Aug 6, 2020 Nate HoldrenLegal History
Despite ideological use of terms like “free market,” people are not free to leave capitalism: capitalism is socially compulsory. Ideologists of capitalism sometimes mask this reality by trying to render capitalism the entirety of our conceptual horizon, so that it becomes impossible to think outside of capitalism. When that happens, capitalism comes to be taken for granted rather than treated as a historically contingent and socially-imposed set of constraints. One of the things that history can do is to examine when capitalism arose and how it became compulsory. Rose Parfitt’s new book is precisely this kind of critical history.
This book centers on Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the ways it has been understood in international law since the end of World War Two. The invasion has been typically treated as a failure of law, as Parfitt demonstrates in a survey of scholarship by historians and international law scholars. The League of Nations let the invasion happen, the typical account goes, and the League’s failure to act must inform the creation and practice of better international legal institutions. Parfitt argues, however, that the legal facilitation of Italy’s annexation of Ethiopia did not arise from particular qualities of the League but from elements of international law more broadly. The force of the argument is that present international law is not so fundamentally different from the League of Nations after all. As Parfitt underlines, the world has witnessed many invasions since the Ethiopian crisis, under what is ostensibly a very different organization of international law and set of institutions. The typical narrative of Italy’s invasion, Parfitt argues, has defended rather than prevented military actions, especially by the US and European countries against formerly colonized countries. Parfitt thus argues that there is far more continuity between the League of Nations era and more recent international law than the typical story admits. She further argues that claims to strong differences between the League and present institutions end up inadvertently offering rhetorical support to war. Continue reading "A Critical History of the Complicity of International Law"
Aug 5, 2020 Alex B. LongWork Law
I haven’t taught the basic Employment Law survey course in a few years, so I was updating my class notes relating to the kinds of pre-employment screening measures that many employers use. The casebook had a note about so-called ban-the-box measures—state laws that require employers to remove questions about criminal histories from a job application. I decided to do a little research into the subject when – lo and behold – I stumbled across one of those articles that helps an instructor add some value to the class while simultaneously making a practical contribution to the scholarship in the field.
Do Ban-the-Box-Laws Really Work? by Dallen Flake takes a look at the practical effect of ban-the-box laws. The article begins with an overview of the rise in these types of measures in recent years and the different approaches that the measures take. The ban-the-box laws reflect a recognition of the difficulties that those with arrest and conviction records often face in seeking to find employment. Much like the Americans with Disabilities Act’s prohibition on disability-related inquiries at the pre-offer stage, ban-the-box measures delay the ability of employers to inquire about an applicant’s criminal history. As Flake explains, “The hope is that an employer will be more likely to hire an ex-offender if it evaluates a candidate’s qualifications for the position before discovering the applicant’s criminal record.” (P. 1084.) Continue reading "The Impact of Ban-the-Box Measures"
Aug 4, 2020 Barbara LevenbookJurisprudence
There is a default theory of legal content that many legal positivists – and non-positivists – accept. It is that the legal contents of texts, or of authoritative pronouncements in general, are, or match, their full (that is, pragmatically-enriched) linguistic contents. Nine years ago, Mark Greenberg published an influential article called The Standard Picture and Its Discontents, attacking what he called the “Standard Picture” predominant among legal theorists. The aforementioned default theory of legal content is one of what Greenberg called the Standard Picture’s “prongs.” Among Greenberg’s objections to this theory, which is sometimes referred to as a “communicative content theory” of law, is that it cannot account for aspects of familiar legal practice. Dale Smith refers to this type of objection as a “practice-based objection.” (He notes that Greenberg is not the only legal theorist to raise a practice-based objection to the communicative content theory.) Practice-based objections, from Greenberg and others, depict an apparent gap between communicative content and legal content. This gap is especially troublesome for many theorists of statutory legal content. In particular, the gap poses a problem for anyone attracted to the idea that statutes are communications from the legislature and ought to be understood and applied the way ordinary communications are.
In this intriguing article, Smith is both friend to a communicative content theory and foe. He is a friend by demonstrating, again and again, how practice-based objections raised so far can be accommodated by such a theory. But he turns foe with his consideration of the practice of using what he refers to as “retrospectively operating modifier laws.” His thesis is that practice-based objections to date are not fatal to a communicative content theory of law, but that there is a practice-based objection that may be. Continue reading "Greenberg Got it Wrong: What Legal Practice Does and Does Not Reveal About Legal Content"
Aug 3, 2020 Jessica SilbeyIntellectual Property Law
Amanda Levendowski,
Trademarks as Surveillance Transparency, 36
Berkeley Tech. L. J. __ (forthcoming 2021), available at
SSRN.
I call this paper a “Levendowski special.” It follows the signature format of much of Professor Levendowski’s prior work which, as in the latest article, recruits a legal tool typically aimed at one set of problems for the purpose of cleverly addressing a different set of problems. Her past articles harnessed copyright law to “fix artificial intelligence’s implicit bias” (2018) and to “combat revenge porn.” (2014). This paper draws on Professor Levendowski’s expertise working in private practice as a trademark attorney to address the problem of surveillance technology opacity. It is a primer on how to investigate trademark filings for hard-to-access information about surveillance technologies.
Levendowski laments and hopes to provide a partial solution to the informational asymmetry between law enforcement and the public about surveillance technologies. Private companies create surveillance technology – doorbell cameras, facial recognition tools, license plate readers – which are frequently used by law enforcement and embedded in communities. Community members are often unaware of the networks of surveillance until years later. Professor Levendowski explains that journalists and regulators often have difficulty investigating or tracking these surveillance tools because of weak or misaligned disclosure regimes. Continue reading "Fixing Informational Asymmetry Through Trademark Search"
Jul 31, 2020 Trudo LemmensHealth Law
- Samuel R. Bagenstos, May Hospitals Withhold Ventilators from COVID-19 Patients with Pre-Existing Disabilities? Notes on the Law and Ethics of Disability-Based Medical Rationing, 130 Yale L. J. Forum __ (forthcoming, 2020), available at SSRN.
- Deborah Hellman & Kate Nicholson, Rationing and Disability in a State of Crisis (Apr. 16, 2020), available at SSRN.
With the COVID-19 pandemic wreaking havoc in health care systems around the world, many jurisdictions have recently drafted or dusted off old clinical care triage protocols to facilitate decision-making when surges in infection rates overwhelm hospitals’ Intensive Care Units (ICUs). Not surprisingly, most of these policies reflect a utilitarian approach. Law and ethics policies generally endorse the notion that a pandemic or other large-scale threat to society requires efficient action by governments, which may involve a curtailing of individual rights. A growing chorus of academic commentators and human rights organizations have voiced concern that the focus on ‘saving the most lives’ embedded in triage policies, and particularly how these policies hope to achieve this, clashes with discrimination law, and particularly the rights of people with disabilities. Of a near-tsunami of blogs, op-eds, and commentaries in the legal, bioethics, and medical literature, forthcoming law articles by Samuel R. Bagenstos, and Deborah Hellman and Kate Nicholson stand out for how they discuss what the demands of equity imposed by discrimination law require, and how they each give us some idea of what accommodation in clinical triage protocol policies could look like.
Triage protocols are intended to solve the clash of commitments among physicians, when they are no longer able to give all patients the care they would normally feel duty-bound to provide. They introduce selection criteria for access to care (particularly ventilators, which I will focus on later), explicitly based on concepts of utility, fairness, proportionality, and reciprocity; and also decision-making procedures built around triage committees. Triage protocols deal with life and death decisions, or a least with who will receive an albeit limited chance of survival, since survival rates of those put on a ventilator for COVID19 appear troublingly low. The disability community has raised particular concerns about those protocols that mention specific disabilities as disqualifying conditions. These concerns flow from a historical experience with deprioritization and broad problems of equitable access to health care; concerns that have been heightened by the disproportionate impact of the pandemic. But even protocols claiming to be purely based on clinical prognoses and prediction of mortality have come under scrutiny because of their disproportionate impact on people with disabilities and other disadvantaged groups. Continue reading "Addressing the Tension between Discrimination Law and Pandemic Clinical Triage Protocols"
Jul 30, 2020 Dara E. PurvisFamily Law
Greer Donley,
Parental Autonomy Over Prenatal End-of-Life Decisions, __
Minn. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2020), available at
SSRN.
In early 2019, controversy erupted when Virginia’s state legislature considered a bill that would loosen restrictions on abortion, including what are colloquially known as late-term abortions performed in the second and third trimester. Although such abortions are extremely rare – only 1.4 percent of abortions are performed from the twenty-first week of pregnancy and beyond, according to Planned Parenthood – people opposed to abortion used the discussion of late-term abortions to accuse the bill’s supporters of promoting infanticide. If it would be morally repugnant to, in President Trump’s words, “execute” a baby after birth, why is it not similarly repugnant to terminate a pregnancy past the point that most pregnancies are considered viable?
In her upcoming article Parental Autonomy over Prenatal End-of-Life Decisions, forthcoming in the Minnesota Law Review, Greer Donley turns this rhetorical question on its head. In many circumstances, parents have the right to decline medical care on behalf of their children. Faced with a catastrophic medical diagnosis and a plan of invasive, painful treatment with very limited chance of success, parents have the authority to make the unfathomably difficult decision to provide only palliative care and minimize their child’s suffering. Why, Donley asks, would we deny parents terminating a wanted pregnancy in the face of a devastating diagnosis the same authority? Continue reading "When Abortion is Parenting"
Jul 29, 2020 Jessica M. EaglinCriminal Law
- Jenny E. Carroll, Pretrial Detention in the Time of COVID-19, __ Nw. U. L. Rev. Online __ (forthcoming 2020), available at SSRN.
- Benjamin Levin, Criminal Law in Crisis, __ Colo. L. Rev. Forum __ (forthcoming 2020), available at SSRN.
The novel coronavirus and its attendant disease, COVID-19, have created a pandemic in 2020. Mass incarceration and the attendant expansion of the carceral state is an epidemic in the United States. The intersection of the pandemic and this epidemic is proving toxic. Prisons and jails are emerging as hot spots for infection across the country. Incarcerated persons, employees at jails and prisons, the family members of both, and those who come in contact with those family members are all affected by the crisis. Demands for change are growing. Like so many other facets of our daily lives, COVID-19 promises to leave its mark on the administration of criminal law. The only question remains – how?
Two new essays begin to grapple with that question. In her essay, Pretrial Detention in the Age of COVID-19, forthcoming in the Northwestern University Law Review Online, Jenny Carroll highlights how the pandemic exacerbates the threat of unnecessary incarceration and exposes an inaccurately narrow conception of “community” in relation to pretrial detainees in criminal administration. In his essay, Criminal Law in Crisis, forthcoming in the Colorado Law Review Forum, Benjamin Levin suggests that, through the prism of the pandemic, flaws of the ordinary administration of criminal law become visible and doubt creeps in as to whether those features make sense, or if they ever did. Because these essays together bring forward hopeful possibilities in this moment for criminal administration, each is a must-read piece for those concerned about mass incarceration, the pandemic, or both. Continue reading "COVID-19’s Effect on Criminal Administration in the Era of Mass Incarceration"
Jul 28, 2020 Jordan SingerCourts Law
Court systems are large, complex, diverse, and resource-dependent organizations, a condition that shapes their character and behavior. It is surprising, then, how often court leaders fail to account for the organizational perspective in their decisionmaking. Amnon Reichman, Yair Sagy, and Shlomi Balaban illustrate this phenomenon, showing how the visionaries behind Legal-Net, Israel’s cloud-based judicial management system, were plagued by their failure to place its development in a broader organizational context.
Reichman and his colleagues trace the Israeli courts’ development of Legal-Net over two decades. Their research reveals a court system brimming with confidence that technology could be used to regulate judicial behavior, but insufficiently appreciative of the challenges of technological integration. The first version of Legal-Net was a flop: complicated and ambitious, it was a poor fit with existing court culture. A subsequent version better accounted for the court system’s unique character, but court leaders failed to anticipate how significantly its implementation would affect that character. In fact, the authors explain, the introduction of Legal-Net “heralded a tectonic shift in the judiciary’s work culture and work patterns,” as judges tailored their behavior toward the system’s incentives and away from their traditional roles. Today, it seems, the Israeli courts work for Legal-Net as much as Legal-Net works for them. Continue reading "The Machinery of Justice"
Jul 27, 2020 Kenneth W. SimonsTorts
Kenneth S. Abraham & G. Edward White,
Conceptualizing Tort Law: The Continuous (and Continuing) Struggle __
Maryland L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2020), available at
SSRN.
Like Gaul, tort law is divided into three parts: torts of intent, negligence, and strict liability. At least, that is what most torts professors teach and what many scholars, judges and practitioners suppose.
In an engaging, lively, and perceptive article, Professors Abraham and White remind us that this tripartite division is descriptively inadequate for characterizing the variety of individual torts recognized today. They further claim that this plethora of distinct torts is a disorganized, fragmented mess. They then surprise the reader with a provocative conclusion: tort law is incapable of principled organization. The authors provide solid evidence of their descriptive thesis. Their critiques of the inevitability of this unprincipled disorganization are more controversial, for reasons that I will later suggest. Continue reading "Is Tort Law Hopelessly Fragmented?"
Jul 24, 2020 Bethany BergerLexNative Peoples Law
What can Federal Indian Law offer public law as a whole? Supreme Court justices have famously dismissed Indian Law cases as “chickenshit” and “pee wee” cases, and scholars have worked for generations to justify the meager recognition of tribal sovereign interests within public law. Maggie Blackhawk’s wonderfully generative Federal Indian Law as Paradigm, however, convincingly argues that Indian law, far from an idiosyncratic backwater, is central to the history of public law in the United States and can provide valuable lessons for framing its future.
First, Blackhawk masterfully synthesizes the work of many scholars (including her own work on the Petitions Clause) to show the role federal Indian affairs has played in the history of government power. Indian affairs were central for the founding generation, figuring prominently in the debates over the Constitution and the early work of Congress and the Executive Branch. Concerns about foreign interference with tribal diplomacy, for example, inspired the first understanding that the Senate’s advice and consent role with respect to treaties included only approval after the fact rather than participation in negotiations. Continue reading "Re-Centering Federal Indian Law"
