Lies, Dating Lies, and Small Claims Court

Irina Manta, Tinder Lies, ___ Wake Forest L. Rev. ___ (forthcoming 2019), available at SSRN.

In a world dominated by online dating, my own marriage seems quite quaint.  We were introduced to each other! In person! By another human being! Sometimes I think that people give me a faintly odd look – a look that just 15-20 years ago was reserved for the bold (and seemingly “shameless”) people who dared to look for a partner online. When I left the dating world, it consisted primarily of websites. But as Irina Manta points out in her intriguing and provocative new article, Tinder Lies, online dating has become even easier and more ubiquitous with the surge in popularity of dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble. Manta confronts a problem that is as old courtship itself, that of sexual fraud, or “lies 1) that were put in profiles on online dating apps/sites, 2) whose content would materially influence the decision of a reasonable person whether to have sexual intercourse with the profile owner, and 3) remained uncorrected before sexual intercourse took place.” Like many problems, the issue of truth and disclosure in dating and sexual interactions has become more magnified and widespread when the primary platform for romantic and sexual introduction involves a great deal of anonymity, self-description, and the uncomfortable knowledge that one is, essentially, in a marketplace.

Tinder Lies is a terrific read. Manta takes on a question of increasing significance in the lives of many Americans who use online dating services and apps: What, if anything, should be done about users who lie about themselves in their profiles, where these lies lead other users to make decisions of significant personal import that they would not have otherwise made–to have sex with the person in the deceptive profile or to invest a significant amount of time and emotional resources in a relationship with a fraudster? While some lies might strike us as relatively harmless and easily debunked upon a face-to-face meeting, such the height or weight of the user, other lies are far more consequential, such as the person’s marital status,.

With these questions in mind, Manta offers an engaging primer on the history and current doctrinal landscape of legal responses to sexual fraud. She uses trademark law as a useful analogue to the problems of sexual fraud in online dating and offers a framework for a state law response to sexual fraud in which behavior that amounts to false advertising subjects that person to civil liability.  She concludes by suggesting that this legislative framework could be operationalized by offering claimants access to expedited proceedings in small claims court. As a civil procedure scholar, it is this last piece that I find most intriguing (and which is, presumably, of most interest to JOTWELL Courts Law readers). Continue reading "Lies, Dating Lies, and Small Claims Court"

How Much Do You Really Know About Fraud?

How did mail fraud come to be a powerful, all-purpose statutory tool for pursuing financial fraud in the United States? How does financial fraud resemble and differ from other kinds of commercial fraud—false advertising, misrepresenting the qualities of goods or land, or making impossible promises a seller never intends to keep? And is there, as there seems to be, a connection between novelty and innovation—new markets, new products, new frontiers—and fraud?

Ed Balleisen’s new book, Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff, examines fraud, writ large in America from the end of the civil war through the turn of the millennium. As anyone who knows Balleisen’s work would expect, Fraud is exceptionally researched, observant, thoughtful, and rendered in charming prose. Fraud spans the familiar legal silos to provide a sweeping history of different varieties of fraud, and their regulation. This is useful, and the book works because of Balleisen’s disciplined focus on his core questions—how fraud manifests, how regulatory anti-fraud strategies have evolved across time, how and when industry self-regulation has intervened to control it, and how judicial institutions and processes have influenced anti-fraud efforts. The book examines a recurring toggle between interventionist and laissez-faire regulatory approaches; the venerable, if inconsistent and imperfect, tradition of industry self-regulation; and the seemingly perennial link between influence (or lack thereof), and punishment (or lack thereof). It makes a remarkable contribution to our understanding of how fraud and its regulation have evolved thus far, and the conditions out of which our current regulatory models developed. Continue reading "How Much Do You Really Know About Fraud?"

The Paranoid “Fringe” in American Politics 

Rick Perlstein, I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong, N. Y. Times Magazine, (April 11, 2017).

The article that made me think hardest about American constitutional law this year was not a work of legal scholarship. It was historian Rick Perlstein’s meditation on the making of modern American conservatism.

Perlstein begins his article by describing the “rough consensus” among historians about how the right became the dominant political force in American politics in the second half of the twentieth century. The story starts in 1955, when William F. Buckley Jr. founded the National Review to combat the decades-long marginalization of political conservatism. Buckley banished John Birchers, anti-Semites, and fanatical Ayn Randians and “fused the diverse schools of conservative thinking—traditionalist philosophers, militant anti-Communists, libertarian economists—into a coherent ideology.” Fueled by support from white suburban voters, the new political conservatives thrived. Crucial to their success—or so the story goes—was their denouncement of the “political surrealism of the paranoid fringe.” Particularly in the South, new movement conservatives sublimated the “frenetic, violent anxieties” aroused by race, and spoke instead of “stable housing values,” “quality local education,” and “colorblind constitutionalism.” Simply put, modern conservatism became a dominant force by eschewing what Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics.” Continue reading "The Paranoid “Fringe” in American Politics "

Creative Communities and Intellectual Property Law

Betsy Rosenblatt, Belonging as Intellectual Creation, 82 Mo. L. Rev. 91 (2017).

In late November 2016, recreational knitters Krista Suh and Jayna Zwieman conceived of The Pussyhat Project — a way for knitters and crocheters to participate in the January 21, 2017, Women’s March on Washington by creating a simple hat for marchers to wear. To facilitate the project, there was a website (featuring several patterns for free download, the first created by yarn store owner Kat Coyle), an Instagram account, and a hashtag. There wasn’t, however, a focus on a particular level of output. Rather, the goal of the project was to foster community through creative work, building on existing networks of knitters and highlighting the ways in which knitting circles are often “powerful gatherings of women, a safe space to talk.”

The community’s boundaries were porous and self-policed. Anyone was welcome to claim membership; the only requirement was to create or be the recipient of creation. Although the basic form of the hat was loosely defined — pink in color and rectangular in shape — individual knitters were free to stylize their hats in any way they wished. Patterns were freely shared, and distribution took place via a voluntary infrastructure. The community that resulted produced tens of thousands of hats in two months, and representative hats now reside in the collections of major museums across the country.

Scholars will undoubtedly have much more to say about this movement as its history is written, including critiques involving, inter alia, race, class, gender identity, and the sociology of protest movements. For now, the project is worth adding to our consideration of other organic communities that have inspired creativity without a focus on commercialization — even if they also feature stronger policing mechanisms (Wikipedia), more reliance on traditional IP inputs (fan edits and cosplay), or more emphasis on reputation building (message boards and Facebook posts). What do these community gardens of creativity — unburdened by concerns about monetization or propertization — tell us about what the goals of intellectual property law should be?

Professor Betsy Rosenblatt suggests in her recent article that the law has too narrow a focus. Creating with and for others, research shows, promotes a sense of belonging, which, in turn, motivates and improves the results of creativity. Indeed, for the pussyhat knitters, a sense of belonging to a social movement likely provided the entire motivation to create. (I should make clear here that the example throughout of the Pussyhat Project is mine, not Professor Rosenblatt’s.) So if the law focuses only on the tangible results of creativity — what Professor Rosenblatt refers to as “stuff’ — and fails to consider the importance of belonging, it might incentivize less creativity than it otherwise would. Continue reading "Creative Communities and Intellectual Property Law"

A New Approach to Labor Law in States & Cities

Kate Andrias, The New Labor Law, 126 Yale L.J. 2 (2016).

Perhaps the greatest success story for unions and workers over the last five years is the wave of state and local ordinances that have raised minimum wages, guaranteed sick and safe time, and improved corporate scheduling practices, among other worker-friendly innovations. At the same time, though, union density has remained flat, as unions’ successes in campaigns for better working conditions have not translated into large numbers of successful union elections. Moreover, with the election of Donald Trump, further erosion of union density is likely: unions will face a hostile NLRB possibly compounded by federal labor law reform in the form of a national “right to work” law or evisceration of collective bargaining rights for federal employees. In other words, unions’ campaigns to improve working conditions have been wildly successful so far – they just haven’t led to more enterprise-based bargaining, as contemplated by the Wagner model of labor law.

Where does this leave unions? The pessimistic story is that private employers – aided by an anticipated spate of favorable NLRB decisions – will continue to rebuff union drives, Republicans will continue to weaken public sector unions in states they control and in the federal government, and the Supreme Court will eliminate mandatory dues or fees in public sector unions nationwide. And it goes nearly without saying that prospects for creating conditions in which unions could thrive – for example, by passing legislation to facilitate sectoral-level bargaining – went from “very unlikely” to “completely DOA” with the 2016 election. But Kate Andrias develops a more optimistic story in her pathbreaking article, The New Labor Law. She focuses with precision on exactly how unions have managed to achieve their recent successes, revealing that, in a sense, sectoral and regional bargaining are actually already here, and they can be nurtured and propelled at the state level. Continue reading "A New Approach to Labor Law in States & Cities"

Racketeers, Mobsters, & Plaintiffs’ Mass-Action Attorneys

Briana Rosenbaum, The RICO Trend in Class Action Warfare, 102 Iowa L. Rev. (forthcoming 2016), available at SSRN.

A racketeer, a mobster, and a plaintiffs’ mass-action attorney walk into a bar. What might be a decent setup for a joke is actually dead serious. Like members of organized crime, plaintiffs’ mass-action attorneys are being sued under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statutes. Briana Rosenbaum’s The RICO Trend in Class Action Warfare carefully considers existing remedies for frivolous litigation and critiques what she sees as the inefficacy of “the RICO reprisal.”

Rosenbaum readily admits that some mass-action attorneys include frivolous claims among meritorious ones in an attempt to obtain a larger settlement, otherwise known as “specious claiming.” But Rosenbaum argues that remedies for abusive litigation already exist. There are tort remedies such as malicious prosecution and abuse of process, and procedural remedies such as Fed. R. Civ. P. 11 and 28 U.S.C. § 1927. Rosenbaum posits that this existing remedial structure for vexatious litigants, while imperfect, was at least created with important countervailing policy considerations in mind, such as access to justice and administrative efficiency. Continue reading "Racketeers, Mobsters, & Plaintiffs’ Mass-Action Attorneys"

The Challenge of Eminent Domain

Yxta Maya Murray, Detroit Looks Toward a Massive, Unconstitutional Blight Condemnation: The Optics of Eminent Domain in the Motor City, 23 Geo. J. on Poverty L. & Pol’y 395 (2016), available at SSRN.

One usually thinks of law review articles as detached, dry, formal, and arcane. This is particularly true of those dealing with property. Even if articles are billed as an “interdisciplinary” effort, this generally means the occasional introduction of similarly detached and desiccated material from other fields.

The article Detroit Looks Toward a Massive, Unconstitutional Blight Condemnation: The Optics of Eminent Domain in the Motor City, by Yxta Maya Murray, shatters that mold. In this work, Murray – a legal scholar and the author of six novels – writes of the infinitely complex layers of law, politics, psychological bias, and human need that eminent domain involves in a way that it has not been done before. Continue reading "The Challenge of Eminent Domain"

A Cure for Just-In-Time Scheduling

Charlotte Alexander, Anna Haley-Lock, and Nantiya Ruan, Stabilizing Low-Wage Work: Legal Remedies for Unpredictable Work Hours and Income Instability, 50 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 1 (2015) available at SSRN.

Many readers were introduced to the concept of “just-in-time scheduling” when the New York Times explored the exhausting and chaotic work life of a Starbucks barista in August 2014. But the practice is certainly not limited to Starbucks. In response to this broader trend, groups like “OUR Walmart” are calling not only for higher wages and more full-time jobs, but for predictable and dependable scheduling, and left-leaning states and cities are beginning to mandate predictable work schedules for at least some workers. This emerging locus of advocacy and media attention is also the subject of Stabilizing Low-Wage Work, a great new article by Charlotte Alexander, Anna Haley-Lock, and Nantiya Ruan. The article analyzes comprehensively not only the problem of “just-in-time” scheduling for low-wage workers, but also the potential for either collective bargaining or state and local law to solve that problem.

Adapted from the practice of just-in-time manufacturing, just-in-time scheduling refers to the now-common practice of adjusting staffing levels in response to current conditions. While it is a problem for workers with many types of jobs, it has particularly taken hold in the service sector where, the article reports, “almost 30 percent or workers” have schedules with “variable start and end times.” Moreover, as the article shows, modern technology has made just-in-time scheduling attractive; employers can monitor and anticipate customer demand in close to real-time, sending workers home or canceling their shifts altogether if potential customers are staying home. Conversely, employers may want to call people in at a moment’s notice; this requires employees to wait by the phone, but seldom results in on-call pay. Federal law, particularly the Fair Labor Standards Act, does little to address this problem; when that law was drafted, the greater problem was that employers frequently demanded excessively long hours from workers. Continue reading "A Cure for Just-In-Time Scheduling"

Boilerplate and the Boundary Between Contract and Tort

Margaret Jane Radin’s latest work, Boilerplate: The Fine Print, Vanishing Rights, and the Rule of Law and a companion article and book chapter interrogate how now-ubiquitous fine print buried deep in consumer contracts affects the rights of ordinary Americans. This boilerplate can take many forms. It includes “extravagant exculpatory clauses,” choice-of-law provisions, and waivers of consequential damages. Frequently, and perhaps most importantly, it also includes agreements to arbitrate—and, in so doing, entails consent to eliminate the background protections we take for granted, including juries, reasonable filing fees, rights of appeal, rules of evidence, the ability to join with similarly aggrieved individuals, and stare decisis. Radin finds this fine print deeply troubling. She argues that, considered in tandem, these contractual terms make certain remedies for transgressions practically unavailable and thereby undermine individual autonomy, degrade democratic principles, and, ultimately, subvert the rule of law.

Because Radin is a contracts scholar—and her recent work is, on the face of it, about contract law—it would be easy for those of us who traffic in tort to miss the scholarship’s significance. That would be a mistake. Continue reading "Boilerplate and the Boundary Between Contract and Tort"

Property as a Vehicle of Inclusion to Promote Human Sociability

Daniel B. Kelly, The Right to Include, 63 Emory L.J. 857 (2014), available at SSRN.

Quite often, “private property” brings with it characterizations of individualism, isolation, and exclusion along with images of fences, gates, locks, boundaries, and barriers. In fact, a “keep out” sign has often been identified as a symbol for the essence of private property rights and their function. Professor Daniel B. Kelly reminds us that such images and characterizations miss a huge portion of the utility served by property law that fosters the capacity and motivation to hang a different sign—one that says “come on in.” Professor Kelly’s recent article, The Right to Include, 63 Emory L.J. 857 (2014), catalogs and analyzes the range of legal options available to owners to include others in the use, possession, and enjoyment of real property.

In recent property law literature, the “right to exclude” has gotten most of the ink. In fact, Kelly explains that, “[i]n delineating the bundle of rights that characterizes property, courts have not identified the right to include as a distinct attribute of ownership,” (P. 868) and most scholars have only hinted at the importance of this separate strand of rights within ownership. Professor Kelly’s work is a welcome rectification of this imbalance of affection. If indeed human beings are dependent on each other to survive and flourish, then finding ways to facilitate inclusiveness in relation to property is vital to nourishing our “interaction imperative.” Kelly thoroughly explores the rules and doctrines in property and related fields of law that have emerged to ignite inclusion and spur human sociability. Continue reading "Property as a Vehicle of Inclusion to Promote Human Sociability"

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