Jul 9, 2020 Laurel TerryLegal Profession
Leslie C. Levin,
The Politics of Lawyer Regulation: The Malpractice Insurance Example, 33
Geo. J. Legal Ethics __ (forthcoming, 2020), available at
SSRN.
If you ask most individuals why lawyers have a monopoly on the provision of legal services and why lawyer regulation exists, I suspect they would answer that lawyer regulation is necessary for “client protection.” Assuming this is correct, it is ironic that most U.S. jurisdictions do not require one of the most basic kinds of protection. Unlike lawyers in many other countries, most U.S. lawyers do not have to carry malpractice insurance, which could protect clients in the event of lawyer error.
Although several U.S. states have recently examined the issue of whether malpractice insurance should be mandatory, only two U.S. jurisdictions currently require lawyers to carry professional liability insurance. Oregon has had this requirement since 1977, and Idaho has had this requirement since 2018. Professor Leslie Levin’s article on The Politics of Lawyer Regulation: The Malpractice Insurance Example, which will be published soon in the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, is a case study that examines and compares the mandatory malpractice insurance initiatives in these and other states. Her thorough and insightful article makes a compelling read, not only for those who are interested in the malpractice insurance issue, but also for those who are interested in other lawyer regulatory issues and wonder why some reforms succeed, whereas others fail. Continue reading "Understanding Lawyer Regulation Initiatives: Is there a Sweet Spot for Achieving Client-Focused Lawyer Regulation?"
Jul 8, 2020 Jedidiah KronckeLegal History
The intertwining of American foreign policy and American law has been a renewed topic of historical interest in recent years, with specific focus placed on the United States’ emergence as a global power at the turn of the 20th century. Rande Kostal’s Laying Down the Law dives deeply into perhaps the two most enduring symbolic episodes that came to shape popular and elite understanding of the place of American law in what many now call America’s informal empire: the post-World War II American occupations of Japan and Germany. Almost every subsequent American military action has to some degree invoked these interventions as precedents to justify efforts to export American legal models to foreign nations. For those working in this vein of international legal history, Kostal’s work has thus been long anticipated.
Kostal examines one aspect of the occupations of Japan and Germany comparatively within each of his six substantive chapters. His first two chapters deal with the details of the planning and occupation of each country, respectively, and his last four chapters the substance of reforms in constitutional law, court organization, criminal justice, and civil liberties. Undergirding all of these efforts was a general presumption that American liberal legality and the rule of law were central to American democracy and, thus, to democratization abroad. Conversely, there was a presumption that fascism and international belligerence sprung from the rejection of such values. Continue reading "Deconstructing the Foundational Mythologies of American Legal Empire"
Jul 7, 2020 Michael GreenJurisprudence
It is curious that Anglophone philosophers of law (many of whom have had some training in logic in conjunction with the classwork required for a Ph.D.) ignore deontic logic — the branch of logic that deals with propositions that employ normative concepts like obligation and permission. The point is not that deontic logic can answer problems in the philosophy of law, but that it can help reveal them. This very short paper by Robert Mullins is a wonderful example. It concerns the apparent incompatibility between a commonly accepted inference rule in deontic logic, deontic detachment, and the core principle of positivism, the social thesis.
According to deontic detachment, the following reasoning is valid (if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true): Continue reading "Deontic Logic and the Philosophy of Law"
Jul 6, 2020 Christina HoHealth Law
Govind Persad,
Expensive Patients, Reinsurance and the Future of Health Reform, 69
Emory L.J. __ (forthcoming, 2020), available on
SSRN.
We are in the midst of a health reinsurance “moment” right now. The idea of reinsurance, and in particular, government-sponsored reinsurance, rises to the fore in cycles, and our current rash of state-based reinsurance proposals signals that we’re in the ascendant phase. Reinsurance is at once a clever technocratic device but also a powerful conceptual frame. In the health context, government-sponsored reinsurance can take the form of a policy where the reinsurer, in this case the government, assumes the obligation to pay claims incurred by a given beneficiary once those claims exceed an annual attachment point. CMS has, for example, built in a de facto reinsurance policy for ACA plans, kicking in 60% of medical costs for any ACA plan enrollee who has incurred over a million dollars in claims. As you can see from this example, the primary insurers with this reinsurance protection are partially shielded from the risks of large catastrophic claims requiring excessive capitalization.
But government reinsurance also represents the distinctive structure of public-private power in our era. How is risk backstopped today, and under what conditions? When does an outcome count as catastrophic such that our existing risk management institutions cannot be expected to absorb it or hold reserves to meet it? Who gets a bail-out, and who must take the consequences of their bad bets? The question of who enjoys government reinsurance is a lens that helps us penetrate many of the mysteries of our current political situation.
Part of my engagement with the reinsurance moment is the pleasure I take in discovering interesting writing, past and present, on the subject of reinsurance. A new and enjoyable entrant in this category is Govind Persad’s new article, Expensive Patients, Reinsurance, and the Future of Health Care Reform, forthcoming in Emory Law Journal. Continue reading "Our Reinsurance Moment"
Jul 3, 2020 Kaiponanea MatsumuraFamily Law
Over the past four decades, people have increasingly turned to reproductive technologies to form their families. As technologies such as egg freezing, in-vitro fertilization, and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis have developed and improved, processes that were once left to chance are now subject to human control. As a result, what were once hopes—for instance, deferring childbearing until some point in the future, or having a male or female child—have transformed into expectations on the part of technology users.
Yet expectations are sometimes dashed because of avoidable human error, like mislabeling a sperm sample or failing to check liquid nitrogen levels in high-capacity freezers. As Dov Fox shows in his comprehensive new book, Birth Rights and Wrongs, courts have largely been unsympathetic to lawsuits stemming from these types of errors. Fox convincingly argues that courts should redress thwarted expectations about reproduction through the tort of reproductive negligence. Continue reading "Reproductive Exceptionalisms"
Jul 2, 2020 Christopher SloboginCriminal Law
Deborah Hellman,
Sex, Causation and Algorithms: Equal Protection in the Age of Machine Learning, 98
Wash. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2020), available at
SSRN.
States have increasingly resorted to statistically-derived risk algorithms to determine when diversion from prison should occur, whether sentences should be enhanced, and the level of security and treatment a prisoner requires. The federal government has jumped on the bandwagon in a big way with the First Step Act, which mandated that a risk assessment instrument be developed to determine which prisoners can be released early on parole. Policymakers are turning to these algorithms because they are thought to be more accurate and less biased than judges and correctional officials, making them useful tools for reducing prison populations through identification of low risk individuals.
These assumptions about the benefits of risk assessment tools are all contested. But critics also argue that, even if these instruments improve overall accuracy, they are constitutionally suspect. While no instrument explicitly uses race as a “risk factor” (which in any event is probably barred by the Supreme Court’s decision in Buck v. Davis), several do incorporate sex (with maleness increasing the risk score) and many rely on factors that are highly correlated with race or socio-economic status, which is said to violate equal protection principles. Continue reading "Reconciling Risk and Equality"
Jul 1, 2020 Seth EndoCourts Law
David Freeman Engstrom & Jonah B. Gelbach,
Legal Tech, Civil Procedure, and the Future of Adversarialism, 169
U. Pa. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2020), available at
SSRN.
Myriad examples—from the rise of chief technology officers in law firms to the over $1.6 trillion invested in legal tech start-ups in 2018 to the use of AI-assisted drafting tools by Walmart’s legal department—demonstrate how technology is inexorably changing the American legal profession and courts, despite their small “c” conservative nature. When Chief Justice John Roberts was asked whether “smart machines, driven with artificial intelligences, will assist with courtroom fact finding or, more controversially even, judicial decision making,” he replied, “It’s a day that’s here….” And the legal community’s integration of more mundane—if no less important—technological tools such as videoconferencing into its existing practices has been dramatically hastened by the COVID-19 pandemic. A prominent example of this trend was when the Supreme Court of the United States held its first telephonic hearing in May.
While legal scholars and the popular press frequently comment on these developments, even the most expansive futurist takes about robot judging focus on how lawyers and the judiciary are (or will be) using new technology to do their traditional work. And courts mostly wrestle with how to adapt existing doctrine to specific applications of new tools. Against this context, David Freeman Engstrom and Jonah Gelbach’s Legal Tech, Civil Procedure, and the Future of Adversarialism marks a significant theoretical push forward, identifying and exploring the overarching question of how legal tech and the civil justice system’s procedural rules mutually shape each other. Continue reading "Charting the Interactions of Legal Tech and Civil Procedure"
Jun 30, 2020 Cristie FordCorporate Law
Luca Enriques, Alessandro Romano & Thom Wetzer,
Network-Sensitive Financial Regulation, 45
J. Corp. L. __ (forthcoming, 2020), available at
SSRN.
It is difficult to know what wisdom from pre-pandemic times will carry forward. One thing that feels very relevant, however, is the notion of applying network-sensitive approaches to regulatory structures that previously were atomistic in orientation. COVID-19 (the global emergency, not the virus) is nothing if not the product of global networks.
It takes some time for the full impact of a new paradigm to be realized. Those of us who have followed the systemic risk literature over the last decade or more will, I think, recognize in “Network-Sensitive Financial Regulation” a more comprehensive embrace of network theory than we have seen so far. Post-crisis recognition of systemically important financial institutions, or SIFIs, has always been somewhat awkwardly bolted onto existing regulatory structures. This is an exceptional article, because it represents a genuine step change in our thinking. It convincingly demonstrates how we might better incorporate network awareness into systemic risk analysis and macroprudential regulation, and then extends its insights further, to the micro level of corporate governance. Continue reading "We’re All in This Together"
Jun 29, 2020 Ilya SominConstitutional Law
Lindsay Wiley and Stephen I. Vladeck,
Coronavirus, Civil Liberties, and the Courts: The Case Against “Suspending” Judicial Review, 133
Harv. L. Rev. Forum __ (forthcoming, 2020), available at
SSRN.
The coronavirus epidemic has raised urgent questions of constitutional rights and judicial review. In response to the pandemic, which has taken over 100,000 lives in the US and many more abroad, governments at all levels have enacted a host of policies that potentially threaten constitutional rights or butt against structural limits on government power. Numerous cases have been filed challenging some of these policies, arguing that they violate the Free Exercise of Religion and Free Speech clauses of First Amendment, the Second Amendment, constitutional protection for abortion rights, the Takings Clause, separation of powers principles, and other provisions of federal and state constitutions.How should we treat these claims? In particular, how should courts treat them?
In light of these questions, it’s hard to imagine a more timely and relevant constitutional law article than Lindsay Wiley and Steve Vladeck’s forthcoming article. In it, Wiley and Vladeck ask whether normal judicial review should be “suspended” during the ongoing pandemic. Continue reading "Judicial Review and Emergency Powers"
Jun 26, 2020 Aditi BagchiContracts
Is there a moral principle that animates contract law everywhere? In his thoughtful book that elegantly spans high theory and ground-level doctrine, Prince Saprai argues that there is not. While contract law in Great Britain might be designed to promote trust through cooperative relations, that is not its exclusive purpose. Moreover, even that purpose is contingent on the particular normative priorities of the British with respect to contract. Saprai says that contract theorists, especially those who promote the idea that contract law tracks promissory morality, are not just wrong about their primary claim but also about their underlying assumption that contract law has an essential governing moral principle that is independent of the commitments of those who use it in a given time and place.
Saprai suggests that contract theorists tend to overclaim in another respect as well. Whatever the constitutive purpose of contract law in a jurisdiction, that purpose is usually not determinative of doctrine in any complete way. There are many ways to interpret the purpose and how it is best served by rule choices. Even systems that espouse the same purpose for contract law are likely to diverge in their substantive doctrines. Continue reading "On the Dangers of Beautiful (Contract) Theory"
