Dec 17, 2019 Katheleen GuzmanTrusts & Estates
Intents and acts are different things. Intent without act rings hollow or benign, and acts without intent can be perplexing or seem cavalier. But add one to the other—animate the intent through act, i.e. externalize what lives in the mind of one into the world of all—and powerful legalities result. Accidents turn into assaults; manslaughter into murder. Such casual communications as drafts or unsent texts could even become a last will and testament, accepted into probate as dispositive acts. This last context frames the inquiry that Professor David Horton explores with mastery in Wills Without Signatures.
It might seem that the unsigned will is too narrow an issue to warrant consideration. “No such thing,” one might say. “No signature, no intent; no intent, no will.” But with both precision and sweep, Professor Horton deconstructs that claim to build all sorts of bridges between small views and big pictures and much in between. The task is neither light nor insignificant. Old rules die hard. But with the continued relaxation of formalism and formalities, the constant expansion of technology, and the increasingly casual and tech-dependent ways in which people behave, unsigned (at least in the traditional sense) documents might indeed reflect the genuine last wishes of their makers. If so, and if “testamentary freedom” deserves the veneration that law and society claim for it, what can or must be extrapolated about intent/signature interplays demands analytic care. Continue reading "Fits, Starts, and Finishes"
Dec 16, 2019 Charlene D. LukeTax Law
Christine Hurt’s Partnership Lost uses the developmental history and law of corporations and “uncorporations” to examine whether a principled justification exists for the differing tax regimes for subchapter C corporations as compared to subchapter K partnerships. As her Milton-evoking title suggests, Hurt describes an early, prelapsarian partnership state, dating to the creation of the income tax. The early partnership form did not spare its owners from personal liability, did not grant them dominion over an entity with perpetual life, did not provide them with the ability to transfer ownership freely, did not permit them to rely passively on the managerial efforts of others, and did not allow them to circumvent fiduciary obligations to each other and to the partnership.
Hurt describes the modern “hybrid” partnership in comparison to this early partnership model. She sets out the developments in the uniform acts and state laws, particularly those of Delaware, that have since allowed partnership hybrids to acquire desirable corporate characteristics, such as limited liability, passive investors, and centralized management, while remaining partnerships for tax purposes. The hybrid partnership, as an “uncorporation,” can avoid certain governance and other requirements. “The backstops against managerial opportunities” applicable to corporations often do not apply. The result is that “[t]he hybrid entity is more corporation-like than the corporation.” Continue reading "Time to Banish Partnership Hybrids from Partnership Taxation?"
Dec 13, 2019 Anne Marie LofasoWork Law
Richard Blum, Labor Picketing, The Right To Protest, and the Neoliberal First Amendment, 42 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 595 (2019).
In his article, Labor Picketing, The Right To Protest, and the Neoliberal First Amendment, Professor Blum argues that labor picketing, which has received diminished protection when viewed from the statutory lens of Section 8(b)(4) of the National Labor Relations Act, would receive greater protection if viewed primarily through a constitutional lens. Blum upfront acknowledges that many scholars—notably Cynthia Estlund, Catherine Fisk, Charlotte Garden, Michael Harper, James Gray Pope, and Mark Schneider—as well as several practitioners have made similar arguments. (P. 600, n. 14.) However, he brings a fresh approach to this important legal agenda by framing the problem not only as a legal challenge but also from the union lawyers’ perspective, which he obtained through surveys and interviews. (Pp. 611–16.)
As a legal matter, Blum correctly notes that the halcyon days of labor picketing protection passed nearly eighty years ago when the Supreme Court, in Thornhill v. Alabama, held that the state’s power to regulate labor picketing was limited by the First Amendment’s free speech clause. But what the Justices giveth, the Justices may taketh away. Thus, labor picketing could lose its constitutional protection: (1) if accompanied by violence, Milk Wagon Drivers Union of Chicago, Local 753 v. Meadowmoor Dairies, Inc.; (2) if the speech targeted a neutral party, Carpenters and Joiners Union of Am., Local No. 213 v. Ritter’s Cafe; or (3) if the picketing had unlawful objectives, Giboney v. Empire Storage & Ice Co. During this time, the Court also began to view labor picketing as inherently involving conduct as well as speech, and therefore subject to greater state regulation for that reason too. Indeed, by the time the Supreme Court penned Int’l Bhd of Teamsters, Local 695 v. Vogt, the transformation of labor picketing to activity benefitting from less than full constitutional protection was nearly complete. Continue reading "What’s Good for the Goose is Good for the Gander, Or Is It? The Pitfalls of Using The Court’s Neoliberal Construction of the First Amendment To Protect Secondary Picketing"
Dec 12, 2019 Andres GuadamuzTechnology Law
Kevin Werbach, The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust (2018).
The distributed ledger technology known as the blockchain has continued to gather interest in legal academia. With a growing number of books and academic papers exploring almost every aspect of the subject, it is always good to have a comprehensive book that not only covers the basics, but also provides new insights. Kevin Werbach’s The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust provides an in-depth yet easy-to-comprehend analysis of the most important aspects of blockchain technology. It also manages to convey astute analysis and some needed and sobering skepticism about the subject.
Werbach describes the characteristics of blockchains, providing a thorough and easy-to-understand introduction to key concepts and the reasons why the technology is thought to be a viable solution for various problems. A blockchain is a cryptographic distributed ledger that appends information in a supposedly immutable manner. An open record of all transactions is made public, which then communicates a “shared truth”, that is a single proof that everyone trusts because it has been independently verified by a majority of the participants in the network. This technology is thought to be a solution for problems such as the lack of reliability in accounting records, and for double spending, where the same amount of currency is used in two different transactions. While the first half of the work is likely to be the most useful for those who are not familiar with the underlying technical concepts, the book really makes its best contributions in its later chapters, where the author begins to criticize various aspects of the technology. Continue reading "Trust, Decentralization, and the Blockchain"
Dec 11, 2019 James E. PfanderCourts Law
Mila Sohoni,
The Lost History of the “Universal” Injunction, 133
Harv. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2020), available at
SSRN.
National and universal injunctions have been in the news. In the wake of an outpouring of scholarly interest in decrees that offer non-party protections, especially in litigation with the federal government, the Supreme Court has taken notice. Invoking Sam Bray’s view of the national injunction as “unthinkable” by standards of “traditional equity,” Justice Clarence Thomas argued in a concurring opinion in Trump v. Hawaii that such injunctions “appear to be inconsistent with longstanding limits on equitable relief and the power of Article III courts.” The Trump Department of Justice has issued guidance to its civil litigators, encouraging them to contest the proposed issuance of universal decrees. And members of Congress have considered legislative fixes that would narrow federal equity power.
Many fixes have been proposed and some will no doubt be adopted, particularly as federal courts grow more cautious about issuing such decrees. But as Mila Sohoni argues in The Lost History of the “Universal” Injunction, it may not make sense to frame any restrictions as constitutional limits on the remedial authority of federal courts. Adjusting the exercise of equitable discretion is one thing; curtailing equitable authority on constitutional grounds is quite another. Continue reading "Due Process and National Injunctions"
Dec 10, 2019 Jill FamilyLexImmigration
Immigration lawyers search for ways to squeeze fairness out of a system that bristles at the concept. Professor Marouf’s article, Invoking Common Law Defenses in Immigration Cases, is a wonderful contribution to this immigration law tradition of creatively searching for fairness in the system. The harshness of immigration law creates the need for Professor Marouf’s contribution. The value of her contribution stems not only from her creative approach, but because her efforts serve as a reminder that immigration law desperately needs reform to become fair.
Professor Marouf is driven to explore the applicability of common law defenses in immigration cases precisely because immigration law is not fair. If consequences were proportional, if more robust relief from removal were available, or if the grounds of removal were not so broad, there would be less of a need for creative approaches such as Professor Marouf’s. As Professor Marouf states in her article, “all possible defenses must be explored.” Continue reading "Creatively Searching for Fairness"
Dec 9, 2019 Kunal ParkerLegal History
Most American law students are familiar with Pierson v. Post, a case that has been a fixture in American property law casebooks for well over half a century. Decided by the New York Supreme Court in 1805, Pierson v. Post is used in property law courses to illustrate the question of how property rights arise in wild animals. Today, it is frequently taught alongside cases exploring how property rights arise in contemporary contexts such as ground water, human genetic materials, baseballs hit into stadiums crowded with fans, and the like. The facts of Pierson are simple and memorable: Post is in pursuit of a fox on a beach in Long Island when Pierson interrupts the hunt and kills the fox. Has Post acquired a property interest in the fox by virtue of the fact of being engaged in pursuit of it? The New York court deciding the case canvassed a range of European authorities going back to Justinian. The majority ruled that no property rights could arise in a wild animal unless it was captured. The rule it advanced has the virtue of clarity. But it risks being unfair to Post, particularly if he was at the point of killing the fox and/or if his labors had made it easier for Pierson to kill it. The dissent, in a witty opinion by Judge (and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Henry Livingston, would have allowed for property rights in the fox to arise through something short of actual capture, namely, imminent taking. The dissent’s solution might be fairer to Post, perhaps, but specifying what counts as an imminent taking is no easy task, entailing more work for lawyers and judges.
In my own property law course, Pierson v. Post has appeared either at the beginning or the end, but in neither instance have I devoted more than half an hour of a single class session to it. I teach Pierson v. Post because it neatly illustrates the difference between clear rules and blurry standards, but also because it is a “classic.” I do not want my students to leave the course without having a glancing familiarity with something they are “supposed” to have run into in law school.
What has been a minor pedagogical experience for me and my students has been, it is fair to conclude, an obsession for Angela Fernandez. She has spent a decade working on her new book, Pierson v. Post: The Hunt for the Fox, and has recently authored a “rewrite” of the Pierson v. Post dissent in which she adopts the style of someone writing in 1805 but advances feminist and animal rights sensibilities. My review will cover both the book and the “rewritten” dissent and will set them in relationship to one another. Continue reading "The Hunt as History and As Game"
Dec 6, 2019 Amy SalyzynLegal Profession
Elizabeth Chambliss,
Evidence-Based Lawyer Regulation, 97
Wash. U. L. Rev. 297 (2019), available at
SSRN.What should a modern legal service regulator look like? In some jurisdictions, like England and Wales, this question has resulted in dramatic reforms, such as taking the power of self-regulation away from lawyers. In contrast, much of the regulatory change in North America has involved relatively low-hanging fruit. Some new duties have been incorporated into codes of conducts, some economic restrictions have been lifted, and certain processes have been professionalized. There hasn’t been, however, any radical change.
For many years, the North American legal profession has defended this regulatory stasis with relatively simple appeals to broad concepts such as the “independence of the bar,” “the public interest,” and “professionalism.” In her recent article, Evidence-Based Lawyer Regulation, Elizabeth Chambliss argues that this approach is no longer sustainable and that “the profession’s authority over the regulation of legal services increasingly will require a commitment to evidence-based regulation.” In other words, if the legal profession wants to introduce—or even maintain—regulatory policies, it must offer convincing empirical data in support of such policies rather than simply lean on well-worn rhetoric. Continue reading "Building Better Lawyer Regulators"
Dec 5, 2019 Brian BixJurisprudence
Steve Hedley, The Rise and Fall of Private Law Theory, 134 L. Quarterly Rev. 214 (2018)
In one sense, contemporary private law theory offers a wide range of approaches. For example, contract law theory includes significant theories whose focus ranges across promise, consent, property, commerce, reliance, choice, and wealth maximization, just to offer a quick sample. In tort law, one also finds theories that emphasize corrective justice as well as theories grounded on the inherent (“formalist”) nature of certain kinds of interactions. Under Steve Hedley’s analysis, however, all of these theories (and the comparable theories of other doctrinal areas within private law) in fact cluster in a narrow category, one that excludes important considerations once considered central to private law theory. In particular, Hedley’s argument is that modern private law theory tends to ignore or discount the purposes the state might try to achieve through law–the use of legislation and regulation in private law areas in order to achieve collective objectives. Hedley goes on to show how this is a relatively recent development, that older writings on private law offered a more central place for public purposes.
If, as current theories claim, private law doctrinal areas are, in fact, essentially about a particular value, or essentially about wealth maximization, or essentially about intrinsic-formalist truth, then what the state does will likely be seen as either irrelevant or ill-advised. State action will undermine the innate wisdom of the efficient market or the efficiency-increasing judgment of judges, and will distort outcomes away from what corrective justice requires. Continue reading "Private Law and Public Purposes"
Dec 4, 2019 Laura A. HeymannIntellectual Property Law
Alexandra J. Roberts, Trademark Failure to Function, 104 Iowa L. Rev. 1977 (2019).
When a new word or catchphrase enters the social lexicon, some individuals will rush to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to try to be the first to obtain a trademark registration. That was the case with one John E. Gillard, who applied pro se to register #COVFEFE for hats, T-shirts, and related goods mere hours after the President included the word at the end of a midnight tweet on May 31, 2017. The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board affirmed refusal of the registration on the grounds that #COVFEFE, as a “sui generis nonsense word” that allowed users and observers to “project onto it any meaning they wish,” failed to function as a trademark for the applicant’s goods, particularly given the wide array of merchandise from different sources already featuring the term.
The question may be a bit murkier, though, when the applied-for mark has a closer association with the applicant. In August, many media outlets were abuzz with the news that The Ohio State University had filed an application seeking a trademark registration for the word THE, for use on “clothing, namely t-shirts, baseball caps and hats” in “standard characters, without claim to any particular font style, size, or color.” Included among the submitted specimens was a photograph of a women’s T-shirt from “The Official Team Shop of Buckeye Nation®,” depicting a red shirt with the word THE in large block letters, with a smaller Ohio State logo underneath, as well as a photograph of a white baseball cap with the word THE in large red capital letters. The popular reaction seemed to revolve around the perception that it was ludicrous to obtain a trademark registration for a common English word, even though many such trademarks exist. (APPLE comes immediately to mind.) Continue reading "What We’ve Got Here Is a Failure to Indicate"
