Oct 8, 2012 JotwellTorts
The Journal of Things We Like (Lots)–JOTWELL–invites you to join us in filling a telling gap in legal scholarship by creating a space where legal academics can go to identify, celebrate, and discuss the best new legal scholarship. Currently there are about 350 law reviews in North America, not to mention relevant journals in related disciplines, foreign publications, and new online pre-print services such as SSRN and BePress. Never in legal publishing have so many written so much, and never has it been harder to figure out what to read, both inside and especially outside one’s own specialization. Perhaps if legal academics were more given to writing (and valuing) review essays, this problem would be less serious. But that is not, in the main, our style.
We in the legal academy value originality. We celebrate the new. And, whether we admit it or not, we also value incisiveness. An essay deconstructing, distinguishing, or even dismembering another’s theory is much more likely to be published, not to mention valued, than one which focuses mainly on praising the work of others. Books may be reviewed, but articles are responded to; and any writer of a response understands that his job is to do more than simply agree. Continue reading "Jotwell Mission Statement"
Oct 8, 2012 Ruth MasonTax Law
Rebecca Kysar,
On the Constitutionality of Tax Treaties, 38
Yale J. Int’l L. (forthcoming 2012)
available at SSRN.
In a forthcoming article entitled On the Constitutionality of Tax Treaties, Rebecca Kysar argues that current tax treaties are unconstitutional under the Origination Clause because they alter the tax law without the involvement of the House of Representatives.
Kysar builds her argument though careful historical and doctrinal analysis. She shows that the Origination Clause was an important concession to the large states that acted as a counterbalance to some of the prerogatives of the Senate, including the treaty power. She shows that although the text of the Origination Clause requires only that “bills for raising revenue” originate in the House, the Supreme Court has interpreted the clause to refer to legislation that increases or decreases revenue. Thus, Kysar argues that, even if the net effect of tax treaties were to reduce tax revenues, the Origination Clause should still apply to them because their “primary purpose” is a revenue purpose, and it is the law’s “primary purpose” that matters for the Origination Clause. Among many other court cases, Kysar discusses at length two relevant Supreme Court precedents. First is Missouri v. Holland, in which the Supreme Court upheld against a Tenth Amendment challenge a properly ratified treaty that sought to accomplish a goal outside the enumerated powers of Congress. In Holland, the Court further held that the Necessary and Proper Clause permitted Congress to pass legislation to accomplish treaty goals that Congress could not accomplish by regulation alone (the treaty involved the regulation of hunting of migratory birds). The other relevant precedent was Reid v. Covert, in which a plurality of the Court held that a treaty could not override individual rights guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. Kysar makes the argument that tax treaties should be analyzed more like the individual rights in the Sixth Amendment, and less like the reservation of powers in the Tenth Amendment since the Origination Clause represents an exclusive grant of power. Furthermore, where appropriations, another exclusive prerogative of the House, is concerned, it has long been policy to seek implementing legislation for treaties. Kysar traces procedure to the Jay Treaty, in which the House asserted its right to enact implementing legislation, and she convincingly argues that the failure of the House to similarly assert its constitutional prerogative under the Origination Clause with respect to tax treaties could not cure any constitutional infirmity in such treaties. Continue reading "Are Tax Treaties Unconstitutional?"
Oct 5, 2012 Carlos BallFamily Law
Darren Rosenblum,
Unsex Mothering: Toward a New Culture of Parenting, 35
Harv. J.L. & Gender 57 (2012),
available at SSRN.
As we all know, the question of whether sex/gender should serve as an eligibility criterion in the distribution of marriage licenses has received a vast amount of attention over the last two decades. Although the issue of whether sex/gender is a crucial element of parenting has received less attention, it is no less important. In this exciting and path-breaking article, Darren Rosenblum calls for the unsexing of motherhood and fatherhood—that is, for the severing of parental categories from biological sex. In Rosenblum’s perfect world, anyone—regardless of sex—can be a mother or a father. The decoupling of parenting from sex will “ultimately eliminate the presumption that the primary parent is the mother, in which case a parent of any sex could claim to be the primary parent.” He adds that “[p]arents would be expected to provide nurturing, support, structure, and discipline to children, but they would not need to divide these and other elements of childcare based on parental biosex.”
As Rosenblum perceptively explains, a powerful interplay of institutions and norms help to link parenting categories with sex. One of these is the market. The fact that men dominate the market sphere reinforces cultural stereotypes about women’s “natural” capabilities in the domestic sphere. And natural understandings of motherhood place great importance on genetics, gestation, and lactation, seemingly ignoring the fact that it is possible for women—those who become parents through adoption or surrogacy, for example—to be mothers in the absence of one or more of these biological factors. Continue reading "Delinking Sex/Gender from Parenting"
Oct 3, 2012 Stuart BannerJotwellLegal History
I think history is most fun to read when it upsets the conventional understanding of something in the present day. That’s a hard trick to pull off. Most conventional understandings are pretty close to the truth – otherwise they would have been abandoned already. And if you want to buck the conventional wisdom about something in the present, you’re more likely to succeed simply by explaining why it’s wrong in the present rather than by detailing its past. It takes an unusual combination of insight and luck to find a topic you can make readers see completely differently by writing its history.
Before I read Jed Shugerman’s The People’s Courts, I would never have guessed that judicial elections were that kind of topic. Like most lawyers, I suppose, I thought judicial elections were a little silly at best, and sometimes downright pernicious. How are voters supposed to know who the good judges are? And worse, how can elected judges prevent politics from leaking into their decisions? The last thing we want is for a judge to be keeping an eye on his reelection when he’s deciding, say, whether a notorious murderer’s rights have been violated, or whether a popular new law is unconstitutional. If you’ve ever been in a state with contested judicial elections and seen the TV commercials in which the candidates all claim to be the toughest on crime, you start to worry about the intrusion of politics. I imagine that’s the conventional understanding of judicial elections. It was certainly mine. Continue reading "Judicial Independence, But From What?"
Oct 2, 2012 Sida LiuJotwellLegal Profession
Bernard A. Burk & David McGowan,
Big But Brittle: Economic Perspectives on the Future of the Law Firm in the New Economy, 2011
COLUM. BUS. L. REV. 1 (2011)
available at SSRN.
Until the recent global financial crisis, elite law firms had been growing in size and number of offices for decades, both in the United States and across the world. Accordingly, the reasons behind law firm growth have fascinated legal scholars as well as social scientists studying the legal profession. Many theories have been formulated and tested by empirical research. Burk and McGowan’s article not only provides an excellent summary of these competing theories, but also proposes two new perspectives, namely, (1) relational capital and internal referral network; and, (2) technological innovation and transaction cost. Both are familiar theories in other research areas but neither had been applied to explain the growth of law firms.
In this essay, Burk and McGowan examine the evolution of large law firms in America from the late nineteenth century to the 2008 economic recession. Until the 1960s, most elite law firms have had a simple “partner-associate” two-tier structure following the Cravath System, which emphasized the long-term training of associates, the “up or out” rule of promotion, and the lockstep system for partners. Lateral hiring of partners were rare. As a result, firm growth was steady, featuring what Galanter and Palay have called law firms’ “internal growth engine.” From the 1970s to the mid-2000s, however, law firm growth entered an “explosive” era – the growth rate of elite firms jumped from 5% per year to 8% or more (p. 11). By the mid-1980s, the number of American law firms with more than a hundred lawyers had increased from a dozen to more than 250. The growth in size was accompanied by the expansion of geographic locations and lateral mobility. By 1988, over a quarter of the 500 largest American law firms had acquired more than half of their partners laterally. The lateral movement of associates had also become more frequent. As a result, the Cravath System was significantly eroded. Meanwhile, the formal structure of large law firms had become more complex – two-tier partnership was more commonly adopted, with an increasing proportion of non-equity partners and a higher leverage (i.e., associate-partner ratio) in most firms. Continue reading "Big and Innovative? The Future of Law Firms (Not Only the American Ones)"
Oct 1, 2012 Camille NelsonEqualityJotwell
It is a good thing when those of us in education are urged to be more thoughtful about what we seek to achieve through our teaching and scholarship. An analysis of the possible impact that education can have moves beyond the standard questioning of pedagogy, and speaks to the societal value of education as transformative, not just for the student and future graduate but also for society. Such higher order questions, as I like to call them, are not typically the stuff of faculty meetings, but they are at the core of a recent article by Professors Angela Mae Kupenda and Michelle Deardorff.
In their article, Negotiating Social Mobility and Critical Citizenship: Institutions at a Crossroads, the authors juxtapose two seemingly inconsistent struggles faced by institutions of higher education – improving the socioeconomic possibilities of our students versus preparing students for what they theorize as “Critical Citizenship.”: Continue reading "Is Critical Citizenship Critical?"
Sep 28, 2012 Lee EpsteinCourts LawJotwell
The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction is indeed a very short book (far shorter than most law review articles), but it is no “Supreme Court for Dummies.” To the contrary, it is a sophisticated, yet accessible, addition to Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series.
This much the author’s identity gives away. Though she now teaches at Yale Law School and no longer covers the Supreme Court full time, the fabulous Linda Greenhouse remains one of Court’s most astute students. (And she continues to write an opinion column for The New York Times website, which should never be missed for its insights on the current Court.) Continue reading "Introducing the Court"
Sep 26, 2012 Charles A. SullivanJotwellWork Law
Slightly off the mainstream of employment law scholarship is Margaret Lemos’s Interpretive Methodology and Delegations to Courts: Are “Common-Law Statutes” Different. This is a terrific, creative piece in only 14 pages. I am especially pleased to be able to highlight it on Jotwell because it will appear in a chapter entitled Intellectual Property And The Common Law (Shyam Balganesh ed., Cambridge University Press, 2012), and therefore might well be missed by most employment law types.
Professor Lemos starts with a commonplace of statutory interpretation, asks why, and comes up with answers that make one reconsider fundamental beliefs. What more could one ask?
The commonplace is that the normal methods of interpretation (whatever they happen to be at the time) are inapplicable when it comes to “common law statutes.” The paradigmatic example of such a statute is the Sherman Act, which is generally viewed as an enabling act — an authorization by Congress to the courts to create jurisprudence of “restraint of trade” largely unconstrained by common law precedents, textualist fussiness, or any need to discern legislative intent. In contrast, “normal” statutes, such as Title VII, are subject to a process of “statutory interpretation,” which these days requires an elaborate parsing of words in order to determine what the enacting Congress intended by the language it chose. Continue reading "Good Things Come in Small Packages"
Sep 25, 2012 Richard PierceAdministrative Law
Cynthia Farina, Mary Newhart & Josiah Heid,
Rulemaking vs. Democracy: Judging and Nudging Public Participation that Counts, 2 Mich. J. Envtl. & Admin. L. (2012),
available at SSRN.
In Rulemaking vs. Democracy: Judging and Nudging Public Participation that Counts, Cynthia Farina, Mary Newhart, and Josiah Heidt explain why the initial efforts to encourage use of electronic media to broaden participation in rulemaking have not, and can not, work. The opening paragraph of the article describes and criticizes the reasoning process that has inspired the initial efforts:
Open government enthusiasts (among which we certainly count ourselves) seem prone to magical thinking—i.e., the building of if-then links that are not objectively justifiable. Open government magical thinking has several strands. If we give people the opportunity to participate, they will participate. If we alert people that government is making decisions important to them, they will engage with the decisionmaking process. If we make relevant information available, they will use that information to engage meaningfully. If we build it, they will come. If they come, we will get better government. (P. 1.) Continue reading "Efforts to Expand Public Participation in Rulemakings Have Been a Failure"
Sep 24, 2012 Michael GreenJotwellJurisprudence
Caleb Nelson,
A Critical Guide to Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, 54
Wm. & Mary L. Rev. (forthcoming 2013)
available at SSRN.
Philosophy of law can get lonely. Most law professors, not to mention lawyers, don’t care whether legal positivism or some kind of anti-positivist alternative is correct. It is surprising, therefore, that philosophers of law so rarely discuss Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, since Erie suggests that the philosophy of law can be relevant to legal practice.
Legal positivism is identified, in part, by the social fact thesis: the law of a jurisdiction is fundamentally a matter of social facts concerning officials (or the general population) within the jurisdiction. In his opinion in Erie, Justice Brandeis rejected the regime of Swift v. Tyson, in part, because he thought Swift was incompatible with this thesis. In Swift, Justice Story opined about the common law prevailing in New York without deferring to the decisions of New York state courts. That sounds anti-positivist. Story apparently understood the common law to be binding in New York independently of social facts about New York (or, indeed, any other jurisdiction’s) officials. Continue reading "Erie, Swift, and Legal Positivism"
