Monthly Archives: July 2014

Understanding Prophylactic Supreme Court Decisions

John F. Stinneford, The Illusory Eighth Amendment, 63 Am. U.L. Rev. 437 (2013).

It is a rare achievement to write about a case in the constitutional law canon and tell us something we did not know. This is the achievement of John Stinneford’s recent article, The Illusory Eighth Amendment. Despite its title, the most interesting part of Stinneford’s article is actually an analysis and critique of the Supreme Court’s famous decision in Miranda v. Arizona.

For those who neither study criminal procedure nor watch police procedurals, Miranda held that in the absence of a provable superior alternative: Continue reading "Understanding Prophylactic Supreme Court Decisions"

Program and Registration Information for “Legal Scholarship We Like and Why It Matters”

We’ve posted a draft program for our conference on “Legal Scholarship We Like and Why It Matters” and also have opened up a registration page for the conference.

We hope to see you Nov 7 & 8, 2014 at the University of Miami School of Law.

If you are planning on coming, you can take advantage of the UM rate at local hotels. The main conference hotel is the Sonesta in Coconut Grove, but the UM discount also applies to the other hotels on the list.

Rulemaking is Biased in Favor of Regulated Firms

Kimberly Krawiec has made a major contribution to the growing number of empirical studies that find that the notice and comment rulemaking process is systemically biased in favor of regulated firms. Professor Krawiec read all of the comments that were submitted in the rulemaking that led to the issuance of the Volcker rule—arguably the most important rule that has been issued to implement the Dodd-Frank Act—as well as all of the agency meeting logs that described the meetings that agency decision makers had with parties who were interested in the outcome of that proceeding.

Krawiec found that, while proponents of strict regulation of financial institutions dominated the comment process numerically, their comments were useless to decision makers. Proponents of strict regulation filed 7831 of the 8000 comments, but 7316 of those were identical brief form letters that provided no data or analysis that would be potentially useful to decision makers. The other 515 comments filed by proponents of strict regulation appeared to be drafted independently by individuals, but they too were worthless as potential aids to decision making. The comment that inspired the title of Krawiec’s article was typical of those comments: The commenter urged the agency to keep “big banks” from attempting to “screw joe the plummer,” with plumber misspelled. Continue reading "Rulemaking is Biased in Favor of Regulated Firms"

A Doctrine in Distress

Aaron D. Twerski & James A. Henderson, Fixing Failure to Warn, 90 Ind. L.J. (forthcoming, 2014), available at SSRN.

A major accomplishment of the American Law Institute’s 1998 Restatement Third of Torts: Products Liability project is its disaggregation of product defects into categories warranting distinct legal treatment: manufacturing (or construction) defects, design defects, and failure to warn. Indeed, this tripartite approach is at the core of the Restatement Third project, which was touted as “an almost total overhaul of Restatement Second as it concerns the liability of commercial sellers of products.”

It may then seem surprising that James Henderson and Aaron Twerski—joint reporters for the Restatement Third project—have second thoughts about the categories they so adeptly forged.

In “Fixing Failure to Warn,” Henderson and Twerski “now believe that too much has been made of the difference [between design defect and failure to warn]” and propose a simple, albeit powerful fix for a “doctrine in distress.” Namely, the former reporters would import the “reasonable alternative design” requirement from the design defect test into the realm of failure to warn, requiring plaintiff to propose a “reasonable alternative warning” in order to make out his prima facie case. Continue reading "A Doctrine in Distress"

(Re)Booting the Dismal Science

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014).

French economist Thomas Piketty has published a lengthy tome on economics that, unusual for economics books, has become a best seller. That attention is for good cause. While not exactly a beach read, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century is a potential game changer for what the study of economics entails and its consequence for future policies. The timing of the book is perfect because the fact of increasing economic inequality has become a topic of increasing focus among academics but also in public policy discussions more broadly. What has been lacking is a deep understanding of how this has come to happen and what might be done to reduce inequality. Picketty’s book moves the discussion forward by pointing to where inequality comes from, where it is going, what might be done to shift its momentum and direction and what might happen if nothing is done to alleviate ever increasing inequality.

In his Introduction, Piketty quotes Marx’s “Communist Manifest” for its prediction of the inevitability of revolution resulting from the internal contradiction of capitalism: “The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” In less dramatic language, Piketty concludes that “the private rate of return on capital, r, can be significantly higher for long periods of time than the rate of growth of income and output, g. The inequality r>g implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. . . . Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.” His evidence supporting his conclusion that makes capitalism inherently unstable, at least in its present form, is his of study of a wide array of data from a number of countries from the 19th century up until the beginning of World War I and, beginning again after the end of World War II until today. During those prolonged periods, the net rate of economic growth in terms of output and wages was about 1% while the return on capital was always between 4 and 5%. Thus, wealth in terms of capital versus from labor increasingly is concentrated in the top 1% and, even more so, in the top .01%. Ever-expanding capital simply cannot be sustained in the long run because that would mean that labor loses all value. If the past is the prologue to the future, capitalism will at some point inevitably collapse if actions are not taken to reduce the growing value of capital. The period from the beginning of World War I through the end of the immediate post-World War II period demonstrated that the momentum toward ever increasing concentration of wealth can be stopped. During that disastrous period of the 20th century, there was a substantial shift as capital shrank due to the destruction of the two great wars, the Great Depression, the end of European colonization and a policy shift toward the creation of a middle class. As a result economic inequality decreased significantly until after World War II. Much economic theory assumed that this period was the new normal, but, for Piketty, the experience since 1970 onward shows that the old normal has reasserted itself so that economic inequality will continue to grow unless substantial efforts are undertaken to change the policies that underpin the growing power of capital over labor. Continue reading "(Re)Booting the Dismal Science"

The Return of Capital

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014).

If I had nothing more specific in mind, it would verge on being trite–or perhaps achieve triteness with margin to spare–to identify Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century as a 2014 publication worth noting at Jotwell. At least as of early spring, the reviews–predictably laudatory from the left, and cautious or critical from the right–have been sprouting like dandelions in Central Park, and there have also been regular (indeed, almost daily) features about Piketty and his opus, appearing in periodicals of all kinds. Most readers no doubt already know that Piketty has combined a compilation of groundbreaking empirical research about wealth distribution in multiple countries over the last few centuries with an important and provocative thesis about the likely (or at least a possible) future.

Piketty argues that high-end wealth concentration has a tendency to keep on augmenting itself in modern capitalist societies, at least for an indefinite time. He views the mid-twentieth century’s “Great Easing” of this process as reflecting distinctive and anomalous factors that make it unlikely to be repeated. He attributes it mainly to the era’s enormous shocks–in particular, the Great Depression and two calamitous world wars–and secondarily to the pursuit of economic and regulatory policies that deliberately sacrificed neoclassical market efficiency in pursuit of other objectives, or else in response to concerns about market failure that came to be dismissed with the rise of such political leaders as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Continue reading "The Return of Capital"

Trusts and Estates Law and the Question of Wealth Distribution

Early in the introduction to his arresting new book on wealth distribution, the French economist Thomas Piketty asserts that “the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers.” (P. 2.) “Everyone,” he writes, should be interested. It seems to me that, on the issue of wealth distribution, trusts and estates scholars should be at or near the front of the queue. In any event, that is my excuse for choosing a book on economics as a JOTWELL selection for trusts and estates.

In the short time the English translation of Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been available (March, 2014), Piketty has achieved near rock-star status. The hard-copy version of the book, which runs 577 pages excluding the footnotes, is sold out on Amazon as I write this. It has been reviewed by all the major newspapers, discussed in all the business and academic journals, and debated across the blogs, and its themes have been batted around by commentators of all stripes. The New York Times, not content to restrict discussion of the splash the book is making to its opinion pages, recently featured Piketty in its Sunday Styles section. Reviews, references, debates and interviews continue. All of which seems to indicate that at least the chattering and scribbling classes, if not the public at large, are rather intrigued by the themes offered by the book. Continue reading "Trusts and Estates Law and the Question of Wealth Distribution"

Thomas Piketty’s Book Is Masterful and Important, but Ultimately a Sideshow

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014).

By now, it seems that everyone has heard of the new tome from French economist Thomas Piketty. Capital in the Twenty-First Century continues to top The New York Times Bestseller list for hardcover non-fiction, which hardly seemed likely for a book that is mostly built on an analysis of European and American tax records over the last century or two.

Piketty’s book deserves all of the plaudits that it has received. It is a masterpiece of economic analysis, advancing our understanding of wealth concentration in the world’s richest democracies, and offering a provocative forecast of the future of inequality in the U.S. and elsewhere. Even the most trenchant reviews of the book that take a negative tone, such as the economist James K. Galbraith’s essay in Dissent, rightly conclude that Piketty has made an important contribution to knowledge. Continue reading "Thomas Piketty’s Book Is Masterful and Important, but Ultimately a Sideshow"

Forewarned is Forearmed: Anticipating Big Changes for the Legal Profession

I don’t know about you, but I am sucker for technology and “Big Data” stories. I was glued in front of my television when IBM’s Watson took on Jeopardy’s reigning champion Ken Jennings–and won.  I am interested in the work of scholars such as Dan Katz and initiatives such as ReInvent Law™ and LawWithoutWalls.™  When NPR and the New York Times ran stories about how technology may do a better job than lawyers for certain tasks such as e-discovery, I emailed those stories to friends and colleagues. My ears perk up when I read about the coming “disruption” to the legal profession. I often recommend to others Richard Susskind’s book entitled The End of Lawyers? about the impact of technology on legal services.

Regardless of whether you share my fascination for these kinds of topics, I encourage you to read the article entitled The Great Disruption: How Machine Intelligence Will Transform the Role of Lawyers in the Delivery of Legal Services which Professors John McGinnis and Russ Pearce contributed to the Fordham Colloquium on The Legal Profession’s Monopoly on the Practice of Law. In my view, regardless of one’s field of expertise, everyone should read this article and begin to reflect on this phenomenon that will revolutionize the practice of law, and dramatically change all of our lives. Continue reading "Forewarned is Forearmed: Anticipating Big Changes for the Legal Profession"

In Plain View

Gregory Ablavsky, The Savage Constitution, 63 Duke L.J. 999 (2014).

In this tightly argued and thoroughly engaging article, Gregory Ablavsky makes the case for a revisionist history of the U.S. Constitution that places Native American Indians at its center. While it isn’t hard to show that conventional constitutional histories largely neglect Indians, it isn’t easy to prove that such neglect is not benign. That is, it’s one thing to argue that standard accounts should include a discussion of Indians, but it’s another thing entirely to make a convincing case that core constitutional understandings would be fundamentally altered if historians fully and prominently integrated the history of relations with Indians into their narratives of the Constitution. Ablavsky aims for the latter, arguing that the history of the creation, drafting, and ratification of the Constitution should be rewritten with Indians in a leading role—and he does not miss the mark.

Ablavsky shows how concern over the problem of persistently hostile relations with Indians during the founding era informed James Madison’s and Alexander Hamilton’s competing Federalist arguments for a stronger central government. This isn’t a modest proposal that we pause for a moment to consider how events on the periphery might shed some light on constitutional debates at the center. Rather, Ablavsky tells us that there is nothing at all peripheral about the frontier when it comes to founding-era debates about constitutional design. The problem of Indian relations, he argues, was central not only for settlers, but for the likes of Madison and Hamilton, and for their fellow delegates and the ratifying public, as they debated the best form of government for the nation they were building. Contesting views on how to solve that problem substantially contributed to shaping the visions they articulated for a more perfect Union, in ways constitutional historians have yet to recognize. Continue reading "In Plain View"

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