Jan 5, 2017 Adam N. SteinmanCourts Law
I’ll start this essay just as Erin Delaney starts her article—with a shout-out to Alexander Bickel. In The Least Dangerous Branch, Bickel extolled the “passive virtues”—deciding not to decide the merits of contentious constitutional issues—in order to preserve the Supreme Court’s institutional legitimacy in the face of the judicial branch’s “counter-majoritarian difficulty.” Strategic avoidance, the argument goes, can enable further dialogue over such issues, allowing resolution through the political branches rather than through judicial intervention.
As it turns out, the United States is not the only place where the judicial branch holds the title of least dangerous. So it is not surprising that other systems have developed devices by which judicial institutions avoid conflict with coordinate branches of government or with popular opinion more generally. As Delaney puts it: “Avoidance is everywhere.” To be clear, Delaney’s article takes no position on whether this sort of strategic avoidance is normatively desirable or whether courts do, in fact, enhance their legitimacy when they engage in such avoidance. But she argues that this assumption appears to influence the behavior of courts across the globe. Her focus in this article is on strategic avoidance by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the Constitutional Court of South Africa (CCSA), and the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC). Continue reading "Comparative Avoidance"
Jan 4, 2017 Deborah DinnerLegal History
The standard history of legal aid begins with the founding of the New York Legal Aid Society in 1876. It then chronicles male attorneys’ efforts to professionalize legal services during the Progressive Era, culminating in the 1919 publication of Reginald Heber Smith’s famous text, Justice for the Poor. By centering gender as a category of analysis, Felice Batlan cracks this narrative wide open. Women and Justice for the Poor demonstrates that the dominance of male attorneys and clients was contested from the start. By exposing the temporality and contingency of categories that Smith and many previous historians took for granted, Batlan deconstructs conceptual boundaries between law and social work, lawyers and reformers. The book, which recently won the Law and Society Association’s J. Willard Hurst Award for the best book in sociolegal history, is beautifully written, precisely researched, and strongly argued.
Batlan shows that organized legal services for the poor began earlier than we have recognized, in a female dominion of legal aid that prevailed from the end of the Civil War through 1910. Although a rich historical literature has documented women’s social reform activities in this period, Batlan provocatively argues that many female-dominated organizations functioned as legal aid services. Women reformers in New York founded the Working Women’s Union in 1863. Similar organizations followed in Boston, Chicago, and much later in New Orleans. Elite women reformers acted as lay lawyers. They educated themselves about caselaw, used moral suasion and social pressure to advocate for clients, founded service institutions, and campaigned for reform in local government. Continue reading "Engendering the History of Legal Aid"
Jan 3, 2017 W.A. EdmundsonJurisprudence
- Avihay Dorfman & Alon Harel, Against Privatization as Such (Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem Legal Research Paper No. 15-29, 2015), available at SSRN.
- Avihay Dorfman & Alon Harel, The Case Against Privatization, Philosophy & Public Affairs 41(1), 67-102 (2013), available at SSRN.
- John Gardner, The Evil of Privatization, Univ. of Oxford (2014), available at SSRN.
Privatization is a phenomenon that legal theorists and legal philosophers have begun to notice and to stake out positions on, for and against. Privatization is defined with reference to the (too?) familiar distinction between public and private actors. Privatization happens when a good, service, or a function that is typically supplied by state government, through the efforts of its officials and personnel, comes to be provided by private actors, perhaps still at state expense. In a pair of recent articles, Avihay Dorfman and Alon Harel have singled out private prisons and mercenary armies as paradigm examples of privatized public goods. Dorfman and Harel lament the fact that both advocates and opponents of privatization conceive the normative issue in purely “instrumentalist” terms. Which type of actor, public or private, can provide a given good or service more efficiently? Discussions therefore deal in contingencies, and at retail level. Dorfman and Harel argue in their 2013 article that this sort of approach fails to engage the intuitive sense that there is something intrinsically worrisome about privatization that pervades it wholesale. It isn’t centrally a question whether private prisons, say, are more or less likely to do the job efficiently (without compromising prisoner rights). It is rather a conceptual question whether there is a category of goods—“intrinsically public goods”—that can only be provided by the state, directly, by its officials; and, for instance, whether criminal punishment is among them. The answer to conceptual question, and the answer’s retail application might allow the possibility of privatization: in which case, but only then, they say, it is proper to go on to the contingent question about the relative efficiency of public and of private delivery. Continue reading "The Zeal of Our Age"
Dec 20, 2016 JotwellJotwell
Jotwell is taking a short winter break. Posting should resume Tuesday, Jan 3, 2017.
We will be doing some technical work over the break, so it is possible that the site may be unavailable for occasional, and one hopes brief, random periods. But we’ll be back. Continue reading "Jotwell Winter Break 2016"
Dec 19, 2016 Jay TidmarshCourts Law
Brian T. Fitzpatrick & Cameron T. Norris,
One-Way Fee Shifting After Summary Judgment (2016), available on
SSRN.
In One-Way Fee Shifting After Summary Judgment, Brian Fitzpatrick and his student, Cameron Norris, address what has been the dominant impulse in federal procedural reform for the past thirty-five years: reducing cost and delay in civil litigation.
The most recent effort to curb litigation expense — the 2015 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that, among other things, sought to invigorate the concept of proportional discovery expenditures that had first found its way into the Rules in 1983 — has been widely criticized as feckless. Switching the proportionality requirement from (principally) Federal Rule 26(b)(2) to (principally) Federal Rule 26(b)(1) and then eliminating “subject matter” discovery seem to be little more than moving the deck chairs on the Titanic, given that judges have no more tools in 2016 to determine whether discovery is proportional than they had in prior years, and “subject matter” discovery was minimal at best. Continue reading "Discovery Costs and Default Rules"
Dec 16, 2016 Laura A. HeymannIntellectual Property Law
One particularly engaging genre of legal scholarship is the deep historical dive into an appellate opinion that has become a classic in a field. In volumes such as Torts Stories, Contracts Stories, and Intellectual Property Stories, scholars resurrect the history leading to landmark cases: the cast of characters involved in the dispute, the lower court wrangling that led to the more famous appeal, the aftermath of the case, and the lasting impact of the court’s opinion.
While we must constantly remind ourselves that each case we analyze or teach involves real individuals with real disputes that affected real lives, there is a certain fictional quality to these stories precisely because the judicial opinion is the lead character. Judicial opinions can never be more than an abstract, a description of events that then becomes the accepted narrative. Paul Robert Cohen’s expletive-bearing jacket was expression serving an “emotive function,” according to the Court, not an “absurd and immature antic,” as the dissent would have it, and that made all the difference. Opinions have authors, and authors are necessarily engaged in a project of crafting narratives with a result in mind.
Yet knowing more about how an opinion came to be does give us a richer understanding of its context and, perhaps, some guidance on how to interpret the opinion going forward. This is the project that Shyamkrishna Balganesh undertakes in his compelling and entertaining article The Questionable Origins of the Copyright Infringement Analysis. Continue reading "Copyright Law’s Origin Stories"
Dec 15, 2016 Michael B. CoenenConstitutional Law
Andrew Coan,
The Foundations of Constitutional Theory, Arizona Legal Studies Discussion Paper No. 16-24 (2016), available at
SSRN.
How should courts decide constitutional cases? The question has been a long-time favorite of judges and scholars, who have defined, developed, and defended a variety of approaches to the project of constitutional adjudication. Some such approaches privilege the “original public meaning” of the constitutional text; others emphasize judicial precedent; others require close attention to moral considerations; others focus on welfare maximization; others place weight on majoritarian preferences; others look to social movements; others privilege representation reinforcement; and countless others require a complex weighing of these and other factors against one another. When it comes to the application and development of constitutional law, different theorists think that different types of considerations should guide the decision-making inquiry to different degrees, and a great deal of constitutional scholarship centers on the question of how these various considerations should bring themselves to bear on the resolution of constitutional cases.
But the disagreements among constitutional theorists run deeper than the question of how to decide cases; scholars also disagree about how to evaluate the merits of a given decision-making approach. One cannot defend one’s preferred method of constitutional adjudication without identifying reasons why that method is preferable to others. And to identify these reasons, one must have an account of what a successful approach to constitutional adjudication achieves. Should we value methodologies that consistently produce substantively desirable judicial outcomes? Should we value methodologies that best reflect the Constitution’s status as written law ratified by “We the People”? Should we value methodologies that constrain the power of unelected judges? Should we value methodologies that adhere to conventional understandings of “what the law is”? And so on. Different approaches to constitutional decision-making will look more or less attractive depending on the criteria against which we evaluate them. And different people favor different approaches in part because they disagree as to what those criteria should be.
Andrew Coan’s illuminating new article is about this second set of questions—questions that go to what Coan calls the “normative foundations” of constitutional theory. These questions, as Coan readily concedes, are by no means unfamiliar to constitutional lawyers; scholars routinely identify criteria for evaluating a decision-making methodology and, in the course of doing so, have very often set out to defend the relevance of the criteria they use. But what Coan’s article aims to provide is a systematic examination of the competing sets of “first principles” from which different theories of constitutional decision-making begin. Coan’s goal, in other words, is to survey the existing landscape of normative constitutional theory with an eye toward describing and evaluating the various types of reasons and arguments that constitutional theorists regard as relevant to the choice among decision-making methodologies. Continue reading "Mapping the Fault Lines of Normative Constitutional Theory"
Dec 14, 2016 Mary CrossleyHealth Law
Rebecca Dresser,
A Fate Worse than Death? How Biomarkers for Alzheimer’s Disease Could Affect End-of-Life Choices, 12
Ind. Health L. Rev. 651 (2015), available at
SSRN.
According to the Alzheimer’s Association’s 2016 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures, one in nine persons in the U.S. over the age of 65 suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, with the prevalence rising to one in three persons over the age of 85. With lengthening life spans and the Baby Boom generation’s aging, the number of Americans with Alzheimer’s is projected to increase dramatically in the coming decades, from 5.2 million in 2016 to somewhere between 13.8 and 16 million in 2050. The sheer enormity of this projected number sobers medical researchers and health policy makers, inspiring initiatives to develop preventive and curative therapies and humane and sustainable care financing and delivery models.
By contrast, just one case of Alzheimer’s haunts most members of the public: the case they, or a loved one, might develop in the future. The title of Rebecca Dresser‘s article acknowledges this fear. In A Fate Worse than Death? How Biomarkers for Alzheimer’s Disease Could Affect End-of-Life Choices, Dresser considers how knowledge of an increased personal risk of developing Alzheimer’s, gained from biomarker tests, might prompt persons to take steps aimed at avoiding a prolonged course of illness. Wishing to act before symptoms of the disease render them incapable of action, persons fearful of their relatively high risk of developing Alzheimer’s might commit pre-emptive suicide. Less drastically, they might execute advance directives instructing that they should not receive life-saving medical care—or even food and water—once the Alzheimer’s manifests and erases their competency. They might even seek to take advantage of laws in the handful of jurisdictions sanctioning physician-assisted death by executing an advance request for assisted death. For each of these potential responses, Dresser cogently and concisely considers the feasibility and legality of the particular strategy for avoiding “a fate worse than death.” Continue reading "Living with Alzheimer’s: A Fate Worse than Death?"
Dec 13, 2016 Brian BixFamily Law
Premarital agreements (also known as “antenuptial agreements” and “prenuptial agreements”) are agreements entered by spouses-to-be just before marriage. Typically, such agreements involve waivers or modifications of the parties’ legal rights at divorce or at the death of one of the spouses. Premarital agreements do not have a good reputation among academics; such agreements are generally considered exploitative and criticized for frequently leaving ex-spouses impoverished (practitioners, especially those for whom preparing such agreements is part of their practice, may have different views). Contrarian views in this area—as in all areas—are a welcome catalyst for new analysis, and perhaps new prescriptions. So Elizabeth Carter’s “rethinking” of premarital agreements—both how they should be valued and what procedures should surround them—is most welcome.
Carter’s initial point is that both scholarly commentary and legal analysis of premarital agreements is based on unsupported empirical claims that premarital agreements generally involve richer would-be husbands imposing exploitative one-sided terms on poorer would-be wives. Like Carter, I do not know of any reliable data regarding how many people enter premarital agreements, what their motivations are, and how frequently one-sided terms are included in those agreements. However, the view of premarital agreements as instruments of oppression is not entirely mythical: it comes from reading the published opinions involving them (where this scenario is in fact common). But why should we assume that the reported cases accurately reflect the general practice of premarital contracting? Perhaps only the unconscionable agreements get litigated (and appealed)? Agreements that are entered in good faith and are substantively fair are unlikely to be challenged, and if challenged, they will probably not raise the sort of issues that result in reported decisions. Continue reading "Supporting Premarital Agreements"
Dec 12, 2016 Cyra ChoudhuryEquality
Since the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas (539 U.S. 558) decision in which the United States Supreme Court overruled the criminalization of private homosexual conduct in the United States, the argument that the ruling would lead to same-sex marriage and also to the recognition of polygamous marriage has been made with regularity by Supreme Court Justices and law professors. Most recently, in the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, the Court proved Justice Scalia right and extended the fundamental right to marry to same-sex partners. (Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. __ (2015)). In his dissent in Obergefell, Justice Roberts reprised the Scalian slippery slope argument and asked whether “States may retain the definition of marriage as a union of two people….Indeed from the standpoint of history and tradition, a leap from opposite-sex marriage to same-sex marriage is much greater than one from a two-person union to plural unions, which have deep roots in some cultures around the world.” (Id. (Roberts, J., dissenting).) Invariably, when asked to legally justify the prohibition of polygamy against constitutional challenge, proponents of exclusively monogamous marriage rely on a host familiar Orientalist tropes as well as assertions of social dangers with little empirical proof.
Regardless of whether one agrees with the practice of plural marriage or same-sex marriage as a moral matter, it has become a requirement in the marriage cases, at least from Perry, Windsor, and now Obergefell, that objections to legalization be based on logical, discernible evidence rather than vague suppositions or, worse, stereotypes. Professor Jonathan Turley’s article The Loadstone Rock: The Role of Harm in the Criminalization of Plural Unions examines and challenges the proffered justifications for continuing the criminalization of polygamy. Using two cases, one from Canada that he refers to as “The Bountiful” (Reference re: Section 293 of the Criminal Code of Can., 2011 BCSC 1588), and Brown v. Buhman from the United States (947 F. Supp. 2d. 1170 (D. Utah 2013)), Turley argues that post-Lawrence, the ability to show harm from specifically consensual, adult plural marriages is very difficult if not impossible. Continue reading "Liberty, Equality, Polygamy?"
