May 5, 2015 Peter ShaneAdministrative Law
Margo Schlanger’s article, Intelligence Legalism and the National Security Agency’s Civil Liberties Gap, is an important contribution to both administrative and national security law. She explains in illuminating detail how the NSA, the hub of so much controversial electronic surveillance activity, is not a rogue enterprise, but deeply enmeshed in and committed to a complex regime of legal compliance. The question she poses is why so elaborate a compliance system is seemingly ineffective in advancing civil liberties values more robustly. Her argument is thematically related to an earlier and equally thoughtful paper, Offices of Goodness: Influence Without Authority in Federal Agencies (reviewed here), which likewise explored the difficulties for administrative agencies in honoring overarching values that are relevant to their programs, but which may appear as orthogonal to a particular agency’s specific primary objectives. (Think about the Department of Transportation promoting park land conservation or the Army Corps of Engineers protecting endangered species.)
Professor Schlanger argues that, within the NSA, the applicable legal rules are insufficient to induce a proper balance between the likely security gains from a particular surveillance initiative and the privacy and civil liberties risks and costs entailed in that initiative. Constitutional restrictions won’t produce the optimal balance between costs and benefits because the scope of constitutional rights doesn’t turn on that balance. Policy is not a major factor driving constitutional interpretation concerning the scope of individual privacy rights, especially where courts may not fully grasp the privacy implications of programs under review. (And, of course, private lawsuits are likely to exert little leverage over the intelligence community because the state secrets doctrine will insulate many government practices from effective—or any—judicial challenge.) Continue reading "Getting from “May We?” to “Should We?” at the NSA"
May 4, 2015 Gerry W. BeyerTrusts & Estates
Professor Reid Kress Weisbord’s article astutely addresses the growing problem of demand outpacing supply for organ donations needed for lifesaving medical procedures. Professor Weisbord’s discussion of the debate surrounding whether compensation should be allowed for posthumous organ donations to encourage higher donation rates focuses on the parameters of a proposed regulatory system to respect the wishes of the donor. This respect for the decedent’s preference for whether their organs may be sold by his or her estate forms the foundation of the article and is referred to by Professor Weisbord as “anatomical intent.”
The article describes a system that would allow compensation for organ donations by striking a balance that both encourages donation by avoiding unnecessary hurdles, and yet still deters fraud and undue influence. Professor Weisbord addresses this balancing act by suggesting specific parameters for registration of anatomical intent that are “sufficiently secure to protect the donor but sufficiently simple to avoid deterring willing donors from registering their intent,” and default rules when no expression of anatomical intent has been made that “respect the autonomy, privacy, and religious liberty interests of non-donors by presuming that the decedent prefers to prohibit the postmortem sale of his or her bodily remains absent an affirmative indication of intent to donate.” Continue reading "Organ-izing Your Estate"
May 1, 2015 Alex B. LongWork Law
Jessica L. Roberts,
Protecting Privacy to Prevent Discrimination, 56
Wm. & Mary L. Rev. (forthcoming, 2015), available at
SSRN.
Jessica Roberts’ upcoming article, Protecting Privacy to Prevent Discrimination, explores the pros and cons of enacting privacy protections to thwart discrimination. Using the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) as her primary example, Roberts argues that the two areas of law may “operate symbiotically rather than separately.” Thus, privacy law may be used to further anti-discrimination goals and vice versa.
Roberts’ article contains a thoughtful discussion regarding the different principles underlying privacy law and anti-discrimination law. The article also raises interesting issues about the extent to which the right to privacy has, over time, evolved. As originally conceived, the privacy torts and their statutory counterparts sought to further the norm of autonomy. The wrong that resulted from an intrusion upon an area of solitude or the public disclosure of a private fact was the invasion of privacy itself. But Roberts suggests that privacy law may also be used as a means of preventing and addressing more tangible harms occurring in the employment context by working in harmony with anti-discrimination principles. Continue reading "The Symbiotic Relationship Between Privacy Law and Anti-Discrimination Law"
Apr 29, 2015 Kathleen DeLaney ThomasTax Law
Reuven S. Avi-Yonah,
Just Say No: Corporate Taxation and Corporate Social Responsibility __ NYU J. Law & Bus. __ (forthcoming), available at
SSRN.
The recent wave of corporate inversion transactions, in which domestic companies essentially move their headquarters abroad to lower their U.S. tax bill, is just the latest in a decades-long trend of aggressive tax avoidance behavior by corporations. From the government’s perspective, inversions and other tax avoidance strategies erode the U.S. tax base and impose a costly enforcement challenge on Treasury and the IRS. But from the perspective of corporate managers, aggressive tax planning may simply be part of the corporation’s duty to maximize shareholder value. Reuven Avi-Yonah questions this latter proposition in Just Say No: Corporate Taxation and Corporation Social Responsibility. He offers a compelling argument that corporate managerial duties are not hopelessly at odds with the goal of promoting better corporate tax compliance.
Avi-Yonah frames the issue of corporate tax avoidance as one of corporate social responsibility (CSR). If it is legitimate for corporations to engage in activities that do not directly benefit shareholders—for example, involvement in philanthropic causes—then it should be legitimate for corporations to act as good tax citizens. On the other hand, if CSR is outside of the scope of legitimate corporate functions, then presumably corporations should seek to minimize their tax liability as much as possible. Continue reading "Do Corporate Managers Have a Duty to Avoid Taxes?"
Apr 28, 2015 Eric BiberLexEnvironmental Law
Cary Coglianese and Jennifer Nash have added yet another thoughtful contribution to the debates over whether voluntary compliance programs can significantly improve environmental law and policy. This thorough and careful empirical review of the most important voluntary environmental compliance programs is essential reading for anyone interested in environmental law and policy.
In the 1990’s and early 2000’s, a strong strain in environmental legal scholarship argued that environmental regulation was too punitive, inflexible, and rigid. According that scholarship, regulation punished regulated parties who sought, in good faith, to comply with the law; it imposed regulatory standards without regard to the benefits of the regulation as applied to a particular regulatory party, or of the feasibility or appropriateness of compliance for a particular regulatory party; it was unable to keep up with complex and rapid economic and technological change. Many of these critiques were initially raised and made prominent by Bob Kagan and Eugene Bardach, beginning with their 1982 book Going by the Book: The Problem of Regulatory Unreasonableness. Continue reading "Do Voluntary Compliance Programs Really Improve Environmental Law?"
Apr 27, 2015 John FloodLegal Profession
Ronit Dinovitzer & Bryant Garth,
Lawyers and the Legal Profession, (
UC Irvine School of Law Research Paper No. 2015-19), available at
SSRN.
One of the main concerns of the authors is the structure of the legal profession in which perpetual reproduction of hierarchies forms a contest among different elements of the profession. The configuration of the profession shapes its research which places corporate lawyers and firms at the top of the hierarchy. This seems to stem from the early Cravath idealisation of law firm development. Even though the Cravath model dates from the late 19th century, it reverberates still in the 21st century and has captured scholars’ thinking. It appears difficult to shake off these established idealisations and models when discussing the legal profession. Dinovitzer and Garth (D&G) endeavour to show how these cleavages rip through the study of legal professions.
“Lawyers and the Legal Profession” draws on the research done on the structure of the legal profession, its divisions, lawyers’ backgrounds (gender, ethnicity, class), law firms and globalisation. The range is broad but there is one caveat, which is most of the work referred to is based on research done within the US. It is legitimate to question this given the global differences between legal professions, regulatory systems and the like. Although the Cravath model might have been the blueprint for law firm organisation that was exported by American lawyers—and its residues are apparent—whether it remains the dominant model is open and contested, even, perhaps, within the US. See, for example, the rise of the “smart” law firm (Wald). I return to this later. Continue reading "The New World Order for Lawyers and the Legal Profession(s)"
Apr 24, 2015 Brian BixJurisprudence
Roger Cotterrell,
Why Jurisprudence Is Not Legal Philosophy, 5
Jurisprudence 41 (2014), available at
SSRN.
Most people who use the terms at all treat “jurisprudence” and “legal philosophy” as interchangeable terms. In “Why Jurisprudence is Not Legal Philosophy,” Roger Cotterrell argues for a distinct meaning for the two terms, and for a greater emphasis on jurisprudence, in comparison to what he perceives as undue current attention to and an unduly high valuation of legal philosophy.
For Cotterrell, legal philosophy is the application to law, usually at a high level of abstraction, of ideas from philosophy, sociology, economics, or other disciplines in the humanities or social sciences. His particular concern is that much of what goes on under “legal philosophy” today—in particular, under what he calls “contemporary legal positivism”—inclines towards questions about what is true “essentially” or “necessarily” of all legal systems (or legal systems “in all possible worlds,” he might have added). These kinds of inquiries might be the sort of thing that is of interest to professional philosophers, Cotterrell maintains, but they are of little interest—and little use—to practicing lawyers. Continue reading "Bricolage Jurisprudence"
Apr 22, 2015 Pam SamuelsonIntellectual Property Law
Michael C. Donaldson,
Refuge From The Storm: A Fair Use Safe Harbor For Non-Fiction Works, 59
J. Copyright Soc’y U.S.A. 477 (2012), available at
SSRN.
So much has been written on the fair use case law in the U.S. that it would seem nigh impossible to find something new to say about it. But new things are indeed possible. Michael Donaldson, who practices entertainment law in Los Angeles and has represented many clients in copyright disputes in the film industry, has made four significant contributions to the fair use literature in his article “Refuge From the Storm: A Fair Use Safe Harbor for Non-Fiction Works,” which was published in the Journal of the Copyright Society in 2012.
One contribution is the concept of fair use safe harbors. Copyright professionals are used to speaking of safe harbors when it comes to the statutory limits on liability of Internet service providers for the infringing acts of others. Some of us also use that term when discussing the judge-made limit on secondary liability for developers of technologies having substantial non-infringing uses. But we have shied away from the safe harbor concept in fair use cases, perhaps because the Supreme Court was unwilling to endorse presumptions of fairness for parodies in its Campbell v. Acuff-Rose decision. Donaldson’s article makes a persuasive argument that a fair use safe harbor does exist for certain uses of pre-existing materials in non-fiction works, and it opened my mind to the possibility that other fair use safe harbors might also exist. Continue reading "Fair Use Safe Harbors?"
Apr 21, 2015 Niva Elkin-KorenTechnology Law
One of the greatest challenges faced by cyber scholars and policymakers is how to predict the undesired social consequences of technological developments and to design the best policies to address them. Digital technology makes this challenge even harder: change is swift and getting swifter, and is often formulated in technical terms.
This is where legal scholarship and policymaking could benefit from a novel. The Circle by Dave Eggers is a dystopian novel about the digital era. Many legal scholars have written over the past decade on the surveillance society, big data, contextual privacy, the right to privacy, the right to be forgotten, transparency and accountability. However, the analysis of these issues in the legal literature remains abstract. The Circle offers a mirror image of our daily digital experiences, helping us to imagine what it would be like to live in a society of total transparency, and to experience the gradual loss of autonomy. The Circle tells a story about the human condition in the info era, the ideology of the digital culture, and the political structure which serves it. It could help us see in real time the social implications of digital technology, identify the forces that come into play, and design more concrete strategies to address them. Continue reading "An Intimate Look at the Rise of Data Totalitarianism"
Apr 20, 2015 Kerry AbramsFamily Law
Why does our current family law system so frequently fail children, and how can we fix it? These are the central questions asked by many family law scholars. Often, the proposed solution is a substantive one. Many scholars, for instance, have advocated altering the “best interests” standard, changing the rules for establishing parentage, or expanding marriage to include same-sex couples so that their children can enjoy greater stability.
In her book, Failure to Flourish: How Law Undermines Family Relationships, Professor Clare Huntington offers a different perspective. For Huntington, family law’s failure is less a matter of substance and more a matter of structure. The law is structured in ways that actively undermine family flourishing. Some of these structural features have obvious impacts on family law. Marriage laws that exclude LGBT couples, for example, are structural impediments to long-term stability for these couples and their children. But many of the structures Huntington identifies are ones that we may not realize undergird family law. Access to public transportation, the existence of sidewalks, playgrounds, and community spaces, and zoning laws that permit multi-generational dwellings, for example, all influence the daily lives of families, encouraging or discouraging families to become embedded in their communities and to be able to balance work, school, and leisure, all of which are factors that lead to long-term stability and flourishing. Many of these structures are designed without consideration for their effect on families. Continue reading "Restructuring Family Law"
