Monthly Archives: March 2014
Mar 12, 2014 Solangel MaldonadoTrusts & Estates
There are certain decisions that most individuals would agree are deeply personal and should be made by the individual, not the state, or a third party. The decision to marry, divorce, relocate, execute a will, or donate one’s organs are among those decisions. But what if an individual has lost the cognitive capacity, due to accident or illness, to make these decisions? In the health care context, individuals increasingly delegate decisions about medical treatment to a representative. States encourage individuals to delegate these decisions by making durable power of attorney for health care forms readily available on their websites. When individuals fail to plan for loss of decisional capacity, states often rely on a statutory list of potential surrogates (such as a spouse, an adult child, a parent, etc.) or court-appointed guardians to make health care decisions on their behalf.
Health care decisions are as personal as any decision can be. Yet, while delegation is increasingly accepted in the health care context, the law generally does not allow individuals to delegate other personal decisions such as the decision to marry, divorce, or execute a will. Why not? What are the harms, if any, of not allowing delegation of personal decisions? Should a person who lacks decisional capacity be doomed to remain in an unhealthy marriage? Should he be bound by his state’s intestate succession scheme even if it is contrary to his values and preferences? These are the questions that Alexander A. Boni-Saenz tackles in Personal Delegations. Continue reading "Expanding Surrogate Decisionmaking"
Mar 11, 2014 Benjamin C. ZipurskyTorts
Professor Daniel Meltzer’s article on federal preemption and statutory interpretation is not exactly a torts article. But for those of us who believe that federal preemption in products liability is among a handful of the most pressing and controversial tort issues today, Preemption and Textualism, is an essential read. One of the nation’s most admired federal courts scholars, recently back from a stint in the Obama administration, Professor Meltzer is an ideal commentator on contemporary debates about the proper scope of federal preemption doctrine.
Meltzer’s target is the interpretive method of textualism. Textualism, he argues, is not up to the task of handling the important preemption issues before the Supreme Court. In particular, Meltzer demonstrates that, while Justice Thomas denounced “obstacle preemption” as inviting unconstrained judicial lawmaking, neither Thomas’s reliance on statutory text nor his putative rejection of obstacle preemption holds up to close analysis. In the end, Justice Thomas, like his conservative brethren, inevitably turns to purposive analysis. Continue reading "Federal Preemption and Products Liability"
Mar 10, 2014 Kimberley BrooksTax Law
Richard Eccleston, The Dynamics of Global Economic Governance: The Financial Crisis, the OECD and the Politics of International Tax Cooperation (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2012).
The breadth of global tax evasion has made public headlines and brought attention to the initiatives of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), alongside the G20 and other international bodies. As Richard Eccleston reports, “the sheer magnitude of the threat that international tax evasion poses, denying governments approximately $250 billion per year – more than 15 times the sum spent on humanitarian aid globally in 2011 – ensures that the issue is gaining prominence on the international political agenda.” (P. 33) When taxpayers evade their obligations, the world suffers. How could anyone not be gripped?
The Dynamics of Global Economic Governance: The Financial Crisis, the OECD and the Politics of International Tax Cooperation is a welcome addition to the literature on the regulatory responses to international tax evasion, authored in the light of the global financial crisis. Richard Eccleston, a political scientist in Tasmania, shifts the typical legal scholar’s lens from the legal frameworks that facilitate tax evasion to a careful and insightful exploration or the role of political actors in facilitating tax cooperation in response to that evasion. The work is supported by interviews with more than 40 national tax officials, business and NGO representatives, OECD and UN staff. Continue reading "After the Financial Crisis"
Mar 7, 2014 Susan FortneyLegal Profession
Leslie Levin, Misbehaving Lawyers: Cross-Country Comparisons, 15 Legal Ethics 357 (2012), available at SSRN.
Commentaries on lawyer discipline often refer to practice areas that are involved in grievances. Discussions of lawyer discipline devote far less attention to examining the circumstances of particular grievances or the characteristics of the lawyers facing disciplinary charges. That is one reason why I especially liked Professor Leslie Levin’s Misbehaving Lawyers: Cross-Country Comparisons. This article was published in a special issue of Legal Ethics—the preeminent international legal ethics journal.
In his preface to the issue, Richard Abel described the premise of the special issue as follows: “we can illuminate the nature of and explanations for lawyer misconduct and the relative advantages of different regulatory responses by comparing case studies of lawyers disciplined a variety of countries.” In the special issue, experts presented fascinating case studies of lawyers disciplined in the authors’ home countries. Following these case studies, Professor Levin’s essay identifies similarities and differences among the cases studies written by experts from Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Anyone interested in lawyer conduct should read Professor Levin’s essay because it provides a concise and thoughtful analysis of patterns and problems that emerge from the accounts presented in the articles in the special issue. Legal profession scholars, lawyers who defend and prosecute disciplinary cases and malpractice cases, jurists, educators, and individual practitioners can learn a great deal by reflecting on Professor Levin’s observations. Continue reading "Patterns and Problems in Professional Discipline Cases"
Mar 5, 2014 Eric BiberLexEnvironmental Law
Most people, when they think of environmental pollution, think of large, industrial factories pumping out noxious fumes into the air, putrid liquids into the water, and barrels of toxic wastes into the soil. For instance, almost every newspaper article, blog post, or television story about climate change has as an image of the smokestack of a major power plant or factory.
Most people’s perceptions are wrong. It has long been the case that much of the degradation of our natural environment is the result of the accumulation of thousands, millions, even billions of individual actions by people across the United States and around the world. Climate change, for example, is the result of the decision of each of us to drive a car powered by fossil fuels, eat meat, fly in planes, heat our house with fossil fuels, and other similar, seemingly trivial actions. Moreover, these misconceptions are not limited to the general public or general journalists—environmental law scholars and policy makers have fallen into this trap as well. Even when scholars and policy makers have recognized the importance of small harms for environmental law and policy, there is often little information about how important they are, or what, exactly the implications are for our current legal and regulatory systems.
Two recent articles—Dave Owen’s piece, Critical Habitat and the Challenge of Regulating Small Harms, and David E. Adelman’s article, Environmental Federalism: When Numbers Matter More than Size—are welcome efforts to address the gaps in our understanding of how small harms matter to environmental law and why they matter. Moreover, they both are outstanding examples of a recent trend in environmental law to jump on the empirical legal studies bandwagon—both collect and use substantial amounts of data in their analyses. Continue reading "Small Things Matter in Environmental Law"
Mar 4, 2014 Angela FernandezLegal History
Irus Braverman’s recent book Zooland is a wonderful read on a topic that is of both historical and current interest—zoos. How should we view zoos given the frank admission by all, including zoo advocates, that zoo animals are captives, forced to forgo what would otherwise be a superior existence in order to serve the pedagogical and conservationist agenda that zoos have cultivated as justifications for their existence? These animals have been conscripted as “ambassadors for their species” (P. 8) and are in a sense turned into “body doubles”—“stand-ins for the real animals” and their wild habitats about which they are supposed to be raising awareness (P. 58). Perhaps zoos are effective at raising this awareness. Braverman is distinctly agnostic on the question of whether zoos are generally a good or bad thing.
Legal historians will be interested in the shift Braverman describes from zoos as sites of entertainment, a variation on the old menagerie style collection of animals, preferably exotic, that would then perform various colonialist and empire-building functions, to the (arguably) more laudable conservationist rationale and its accompanying practices often targeted at educating adults and children about species and habitat decline and destruction. The real animals are “just the hook” as one of Braverman’s interview subjects, Jim Breheny of the Bronx Zoo, puts it. (P. 41.) They are meant to draw you in. What they draw you into, as Braverman’s book details, is a world of contradictions. Braverman calls what she has found a Foucauldian “power of care,” minute in its regulation of the daily lives of zoo animals and profound in its reach into such fundamental aspects of the animals’ lives as the question of which animals are allowed to reproduce and which are not, which will be put on board “Noah’s Ark” and saved and which will not. The regimentation of the animals’ lives serves another disciplinary end: “Whereas once zoos were in the business of entertainment through taxonomic exhibitions,” Braverman writes, “now they discipline the public into caring about nature.” (P. 90.) Continue reading "Forget About Noah’s Ark"
Mar 3, 2014 Mortimer SellersJurisprudence
There is an innovative, very influential, and deeply pernicious tradition in English law and jurisprudence equating liberty with license and the rule of law with legal despotism. The beauty of this short chapter by T.R.S. Allan lies in its full implicit refutation of this shared misconception, as found in Thomas Hobbes, John Austin, and H.L.A. Hart, and its shorter explicit repudiation of their gentle contemporary apologist, Joseph Raz. Allan embraces traditional conceptions of the rule of law, demonstrates their central position in British jurisprudence, and makes sense of the doctrines of A.V. Dicey, often misstated as mere legal formalism.
“The rule of law and not of men” in its original, best, and most coherent sense is the antithesis of arbitrary power. This is both a political ideal and a constitutional doctrine: law and government are only legitimate when they serve justice and the common good of their subjects. To legislate, adjudicate, or execute the laws to any other end is contrary to the proper purposes of law, and therefore corrupt. “Liberty” consists in subjection to just laws, made for the common good — not (as some would have it) the simple license to do what one wants. Continue reading "Liberty, Equality, and the Rule of Law"
