Jan 19, 2017 Francesca BartlettLegal Profession
Richard Moorhead, Catrina Denvir, Rachel Cahill-O’Callaghan, Maryam Kouchaki and Stephen Gloob,
The Ethical Identity of Law Students, International Journal of the Legal Profession, (2016).
Much has been written about the ‘ethical identity’ of law students with what Elizabeth Chambliss describes as a dominant ‘corruption narrative’ informing philosophical and empirical accounts. In another myth-busting study from Richard Moorhead and others, The Ethical Identity of Law Students, the diminishment thesis is tested, somewhat supported and problematized.
Blame is often leveled at an ever more commercialized profession and the (poor) signals it sends to law students about role morality. Moorhead’s research suggests that pre-conceptions of differing legal practice might attract differently ethically inclined students. . What these students then learn at law school is also subject to what Wald and Pearce describe as an ’industry’ of criticism. Scholarship across the common law world points to the negative effect of a neo-liberal turn of law schools; in Australia, Margaret Thornton has long argued that we produce ‘narrow technocrats.’ Elizabeth Mertz describes a language of indoctrination at law school which favours professional ‘hubris’ over social justice and moral reasoning. While not all legal education has been implicated in ethical diminishment—notably clinical education—smaller-scale studies have produced little evidence of positive impact. Nevertheless, Chambliss argues that our student days and professional lives may be subject to many instances of ‘ethical learning’ and ‘ethical fading’. The difficulty then for any researcher trying to measure this influence is to understand the context and the subject. Continue reading "‘Benchmarking’ Ethical Identity of Law Students and How it is (or is not) Impacted by Law School"
Jan 18, 2017 Verity WinshipInternational & Comparative Law
Melissa J. Durkee,
Astroturf Activism, 69
Stanford L. Rev. (forthcoming 2017), available at
SSRN.
Citizens for Sensible Control of Acid Rain. Consumers for World Trade. The American Forest and Paper Association. The Turkish Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists. These are a few of the 4600 organizations that are formal, registered consultants to the United Nation’s Economic and Social Council. They are also examples of the mode of corporate access to international lawmaking that is the subject of Melissa J. Durkee’s excellent article, Astroturf Activism.
At the heart of Astroturf Activism is a nuanced description of institutionalized corporate participation in international lawmaking. It takes readers behind the curtain at the United Nations to examine a system of registering non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as consultants with a special advisory role. The article’s pithy title captures a central concern: that businesses lobby international lawmakers through “’astroturf’ imitations of grassroots organizations,” using “nonprofit NGOs as front groups to advance business interests through the U.N. consultancy system.” Despite the title, however, the author resists simple identification of NGOs as the good guys and business as the bad. She suggests here and in other work that business participation can sometimes be beneficial, lending expertise or breaking “geopolitical logjams.” Continue reading "Business Lobbying Goes Global"
Jan 17, 2017 Kathryn WattsAdministrative Law
Nicholas Bagley,
Remedial Restraint in Administrative Law,
Columbia Law Review (forthcoming 2017), available via
SSRN.
We have all heard the saying that you “don’t need a sledgehammer to kill a gnat.” Yet, when it comes to fashioning remedies for agencies’ transgressions of administrative law principles, the courts often use the equivalent of legal sledgehammers to remedy agency transgressions—no matter how minor the transgressions. This, at least, is the picture painted by Professor Nicholas Bagley in his draft article titled Remedial Restraint in Administrative Law, which will be published in 2017 in the Columbia Law Review.
As Professor Bagley’s article carefully describes, when a court determines that agency action violates the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), the usual response is for the reviewing court to reflexively invalidate the agency action and to remand to the agency. Administrative law’s adherence to this rigid, rule-like approach to remedies—one that generally vacates and remands without pausing to ask how the agency’s mistake harmed or prejudiced the complaining party—means that courts “treat every transgression as worthy of equal sanction.” (P. 4.) This, in turn, leads to what Professor Bagley perceives as a frequent mismatch between the underlying APA violation and the harshness of invalidating the agency action.
Until I picked up Professor Bagley’s piece, I must admit that I had not given the question of remedies in administrative law much sustained or critical thought. And, as it turns out, I am not alone. Indeed, as Professor Bagley describes it, “systematic inattention” plagues remedial questions in administrative law. (P. 2.) This is the main reason why I highly recommend that you read his article. Unless you are unlike most administrative law observers, the article will likely push you to consider issues that you have not carefully thought through before despite their central importance to administrative law disputes. Continue reading "Rethinking Remedies"
Jan 16, 2017 Anders WalkerLegal History
In The Jim Crow Routine, historian Stephen Berrey brings fresh eyes to the intricate set of legal rules that maintained racial segregation in the American South. Building on works like Leon Litwack’s Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow and Neil R. McMillen’s Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow, Berrey focuses not on the rise or demise of Jim Crow so much as the manner in which it disciplined daily life. For average folks, argues Berrey, Jim Crow turned the South into a stage where whites and blacks learned to negotiate one another’s presence on the street, in stores, at the post office, and at work – according to elaborate, albeit unwritten, scripts.
Taking Mississippi as a point of focus, Berrey demonstrates that Jim Crow involved a complex set of scripted “exchange[s]” between whites and blacks that were at once “subtle and dynamic, intimate and volatile,” exchanges that in a sense formed a customary law of interaction independent of legislatures and courts. (P. 4.) Closely linked to this were strategies of resistance that African Americans developed to avoid white recriminations, as well as strategies that whites developed to enhance, or modernize, the legal challenges of racial control. Such modernizations exploded dramatically following the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, as southern states moved quickly to erase overt racial classifications from their law, meanwhile imposing new, more subtle forms of surveillance rooted in the rubrics of maintaining the peace, protecting property, and preventing crime.
At least one startling observation emerges from Berrey’s study. First, as much as southern law worked to achieve racial separation, whites and blacks in the Deep South interacted and existed in a near constant state of racial togetherness, working, playing, shopping, fishing, and even eating in close proximity to one another, often to the point that racial segregation was adhered to only in the flimsiest, most ad hoc fashion. For example, Berrey presents us with stories of whites and blacks attending the same functions divided only by a row of stools (P. 19), attending the same theaters separated only by a rope (P. 25), eating together in fishing boats separated only by a casually placed stick (P. 24), and sitting in the same rows in courthouses with only one extra space between them (P. 27). Such divisions, which hardly kept the races apart, were further compromised by outright concessions that allowed for black servants to join their employers on train cars and trolleys and even live in their homes. Continue reading "Jim Crow’s Unwritten Code"
Jan 13, 2017 Eric BiberLexEnvironmental Law
Kellen Zale,
When Everything is Small: The Regulatory Challenge of Scale in the Sharing Economy,
San Diego L. Rev. (forthcoming 2016), available at
SSRN.
There has been a lot of literature about the so-called “sharing” economy lately, in particular focusing on the conflicts over whether and how that economy will fit within the existing regulatory systems at the local, state, and federal levels. And at first blush, the question of whether Uber drivers should be regulated as taxis or not doesn’t seem to have much of a connection with the standard concerns of environmental law—particularly the regulation of large industrial sources of pollution.
But as Kellen Zale’s excellent article points out, the problems that the sharing economy poses to existing regulatory systems are ones that we have seen before, and ones that we will see again. Zale notes that the sharing economy poses regulatory challenges precisely because of its scale of a large number of small activities—thousands and thousands of individual drivers working for Uber or Lyft, or of homeowners renting through Air BnB. Large numbers of individually small activities are incredibly difficult to regulate effectively, and that regulation can impose substantial social costs. As a result, the law has traditionally exempted many small scale actions from regulation. On the other hand, the accumulation of all of these individually small actions can impose significant harms on neighbors, communities, and the environment. For instance, the congestion and noise impacts of large numbers of Air BnB rentals have been a source of major complaint in some tourist communities. Zale also identifies how the sharing economy is but one example of this phenomenon—a growth of the impacts from individually small activities to the point at which regulation is required—and discusses how it can be discerned in a range of areas, including landlord-tenant law. Continue reading "What the Sharing Economy and Environmental Law Have In Common"
Jan 12, 2017 Anne Marie LofasoWork Law
In her article, A Positive Right to Free Labor, Professor Zietlow recounts the history of the working person’s claim to free labor. Zietlow traces that history from its roots – in the antislavery and labor movements of nineteenth-century antebellum America – right through to the post-Title-VII era of today, showing us that there is much more work to be done.
Professor Zietlow begins by defining a positive right to free labor as including “the right to work for a living wage free of undue coercion and free from discrimination based on immutable characteristics. Not merely the negative guarantee against the state’s infringement on individual equality and liberty, a positive right to free labor is immediately enforceable against state and private parties.” (P. 861.) From there, she states her thesis – a positive right to free labor cannot be found in the Fourteenth Amendment but is found in the Thirteenth Amendment, which is unique among constitutional provisions insofar as it applies to non-state actors and obliges the state to take positive action to ensure workers’ rights. In Zietlow’s view, by picking up this strand of positive rights that have been lost to history, the potential for progressive regulation of private employers’ duties to employees is great. Continue reading "Connecting Nineteenth-Century Antislavery and Labor Movements with Twenty-First-Century Workers’ Rights"
Jan 11, 2017 Scott HershovitzTorts
Nicolas Cornell,
Wrongs, Rights, and Third Parties, 43
Phil. & Pub. Aff. 109 (2015), available for purchase at
Wiley Online Library.
The word “wrong” is the source of much confusion, in part because it does double duty. “You set the table wrong,” I might say, noting that you’ve misplaced the forks and knives. When I say that, I imply that there’s a standard against which place settings are properly judged, and that you’ve mucked things up by failing to match it. This use of the word “wrong” pops up all over the place: “You took a wrong turn.” “That’s the wrong answer.” “Why do I get everything wrong?”
But there’s another way to use the word “wrong”: “You wronged Tom,” I might say, “and you really ought to do something about it.” When I say that, I imply that Tom had a right that you not do what you did, and, moreover, that you owe him something for having breached his right. This usage is related to the first. Tom’s right sets a standard, against which your action is properly judged. What you did was wrong, relative to that standard. But since the source of the standard was Tom’s right, you didn’t just do something wrong, you also wronged Tom. Continue reading "Wrongs Without Rights"
Jan 10, 2017 Kristin HickmanTax Law
Tax specialists are no strangers to the exercise of statutory interpretation. The Internal Revenue Code is an enormously complex statute, with all of the overlapping provisions, competing goals, and specificity interspersed with ambiguity that one would expect to accompany that complexity. And mastering the tax policy aspects of the Code is hard enough that tax specialists might be forgiven for reducing the exercise of statutory interpretation to short statements about considering the Code’s text, history, and purpose, or the “spirit” of the tax laws. A recent exchange between two prominent federal judges—Chief Judge Robert Katzmann of the Second Circuit and Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the D.C. Circuit—and the lengthier books highlighted within their exchange offer a highly readable reminder of the parallel complexity of statutory interpretation theory and jurisprudence. Tax specialists interested in seeing their policy preferences succeed in the real world would do well to take note.
Although tax specialists often like to think of the tax laws as unique, judges in tax cases routinely rely upon and debate about the same tools of statutory construction that they apply and discuss in interpreting other statutes. For just one particularly expansive example, in Rand v. Comm’r, 141 T.C. 376 (2013), in deciding that refundable credits like the earned income tax credit reduce “the amount shown as the tax by the taxpayer on his return” when computing the underpayment penalty under § 6662 and 6664, Judge Ronald Buch discussed the consistent usage canon, the expressio unius canon, the surplusage canon, and the rule of lenity, in addition to the Chevron and Auer standards of review. Judge David Gustafson in dissent maintained that proper application of the rule of lenity supported the opposite conclusion. Judge Richard Morrison, dissenting separately, criticized Judge Buch’s opinion for relying too heavily on the consistent usage canon and ignoring relevant legislative history. (Congress subsequently amended § 6664 to clarify its intent.) Carpenter Family Investments, LLC v. Comm’r, 136 T.C. 373 (2011)—one of the cases leading up to the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Home Concrete that basis overstatements are not omissions of an amount from gross income under §§ 6229(c)(2) and 6501(e)(1)(A), includes an interesting exchange between Judge Robert Wherry for the majority and Judges James Halpern and Mark Homes in concurrence over whether unique attributes of the tax legislative process are relevant when considering legislative history in tax cases. And in Yari v. Comm’r, 143 T.C. 157 (2014), in interpreting the phrase “tax shown on the return” in connection with the § 6707A reportable transaction penalty, Judge Robert Wherry referenced several canons, discussed at some length which documents were relevant as legislative history, and observed further that “the process of divining the legislative intent underlying a statute’s language and structure, while subject to canons of construction and well-established methodologies, is hardly an exact science.” Continue reading "Thoughts On Statutory Interpretation—For Tax Specialists, Too"
Jan 9, 2017 Shelby D. GreenProperty
The enactment of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (“FHA”) is a story filled with intrigue — coercion, duplicity, and back-room deals. In The Secret History of the Fair Housing Act, Professor Jonathan Zasloff provides a riveting account of the maneuvers by the various protagonists in that story.
Some fifty years later, the plots and impacts continue to unfold. Starting with President Lyndon Johnson, who had handily pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, even before his landslide election for his full term, Professor Zasloff shows how it took almost every political arrow in Johnson’s quiver to quash opposition to the FHA. Continue reading "The Passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968: Stories to Be Told"
Jan 6, 2017 Jill FamilyLexImmigration
For undocumented immigrants, deportation is a constant looming threat. Given the harsh and broad categories of things that an immigrant can do to become deportable, the unfairness of the deportation adjudication system, and the devastating consequences of deportation, it makes sense that immigration law scholars focus on the phenomenon of deportation. Nathalie Martin, whose primary scholarly focus is not immigration law, reminds immigration law scholars that, unfortunately, there are many problems to explore beyond deportation.
Martin explores themes of scarcity by reporting on what she learned through a qualitative study of 50 undocumented immigrants in New Mexico. The study, funded by the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges, investigates the banking and credit habits of undocumented immigrants through a snowball sampling technique. In Survival in the Face of Scarcity, Martin uses data from the study to explore how issues of scarcity are compounded for a population without legal status. As Martin explains, her findings “show a perfect storm” (P. 109) where individuals with limited rights are fearful to assert any legal rights they have. Continue reading "Problems Beyond Deportation"
