Mar 7, 2014 Susan FortneyLegal Profession
Leslie Levin, Misbehaving Lawyers: Cross-Country Comparisons, 15 Legal Ethics 357 (2012), available at SSRN.
Commentaries on lawyer discipline often refer to practice areas that are involved in grievances. Discussions of lawyer discipline devote far less attention to examining the circumstances of particular grievances or the characteristics of the lawyers facing disciplinary charges. That is one reason why I especially liked Professor Leslie Levin’s Misbehaving Lawyers: Cross-Country Comparisons. This article was published in a special issue of Legal Ethics—the preeminent international legal ethics journal.
In his preface to the issue, Richard Abel described the premise of the special issue as follows: “we can illuminate the nature of and explanations for lawyer misconduct and the relative advantages of different regulatory responses by comparing case studies of lawyers disciplined a variety of countries.” In the special issue, experts presented fascinating case studies of lawyers disciplined in the authors’ home countries. Following these case studies, Professor Levin’s essay identifies similarities and differences among the cases studies written by experts from Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Anyone interested in lawyer conduct should read Professor Levin’s essay because it provides a concise and thoughtful analysis of patterns and problems that emerge from the accounts presented in the articles in the special issue. Legal profession scholars, lawyers who defend and prosecute disciplinary cases and malpractice cases, jurists, educators, and individual practitioners can learn a great deal by reflecting on Professor Levin’s observations. Continue reading "Patterns and Problems in Professional Discipline Cases"
Mar 5, 2014 Eric BiberLexEnvironmental Law
Most people, when they think of environmental pollution, think of large, industrial factories pumping out noxious fumes into the air, putrid liquids into the water, and barrels of toxic wastes into the soil. For instance, almost every newspaper article, blog post, or television story about climate change has as an image of the smokestack of a major power plant or factory.
Most people’s perceptions are wrong. It has long been the case that much of the degradation of our natural environment is the result of the accumulation of thousands, millions, even billions of individual actions by people across the United States and around the world. Climate change, for example, is the result of the decision of each of us to drive a car powered by fossil fuels, eat meat, fly in planes, heat our house with fossil fuels, and other similar, seemingly trivial actions. Moreover, these misconceptions are not limited to the general public or general journalists—environmental law scholars and policy makers have fallen into this trap as well. Even when scholars and policy makers have recognized the importance of small harms for environmental law and policy, there is often little information about how important they are, or what, exactly the implications are for our current legal and regulatory systems.
Two recent articles—Dave Owen’s piece, Critical Habitat and the Challenge of Regulating Small Harms, and David E. Adelman’s article, Environmental Federalism: When Numbers Matter More than Size—are welcome efforts to address the gaps in our understanding of how small harms matter to environmental law and why they matter. Moreover, they both are outstanding examples of a recent trend in environmental law to jump on the empirical legal studies bandwagon—both collect and use substantial amounts of data in their analyses. Continue reading "Small Things Matter in Environmental Law"
Mar 4, 2014 Angela FernandezLegal History
Irus Braverman’s recent book Zooland is a wonderful read on a topic that is of both historical and current interest—zoos. How should we view zoos given the frank admission by all, including zoo advocates, that zoo animals are captives, forced to forgo what would otherwise be a superior existence in order to serve the pedagogical and conservationist agenda that zoos have cultivated as justifications for their existence? These animals have been conscripted as “ambassadors for their species” (P. 8) and are in a sense turned into “body doubles”—“stand-ins for the real animals” and their wild habitats about which they are supposed to be raising awareness (P. 58). Perhaps zoos are effective at raising this awareness. Braverman is distinctly agnostic on the question of whether zoos are generally a good or bad thing.
Legal historians will be interested in the shift Braverman describes from zoos as sites of entertainment, a variation on the old menagerie style collection of animals, preferably exotic, that would then perform various colonialist and empire-building functions, to the (arguably) more laudable conservationist rationale and its accompanying practices often targeted at educating adults and children about species and habitat decline and destruction. The real animals are “just the hook” as one of Braverman’s interview subjects, Jim Breheny of the Bronx Zoo, puts it. (P. 41.) They are meant to draw you in. What they draw you into, as Braverman’s book details, is a world of contradictions. Braverman calls what she has found a Foucauldian “power of care,” minute in its regulation of the daily lives of zoo animals and profound in its reach into such fundamental aspects of the animals’ lives as the question of which animals are allowed to reproduce and which are not, which will be put on board “Noah’s Ark” and saved and which will not. The regimentation of the animals’ lives serves another disciplinary end: “Whereas once zoos were in the business of entertainment through taxonomic exhibitions,” Braverman writes, “now they discipline the public into caring about nature.” (P. 90.) Continue reading "Forget About Noah’s Ark"
Mar 3, 2014 Mortimer SellersJurisprudence
There is an innovative, very influential, and deeply pernicious tradition in English law and jurisprudence equating liberty with license and the rule of law with legal despotism. The beauty of this short chapter by T.R.S. Allan lies in its full implicit refutation of this shared misconception, as found in Thomas Hobbes, John Austin, and H.L.A. Hart, and its shorter explicit repudiation of their gentle contemporary apologist, Joseph Raz. Allan embraces traditional conceptions of the rule of law, demonstrates their central position in British jurisprudence, and makes sense of the doctrines of A.V. Dicey, often misstated as mere legal formalism.
“The rule of law and not of men” in its original, best, and most coherent sense is the antithesis of arbitrary power. This is both a political ideal and a constitutional doctrine: law and government are only legitimate when they serve justice and the common good of their subjects. To legislate, adjudicate, or execute the laws to any other end is contrary to the proper purposes of law, and therefore corrupt. “Liberty” consists in subjection to just laws, made for the common good — not (as some would have it) the simple license to do what one wants. Continue reading "Liberty, Equality, and the Rule of Law"
Feb 28, 2014 Pam SamuelsonIntellectual Property Law
Sony’s Betamax was the first reprography technology to attract a copyright infringement lawsuit. Little did copyright experts back then realize how much of a harbinger of the future the Betamax would turn out to be. Countless technologies since then designed, like the Betamax, to enable personal use copying of in-copyright works have come to market. Had the Supreme Court outlawed the Betamax, few of these technologies would have seen the light of day.
The most significant pro-innovation decision was Supreme Court’s Sony Betamax decision. It created a safe harbor for technologies with substantial non-infringing uses. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have heavily relied on this safe harbor as a shield against copyright owner lawsuits. Yet, notwithstanding this safe harbor, copyright owners have had some successes in shutting down some systems, most notably, the peer-to-peer file-sharing platform Napster.
It stands to reason that decisions such as Napster would have some chilling effect on the development of copy-facilitating technologies. But how much of a chilling effect has there been? Some would point to products and services such as SlingBox and Cablevision’s remote DVR feature and say “not much.”
Antitrust and innovation scholar Michael Carrier decided to do some empirical research to investigate whether technological innovation has, in fact, been chilled by decisions such as Napster. He conducted qualitative interviews with 31 CEOs, co-founders and vice presidents of technology firms, venture capitalists (VCs), and recording industry executives. The results of his research are reported in this Wisconsin article, which I like a lot. Continue reading "Copyright as a Chill on Innovation"
Feb 26, 2014 Christopher RobertsonHealth Law
• Michelle M. Mello et al., Communication-And-Resolution Programs: The Challenges And Lessons Learned From Six Early Adopters, 33(1) Health Affairs 20 (2014).
• Michelle M. Mello, Susan K. Senecal, Yelena Kuznetsov & Janet S. Cohn, Implementing Hospital-Based Communication-And-Resolution Programs: Lessons Learned In New York City, 33(1) Health Affairs 30 (2014).
In January of 2014, Health Affairs published an entire issue dedicated to new approaches to medical malpractice reform, featuring several jotworthy articles with overlapping lists of authors, including these two led by Michelle Mello. This work is invaluable as it provides an early look at two sets of demonstration projects exemplifying new solutions to the problems of medical error and medical liability.
Across the multiple medical malpractice crises and waves of reform, the traditional debates have focused on ways to reduce the number, amount, and variability of liability judgments—imposing shorter statutes of limitations, interposing screening panels to filter out some cases, narrowing the range of potential expert witnesses eligible to testify, and capping damages regardless of the individualized proof determined by the jury. Regrettably, there is no reason to think that these reforms actually reduced the number of medical errors patients suffer. In fact, they may have exacerbated that problem if they have weakened the (imperfect) deterrence signal sent by liability. This point was sharpened in 1999, when the Institute of Medicine released a report summarizing evidence estimating that over 40,000 Americans were being killed every year due to preventable medical errors: the equivalent of a couple of jumbo jets full of passengers crashing every day. Continue reading "Mello’s MedMal 2.0 Study Documents Discordant Outcomes in the Communication-and-Resolution Programs"
Feb 25, 2014 Katharine BarlettFamily Law
Legal scholarship has been increasingly attuned to the role of performance in constructing legal norms. In Staging the Family, Clare Huntington brings this sensitivity to family law. Accordingly to Huntington, people act out the “collective understandings of mother, father, child, and the family itself.” These collective understandings reflect and perpetuate the law’s definition of the family and the rights and responsibilities of its members. Through this mutually reinforcing process, the law’s participation is “normatively narrowing” because it recognizes and thus reinforces only the prevailing, “dominant” images of the family. A consequence, Huntington argues, is that the law has ignored “seismic demographic changes in family form” such as nonmarital families, cohabitation, same-sex couples, and assisted reproduction. In replicating dominant family forms, the law has also idealized them. By reproducing “[o]verwhelmingly positive images of the family,” Huntington writes, the law has approached child sexual abuse “as a problem of strangers lurking in the shadows” rather than a problem within families themselves. (P. 595.)
At the root of the law’s conservatism is that it treats the dominant image of the family as the “natural” one. Huntington’s proposed solution is to “decenter ” or “denature” those dominant images. Operationally, this means “recognizing broader social fronts so that no one performance takes precedence over all others” (P. 640), giving “far greater leeway to parties to decide for themselves whether they constitute a family” (P. 641), and, in the child welfare arena, moving away from “set scripts that reinforce dominant images of family.” (P. 644.) Continue reading "Denaturing the Family"
Feb 24, 2014 Andres GuadamuzTechnology Law
When it comes to the issue of copyright in the digital age, it is not uncommon to read claims and counter-claims regarding the public’s perception of copyright enforcement and infringement through file-sharing mechanisms. Public policy in the field is often driven by assumptions that tend to be nothing more than guesswork as to their effectiveness and efficiency. While copyright policy has been the subject of several government-funded reviews in the UK in several years, these have usually failed to be conducted with the end-user of copyright works in mind, which seem to cement the idea that the subject is too complex for the public. It is therefore a very refreshing development when research is conducted to provide us with better empirical understanding of what the public really thinks with regards to copyright, going beyond mere conjecture and potential biases.
In Isn’t it just a way to protect Walt Disney’s rights?, the authors have set out to engage in an empirically sound exercise in order to ascertain the validity of various statements that are often part of copyright debates. They have put together a series of focus groups designed to get the opinion of “ordinary media users,” as the authors claim that this is a sector that does not often get their opinion represented in the copyright debates. The study’s methodology consisted in carrying out twelve focus groups based in Yorkshire, England, and each of these ranged from three to ten participants, who were recruited as pre-existing groups of media users, varying in age, background and experience with downloading media. The groups were asked to discuss topics relating to copyright, the creative industries, digital media, downloading and piracy for over one hour, and while the groups were directed, they were given a set of open-ended questions to explore the users’ experience, attitudes, and behaviour with regards to copyright. Continue reading "What Do People Think About Copyright?"
Feb 21, 2014 Kim BrooksEquality
One of the most heated series of conversations I had with my colleagues in law school was about hair: color, style, length, and accoutrements. All of these choices apparently meant something. It was unclear to me what, precisely, my haircut at the time signalled—or didn’t—but it was clear to me that Hair Matters.
Thankfully, Ruthann Robson has authored Dressing Constitutionally: Hierarchy, Sexuality, and Democracy from our Hairstyles to Our Shoes. The book is something of a relief for me. It clarifies how my hair (and clothes, and shoe) choices are constrained by the regulatory framework of the American Constitution. I feel less responsible for my Hair and Clothing Mistakes, since it is clear that my choices are subject to constitutional limits. And it has advanced my understanding of what Dressing Means. Continue reading "Dressed Up and Ready to Read"
Feb 19, 2014 Lawrence MitchellCorporate Law
• Brian R.Cheffins, Steven A. Bank, & Harwell Wells, Law and History by the Numbers: Use, But with Care, UCLA School of Law, Law-Econ Research Paper 13-21 (2014), available at SSRN.
• Brian R. Cheffins, Steven A. Bank, & Harwell Wells, Questioning “Law and Finance:” US Stock Market Development, 1930-1970, 55 Bus. Hist. 598 (2013), available at SSRN.
The relationship between civil and economic governing institutions and economic development is significant. Law matters to economic development. Acemoglu’s and Robinson’s comprehensive overview in Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty provides a compelling case for the proposition that extractive institutions, in either sphere of civil life, can significantly retard economic progress and result in poor living conditions for the majority of people in a given society. Largely the province of development economists studying political institutions, the inquiry into the relationship between governance and economics in the corporate sphere was catalyzed by the famous work of Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny (LLSV) in the late 1990s. The relationship among economic development and the institutions of finance – corporations, markets, and financial institutions – has since progressed from development economics to corporate legal scholarship.
The study of economic development is, necessarily, historical, and is in its nature largely comparative. A welcome corollary in legal scholarship to the introduction of development economics is a renewed interest in corporate and financial history. Cheffins, Bank, and Wells (CBW), all excellent contributors to this industry, have performed a notable service with a recent interesting pair of papers. In Questioning Law and Finance, they turn from the traditional comparative approach of the development literature to examine, longitudinally, what that literature might teach us about economic development in 20th century America as a function of corporate and securities law. In Law and History by the Numbers, they step back to examine the extent to which empirical research of the type used in the economics literature can shed light on corporate legal analysis. Continue reading "Law Matters (A Bit)"
