Apr 25, 2023 Kerri Lynn StoneWork Law
In Workplace Anonymity, Professor Jayne Ressler takes on the intersection of two critical workplace issues: toxic work environments and employee privacy. Citing workplace toxicity in the form of harassment, abuse, wage theft, and risk exposure among other things, Professor Ressler notes the failures of agencies like the Department of Labor, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, as well as government agencies and labor unions, to redress much of the toxicity that has fueled what has come to be known as the “Great Resignation” as the nation reeled from the pandemic.
The piece posits that fear of retaliation engenders a culture of silence around abuse and sets about examining reporting mechanisms. Ressler seeks to complement the suggestion of legal scholarship that employer access to certain private employee information be curbed, with a proposal “that uses information restrictions to report and document workplace misconduct ex post,” and proposes “anonymous reporting mechanisms concerning workplace misconduct” that would facilitate workplace redress and reform without the threat of retaliation. (P. 1497.) Continue reading "Keeping Confidences: Where Workplace Abuse and Privacy Protection Intersect"
Apr 24, 2023 Katheleen GuzmanTrusts & Estates
Scholarship brings variety. Complex constructions that drag readers through thickets; subtle and sublime ones suggesting some knowing inner ring; irony with head feints that leave the reader thunderstruck when the rug is pulled – each form can delight, with the best scholarship inviting others into the mind (if not heart) of its author. Reading this sort of piece can feel a bit like a temporary possession, every bit as exhausting as its writing may have been.
Richard Ausness pulls no such punches. In These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things, he squares up unafraid to take down assorted aspects of the 1990 Revised Uniform Probate Code with an approach that is rapid but measured and always direct. There is much to be said for writing that inspires readers to see brand new things. But there is also something thrilling about seeing the same old things anew. Continue reading "When The Dog Bites"
Apr 21, 2023 Shelley Ross SaxerProperty
Professor Richard C. Schragger’s article, The Perils of Land Use Deregulation, provides a cautionary tale as to whether land use reform by state legislative preemption will backfire in the attempt to provide more affordable housing. Efforts to address the housing crisis have focused on state preemptive legislation to combat NIMBYism (“Not in My Backyard”) and local land use controls by using market reforms to speak to the perceived housing shortage.
The affordable housing crisis has generated calls for land use reform in response to claims that exclusionary zoning (for example, single-family housing codes and discriminatory practices by localities) exists at the base of this crisis. With the vigorous ongoing debate about the supply-side solution to housing demand, it is not clear whether upzoning, which may reduce market rate housing prices marginally, will produce affordable housing.
State regulation adopting a market-based solution could potentially reduce localities’ power to address economic inequality. Schragger challenges the conventional wisdom, supported by the YIMBY (“Yes in My Backyard”) movement that the state or possibly the federal government should preempt local regulations that interfere with market-rate housing construction. Continue reading "Land Use Deregulation and Affordable Housing"
Apr 20, 2023 Jennifer WrigginsTorts
Allyson Gold,
Insuring Justice, 101
N.C.L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2023), available at
SSRN.
Allyson Gold’s excellent article, Insuring Justice, shows that when low-income tenants suffer personal injuries caused by substandard housing conditions, the torts system fails them and protects negligent landlords. While the negligence cause of action applies to landlords’ actions and omissions in theory, low-income tenants face multiple barriers to successful negligence claims against landlords for their injuries. A chief barrier is the lack of liability insurance for landlords. This long-overdue article is the first to examine liability insurance for landlords, particularly for those who rent to low-income tenants.
Prof. Gold brings extensive knowledge of issues and problems facing low-income tenants as well as of insurance, and tort law, to bear in discussing liability for injuries caused by substandard housing. Why, Prof. Gold asks, do lawmakers require Airbnb landlords to have liability insurance for short-terms rentals to tourists, yet they do not require that landlords renting to long-term tenants carry liability insurance? She shows that this disparity is neither inevitable nor justifiable. Continue reading "Injured Tenants, Uninsured Landlords, and a Proposal for Mandatory Landlord Insurance"
Apr 19, 2023 Nicholson PriceTechnology Law
Janet Freilich,
Government Misinformation Platforms, __
U. Pa. L. Rev. __(forthcoming 2023), draft available at
SSRN (Feb. 27 2023).
Where does trusted information come from? In a world of misinformation, where everyone is skeptical of everything, at least we can rely on expert, authoritative government agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control, the Patent Office, and the Food and Drug Administration, right? Right!?
Not so fast, Professor Janet Freilich persuasively but depressingly argues in the smart, eye-opening, “why didn’t I think of that” Government Misinformation Platforms. Freilich’s central point is fairly straightforward (although the article is rich with nuance and detail): We usually laud the government’s sharing of information because government-provided information is usually pretty trustworthy and useful for all kinds of things, and because transparency is usually a good goal. There’s a whole law (the Freedom of Information Act) about getting government to share information on request, supplemented by various transparency efforts. But there are also many government-run platforms that share information that the government itself didn’t produce—and in fact, that share unvetted, frequently incorrect, sometimes deliberately misleading information. When people see information on these platforms and think “government information = trustworthy,” then the problems start. Continue reading "Trust, Trustworthiness, and Misinformation Shared by the Government"
Apr 18, 2023 Jon ChoiTax Law
Brian D. Galle & Stephen E. Shay,
Admin Law and the Crisis of Tax Administration, __
N.C. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2023), draft available at
SSRN (Jan. 27, 2023).
Tax regulations and subregulatory guidance abound with apparent giveaways to taxpayers, favorable interpretations with little or no statutory justification. Examples include the check-the-box rules, the waiver of 382(l)(5) net operate loss carryforward limitations during the financial crisis, and many more. On the other hand, it’s hard to think of cases where Treasury or the IRS has deviated from the statute at taxpayers’ expense. The typical explanation for this asymmetry is standing doctrine: if my tax bill is too high because of an agency rule, I can sue the government, but if it’s too low, nobody can sue to raise it. Now, a terrific new article by Brian Galle and Stephen Shay considers the implications of this “tilt against revenue” for administrative law.
Galle and Shay bring a fresh perspective to the classic debate on administrative tax exceptionalism. They suggest that the tilt against revenue cuts against the formalist, anti-exceptionalist position (most famously promoted by Kristin Hickman) that tax regulations should follow the same procedural rules that apply to all other regulations. Instead, they suggest that courts should counter-act the tilt against revenue by applying administrative law requirements more leniently to Treasury and the IRS. Continue reading "The Case for a Tilt Toward Revenue in Tax Administration"
Apr 17, 2023 Francesca BartlettLegal Profession
The “baby boomers” of the English-speaking West are those born from the late 1940s to early 1960s, and, as the name suggests, there were a lot of them. Despite their advancing age, and recent COVID-19 threats, this generation remains the second-most numerous in the USA. In Australia—the subject of Angela Melville, Valerie Caines and Marcus Walker’s paper—the same generation dwarfed all others until very recently.Consequently, there are many aging lawyers leading to what has been described as an impending “senior tsunami.”
Melville, Caines, and Walker provide an analysis of the available data on the Australian legal profession to trace a range of intersecting concerns around its aging profession. This is the first analysis of its kind in Australia, and it is a clear and nuanced examination with some sensible recommendations. The study reflects the findings of the first and second Joint Committee on Aging Lawyers established by the National Organisation of Bar Counsel and the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers (NOBC-APRL), which noted:
there is a great number of lawyers with tremendous experience, insight and wisdom that can be shared with newer members of the bar. These same lawyers can devote themselves to valuable public service and improvement of the profession. The bad news is that there is an ever increasing risk of more lawyers with age-related impairments and insufficient preparation for transitioning away from practice before a crisis forces that transition. Continue reading "The Complex Picture of Aging Lawyers"
Apr 14, 2023 André den ExterHealth Law
Most lawyers will not be acquainted with the concept of Health Technology Assessment (HTA), although it is now considered a key instrument in health policy decision-making in Europe. It is also a potentially controversial concept as it reviews the cost-effectiveness of health technologies taking into account resource constraints. HTA has been defined as “a multidisciplinary process that uses explicit methods to determine the value of health technology at different points in its lifecycle.” Its purpose is “to inform decision-making to promote an equitable, efficient, and high-quality health system.”
HTA can be used as a policy instrument to decide whether a social insurance policy will cover a new health technology—whether a therapy, medicine, or device. HTA is not restricted to Europe. It has been applied in other parts of the world and is supported by the World Health Organization. One may ask, what’s in it for lawyers? Since HTA decision-making has health policy implications concerning the availability and accessibility of new medical technologies for all, it has human rights implications with respect to the right to health care.
This dissertation questions the role of law and the right to health care. It is grounded in the idea that international law regarding rights to health care can contribute to formulating standards for implementing health policies. The author argues that the role of law is not restricted to procedural issues such as transparency, but also more substantive criteria, including non-discrimination, maximum available resources, progressive realization, and international cooperation. Bottini Filho describes this as “applying the human rights-based approach” (HRBA) in HTA decision-making. The result of that approach, according to the author “should be an accountable process not only to distribute resources but also to create them and thus avoid unnecessary [health care] rationing.” For those who believe health care rationing is inappropriate and that health care is not a social good, a rather bizarre outcome. Continue reading "Health Care Decision-Making and the Law"
Apr 13, 2023 Brooke D. ColemanCourts Law
The authors of Racial Capitalism in the Civil Courts bring together two underexamined areas of civil procedure scholarship—the state civil court system and race. Using the theory of racial capitalism as a lens, the authors argue that state courts, by design and effect, entrench the inequality upon which capitalism relies. Instead of providing a respite from injustice, state civil courts function by processes in opposition to traditional conceptions of fair procedures. For example, most individual defendants are without representation while the corporate plaintiffs have lawyers; there is little or no discovery; and there are high rates of default judgments. Moreover, racialized litigants bear the brunt of state court processes and their shortcomings. The authors argue that this perversion of justice is no accident but is instead by design.
In the wake of 2020’s racial reckoning, scholars have paid more attention to how race impacts the civil legal system. But much of the scholarship to date has focused on impact—how race drives one’s experience of the civil legal system through lack of access, how one is treated within the system, or how racial discrimination claims are adjudicated. Unlike the deep literature on the criminal legal system, which examines how systems of oppression—including the institution of slavery—have characterized the system’s development, no robust studies examine how the civil legal system entrenches racial inequities. Continue reading "State Civil Courts of Racial Oppression"
Apr 12, 2023 Jaya Ramji-NogalesLexImmigration
Scholarly examinations of sanctuary for immigrants tend to focus on destination states in the Global North, where the concept implicates support for the immediate needs of immigrants in a specific location—such as a church, or throughout a city—and in some cases policy advocacy efforts. Few scholars writing in the Global North have explored how this concept translates to the Global South, where most migration and transit occurs, and where a substantial amount of work is happening to support migrants despite the more profound costs to those residing in countries with more limited resources. Alexandra Délano Alonso offers the reader a shift in the epistemology of migration, taking us to locations in the Global South where this work is taking place. In Sanctuary in Countries of Origin: A Transnational Perspectives, she investigates the concept of sanctuary through a case study of her home country of Mexico, determining that the term is an uneasy fit and that the practice of sanctuary is more transformative in the Mexican context.
Délano begins with an examination of historical sanctuary practices in Mexico, noting that, much like in the United States, the main actors have been migrant shelters, churches, and community organizations, but that Mexicans are more likely to use the terms hospitality, shelter, and welcome to describe the support offered to migrants. Given that the Spanish definition of sanctuary tends to focus narrowly on religious spaces, she questions its political power in popular discourse. Délano also asks the key question about sanctuary that Mexicans raised in response to the Central American caravans in 2018, namely, whether sanctuary can exist in a location that is unsafe and under-resourced even for locals. She also explores the complexity and contradiction in the political discourse around these caravans, noting an about-face between governments, from a discourse of hospitality for asylum seekers to the assertion just a few months later that Mexico is not a sanctuary or a “country of open doors” by the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Continue reading "Whither Sanctuary? Shifting the Sites of Knowledge Production"
