Jul 21, 2021 Martha ErtmanContracts
Mehrsa Baradaran makes an outstanding contribution to the literature on de jure, systemic racial bias and lays a foundation for reparations in the context of consumer credit in Jim Crow Credit. Drawing from and building on her two Harvard U. Press books, How the Other Half Banks (2018) and The Color of Money (2017), Baradaran documents the systematic subsidization of white borrowers–and thus the creation of the white, suburban middle class–in the New Deal and subsequent 20th century government programs that brought us today’s home mortgages, credit cards, and predatory lending practices such as payday lending. Bottom line up front: in credit as elsewhere the haves come out ahead. The surprise is how the federal government subsidized this enormous giveaway to create a white, suburban middle class at the expense of urban and African-American communities.
In bumper sticker form, Baradaran’s message is that Black lines of credit matter. Just as driving or jogging while Black too often proves fatal, borrowing while Black harms Black lives by imposing financial and other injuries that white borrowers are much less likely to suffer. Perhaps most galling–and akin to criminal defendants funding mass incarceration through fees and fines–is that African Americans taxpayers helped fund the U.S subsidies to white borrowers via mortgages and later, credit cards. The compound interest resulting from those subsidies explains a good amount of today’s income inequality: whites enjoy 10 times the wealth of African-Americans, and measured in quasi-liquid assets like retirement accounts, that inequity jumps to a jaw-dropping 100 times more wealth. Continue reading "Black Lines of Credit Matter"
Jul 20, 2021 Paul HorwitzConstitutional Law
David E. Pozen & Adam M. Samaha,
Anti-Modalities, 119
Mich. L. Rev. 729 (2021).
A specter is haunting modern American legal scholarship—the specter of branding.
Whether it is a marketplace of ideas or just a marketplace, legal scholarship today overflows with neologisms, “I call this”-es, and other efforts to hawk our wares to law review editors and, perhaps, other scholars. Useful at times, branding is often unnecessary or silly. It routinely announces a purportedly un-noticed phenomenon that in reality fills whole library shelves. (One awaits with resignation the inevitable article proclaiming, “I call this activity, in which two parties reach a binding and often memorialized exchange of promises, agreementification. It urgently deserves closer study.”) Given the frequency with which legal scholars treat as “new” arguments or observations that were old before they were born but lie outside Westlaw’s reach, branding often involves neither new wine nor new bottles, but old wine in old bottles with a new label slapped on. It is bad enough if these efforts are cynical, worse if they are not, and perhaps worse still when they are a bit of both. We might call this the Late Capitalism-ization of legal scholarship.
With that cheerful preface, it is a pleasure to see a new label that actually performs a useful service, spotlighting something we might otherwise neglect. It is doubly pleasing because the article neither celebrates nor condemns what it labels. It walks us through the phenomenon with a proper sense of its nuances and its costs and benefits. Written by David Pozen and Adam Samaha, Anti-Modalities exemplifies the difference between a meaningful scholarly label and a mere marketing gambit. Continue reading "The Excluded Muddle"
Jul 19, 2021 Kali MurrayProperty
Nancy Leong, Enjoyed by White Citizens, 108 Geo. L. J. __ (forthcoming, 2021), available at SSRN.
I recall being confused by how the average 1L Property course treated the “important” property provisions. I was struck that we spent all of our time on the 5th Amendment clause that required compensation by the government for the “taking” of private property by the government. But we did not cover the 13th Amendment, which eliminated slavery, thus impacting the property rights of (predominately) white citizens.
Why were we not talking about the 13th Amendment and the supporting legislation, §1981 and §1982 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which granted property rights to freed blacks? What did it mean in these statutes that all persons should have the “same right” of property as that “enjoyed by white citizens”?
Nancy Leong’s Enjoyed by White Citizens seeks to solve that mystery. In the process, she helps us better understand the meaning of property rights as a general matter and illuminates the role of property rights rhetoric in struggles for civil rights and against privileged caste status. Continue reading "Our Joy: An Inclusive Right of Enjoyment in Property and Contract Law"
Jul 16, 2021 Bijal ShahAdministrative Law
Anne Joseph O’Connell,
Actings, 120
Colum. L. Rev. 613 (2020).
President Trump relied heavily on temporary leadership to run his branch. According to critics, the tenuousness of Trump’s cabinet positions—and their high turnover rate—was both a cause and reflection of an amateur and unreliable presidency. And yet, while the extent to which Trump depended on acting officials was anomalous, he was not the only president to do so; indeed, presidents have utilized temporary officials for quite some time. In addition to demonstrating that temporary officials have been fairly common across both Republican and Democratic administrations since the turn of the century, Anne Joseph O’Connell argues in Actings that these officials stabilize the government in times of crisis and transition.
Professor O’Connell, along with Nina Mendelson, is one of today’s preeminent legal experts on the Federal Vacancies Reform Act (Vacancies Act). Professor O’Connell’s prior scholarship and testimony on this topic is both detailed and accessible, and makes clear the stakes of the relevant debates. Actings, published recently in the Columbia Law Review, is no exception. This comprehensive work offers a nuanced and evocative account of the history, constitutional and legal frameworks, and problems that attach to temporary leadership in the top positions of the executive branch. It also marks a departure from Professor O’Connell’s previous writing, in that it is relatively accepting of temporary political appointees. Continue reading "A Definitive Work on Temporary Political Leadership"
Jul 15, 2021 Alex B. LongWork Law
There are plenty of legal rules that were originally born from faulty reasoning and that somehow ended up becoming firmly entrenched despite their flaws. One hopes that among the many changes it has brought, COVID-19 will cause courts and other legal authorities to revisit well-established legal rules, the shortcomings of which have been exposed during the pandemic. Professor Michelle Travis discusses one of these areas in her forthcoming article A Post-Pandemic Antidiscrimination Approach to Workplace Flexibility.
Travis takes aim at what she calls the “full-time face-time norm,” a term she coined fifteen years ago. The phrase describes “the judicial presumption that work is defined by long hours, rigid schedules, and uninterrupted, in-person performance at a centralized workspace.” (P. 203.) This presumption appears repeatedly in reasonable accommodation cases under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Courts often use some variation of the phrase “attendance is an essential function” almost as boilerplate when explaining why a plaintiff is not entitled to a reasonable accommodation such as telecommuting or a flexible work schedule. One also sees this “full-time face-time norm” appear in Title VII disparate impact cases involving female employees who also have primary caregiving responsibilities. In these cases, courts often treat an employer’s practice of requiring full-time face-time attendance as a basic component of a job, rather than the type of “particular employment practice” that is subject to challenge as part of a disparate impact claim. Continue reading "Reconsidering the “Full-Time Face-Time Norm” After COVID-19"
Jul 14, 2021 Neil H. BuchananTax Law
Justice Louis Brandeis famously described U.S. states as “laboratories” in which citizens can authorize their sub-national governments to “try novel social and economic experiments.” His logic surely also applies to nations as well, with countries around the world offering a wealth of real-world experiments from which we can all draw valuable insights.
Kim Brooks knows quite a lot about comparative legal scholarship (tax studies in particular), but she understands that most people have only passing familiarity with that vast body of literature. She also understands that most every scholarly enterprise could profit from a comparative perspective but that most scholars do not have the time or inclination to become full-on comparativists. What to do? Continue reading "Comparative (Tax) Scholarship is for Everyone, and Everyone Can Make It Better"
Jul 13, 2021 Kenneth W. SimonsTorts
Erik Encarnacion,
Resilience, Retribution, and Punitive Damages, 100
Texas L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2021), available at
SSRN.
Most American states permit the award of extra-compensatory punitive damages to tort plaintiffs if the defendant’s conduct was especially culpable. The conventional rationales for this practice are the value of punishing such conduct and the special need to deter it. Yet these rationales are focused entirely on the defendant: they explain why a defendant should pay more than compensatory damages but do not explain why that additional punitive award should be transferred to the plaintiff. And indeed, many states, under “split recovery” schemes, require that a specified proportion of a punitive damage award be paid to the state, not to the plaintiff. But critics of punitive damage awards are not satisfied by this response: they believe that transferring any nontrivial portion of a large punitive damage award to a plaintiff gives that plaintiff an unjust and undeserved “windfall.”
Can the practice of awarding substantial punitive damages to plaintiffs be justified? The literature on the propriety of punitive damages in tort law is enormous, but that literature has paid little attention to the “windfall” objection. The objection is not especially troubling to consequentialist or law and economics scholars: punitive damage awards help incentivize plaintiffs’ lawyers to fully investigate serious wrongdoing and may offer useful additional deterrence of especially culpable conduct. But corrective justice and civil recourse theories cannot so readily overcome the windfall objection, insofar as they emphasize the close bipolar relationship between defendant’s wrong and plaintiff’s injury, and between defendant’s duty to pay damages and plaintiff’s right to receive those damages. Continue reading "A New Retributive Justification for Punitive Damages"
Jul 12, 2021 Kent D. SchenkelTrusts & Estates
Eric A. Kades,
A New Feudalism: Selfish Genes, Great Wealth and the Rise of the Dynastic Family Trust (“DFT”) (2019), available at
SSRN.
In a majority of U.S. jurisdictions, at least for purposes of trust law, the Rule Against Perpetuities (“RAP”) is dead. Yes, it’s true. In recent years most states either substantially weakened or completely eliminated their Rules Against Perpetuities. This fact has major implications for the wealthy, and more so for the ultra-wealthy. Freed from the restrictions of the RAP, those with the means and inclination can now create trusts that entrench great wealth within their families forever.
Eric Kades is concerned about this. In his second article addressing the potential repercussions of RAP repeal, A New Feudalism: Selfish Genes, Great Wealth and the Rise of the Dynastic Family Trust (“DFT”), Kades proposes a reinstatement of the RAP, this time in federal form, something he wants to call “The National Anti-Feudalism Act.” This prescription comes after he engages in a kind of predictive analysis of the imagined estate planning of the ultra-wealthy, improbably informed by his reading of evolutionary biology. According to Kades, evolutionary biology should play a “significant role” in “explaining patterns of inheritance behaviors.” Continue reading "The Case for a Federal RAP"
Jul 9, 2021 Ifeoma AjunwaTechnology Law
Danielle Keats Citron & Daniel J. Solove,
Privacy Harms, Geo. Wash. U. L. Stud. Res. Paper No. 2021-11 (Mar. 16, 2021), available at
SSRN.
Privacy law scholars have long contended with the retort, “what’s the harm?” In their seminal 1890 article The Right to Privacy, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis wrote: “That the individual shall have full protection in person and in property is a principle as old as the common law; but it has been found necessary from time to time to define anew the exact nature and extent of such protection.” Other legal scholars have noted that the digital age brings added challenges to the work of defining which privacy harms should be cognizable under the law and should entitle the complainant to legal redress. In Privacy Harms, an article that is sure to become part of the canon of privacy law scholarship, Danielle Citron and Daniel Solove provide a much needed and definitive update to the privacy harms debate. It is especially notable that the authors engage the full gamut of the debate, by parsing both who has standing to bring suit for a privacy litigation and also what damages should apply. This important update to privacy law literature builds upon prior solo and joint influential work by the two authors, such as Solove’s Taxonomy of Privacy, and Citron’s Sexual Privacy, and their joint article Risk and Anxiety.
The article furnishes three major contributions to law and tech scholarship. First, it highlights the challenges deriving from the incoherent and piecemeal patchwork of privacy laws in the U.S., exacerbated by what other scholars have noted are the exceedingly higher showings of harm demanded for privacy litigation versus other types of litigation. Second, the authors construct a road map for understanding the different genre of privacy harms with a detailed typology. Third, Citron and Solove helpfully provide an in-depth discussion of when and how privacy regulations should be enforced. That exercise is predicated on their viewpoint that there is currently a misalignment of the goals of privacy law and available legal remedies. Continue reading "What’s the Harm? The Answer is Many"
Jul 8, 2021 Gilberto MorbachJurisprudence
Matthew H. Kramer,
Hart on Legal Powers as Legal Competences, 19
Univ. of Cambridge Fac. of L. Res. J. __ (2021), available at
SSRN.
As Professor Matthew H. Kramer states at the beginning of his rigorous, insightful analysis, Hart on Legal Powers as Legal Competences, “[a]s virtually everyone among the ranks of present-day Anglophone legal philosophers is aware, one of the chief complaints about Austin by Hart was that the former theorist had disregarded and obscured the major role of power-conferring norms in the structures and operations of legal systems.” (P. 1.) Indeed, Austin’s preoccupation with duty-imposing laws contrasted with his neglect of laws that confer powers, and H.L.A. Hart started his own quest for an adequate concept of law by rejecting his predecessor’s mistake. But what if Hart himself was guilty of a similar sin, at least to some extent?
Before taking up on that challenge, Kramer goes on to explore in some detail (1) Hart’s critique of Austin — in his distinction between power-conferring and duty-imposing laws — and (2) possible rejoinders from Austin defenders. Continue reading "Did H.L.A. Hart, of All People, Neglect Power-Conferring Laws?"
