Feb 2, 2016 Steve VladeckClassics
For those who teach and write about the federal courts and/or constitutional law, Alexander Bickel’s 24-page review of how the Voting Rights Act fared in the Supreme Court – a lucid dissection of South Carolina v. Katzenbach, Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, and Katzenbach v. Morgan — would almost certainly be worth a read as a pure matter of historical (and academic) curiosity.
What’s particularly salient about Bickel’s analysis, though, is its contemporary relevance along at least two axes. First, it provides the outlines of a rejoinder to the Supreme Court’s 2013 conclusion that key provisions of the VRA are unconstitutional (for economy of space, I’ll leave this issue to the interested reader). Second, and, even more significantly, it makes perhaps the most emphatic argument against broad state standing in lawsuits challenging the scope of federal government policies — including Virginia’s rejected challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate and Texas’s pending challenge to President Obama’s “deferred action” immigration policy. Thus, although no one needs convincing that Bickel was the first among equals, contemporary readers might benefit from this relatively short and less well-known piece of his. Continue reading "The Perils of State Standing, Revisited"
Feb 1, 2016 Mila SohoniAdministrative Law
Jacob E. Gersen & Matthew C. Stephenson,
Over-Accountability, 6
Journal of Legal Analysis 185 (2014).
Many an administrative law article ends with a simple and appealing recommendation: “just add accountability!” Accountability, along with institutional expertise and democratic legitimacy, is one of the key yardsticks that frames evaluations of the legal rules and institutions of the regulatory state. Why might judicial deference to agency interpretations of statutes be desirable? Because agencies are more politically accountable than courts. Why might privatization be worrisome? Because corporations are less accountable than agencies. Accountability, like motherhood and apple pie, is something we can all safely get behind.
Or is it? In Over-Accountability, Jacob Gersen and Matthew Stephenson look at the downsides of augmenting the accountability of political institutions. Lots of ways exist to add accountability to governmental decision-making: one could have more elections, or concentrate power in a “unitary” executive, or reduce the power of politically unaccountable Article III courts. As the authors point out, these and other such accountability-enhancing moves might actually have a surprising and perverse consequence: they might exacerbate bad behavior by the government. Continue reading "Too Much of a Good Thing"
Jan 29, 2016 Joseph SlaterWork Law
Sanjukta Paul,
The Enduring Ambiguities of Antitrust Liability for Worker Collective Action, 47 Loy. U. Chi. L.J. ___ (forthcoming 2016), available at
SSRN.
As someone interested both in the history of workplace law and in modern forms of worker organization, but not especially well-versed in antitrust law, I was delighted to read, and learned a lot from, Sanjukta Paul’s excellent article. The piece starts with a troubling suggestion I have not seen seriously addressed elsewhere: antitrust law could be used against workers engaged in collective action if those workers are not traditional employees: e.g., against low-wage independent contractors. After showing this is a legitimate concern, Paul provides a rich description of the history of antitrust law (including but not limited to the “labor exemption”). She then makes a convincing argument that while current antitrust law could be applied to such collective action, it should not be. While her history is ultimately aimed at a modern issue, this is not “law office history.” Indeed, her detailed discussion of the development of both antitrust and labor law (a rare combination) would be a worthwhile contribution to the historical literature by itself. Linking it to a modern question makes the piece even more valuable.
Paul starts with a vignette about a 1999 federal antitrust investigation into potential price-fixing by striking port truck drivers who were not “employees.” This leads her to the early days of labor and antitrust. She argues that before the New Deal, courts “dominated by classicists who were concerned primarily with freedom of trade and contract, imported fundamentally hierarchical and coercive assumptions regarding workers” into the Sherman Act. (P. 2.) In so doing, the courts “relied upon status-based normative assumptions that violated their own freedom of contract principles.” (P. 2.) Worker collective action was thus presumptively illicit. The “labor exemption” the Supreme Court ultimately created in the 1940s was the exception, not the rule, and arguably might not apply to independent contractors. Continue reading "The History, and Worrying Contemporary Relevance, of Anti-Trust Law for Non-Traditional Worker Organization"
Jan 28, 2016 Tom SimmonsTrusts & Estates
Kai Lyu explains some of the unique characteristics of Chinese trust law in Re-Clarifying China’s Trust Law: Characteristics and New Conceptual Basis. China’s civil law basis makes for a strange soil in which to transplant (and codify) a common law concept such as the law of trusts, which owes its origins to Medieval England. But other jurisdictions (Japan and South Korea, for example) have adopted trust law without generating the odd mutations that China has. What happened and how can one approach an understanding of the unique creation that is Chinese trust law?
The two principle unorthodoxies with trust law in China are the ambiguous title to the trust res and the almost unrestrained retained powers of a settlor that the 2001 trust act (enacted by the National People’s Congress after two false starts in 1996 and 2000) generated. Lyu grounds the thinking of the Chinese legislators in the law of contracts, and identifies how contract law falls short as a theory in explaining trusts, even—or perhaps especially—Chinese trusts. Instead, Lyu proposes, Roman law’s patrimony theory provides a lens for understanding the unique characteristics of Chinese trust law. Continue reading "Mapping Chinese Trusts with a Patrimony Compass"
Jan 27, 2016 Catherine SharkeyTorts
Donald G. Gifford & Brian M. Jones, “Keeping Cases from Black Juries: An Empirical Analysis of How Race, Income Inequality, and Regional History Affect Tort Law,” __ Wash. & Lee L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2016), available at
SSRN.
What do Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington D.C. have in common? Answer: They all apply the doctrine of contributory negligence to tort cases. Indeed, they are the last five contributory negligence outposts; the rest of the United States has long since moved on to comparative fault regimes of one form or another.
They are, moreover, all located in the South. And according to Donald Gifford and Brian Jones, this is no coincidence.
In their provocative article, Keeping Cases from Black Juries: An Empirical Analysis of How Race, Income Inequality, and Regional History Affect Tort Law, Gifford and Jones argue that certain states cling to contributory negligence and other “anti-plaintiff” tort doctrines to prevent cases from being decided by juries. The most worrisome aspect of their thesis is that this concerted effort to insulate cases from juries is most pronounced in Southern states whose major urban centers include significant African-American populations. Continue reading "Stealth Ways to Keep Tort Cases from African-American Juries"
Jan 26, 2016 John FloodLegal Profession
Francis Snyder,
The Contribution of Anthropology to Teaching Comparative and International Law in
The Trials and Triumphs of Teaching Legal Anthropology in Europe (Marie-Claire Foblets, Gordon Woodman and Anthony Bradney eds., 2015), available at
SSRN.
Empirical approaches to law are commonplace now, but once they were rare and occasionally looked down on by classically trained lawyers who favored doctrinal methods of analysis. Francis Snyder’s engaging paper on the contribution of anthropology to teaching comparative and international law raises questions and issues on empirical law. Economics and law is probably the best known and most widespread combination of social science and law, although law and society was the first entrant to this new academic field. Law imports many concepts and methods from sociology, psychology, history and others. And yet legal education still struggles with how to incorporate these other disciplines into its syllabus. How then is legal education affected by incursions from other fields? For American readers the research discussed by Snyder takes place outside the US although recent work on legal ethnography by Eve Darian-Smith, The Crisis in Legal Education: Embracing Ethnographic Approaches to Law brings it firmly back onshore.
Snyder came to anthropology indirectly, first as a political scientist interested in one-party government in Mali, second as a research assistant for a Chinese law professor, and thirdly in doing a PhD in Paris on comparative law and legal anthropology (p. 1). These early experiences fed through into his teaching of comparative law in Canada. It was while at Warwick, the home of law in context, that Snyder introduced the anthropological framework into EU law and its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the key common policy of the EEC. Instead of analysing rules and decisions, Snyder examined the formation of CAP from the ground up, how the different political actors negotiated with each other, and how the policy impacted on farmers and consumers. In extending this into food policy, students were required to negotiate, draft and apply rules in relation to the regulatory regime for lamb meat. This was part of Warwick’s drive to incorporate non-legal materials into legal subjects. (See the Law in Context series by CUP for further examples.) These approaches were reinforced by the tackling of bigger topics such as globalisation and China and establishing a new journal, the European Law Journal, which encouraged alternatives to black-letter law. Continue reading "Understanding Law by Doing Anthropological Fieldwork"
Jan 25, 2016 Omri MarianTax Law
Tax literature is bitterly divided on the role that tax havens play in global economy. The negative view of tax havens paints them as parasitic, poaching revenue from other jurisdictions. The positive view suggests that tax havens facilitate low-cost capital mobility, mitigating some of the distortive effects of taxation.
To date, this extensive scholarly debate has produced very little information on tax havens themselves. This is hardly surprising, since tax havens are well known to be secrecy jurisdictions. This aspect of tax havens forces scholars who write about them to resort to financial modeling or available country data – data which is rarely on point. Zucman’s book is a unique breed in this context. In order to address the role of tax havens in global economy, Zucman actually collects and interprets the necessary data. Zucman assesses the wealth held in tax havens based on a long lasting anomaly in public finance: that in the aggregate, more liabilities than assets are recorded on national balance sheets, as if a portion of global assets simply vanishes into thin air, or as Zucman put it: “were in part held by Mars.” Zucman meticulously collected macro-economic data of multiple jurisdictions, and discovered that roughly the same amount of assets missing from national balance sheets shows up as ownership interest in investment pooling vehicles (such as mutual funds) organized in tax havens. Continue reading "Tax Havens and the Rise of Inequality"
Jan 22, 2016 Donald KochanProperty
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"
Jan 21, 2016 Jack PreisLexRemedies
Joanna C. Schwartz,
How Governments Pay: Lawsuits, Budgets and Police Reform, UCLA L. Rev. (forthcoming 2016), available at
SSRN.
How do lawsuits deter misconduct? That is an issue that Professor Joanna Schwartz has written about before, and her latest article on the topic, How Governments Pay: Lawsuits, Budgets and Police Reform, could not be more timely. Over the past year, our county has witnessed dramatic instances of police abuse and the public is understandably demanding reform. Schwartz’s terrific article explains why civil rights actions may fail to instigate reform, and suggests how insurance contracts, of all things, can play a role in fixing this problem.
To understand how lawsuits deter, consider a reckless driver. You know, the type that takes corners too fast, sends texts while on the interstate, and whips past school buses with flashing lights. What will it take for the driver to finally reform herself? Well, first of all, she’ll probably get a bunch of tickets. If she gets tired of paying the tickets and fears losing her license, she’ll probably start driving more carefully. Aside from the tickets, however, the driver may end up getting sued when her reckless behavior finally causes an accident. Even though her insurance company will likely pick up the tab for any judgment, the company is likely to jack up her premiums after it pays the damages. In the end, the driver’s recklessness is going to cost her a lot of money. And this will probably convince her to become a safer driver. Continue reading "Why Insurance Contracts Might be the Trick to Police Reform"
Jan 20, 2016 Mary ZieglerLegal History
The Supreme Court’s latest abortion case, Whole Women’s Health v. Cole, involves a challenge to a Texas law targeting not women seeking abortions but the clinics that provide them. Yet, as Johanna Schoen’s Abortion After Roe reminds us, we know little about how abortion regulations affect those who deliver reproductive health services. Schoen carefully documents how the Court’s abortion jurisprudence has transformed what goes on in American clinics. While historians and legal scholars have often focused on the effect of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on access to abortion, Schoen, by focusing on law’s impact on abortion providers, tells a far more nuanced story.
Throughout Abortion After Roe, Schoen focuses on the experience of providers and patients at independent abortion clinics. While the story of Planned Parenthood and other major abortion providers deserves scholarly attention, Schoen persuasively uses the experiences of independent clinics to understand the complex relationship between feminist politics, potential profit, and legal interference that dictated practice at many American clinics. The vast majority of clinics that opened their doors in the 1970s were independent, and by telling their story, Schoen provides a valuable picture of how the medical practice and business of abortion care developed over the course of several decades in an increasingly hostile climate. Independent clinics also often challenged the strategic priorities of the political pro-choice movement. Their experiences expose the disconnect between the reality of abortion care and the rights won and lost by pro-choice lawyers. Continue reading "Health Care in the Shadow of the Law: The Impact of Abortion Jurisprudence"
