for how allocation priorities that minimize the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on racial minorities might be implemented without being struck down on constitutional grounds. Continue reading "Using Public Health Law to Minimize the Racially Disparate Impact of COVID-19"
Mar 26, 2021 Josh Gupta-KaganFamily Law
Lucas A. Gerber,
et al.,
Understanding the effects of an interdisciplinary approach to parental representation in child welfare, 116
Child. & Youth Serv. Rev. 105163 (2020), available at
SSRN.
Two empirical studies demonstrating the impact of vigorous family defense legal work on child protection cases bookended the 2010s. In 2012, Mark Courtney and Jennifer Hook found that cases in which a specialized interdisciplinary law office (ILO) represented parents had faster reunifications, guardianships, and adoptions than similar cases with different parental representation, though it did not explore how those results were obtained. In 2019, Lucas Gerber, Yuk Pang, Timothy Ross, Martin Guggenheim, Peter Pecora, and Joel Miller found that, compared to solo and small office practitioners, ILOs in New York City hastened reunification and guardianships for their clients, leading to 118 fewer days in foster care per child on average, without any negative child safety outcomes.
The New York City study also led to a 2020 qualitative study offering insight into what made these specialized ILOs so impactful and helping define what makes for high-quality parent representation (known as “family defense”). The answer: traditional lawyering, done aggressively and in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team. Continue reading "A Ringing Endorsement of Lawyers, and the Most Important Development in Child Protection Law"
Mar 25, 2021 Ann E. TweedyEquality
Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement is an essential read for anyone interested in women’s history, the history of voting rights in the United States, Indigenous history, or the history of other under-represented groups. Cathleen D. Cahill brings to light the little-known contributions of Native, African-American, Asian, and Latina women to the struggle for voting rights in America. Cahill combed multitudinous sources to paint robust portraits of these women, including Native activists Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, and Zitkala-Ša, African-American voting rights advocate Carrie Williams Clifford, Chinese-born activist Mabel Lee, and Latina activist Nina Otero-Warren, among others.
The book rightfully complicates the notion of women’s suffrage, revealing that a singular focus on women’s suffrage both obscures the larger struggles that these women were engaged in to secure the voting rights of all members of their communities and elides the contributions of these women to the suffrage movement. As Cahill explains, “[t]he suffrage histories of women of color bridge 1920, so to see that year as an end point leads us to tell a story that inevitably ignores them and truncates our understanding.” (P. 205.) Another invaluable aspect of this book is that Cahill refuses to shy away from the complexities of the important history she is unveiling. Thus, as readers, we are forced to reckon with the fact Native and Latina activists, for instance, sometimes drew distinctions between themselves and African-Americans to demonstrate the worthiness of their own communities for voting rights. More broadly, we are faced with the shameful history of exclusion within the women’s suffrage movement. White suffrage parade organizers, for instance, tried to relegate Ida B. Wells (then going by Mrs. Wells-Barnett) to the portion of the 1913 Washington D.C. suffrage parade reserved for African-Americans, rather than allowing her to march with the Illinois delegation as planned. As a consequence, she had to jump into the parade after it had already started in order to march with her fellow Illinois citizens. (P. 104.) Continue reading "Uncovering the Little-Known History of Suffragists of Color"
Mar 24, 2021 Jasminka KalajdzicCourts Law
Peter Salib,
Artificially Intelligent Class Actions (December 16, 2020), __ Tex. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming), available on
SSRN.
The effect of artificial intelligence (AI) on legal services is one of the most pressing issues facing the profession and legal education. AI has enormous potential to improve efficiencies and reduce costs for clients across many fields, from due diligence to online dispute resolution. This potential renders AI a highly disruptive force in the legal profession. In The End of Lawyers, Richard Susskind asked whether lawyers have any future given the ability of machines to take on many of the tasks we once believed required human lawyers.
In Artificially Intelligent Class Actions, however, Peter Salib argues that in the field of class action litigation at least, AI may lead to more, not less, work for litigators. Salib explores the use of AI to manage large numbers of individual assessments of causation and harm among class members. Rule 23(b)(3) requires that common issues predominate over individual ones for a lawsuit to proceed as a class action. Thus, the need to prove individual causation in product liability cases, or to assess damages for thousands of class members, may be fatal to certification. In other words, some cases are too big to succeed. Continue reading "AI & the End of Lawyers… Defeating Class Certification"
Mar 23, 2021 Maartje van der WoudeCriminal Law
The publication I would like to discuss in this Jot is a chapter in a book that is, in its entirety, a great and important read for those interested in the field of (critical) criminology and criminal justice. The 2020 edited collection “Contemporary Criminological Issues” provides its readers with an interesting set of chapters that challenge current critical criminological theoretical perspectives, themes and methods.
In the opening chapter, Mofette and Pratt introduce a new way to look at the intersection of criminal justice with immigration. According to the authors, this process is by no means fully captured – or understood – by applying the increasingly popular conceptual lens of ‘crimmigration’. The authors claim that the crimmigration lens tends to unjustly focus on finding evidence for the notion of the convergence – or merger – of criminal law and immigration law. As a result, the heterogeneity, contingency, and multiplicity of ordering and bordering practices, including the important ways that jurisdiction brackets and authorizes different legal powers and practices, remains hidden. This leads to false – and oversimplified – claims concerning the mechanisms driving the intersection of criminal justice with immigration. It also pushes into the background many other legal and quasi-legal regimes that are engaged in bordering practices and that contribute to the regulation and punishment of immigrants. Continue reading "Criticizing Crimmigration"
