Feb 18, 2014 Jonathan SimonCriminal Law
Despite reforms in the elements and evidentiary rules concerning rape and sexual assault crimes, successful prosecutions often face more practical narrative problems in convincing the jury of the credibility of complainants when the timing and manner of their accusation falls outside of how jurors may imagine the normal rape survivor would present herself to authorities. The proper place of psychiatric and psychological expertise about what is sometimes denominated “rape trauma syndrome” in trials and proper instruction of jurors in those trials has been the subject of serious critical debate among feminist legal scholars and rape survivors for twenty years. The sharp question of whether individual rape survivors or rape survivors as a class benefit from the ability to describe the rape survivor whose complaint comes “late” or is delivered in a flat and calm affect to police or medical authorities as suffering from a syndrome remains unresolved, and the same dilemma emerges in the domestic violence realm with “battered women’s syndrome evidence.”
Yxta Maya Murray brings us into this long and always troubling debate quite literally with the example of British artist and rape survivor Tracey Emin, whose work is both quoted and depicted in rare law review color photos. This article stands out amongst the many great criminal law articles that I’ve read in the past couple of years because it combines empirical social science, art, and humanities analysis, which gives us new purchase on concrete legal questions that have already received a great deal of both conceptual and empirical research. Continue reading "Not “Just the Facts”: Art, Rape Survival, and Imagining Law Reform"
Feb 17, 2014 The EditorsCriminal Law
Andrew Taslitz
With sadness we note the passing of Jotwell criminal law co-editor Andrew Taslitz who has died at age 57. (See his obituary here.) Andrew was a graduate of Queens College and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. After a practice career with the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, and in private practice, Andrew spent 23 years at Howard University School of Law. He joined the law faculty at American University in 2012. Andrew’s teaching included evidence, criminal procedure, and criminal law. His scholarship dealt centrally with criminal law and procedure including one book on legal history, Reconstructing the Fourth Amendment: A History of 1789-1868 (2009), as well as Rape and the Culture of the Court Room (1999) and dozens of articles on criminal procedure and criminal law. One of the most admired criminal law teachers of our time, Andrew’s passion for law and its reform were evident to his students, colleagues, and many readers.
Feb 17, 2014 Jay TidmarshCourts Law
The banes of every civil-justice system are delay and expense. The two maladies are often run together in a single phrase as if they were one disease, but they are distinct problems whose antidotes sometimes work at cross-purposes. One solution to delay, for instance, is to impose early, firm deadlines during litigation, but that can simply induce parties to “lawyer up” and spend more money in the rush to meet truncated deadlines. Conversely, keeping the cost of litigation down may induce more people to sue, which will drive up the length of time to resolution.
In England, where I taught this past Fall, the delay-and-cost two-step has played out over fifteen years and two sets of procedural reforms. The first, and better known, effort occurred in 1998, when the Wolff reforms (named after Lord Chief Justice Woolf, principal author of the report Access to Justice) led to the creation of the Civil Procedure Rules. The principal innovation of the Woolf reforms was case management, an idea that had been growing in popularity on the American side of the Atlantic since the 1970s. But it also included a number of other innovations—such as pre-action protocols in which parties in some cases exchanged information before suit, greater resort to ADR, and a rule (“Part 36”) that operates akin to but more broadly than Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 68—that were designed to both reduce delay and lower the cost of litigation. Continue reading "Jackson"
Feb 14, 2014 Paul HorwitzConstitutional Law
James D. Nelson, Conscience, Incorporated, Mich. St. L. Rev. (forthcoming), available at SSRN.
Perhaps the single hottest issue in American law and religion right now is the dispute over the so-called “contraceptive mandate.” The Affordable Care Act requires employers to extend insurance coverage to include contraceptive care. It includes some exemptions for particular churches and other religious organizations, but the Obama administration has refused to extend that exemption too widely. A number of businesses or business owners have complained that this mandate violates “their” religious consciences and that, under the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment and/or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, an exemption is required. Key questions raised by the controversy include whether corporations have religious rights at all, whether the mandate constitutes a substantial burden, and whether the mandate is generally applicable or not. Lower court rulings are all over the map. The Supreme Court will hear two of those cases next month.
Articles on the contraceptive mandate are a growth industry right now but, with all due respect, few of them have said anything all that deep. Much of the work on this issue is still at the shadow-amicus-brief stage of legal doctrinalism, in which the first articles addressing a legal issue read like standard legal briefs lining up on one side of the issue or the other. There is some value in that for the litigants, and for those scholars who are rehearsing for amicus participation. But those articles really are just rehearsals, efforts to fight tomorrow’s battles with yesterday’s tools. Continue reading "Beyond Contraceptive Mandate Doctrinalism"
Feb 12, 2014 Henry ChambersWork Law
Joni Hersch & Beverly I. Moran, He Said, She Said, Let’s Hear What the Data Say: Sexual Harassment in the Media, Courts, EEOC, and Social Science, 101 Ky. L.J. 753 (2013), available at SSRN.
In He Said, She Said, Let’s Hear What the Data Say: Sexual Harassment in the Media, Courts, EEOC, and Social Science, Joni Hersch & Beverly Moran explore whether coverage of sexual harassment in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal is consistent with sexual harassment as it is reported in three other sources: a 1994 United States Merit Systems Protection Board (USMSPB) survey, charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) from 2006-2010, and complaints filed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (EDPa) from 2010-2011. As the authors note, the article stemmed from curiosity regarding what national media outlets are reporting about sexual harassment and if that matches the reality of sexual harassment: “This article was inspired by a desire to learn if our national portrait of sexual harassment comports with what we know about harassment through social science.” (P. 775.) I like the article because it explores a practical issue that can help illuminate how one particularly important area of law is perceived and lived. How sexual harassment is perceived can help shape how sexual harassment law is enforced and how sexual harassment is lived in the workplace. Consequently, the article may be of interest to almost anyone who works with or cares about employment discrimination law.
The article can be summarized fairly quickly. The authors identify the key issue: whether major media outlets cover sexual harassment reasonably, fairly and accurately. After a brief discussion of the literature regarding sexual harassment in the workplace and the doctrine and history of sexual harassment, the authors compare sexual harassment coverage in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal with three data sets noted above: the USMSPB survey on sexual harassment, EEOC charge data, and sexual harassment complaints filed in the EDPa. The authors quickly analyze each data set noting the demographics of the sexual harassment claimants and what behavior tends to trigger harassment charges. The review of the media coverage suggests that sexual harassment is covered in an intensely local and episodic manner, with little recognition that sexual harassment is a national phenomenon that could be connected to “a larger, social, economic or political trend.” (P. 778.) In comparing the media coverage and the data sets, the authors found that while the reporting of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal generally does not mislead regarding the demographics of sexual harassment claimants, particular stories may downplay the seriousness of the factual allegations made in complaints. The article suggests that differences between the media portrayal of sexual harassment and what can be found in the data may result from the media’s focus on litigation. The authors note that a focus on pre-litigation harassment claims may provide a fuller picture of sexual harassment. The authors end the article observing that the focus on litigation leads to reporting that tends to miss “a sense of what happens before litigation and what sexual harassment means to victims in terms of their economic, professional, and emotional lives.” (P. 781.) Continue reading "Who, What, Why, When and Where: How Well Does the National Media Report on Sexual Harassment?"
Feb 11, 2014 Keith HyltonTorts
Duty in the Litigation Investment Agreement: The Choice Between Tort and Contract Norms When the Deal Breaks Down, by Anthony Sebok and W. Bradley Wendel, addresses a topic of growing importance: third-party funding of litigation. In a third-party funding contract, a firm finances a lawsuit, and receives in return some portion of the judgment. Several finance firms have appeared recently, with Juridica and Burford perhaps the best known, that specialize in investing in large-claim lawsuits.
Third-party litigation funding is also known as champerty, and has been prohibited for a long time under the common law. The common law prohibition has been relaxed in recent years in some states, making the legal status of third-party funding agreements unclear as a general matter. The litigation investment firms have a large stake in the law changing in their favor, or at least remaining unclear. Continue reading "Third-Party Financing of Litigation: Good or Bad?"
Feb 10, 2014 Linda JellumAdministrative Law
Gary Lawson & Stephen Kam, Making Law Out of Nothing at All: The Origins of the Chevron Doctrine, 65 Admin. L. Rev. 1 (2013), available at BePress.
If you are teaching administrative law this semester, you can look forward to a riveting discussion of Chevron. There have been volumes written on this topic, and here I plead guilty. But if you will indulge me for a moment, I’d like to recommend that you read one more article about Chevron.
Professor Gary Lawson and former student Stephen Kam collaborated to write Making Law Out of Nothing At All: The Origins of the Chevron Doctrine. Their mission is to explain why the Chevron decision is irrelevant to the Chevron doctrine. They write not to praise or criticize the case, but “to bury it.” Or, to put it another way, they explain why one cannot resolve the many questions relating to the Chevron doctrine by examining the Chevron decision. In their article, Lawson and Kam elucidate how the lower courts, particularly the D.C. Court of Appeals, transformed the unrevolutionary Chevron case into the revolutionary Chevron doctrine within just two short years. Continue reading "Judge Wald and Justice Scalia Dance the Chevron Two-Step"
Feb 7, 2014 Kerry RyanTrusts & Estates
Luc Arrondel & André Masson, Taxing more (large) family bequests: why, when, where?, (2013), available at HAL-SHS.
As I write this review, I am blatantly aware of the maxim “we like what we know.” I like Luc Arrondel and André Masson’s (A&M) working paper (lots) because it touches on themes I have previously written about (the clash between family autonomy and equality of opportunity as the central normative tension underlying the federal wealth transfer taxes) or enjoyed in other legal scholars’ work (the failure of economic models to account for “life in all of its fullness”). The contribution to these subjects made by A&M is interesting for two reasons: 1) they are economists by trade and 2) they offer a distinctly interdisciplinary analysis of the conundrum of wealth transfer taxation.
A&M first identify (and empirically document) a tax “puzzle:” revenues from wealth transfer taxation are very low and have fallen as a percentage of GDP in most developed countries over the past 50 years; whereas, revenues from lifetime capital taxation (including taxes on property/wealth and taxes on annual capital income flows) are generally higher and show no decreasing trend. The article discards several proffered explanations for this phenomenon (increased lobbying by the rich, growing international tax competition, and the relatively recent anti-government/tax movement) because these factors, intended to account for the growing unpopularity of inheritance taxation, would also imply—wrongly—a sharp decline in lifetime capital taxation. Continue reading "Are Inheritance Taxes Special?"
Feb 5, 2014 Jaya Ramji-NogalesLexImmigration
Chantal Thomas, Immigration Controls and “Modern-Day Slavery” (Cornell Law Sch. Legal Studies Research Paper Series, Paper No. 13-86, 2013), available at SSRN.
In the heat of the debate over comprehensive immigration reform last spring, Marco Rubio’s press secretary likened undocumented migrants to slaves, noting that Americans have not “had a cohort of people living permanently in US without full rights of citizenship since slavery.” The parallel between slavery and undocumented status is drawn often, but rarely with precision or analytical rigor.
Chantal Thomas’s new paper, Immigration Controls and “Modern-Day Slavery”, takes on the challenge of bringing hard-nosed logic to bear on the concept of “modern-day slavery” and its interface with immigration law. In my view one of the most interesting authors out there on questions of international law, immigration, and labor, Thomas’s analysis of the slavery debate does not disappoint. Continue reading "Undocumented Status and Slavery: Examining the Parallels"
Feb 4, 2014 Sergio J. CamposCourts Law
In Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938), the Supreme Court famously ruled that a federal court cannot displace state common law with its own common law. Justice Brandeis’s majority opinion suggested that the Constitution compelled this result, and ever since, the decision has been called everything from a “brooding omnipresence” to an “irrepressible myth.” If Erie means anything (and, trust me, there is a lot of disagreement about whether it means anything at all), it makes clear that the federal government’s powers are limited vis-à-vis the states, and these limitations extend to the judiciary’s power to make law through precedent. To borrow Justice Brandeis’s words, “there is no federal general common law.” But translating this idea into doctrine has been a difficult task.
Applying Erie becomes even more complicated once you throw in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (which, ironically, became effective the same year as Erie). The Rules are like a legal mythical beast. The Rules are not statutes, even though they are exercises of Congress’s power to regulate the practices and procedures of Article III inferior courts. With rare exceptions, Congress does not exercise this power directly, but rather has delegated it to the Supreme Court through the Rules Enabling Act. The Court, in turn, has delegated the primary drafting of the Rules to an ad hoc advisory committee. Finally, under the Rules Enabling Act, the Rules cannot “abridge, enlarge or modify a substantive right,” which reflects a concern by Congress that the Court will abuse this delegated power to make “substantive” law without the authorization of Congress. Consequently, the Rules introduce a separation of powers dimension on top of the federalism concerns of Erie. Continue reading "The Erie-ness of the Rules"
