Jun 22, 2015 Christina Duffy PonsaLegal History
I have a soft spot for any argument that tends to show the relevance of long-settled constitutional controversies over territorial annexation to hotly debated current events. Even so, I wouldn’t write about this piece if I didn’t think it was well worth reading regardless of how much one cares about the United States’ imperial adventures of over a century ago—or about any given headline today, for that matter. The piece is a student Note by Daniel Rice in a recent issue of the Duke Law Review entitled Territorial Annexation as a “Great Power.” The annexations in question are those of Texas in 1845 and Hawaii in 1898—statutory annexations accomplished by Congressional joint resolution instead of by treaty. And the current event is Supreme Court’s decision in NFIB v. Sebelius in 2012. Rice’s Note makes a convincing case that the basic significance of the healthcare decision cannot be properly understood without a solid grasp of the debates around the constitutionality of Texas’ and Hawaii’s annexation. As Rice describes the evolution of doctrine on Congressional power and the Necessary and Proper Clause from McCulloch v. Maryland to NFIB v. Sebelius, it simply isn’t possible to get from the former to the latter, and fully understand where we’ve been and where we’re headed, without stopping to consider nineteenth-century territorial expansion.
Rice’s Note contributes to the debate on Chief Justice Roberts’ claim in NFIB v. Sebelius that, as Rice paraphrases it, “some powers are too important to be exercised merely through implication, even if they might be the most convenient means imaginable for executing Congress’ enumerated powers. These so-called ‘great powers’ are off-limits to Congress unless the Constitution specifically mentions them.” (P. 718.) Applying what Rice describes as this “conceptual bombshell” to the Affordable Care Act’s minimum-coverage provision, Roberts explained that the power to require individuals either to purchase health care or pay a fine—“the ability to create commerce, rather than regulate preexisting commerce” (again in Rice’s words)—qualifies as a “great power,” that is, a power “incapable of being claimed inferentially.” (P 720.) Continue reading "To Enumerate or Not To Enumerate: A Theory of Congressional “Great Powers”"
Jun 19, 2015 W.A. EdmundsonJurisprudence
“Money is the mother’s milk of politics,” said California pol Jesse Unruh, way back in the 1960s. Benjamin Franklin, in the 1790s, could not have said it more memorably; but wouldn’t it shock us if it had been Franklin, and not Unruh (or Karl Marx) who first said it? The certainty of death and taxes is a hard lesson, but it doesn’t prepare us for the bitter thought that politics is helpless before the power of money.
Students of American democracy have divided on the point. Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page assign the principal theories of American politics to four schools: Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-elite Domination, Majoritarian Pluralism, and Biased Pluralism. Majoritarian Electoral Democracy holds that policy outcomes are determined largely by the views of average citizens. Economic-elite Domination holds that policy outcomes are largely determined by the views of the wealthiest citizens. The two other types of theory focus not on individual voters, but on interest groups. Majoritarian pluralism is the view that policy outcomes are mainly responsive to pressures from mass-based interest groups. Biased pluralism maintains that pressure from business-orientated interest groups is what mainly determines state policy. Continue reading "Roll Over, De Tocqueville"
Jun 17, 2015 Chris BuccafuscoIntellectual Property Law
By now, most Jotwell readers will be familiar with the terrific empirical research that Paul Heald has been doing on the public domain. Now, Paul has teamed up with Kristopher Erickson and Martin Kretschmer, scholars at the University of Glasgow and the CREATe centre (which stands for Creativity, Regulation, Enterprise, and Technology). CREATe is a publicly funded multi-disciplinary program that provides research support to produce evidence-based assessments of IP policies—something I think we can all agree that we like lots.
Heald, Erikson, and Kretschmer (HEK) have recently posted a new paper that presents a section from CREATe’s larger empirical project on copyright and the value of the public domain. I strongly recommend the entire report, which includes two separate empirical studies, but will focus my comments on the shorter paper.
The authors begin by noting that copyright owners have become adept at offering quantitative assessments of the economic value that copyright industries produce. Although there are numerous estimates of the value of copyright law, there are, however, very few attempts to measure the economic value of the public domain. HEK’s paper begins to balance the ledger by estimating the value of a robust public domain for creative reuse.
To do so, the authors modify and extend a technique that was recently introduced by Abishek Nagaraj at MIT. The basic idea is to analyze Wikipedia pages for the use of photographs where the availability of photographs is affected by the public domain. HEK study the use of photographs of successful literary authors on their Wikipedia pages. Continue reading "Estimating the Value of the Public Domain"
Jun 16, 2015 Angela Mae KupendaEquality
Daria Roithmayr’s book, Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock in White Advantage, situates the reproduction of racism outside of intentionally inflicted racist acts. She argues that even if racism by individual design ceases, everyday decisions by Whites lock in the many decades’, and even centuries’, of entrenched structures of White advantage. Tracing the history of race in America especially from Jim Crow, Roithmayr illustrates how White advantage was locked in through wealth accumulation protections given Whites and denied Blacks, through the real estate market practices favoring Whites, in educational policies perpetuated through a de jure then a de facto system, through the use of incarceration and its rise against Blacks soon after the end of slavery, and even in the levels of Black infant mortality.
Using antitrust theories, Rotihmayr’s work explaining the cartel like structure of White advantage can be juxtaposed against Lani Guinier’s analogously familiar book from over twenty years ago. In Guinier’s book, The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy (1994), Guinier discusses the many statutory protections given to those who hold less than the majority votes in corporations. Guinier argues that just as minority ownership interests are given “a turn” in corporate law, such could also protect minority racial interests in our governmental democracy. Similar to Guinier’s use of principles from corporate law, Roithmayr uses principles from antitrust law. Guinier’s book focuses more on arguing the corporate law principles as remedies. Roithmayr’s book focuses more on identifying the antitrust cartel structure and showing the way for our own creative construction of remedies to break these cartels to stymie the reproduction of racism. Continue reading "Breaking Cartels to Stymie the Reproduction of Racism and Breaking them in Time"
Jun 15, 2015 Ilya SominConstitutional Law
Lochner v. New York (1905) has long been one of the most widely reviled decisions in Supreme Court history. The Court’s 1905 ruling striking down a New York maximum hours law for bakers under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been routinely denounced as callous, unjust, and based on blatantly fallacious legal reasoning. It is one of the leading members of the “anti-canon” of important Supreme Court decisions that almost all right-thinking people believe to be wrong. Thomas Colby and Peter Smith’s important new article argues that the longstanding dominance of this view of Lochner has begun to erode, at least among conservatives.
Colby and Smith provide an excellent account of why this trend began, and how it compares with previous developments in conservative and liberal legal thought. As they emphasize, even when the anti-Lochner consensus was at its height, liberals and conservatives opposed the decision for different reasons. For liberals, it became the leading symbol of an era in which the Supreme Court improperly intervened to shield “laissez-faire” economic policy against government interventions intended to protect workers and the poor. Especially after the New Deal revolution in constitutional law, they drew the lesson that Lochner was wrong because courts should generally stay out of “economic” issues, especially in cases where judicial intervention is sought for the benefit of the wealthy and business interests. Continue reading "A Revival of Lochner?"
Jun 12, 2015 Paul OhmTechnology Law
Thank you to the Jotwell editors for indulging me as I stretch their mission statement (and quite possibly their patience) by highlighting not an article nor even a conventional work of scholarship but rather a piece of software as the “thing I like (lots)”: mitmproxy, a tool created by Aldo Cortesi who shares authorship credit with Maximilian Hils and a larger “mitmproxy community.”
mitmproxy does just what it says on the tin (assuming you know how to read this particular kind of tin). It’s a Man-In-The-Middle Proxy server for the web. In English, this means that this tool allows you to reveal, with finely wrought control, exactly what your browser is saying and to whom. It is an X-ray machine for the web, one which lays many of the Internet’s secrets bare. Let me extol the many virtues of this well-designed piece of software, and after I do that, let me explain why I think this strikes me as an important contribution to legal scholarship. Continue reading "An Internet X-Ray Machine for the Masses"
Jun 10, 2015 SpearItCriminal Law
Like the Chimera of Greek mythology, American penal thought has its own powerful and elusive forces. In the world of punishment, proportionality occupies a similar space in the American imagination. The fancy of proportionality is to balance the severity of punishment with the severity of crime. On its own, the task is herculean, yet in practice, success becomes absolutely elusive due to consequentialist considerations that continue to shape law and policy.
In this article, Lacey and Pickard show why proportionality cannot deliver on its promise of equalizing punishment. In the ‘neo-classical’ articulation, punishment has come to be understood as a morally appropriate equivalent to an offense, which in theory is constrained by the requirement of proportionality. However, the authors argue that proportionality generates in itself no concrete limits to punishment, and that the question of “how much” remains open to the sways of convention, political decision, and expediency. Continue reading "Rethinking Proportionality in Punishment"
Jun 9, 2015 Elizabeth ThornburgCourts Law
Opponents of civil litigation portray it as one massive resource suck, focusing on its transaction costs and ignoring its social benefits–not only fair and accurate resolution of disputes, but also the potential for improved compliance with the laws governing civil society. Thus the current round of discovery rule amendments recite the usual claims about the expense of discovery, despite empirical research showing that discovery costs are actually quite modest in most cases. A number of civil procedure academics question the need for those new limits, even considering only costs.
Discovery’s benefits, while harder to measure, come in a number of forms. My last Jotwell essay highlighted the egalitarian information-sharing function of discovery. Steve Burbank’s forthcoming article, Proportionality and the Social Benefits of Discovery: Out of Sight and Out of Mind?, reminds us that lawsuits, including discovery, reflect the deliberate congressional policy choice of enforcing law through private litigation. And now Joanna Schwartz’s excellent article, Introspection Through Litigation, adds to the “benefits” side of the analysis. While Burbank focuses on benefits external to the litigants themselves, Schwartz calls our attention to a litigant-centered phenomenon: self-study, based on information unearthed and marshaled in the process of being sued. Continue reading "Discovery and Self-Improvement"
Jun 8, 2015 William FunkAdministrative Law
Adrian Vermeule, ‘
No’ (Review of Philip Hamburger, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?
),
Texas L.Rev. (forthcoming), available at
SSRN.
Last year, the University of Chicago Press published “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” by Philip Hamburger, the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at the Columbia University School of Law. A book by a named professor at a top-ten school published by a respected academic publisher with a provocative title would seem to be a must-read book for adlaw aficionados. His conclusion is that administrative law is unlawful, root and branch, because it is unlawful for administrative agencies to issue any rule or order that binds private parties. This is more than provocative; it is radical. Radically wrong. So wrong, one might wonder how it came to be published, and in any case so wrong that no one would take it seriously. Not so fast. In March, Justice Thomas cited it extensively in his concurrence in Department of Transportation v. Ass’n of American Railroads, 2015 WL 998536 (2015) to support his conclusion that the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 is an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority, concluding:
We have too long abrogated our duty to enforce the separation of powers required by our Constitution. We have overseen and sanctioned the growth of an administrative system that concentrates the power to make laws and the power to enforce them in the hands of a vast and unaccountable administrative apparatus that finds no comfortable home in our constitutional structure.
In his review of the book, Adrian Vermeule, the John H. Watson Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, steps up to be the Dr. Van Helsing to drive the stake through the heart of this vampire. He minces no words:
The book makes crippling mistakes about the administrative law of the United States; it misunderstands what that body of law actually holds and how it actually works. As a result the legal critique, launched by five-hundred-odd pages of text, falls well wide of the target.
And that’s just the beginning. Continue reading "Is Administrative Law Unlawful? NO!"
Jun 5, 2015 Matt BodieWork Law
Where does the employee end and the employer begin? In The New Cognitive Property, Orly Lobel confronts us with employers’ ever-expanding reach into the craniums of their employees, both past and present. The article continues Lobel’s groundbreaking work into the intersections between employment law, intellectual property, and what she terms “human capital law.” Employers are bringing new legal tools to bear against employees to keep their ideas within the firm and prevent them from using their talents outside their current workplace. And as her research makes clear, the costs may be borne not only by these workers, but by our society and its capacity to innovate.
Lobel’s 2013 book Talent Wants to Be Free explained, for a more general and business-oriented audience, how restrictions on employees such as covenants not to compete, trade secrets, and the work-for-hire doctrine limit employees’ capacity to develop and use their human capital. As a result, workers are less able to develop this capital and less likely to want to do so. These themes are updated and further developed in The New Cognitive Property, which spends a great deal of time on the legal mechanisms themselves. Her discussion of human capital restrictions circa 2015 is an eye-opening read even for those well-versed in the traditional employer tools in this area. You may know about the shop-right doctrine, but did you know that employers are laying claim to employees’ ideas that are too abstract to be patented? You have likely heard about trade secret law, or even “inevitable disclosure,” but how about the criminalization of trade secret law, where one employee was sent to jail for emailing himself code that was largely open-source? And while covenants not to compete have a long and familiar lineage, Lobel brings us up to date with a dizzying array of post-employment restrictions: non-solicitation, non-dealing, non-poaching, and non-hiring clauses. Using a series of vivid examples, The New Cognitive Property artfully explores the manifold ways in which employers are claiming more and more of their employees’ human capital for themselves. Continue reading "We Are What We Work"
