Jul 29, 2013 Janet HalleyFamily Law
How do American law and culture accommodate the fact that old age is almost everyone’s fate, and that—though we know for sure that it ends at last in death—its course and the kinds of dependency it brings are so profoundly unpredictable and often categorically intense? In this brilliant, grimly humane page-turner of a book, Hendrik Hartog lays out three different historical periods marked by very different answers to this question.
Before the rise of a market economy in the middle of the nineteenth century, old people were cared for and died in their households, surrounded and aided by relatives and, if they had them, servants or slaves. But as the master/servant relation was replaced by employment in the rapidly industrializing private sphere, and as the household nuclearized into the husband/wife, parent/child family, this ready-to-hand supply of helpers dwindled, often disappearing entirely. In response to these changes, old people who had property started promising to bequeath it to children, other family members, and even housekeepers in exchange for their staying at home and devoting themselves to filling what we would now call the care gap. Continue reading "Elderlaw As Family Law"
Jul 26, 2013 Ruthann RobsonEquality
That we are still strategizing how to achieve gender equality—the equality of women’s constitutional and legal status, social and economic opportunities, and daily realities with those of men’s—is the perplexing truth at the heart of Penelope Andrews’ important book, From Cape Town to Kabul. Known for her work on South Africa and legal feminism, Andrews here posits questions about how gender equality can be achieved on a global scale. She offers no easy answers or totalizing theories, but proposes a notion of “conditional interdependence” as a method of situating women within their various cultures as a way to move forward with the project of equality. It’s a concept that could go far in resolving some of the thorniest arguments about “choice” and “autonomy” that permeate questions of women’s equality.
At its most hopeful, Andrews’ book presents the struggle for equality in South Africa as it was mounted against the Apartheid state, resulting in a new constitutional regime devoted to transformative law and politics. Andrews attributes the fact that this transformation included gender equality to a confluence of forces, but most importantly women’s participation. She suggests that the path chosen by South Africa is a model for many other nations, stressing that the involvement of women at all levels and phases is vital. Continue reading "The Global Problem of Women’s Equality"
Jul 24, 2013 Christopher SloboginCriminal Law
The recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s dragnet surveillance programs highlight three significant developments that have occurred in the national security domain in the past decade. First, the most significant foreign threats to national security are no longer nation-states but individuals armed with powerful weapons who operate independently of any country. Second, technology has vastly enhanced the government’s capacity to discover and prevent these threats. Third, technology has also both reduced individual privacy and conditioned people to surrender it without qualms.
These three developments, Simon Chesterman argues in One Nation Under Surveillance, mean that regulation of intelligence agencies needs to be rethought. While the traditional civil libertarian efforts to limit camera surveillance, data mining, biometric identification, and other types of intelligence gathering are “worthy,” he says, ultimately they are “doomed to failure because modern threats increasingly require that governments collect [such information], governments are increasingly able to collect it, and citizens increasingly accept that they will collect it.” Instead, Chesterman argues, governments should concentrate on regulating the use of the intelligence it collects, pursuant to publicly debated laws that provide a transparent framework for making decisions about how and when to disseminate the information obtained. As the subtitle suggests, this regime can be seen as a form of “social contract” in which citizens grant access to information about them in return for “a measure of increased security and the convenience of living in the modern world.” Continue reading "How Much Information Can Government Collect to Protect National Security?"
Jul 23, 2013 Paul HorwitzConstitutional Law
Ronald Dworkin’s death in February, at the age of 81, was surely a deep personal loss for those who knew and loved him, and marked the end of an epoch, an after-the-fact close to the late twentieth century, in liberal legal thought. The loss was of less moment, perhaps, to current work in constitutional law and theory. Dworkin’s missiles against the current Supreme Court, which continued to land in the pages of the New York Review of Books, were more than merely transatlantic missiles; they seemed to have been launched from another time and place altogether. Still, until the end, he wrote with grace, clarity, and an air of authority. I’m grateful that what appears to be his last major work was in one of my own areas of interest, the relationship between law and religion.
One of the bigger-picture theoretical questions that seems to have sparked renewed interest in this field is whether “religion”—whatever that is—is “special” for constitutional purposes. That question has been raised in a variety of ways. Chris Eisgruber and Larry Sager have asked, from an egalitarian perspective, whether religious claims can be set apart from claims of conscience. Both Brian Leiter and Micah Schwartzman have questioned from a philosophical perspective whether the distinctive treatment of religion is capable of coherent justification. Others, such as Caroline Mala Corbin and Nelson Tebbe, have approached things from a different but complementary position, asking whether nonbelievers are unfairly disadvantaged in the current legal regime. And religion’s specialness, as an intrinsic matter or for more earthbound legal purposes, has its defenders, too, prominent among them such writers as Michael McConnell and Andy Koppelman. It’s a question that certainly has an air of the abstract, but it has important implications for Religion Clause doctrine. Continue reading "The Sublime Dworkin"
Jul 22, 2013 Brian BixJurisprudence
Frederick Schauer,
On the Nature of the Nature of Law,
Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie (ARSP), Vol. 98, pp. 457-467 (2012), available at
SSRN.
At the heart of analytical legal philosophy are theories about the nature of law. In recent decades, there has been a growing convergence around the conclusion that theories about the nature of law (like those of H.L.A. Hart and Joseph Raz) are conceptual analyses, determining the “essential” or “necessary” characteristics of the concept of law. (The debates about the proper way to understand theories about the nature of law are summarized in Brian Bix, Joseph Raz and Conceptual Analysis, APA Newsletter on Philosophy of Law, Vol. 6(2), Spring 2007, available at SSRN.) Against this background, Frederick Schauer, in a number of important recent articles, including On the Nature of the Nature of Law, has argued that legal theorists should focus more on “the typical truths” of law, even if this is different from the list of its “essential characteristics.”
To explain: the “essential” or “necessary” characteristics of law are those characteristics that make it “law,” the characteristics without which it would not be “law.” These characteristics will be present (by definition) in all legal systems, present, past, future, or hypothetical. Claims of which characteristics are “essential” or “necessary” are claims about our concepts, not (or at least not primarily) falsifiable claims about the world independent of those concepts. (The role of “necessity” in philosophy generally and in legal philosophy in particular is a large topic that would take us too far afield. I discuss the topic in Raz on Necessity, 22 Law and Philosophy 537 (2003), also available at SSRN.) Continue reading "The Nature of Law: Essential vs. Important"
Jul 19, 2013 Elizabeth DaleLegal History
When I was growing up in Chicago in the 1970s, I obsessed about Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). The book captured much about what I loved about living in the city: The differences one discovered walking down that street instead of this one, the various faces a single block could present at different moments of the day, the way the little independent stores that sold small market journals or Asian specialties butted up against the more generic stores that sold the Snickers bars and Dr. Peppers that I lived on in high school. But there were also things about Chicago that the book did not address: The fact that there were areas not far from my home that I could not go into as a white teenager and other areas that my classmates could not go as teenaged blacks. The way that those spaces were defined as much by the city government’s decisions not to enforce laws or to fail to enforce laws equally, as they were by local preferences. The fact that Chicago’s neighborhoods, and the racial tensions between them, were defined as much by choices to ignore federal laws against redlining, racial steering, or housing discrimination as they were by community norms. And, finally Jacobs’ celebration of the local did not capture the extent to which the struggles over those problems were defined by national, and sometimes even international, debates.
I started reading Mariana Valverde’s recent book, Everyday Law on the Street: City Governance in an Age of Diversity (2012), a study of street-level urban governance in Toronto, because it promised a law and society alternative to Jacobs’ work. But while I came, so to speak, for the law and society recasting of Jacobs, I stayed for the reminders her work offers legal historians. Continue reading "Law And The City"
Jul 17, 2013 Jonathan WeinbergAdministrative Law
David Markell and Emily Hammond Meazell, Administrative Proxies for Judicial Review: Building Legitimacy from the Inside-Out, 37 Harv. Envtl. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2013), available at SSRN.
The great question underlying American administrative law is that of agency legitimacy. Administrative agencies, whose heads don’t answer to the voters and whose decisions for the most part are not subject to effective popular checks, have dubious democratic bona fides. Where do they get off, then, mandating rules of conduct and imposing punishments backed up by the coercive power of the state? A crucial part of the answer, in American administrative-law thinking, has rested on the institution of judicial review: We can trust agencies to exercise their delegated authority, the classic argument runs, and we can treat that authority as legitimate, because we can rely on courts to take action if the agencies step out of line.
But as administrative-law scholars well know, the judicial-review focus has limitations. David Markell and Emily Hammond Meazell, in their paper Administrative Proxies for Judicial Review: Building Legitimacy from the Inside-Out, note that few administrative decisions ever go before a court. Judicial review of most agency decisions is neither cost-effective nor practical; review of others is precluded by law. This, the authors urge at the beginning of their paper, is one of the “great paradoxes of administrative law,” raising the question, “What else is there to legitimize unreviewable agency action?” Continue reading "Assessing Agency Legitimacy"
Jul 16, 2013 Corey YungCourts Law
Research on the federal courts often follows this basic pattern: 1) identify issue (often made salient because of a recent Supreme Court case); 2) analyze federal court opinions for cases relevant to that issue; and 3) write article. This process, which we might label “issue analysis,” has served, and will continue to serve, legal scholarship well. Issue analysis is very effective for evaluating and analyzing court handling of specific doctrines, statutes, and regulations. Less frequently, federal courts scholarship seeks to identify larger, often comprehensive, theories of how judges and courts behave, which we might label “behavior analysis.” Such endeavors can apply to the hundreds of thousands cases filed each year in the federal courts. As a result, researchers face significant problems not normally associated with issue analysis, including cherry picking suitable examples, confirmation bias, and inadequate treatment of contrary evidence. Empirical methods are a logical way to deal with those concerns, but publicly available datasets are few and human coding of legal documents can be extremely labor intensive and costly. Thankfully, these problems can be significantly curtailed by using computer-aided content analysis to evaluate large pools of cases.
Chad Oldfather, Joseph Bockhorst, and Brian Dimmer have published a wonderful article, Triangulating Judicial Responsiveness: Automated Content Analysis, Judicial Opinions, and the Methodology of Legal Scholarship, which illustrates exactly how such research should proceed. The research question they address is a very basic one: how do party briefs affect judicial opinions? One might think such a core question of litigation would have been addressed by numerous studies. However, as the authors rightly explain, the methods for addressing such a question are prone to the classic concerns with using behavior analysis. As a result, there simply has been no tested general theory of how briefs affect judicial opinion writing. Continue reading "Opinions, Briefs, And Computers—Oh My!"
Jul 15, 2013 Kerri StoneWork Law
Natalie Bucciarelli Pedersen,
The Hazards of Dukes: The Substantive Consequences of a Procedural Decision, 44
U. Tol. L. Rev. 123 (2012) available at
SSRN.
The Hazards of Dukes: The Substantive Consequences of a Procedural Decision, by Natalie Bucciarelli Pedersen—aside from having quite possibly the best title of any article, ever—is an important and informative reminder that one of the most newsworthy and talked about cases of the past decade, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 131 S. Ct. 2541 (2011), has import and significance beyond the realm of class action lawsuits. Indeed, as Professor Pedersen makes clear, the Supreme Court “not only reversed the grant of class certification to one of the largest employment discrimination classes ever, but also indelibly altered the substance of employment discrimination law.” (P. 124.) The major contribution of this article is its original examination of the impact of the language and law in the Dukes opinion on substantive Title VII jurisprudence as it applies to the adjudication of disparate impact cases, systemic disparate treatment cases, and implicit bias cases that utilize social framework evidence.
As Professor Pedersen recounts, in 2011, the Supreme Court reversed a grant of class certification to some 1.5 million female Wal-Mart employees who claimed that they were victims of sex discrimination because of inequalities related to the employer’s salary, promotion, and management track policies and procedures. The policies and practices alleged, however, were not explicitly discriminatory. In making out their disparate impact claim, the plaintiffs pointed to the delegation of decision-making discretion to local managers when it came to pay and promotion decisions. In making out their disparate treatment claim, the plaintiffs alleged that despite knowing of the disparate impact conferred upon women by the unfettered discretion afforded to local managers, Wal-Mart intentionally failed to remedy the situation. The District Court certified a class of at least 1.5 million women, and the Ninth Circuit agreed that the class certification requirements set forth in Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(a) had been met. The Supreme Court, however, reversed the Ninth Circuit’s holding that class certification had been appropriate in the case, finding that the plaintiffs did not “depend upon a common contention.” (P. 128.) Continue reading "A Fresh Look at Dukes"
Jul 12, 2013 Martha ChamallasTorts
Recently, there has been a flowering of family law scholarship critically examining what Janet Halley calls “family law exceptionalism,” the tendency in the law to treat the family as a special realm wholly divorced from market relations and to steer family matters, regardless of their economic nature, into family law. Although she never uses the term “family law exceptionalism,” Elizabeth Porter’s new article on parental immunity and negligent supervision cases follows in this vein. The article is an indictment of what she regards as the exceptionally favorable treatment of parents under current tort law. Professor Porter argues for ending the special rules favoring parents, applying ordinary negligence principles in parental liability cases, and ultimately sending more cases to the jury.
As Porter reminds us, it is a particularly appropriate time to re-examine the rules governing parental liability. On the cultural front, the steady stream of tragic cases (whether Newtown, Columbine or countless accidental shootings) has reignited perennial questions about the extent of parental responsibility to control dangerous children and whether parents should be held accountable to victims for their failures as parents. On the doctrinal front, the new approach to duty endorsed by the Restatement (Third) of Torts—which calls for presuming a general duty of care and abandoning that presumption only in exceptional cases when there are strong countervailing reasons of principle or policy— has the potential to reopen questions about the scope of parental liability.. Porter’s article suggests that if courts heed the Third Restatement they may well conclude that parental liability cases are not so exceptional after all, ushering in what would be a major, very concrete change in tort doctrine. Continue reading "The Exceptional Case of Parental Negligence"
