Dec 19, 2013 Myrna RaederCriminal Law
Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin, Gendered Harms and Their Interface with International Criminal Law: Norms, Challenges and Domestication, Minnesota Legal Studies Research Paper No. 13-19 (2013), available at SSRN.
Expanding legal definitions and the enforcement of rape and domestic violence laws have been a major focus of the feminist agenda for decades, not only in the United States but also around the world. While we tend to think of such crimes in national terms, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, currently the Dorsey and Whitney Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and Co-Director of the University of Ulster Transitional Justice Institute in Northern Ireland, looks at these crimes more broadly to suggest that developing international criminal norms about rape may have a positive impact on developing more robust domestic law. Professor Ní Aoláin’s work in the fields of human rights and sex-based violence in times of war has been widely recognized, and the Irish government has twice nominated her to the European Court of Human Rights.
This working paper does not analyze legal issues in the United States. However, the use of international human rights law to affect a paradigm shift in analyzing domestic violence cases and other gendered crimes such as trafficking is a hot topic in the United States since the 2011 decision in Jessica Lenahan (Gonzales) v. United States by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS), which held the U.S. responsible for human rights violations in domestic violence settings. The United States government participated in that litigation pursuant to our ratification of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man (American Declaration). While we have not signed on to the International Criminal Court, which is the focus of Professor Ní Aoláin’s current article, her insightful analysis confirms that efforts to encourage signing and ratification of international criminal and human rights treaties should remain a priority here for those who hope to promote domestic law reform punishing all forms of violence against women. Continue reading "Does Becoming a Party to the International Criminal Court (ICC) Have a Positive Effect on Regulating Violence Against Women in Domestic Law?"
Dec 17, 2013 Michael CarrollIntellectual 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.
When is a use of a copyrighted work a fair use? This issue has grown in significance with the increase in the economic value of copyrighted works and in the ways in which users can distribute, rework, or otherwise borrow from copyrighted works. The fair-use inquiry is contextual, formally focusing on the nature and purpose of a use, the creative nature of the work, the amount of the work used, and the effect of the use on the copyright owner’s ability to economically exploit the work. For some, fair use’s attention to context renders it an unreliable ally for the diligent user.
However, a number of commentators, including this one, have argued that the multifactor inquiry does not lead truly to “case-by-case” adjudication. Instead, the principles of fair use protect certain identifiable patterns or bundles of uses with soft rules while remaining sufficiently open textured to balance interests implicated by new or emerging patterns of use. Others have gone further. My colleagues Peter Jaszi and Patricia Aufderheide have worked with creative communities to identify and articulate best practices in fair use in the context of their patterns of use as described in their recent book Reclaiming Fair Use. Continue reading "Fair Use in Context"
Dec 17, 2013 Elizabeth Weeks LeonardHealth Law
Micah L. Berman, Defining the Field of Public Health Law, 15 DePaul J. Health Care L. (forthcoming 2014), available at SSRN.
In a methodical, comprehensive exposition, Micah Berman’s forthcoming article considers why public health law remains the Rodney Dangerfield of the legal academy. As a member of a working group of scholars and practitioners who share the mission of advancing the prominence of public health law, I am well versed on the issue but was enlightened by Berman’s insights. I especially appreciated that he began by begging his own question: What difference does it make to recognize public health law (or any other area of law, for that matter) as a “field”? Why it matters, he answers, is respect: For an area of law to be recognized as “field” is to be in the mix of law school hiring priorities, to headline symposia and conferences, and generally to be taken seriously within the academy and practicing bench and bar.
Berman’s article is exceptionally well organized, stepping through difficult foundational questions, clearly explaining the paradigms, testing those paradigms with other examples, and engaging the leading scholarship on the problem presented. His roadmap proceeds by: (1) Defining a field of law; (2) defining public health law; and (3) evaluating whether public health law is a field of law. Continue reading "Don’t Get No Respect: Defining the Field of Public Health Law"
Dec 16, 2013 Brian BixFamily Law
Tonya L. Brito, Fathers Behind Bars: Rethinking Child Support Policy Toward Low-Income Noncustodial Fathers and Their Families, 15 J. of Gender, Race & Justice 617 (2012), available at SSRN.
There are well-known problems with child support, the court-ordered financial obligations that non-custodial parents—whether divorced or separated from the other parent, or never married to that parent—owe to custodial parents for the care of the children. It has been long documented that such support awards are often too low, and are far too frequently under-paid or not paid at all. Over the last few decades, a panoply of federal, state, and interstate laws and procedures have been created to try to increase the enforcement of support awards and to increase the amount of money reaching children and their caregivers. By most accounts, these efforts have been successful, at least to some degree. However, legal reforms often have unintended consequences, and, as often as not, these negative consequences often affect groups that are already disadvantaged. As Tonya Brito explains in her important article, Fathers Behind Bars, these negative consequences are happening with enforcement measures for child support, especially the use of incarceration for non-payment.
In some states, those in prison for non-payment of support make up a significant portion of the jail population. This is perhaps not surprising. Imprisoned parents (usually, but not always, fathers) often are ensnared in a cycle in which they are incarcerated because they cannot earn money to pay off their obligations; their incarceration record hinders their employment opportunities after incarceration, placing them in the unenviable position of risking additional imprisonment because they are still unable to pay off their support obligations. To illustrate this troubling cycle, Brito focuses on the story of Michael Turner, who had been in prison six times since 2005 for nonpayment of child support. Continue reading "The Costs of Imprisoning Nonpaying Parents"
Dec 13, 2013 Michael MadisonTechnology Law
A debate continues to brew about the proper interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the federal statute that imposes criminal penalties on individuals who access computer networks without authorization. For at least a decade, scholars and a growing number of courts have wondered whether the owner of a computer network could define “authorization” using form “terms and conditions” of the sort often presented to consumers who purchase or use digital services. If that strategy were successful, then someone who clicked “I Agree” on a digital form yet failed to comply with all of its terms might be accused – even convicted – of the federal crime specified by the CFAA.
Andrea Matwyshyn uses that apparently technical problem to revisit a much larger question: When, whether, and how the law should treat computers and computer networks as special in any way when dealing with a host of doctrinal and policy issues: commercial law, intellectual property law, telecommunications law, antitrust law, criminal law, and so on? This was the subject of a famous scholarly debate back at the turn of the 21st century between Lawrence Lessig, who argued that considering a “law of cyberspace” offered commentators access to potentially valuable insights about how people interact with each other, and Judge Frank Easterbrook, who accused cyberspace promoters of constructing an unworkable and unhelpful “law of the horse.” No one “won” the debate in its original form, but in the late 1990s the question was mostly academic, literally. Too few law and policy judgments turned on the answer to make the debate matter in any but a conceptual or theoretical sense. Continue reading "What’s So Special About Information Security"
Dec 12, 2013 JotwellJotwell
The ABA Journal has listed Jotwell as one of the top 100 law-related blogs of 2013, and invites readers to vote for which of the 100 is their favorite.
We’re starting late, as the contest has been going for a while, but readers are invited to vote for Jotwell as their favorite law blog — look in the “News/Analysis” category. Balloting ends Dec. 20. Please vote, as a good result will help publicize Jotwell’s reviews of legal scholarship to the circa 550,000 lawyers who read the ABA Journal.
This may also be an occasion to remind readers that we have a nice Jotwell Flyer that you can print out and post to tell colleagues about Jotwell. And, of course, we welcome your writing — see our Call For Papers.
Dec 11, 2013 Nick J. SciulloEquality
Nancy Leong provides the legal academy with a riveting account of the ways in which the logic of capital influences racial politics. Leong weaves together several topics of interest to legal scholars in her new article: criticisms of capital, diversity politics, and race as property. Her analysis revives the Marxian analysis conducted by early scholars of the critical legal studies movement at a time when questions of capital and race are as relevant as ever. I like it lots.
Leong’s work takes on the momentous task of breathing new life into Marxian legal theory. It also contributes to our substantive knowledge of the ideology of diversity and to our understanding of Marxian ideas and their relationship to law. Leong’s contribution is timely given the recent Supreme Court decisions in Fisher v. University of Texas and Shelby County v. Holder, both of which arise from historical legacies of race and racism. Her article does much to question the rhetoric of diversity, the linkages of capitalism and law, and the complexities of racial politics in a racialized world. Continue reading "The Sublime Object of Race"
Dec 10, 2013 Kevin C. WalshCourts Law
Reflections on Judging, by Judge Richard A. Posner, is the latest contribution to the familiar genre of extrajudicial writings by judges on the judicial process. But the book stands apart from most other works in the genre by the way that Posner situates the judge as part of a larger system while simultaneously maintaining a candid, personal, experience-based approach throughout.
In addition to offering personal reflections on the core judicial function of deciding cases through a sometimes creative process, Posner discusses the effects of pre-judicial careers, judicial selection, judicial training, law clerk selection and management, the writing process, the qualities of good and bad judicial opinions, the distinctive functions of trial court and intermediate appellate judges, judicial “googling” (he is an enthusiast), appellate advocacy, and many other matters beyond those conjured up by an image of the “judicial process” as the individual judge wrestling alone with difficult legal issues. For Posner, it is a matter of “urgent concern” to figure out “how the federal judiciary can cope with the increasing complexity of federal cases.” (p. 3) A question is “complex,” in this usage, “when it is difficult by virtue of involving complicated interactions, or, in other words, involving a system rather than a monad.” (P. 3) Appropriately, then, the book’s non-monadic reflections on judging exemplify the kind of approach that he thinks federal judges ought to take to complex matters more generally. Continue reading "Posner on Realist Judging"
Dec 9, 2013 Gabriel "Jack" ChinCriminal Law
Andrew Chongseh Kim, Beyond Finality: How Making Criminal Judgments Less Final Can Further the Interests of Finality, 2014 Utah L. Rev. (forthcoming), available at SSRN.
Appellate courts often adjudicate as if prison is free. While no doubt many judges and justices are concerned with the accuracy and fairness of the convictions they review, at least to a degree, they also make economic judgments as if the costs at issue were principally borne by the judiciary. Criminal defendants can lose appeals not because their claims are meritless, but because the issue was not timely or sufficiently raised below; courts affirm in the face of error on considerations of judicial economy or avoidance of further proceedings which would not have been necessary had the issue been raised in a timely manner.
A court-focused analysis of costs might have been reasonable in an era when prison populations were much smaller and probationary sentences were available for almost every offense. Today, however, at issue in almost every criminal appeal is whether to affirm the issuance of a six- or even seven-figure check, paid not by the judiciary but by the taxpapers. Professor Andrew Chongseh Kim’s paper suggests that courts have been looking at the economics through the wrong end of the telescope. Continue reading "Punishing Taxpayers for Erroneous Convictions"
Dec 6, 2013 Caroline BradleyCorporate Law
Salo V. Coslovsky & Richard M. Locke,
Parallel Paths to Enforcement: Private Compliance, Public Regulation, and Labor Standards in the Brazilian Sugar Sector, 41
Pol & Soc 496 (2013), available at
SSRN.
An article in the Wall Street Journal in June 2013 described supply chain management as “The Hot New M.B.A.” The Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University says it has been focusing on supply chain issues since 1919, and says that now “[s]upply chain managers very often hold the key to corporate profitability.” But as well as managing supply chains from the perspective of efficiency, corporations also need to manage their legal and reputation risks, especially when their supply chains are global. Transnational corporations manage these risks by developing and monitoring compliance with their own codes of conduct. At the same time the states where producers and manufacturers operate have, and are developing, their own regulatory regimes.
In a special issue of Politics & Society on regulation in Latin America, Salo Coslovsky and Richard Locke examine interactions between private codes and public regulation focusing on Coca-Cola’s management of working conditions in its sugar supply chain in Brazil. As the authors point out, working conditions in the sugar production industry have generally not been good: sugar production inherently involves hard work in hot climates, and large and politically connected family firms are involved in sugar production in Brazil. Recent events illustrate that focusing on working conditions does not tell the whole story: in October 2013 Oxfam published a report which argued that increasing demand for sugar was encouraging large companies to displace poor sugar farmers. Coca-Cola promptly promised to take action to protect land rights of farmers in sugar-producing areas. Nevertheless, Coslovsky and Locke describe an interaction between private and public regulatory regimes that improves working conditions for sugar producers. And it is the interaction that matters: public regulation and Coca-Cola’s efforts combine to help workers. Continue reading "Managing Global Supply Chains: Coca Cola and Sugar in Brazil"
