Nov 5, 2015 Mary CrossleyHealth Law
Even as some in Congress continue to vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act, most observers and political participants agree that the health reform law’s central elements are here to stay. Yet broad agreement also exists that, despite the law’s progress in decreasing the number of uninsured Americans, serious problems still plague the U.S. health care system. Escalating costs figure centrally among these problems, and recent news reports have highlighted the plight of insured Americans who face burdensome premiums or out-of-pocket costs. What is the most promising “fix” for addressing the persistent problems Americans face in accessing and affording medical care?
Against this backdrop, Nicholas Bagley’s new article Medicine as a Public Calling suggests approaches in the tradition of public utility regulation as a plausible response. Bagley’s argument is that—as we try to figure out how to move forward in a post-ACA landscape—we would do well to recognize how the public utility model shaped health care regulation in the twentieth century. The article is descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Bagley does not advocate regulation of health care prices, access, or supply, but he wants to make sure readers realize that such regulation would have a long lineage. I found the article’s careful description of this lineage tremendously valuable. Keeping up with the rapid pace of changes in health law, policy, systems, and technology is a constant challenge for health law teachers and scholars. These changes make it all too easy to think that “taking a historical perspective” means looking back ten years or so, which obscures understanding of the legal historical path to today’s vantage point. Bagley’s article corrects that historical shortsightedness. Continue reading "Pendulums Swing"
Nov 4, 2015 Mark McKennaIntellectual Property Law
Kevin Emerson Collins,
Economically Defeasible Rights to Facilitate Information Disclosure: The Hidden Wisdom of Pre-AWCPA Copyright (2015), available at
SSRN.
In his new piece Economically Defeasible Rights to Facilitate Information Disclosure: The Hidden Wisdom of Pre-AWCPA Copyright, Kevin Collins brings his background as a trained architect to bear on the puzzling history of architectural copyright. In Collins’s view, far from being inadequate, as some have contended, pre-AWCPA copyright was a sort of Goldilocks solution: not so strong as to prevent beneficial borrowing, not too weak to provide incentives, but instead just right to solve a particular disclosure problem unique to the design-minded architecture market. In the process, Collins makes a compelling case for tailoring in copyright, and for the importance of theory to doctrinal design.
Before the Architectural Works Protection Act was passed in 1990, architectural works received an unusually narrow form of copyright protection, even as compared with other highly useful works. Pre-AWCPA copyright gave architects the right to prevent copying of architectural drawings into new drawings. But architects could not prevent (or at least most thought they could not prevent) the making of derivative works from those drawings in the form of constructed buildings, nor could they prevent copying of the constructed buildings into new drawings or other constructed buildings. This form of protection was unusual not only because it was, as Collins memorably puts it, “runtish” by comparison to the protection afforded other works, but because it was essentially a “defeasible” right, lost upon the construction of a building that embodies the architectural work. (P. 6.) Continue reading "Designing Architectural Copyright"
Nov 3, 2015 Kim BrooksEquality
There’s a growing body of work that explores the contours of nonhuman animals and law. Just to illustrate, see previous Jotwell posts in Jurisprudence (here and here) and in Legal History. Maneesha Deckha’s article, “Vulnerability, Equality, and Animals”, brings that body of literature squarely into engagement with equality theory.
I read everything Professor Deckha writes: not because I am always on board with where her analysis takes her, but because I’m always left asking questions I hadn’t thought through before. This piece is yet one more illustration of her ability to connect unexpected dots; to press on boundaries that had not been explicitly articulated before; and to draw the reader in. Continue reading "The Turn to Vulnerability"
Nov 2, 2015 James E. PfanderCourts Law
Ryan C. Williams, Questioning Marks: Plurality Decisions and Precedential Constraint (forthcoming).
In Questioning Marks, Ryan Williams tackles a piece of Supreme Court doctrine that many dismiss with the back of their hand: how to make precedential sense of the Court’s plurality opinions. Oh sure, we all begin with the statement in Marks v. United States that lower courts should ascribe precedential weight to the “holding” of the case, understood as “that position taken by those Members who concurred in the judgments on the narrowest grounds.” But that formulation obscures any number of difficulties. How does a lower court identify the narrowest grounds of the shared decision that produced a judgment that was supported by separate reasons that failed to offer clear guidance in future cases?
Williams first shows that lower courts have taken a range of different approaches to the problem of identifying the narrowest grounds. Some look for an implicit consensus among the five (or more) concurring Justices, others give pride of place to the notion that the Justice casting the fifth vote must have played a decisive role in the outcome and so treat the opinion accompanying that swing vote as controlling. Still others adopt an issue-by-issue approach, looking for the alignment of Justices who expressed agreement with a particular proposition that may be relevant in future litigation. Somewhat controversially, this issue-by-issue approach may also consider the views of dissenting Justices, a group seemingly omitted from the Marks reference to the members concurring in the judgment. Continue reading "Making Sense of Plurality Decisions"
Oct 30, 2015 Christopher WalkerAdministrative Law
Last Term the Court gave administrative law scholars a lot to digest. Writing for the Court, the Chief Justice in King v. Burwell reinvigorated the major questions doctrine as a Chevron Step Zero inquiry, Justice Scalia in Michigan v. EPA ruled that the EPA must consider costs when a statute says to take action that is “appropriate and necessary,” and Justice Sotomayor in Perez v. Mortgage Bankers abolished the D.C. Circuit’s Paralyzed Veterans doctrine. The separate writings were perhaps even more intriguing. In Mortgage Bankers, Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas all indicated some appetite to revisit Auer deference. In Mortgage Bankers and the Amtrak case, Justice Thomas questioned the modern administrative state on separation of powers and nondelegation grounds, and then wrapped up the Term in Michigan v. EPA arguing that Chevron deference itself raises serious separation of powers concerns (and Justice Scalia may have suggested something similar in Mortgage Bankers).
These decisions all deal with foundational principles in administrative law. One decision, however, also grapples with the fringe: Department of Transportation v. Association of Railroads. At issue there was a congressionally created corporation—Amtrak—and its congressionally delegated authority to engage in joint rulemaking with a more traditional federal agency, the Federal Railroad Administration. The D.C. Circuit had held that Congress could not delegate regulatory power to Amtrak because it was a private corporation (at least for rulemaking purposes). The Supreme Court reversed, holding that Amtrak is a government entity for constitutional rulemaking delegation purposes. Continue reading "Fringe Administrative Law"
Oct 29, 2015 Daithí Mac SíthighTechnology Law
Marco Loos & Joasia Luzak,
Wanted: A Bigger Stick. On Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts with Online Service Providers (Ctr. for the Study of European Contract Law, Working Paper No. 2015-01, 2015), available at
SSRN.
The reliance of online service providers on lengthy terms of service or related documents is easily mocked. When I teach this topic, I can choose to illustrate the topic with the selling of souls, in cartoon or written form, point to the absurd length of the policies of popular sites, and highlight experiments that call us out on our love of the I Accept button. But behind the mirth lie a number of serious legal issues, and the recent working paper by Marco Loos & Joasia Luzak of the University of Amsterdam tackles some of them.
Loos & Luzak work at the Centre for the Study of European Contract Law, and their particular concern is with the European Union’s 1993 Unfair Contract Terms Directive. They point out that although the gap between typical terms and policies and the requirements of the Directive is often pointed to, it is rarely studied in detail. In their thorough study, the authors examined the instruments used by five well-known service providers, and evaluated them against the Directive’s stipulation that mass terms (those not individually negotiated with the consumer) be ‘fair’. Continue reading "Is it Fair to Sell Your Soul?"
Oct 28, 2015 Anna GelpernCorporate Law
I feel only a bit sheepish for snatching Melissa Jacoby‘s Federalism Form and Function in the Detroit Bankruptcy (Yale J. on Reg. forthcoming) from all the other sections that could claim it, notably Constitutional Law and Courts Law. Although it is the richest law review article I have read in a while—sweeter for being the first in a cycle—I worry that it might fall through the interdisciplinary cracks. Debt rarely takes center stage in constitutional theater these days, ditto bankruptcy procedure in procedure. Even by bankruptcy standards, the project might seem exotic—a deep dive into audio recordings and other primary sources from Chapter 9 (municipal) bankruptcy hearings. Whatever your discipline, you would be mad to miss it. The subject is the biggest-ever public debt restructuring under a statutory scheme. The article is packed with doctrinal, theoretical, and methodological insights. The treatment is sophisticated and empathetic. The policy salience is obvious, as Detroit taps the markets, Chicago totters, Puerto Rico defaults, and the United Nations and the Pope endorse bankruptcy for states.
Chapter 9 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code is one of the few statutory regimes in the world for public debt restructuring. Its effort to balance federalism and democratic deference against the need to put an over-indebted (likely mismanaged) political unit on a sound financial footing has inspired imitation and criticism. Chapter 9 combines a high barrier to filing with extraordinary deference to the debtor’s policy decisions once it files. There is no bankruptcy estate, no equity, and no liquidation. In theory, states retain sovereignty over municipalities, while federal bankruptcy courts must keep their noses out of municipal affairs. Some commentators have argued that such reticence fuels debtor moral hazard; others have used it to highlight the limitations of Chapter 9 as a framework for bigger, more complex political units. Continue reading "Debt, Detroit, Democracy"
Oct 27, 2015 Annie Brett & A. Michael FroomkinJotwell
Jotwell began on October 27, 2008 with the goal of identifying new and interesting legal scholarship. Over the past seven years, Jotwell has recruited more than 300 Section and Contributing Editors who are leading academics (or in a few cases leading practitioners) and asked them each to write a short essay once a year identifying one of the best examples of recent scholarship relating to the law in their respective fields. This year, we wanted to reflect on where Jotwell is, and attempt to measure how well it is achieving its goals.
Jotwell has two objectives. On the one hand, we wanted to provide a service for persons who are not trying to be expert in a particular sub-field of law but still would like to keep up with the major developments in it. Given the proliferation of law reviews, and the resulting evolution away from having a few top journals act as the gatekeepers for high-quality scholarship, it is increasingly difficult for legal academics to know what is happening in their own fields, let alone what is most important and relevant in other fields. We expected, therefore, that some of the reviews would inevitably be of work by famous scholars and/or work appearing in top-ranked journals. On the other hand, we hoped also that our reviewers would be moved to call attention to significant work published in less prestigious journals and works authored by younger academics and others who were not yet widely recognized.
Although these goals were communicated to Jotwell’s Contributing Editors, and are noted in our author guidelines, we did little behind the scenes to enforce or even incentivize adherence to either goal. Instead we let Jotwell’s editors determine on their own what works of current scholarship they believe are worth recognition. Our thinking was that having assembled such a talented group of contributors we should leave it to them to decide what they liked and wanted to recommend.
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Oct 26, 2015 Michael B. CoenenConstitutional Law
David Landau & Rosalind Dixon,
Constraining Constitutional Change, 51
Wake Forest L. Rev. (forthcoming, 2015), available at
SSRN.
Changes to constitutional law do not always further beneficial ends. Sometimes, in fact, they do the opposite, with political actors utilizing mechanisms of constitutional law-making to consolidate their powers, entrench themselves in office, marginalize opposition, and otherwise undermine basic democratic values. Under these circumstances, a constitution can find itself in the perverse position of enabling rather than constraining abusive governmental action—subverting the very principles that it was originally intended to promote.
Comparative constitutional scholars have puzzled over the question of how to prevent “abusive constitutionalism” of this sort. To date, they have focused largely on mechanisms of constitutional amendment, considering ways in which an existing constitutional regime might structure its internal rules of change so as to frustrate a would-be autocrat’s anti-democratic amendment efforts. For example, timing requirements and supermajority voting procedures might render undesirable amendments especially difficult to enact; “eternity clauses” might safeguard essential provisions of a constitutional text against the threat of repeal; and the doctrine of “unconstitutional constitutional amendments” might empower courts to invalidate some forms of anti-democratic action after the fact. In these and other ways, amendment-restricting devices might manage to prevent at least some abusive amendments from ever taking effect.
These are important tools, which have enjoyed some measure of success in the real-world. But, as Professors David Landau and Rosalind Dixon point out in their wonderfully thought-provoking article, Constraining Constitutional Change, even a fail-safe set of constraints on the amendment process cannot eliminate the specter of abusive constitutional change. Looming in the background is the alternative and more daunting possibility of wholesale constitutional replacement—the outright rejection of an old constitutional order (including its amendment rules) in favor of a brand-new constitutional regime. Where amendment rules threaten to foil a would-be autocrat’s abusive constitutional ambitions, that official might simply choose to take the replacement route instead. Continue reading "Can Abusive Constitutionalism Be Checked?"
Oct 23, 2015 Angela HarrisCriminal Law
The recent cascade of highly-publicized murders of American black men and women by police and by white “domestic terrorists” has brought into public debate one of the most spectacular forms of American anti-black racism. Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines this racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Michael Brown’s body—killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 and subsequently left on the street for hours—has come to literally embody American contempt for black life.
But Ferguson also exposed a less lethal manifestation of American racism: the reliance of strapped-for-cash municipalities on fines and fees imposed on the poor through the criminal justice system. In her article, Misdemeanor Criminalization, Alexandra Natapoff warns us that one attempt to scale back mass incarceration may, paradoxically, expand racism in this subtle but insidious form. Turning felonies such as drug crimes into misdemeanors, she argues, expands the potential for American cities and counties to make money off poor people—with disturbing implications both for people of color and for the nature of criminal justice. Continue reading "Discipline and Fine"
