Monthly Archives: April 2015
Apr 13, 2015 Robert RosenCorporate Law
How many different law review articles cite work by Kahneman and Tversky, progenitors of law and behavioral economics? At least two thousand, two hundred and seventy-three (2,273). And this does not include articles like Professor Baer’s which do not cite Kahneman and Tversky, but cite law review articles which do. Law and behavioral economics is a law professor industry. And, why not? It doesn’t require math and who doesn’t like Brain Games?
How many different law review articles cite work by Oliver Williamson, progenitor of the new institutional economics? At least one thousand, two hundred and fifty-four (1,254). Although smaller, this also reflects an industry which incorporates ideas of agency cost or of just opportunism, which Baer says is, “according to Oliver Wiliamson’s famous definition, a form of self-interest seeking with guile” (P. 99.)
What is the overlap between these 3,527 articles? That is, how many articles cite both Kahneman and Tversky and Williamson? At most 82 (2.3%). Of course, one might also ask what percentage of the smaller number of Williamson-citing papers cite Kahneman and Tversky, yielding a larger but still small number (6.5%). By and large, these appear to be two different lines of scholarship; two different industries.
Miriam H. Baer argues that both lines need to be considered concurrently. Why? The methods and structures of organizational compliance need to deter both deviance originating in individual departures from rationality (the law and behavioral economics line) and individuals whose rationality departs from that of the organization as an entity (the new institutional economics line). To complicate matters, in ways Professor Baer doesn’t highlight, such deterrence also sometimes cut against each other. Call it “the lure of the taboo.” Creating a culture that enshrines non-opportunistic values creates psychological pressures to evade. Sociologists talk about the normality of deviance, but you can just think of the attractiveness of shrimp to those raised in an Orthodox Jewish culture. (And let’s agree to not discuss other taboos). Continue reading "Deterring Both Spur-of-the-Moment and Carefully Planned Corporate Crimes"
Apr 10, 2015 Jessica Bulman-PozenConstitutional Law
Alison L. LaCroix,
Continuity in Secession: The Case of the Confederate Constitution (forthcoming), available at
SSRN.
Secession has been back in the news of late. Hundreds of thousands of individuals across the country signed petitions seeking permission for their states to leave the United States after President Obama’s reelection; Governor Perry riffed on Texas’s departure from the Union “if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people”; and members of the Second Vermont Republic insist the Green Mountain State would be better off alone. Overseas, a bid for Scottish independence from the United Kingdom nearly prevailed last fall.
A curious feature of many contemporary secessionist movements is their claim to represent the real nation-state from which they seek to depart. The paradigmatic secession case involves a self-consciously distinct national group trying to throw off the yoke of the state encompassing it. But many of today’s movements instead embrace the nation-state they would leave behind, insisting they are truer to its founding principles than the current regime. Alison LaCroix’s provocative and illuminating essay, Continuity in Secession: The Case of the Confederate Constitution, not only sheds light on the most important secessionist movement in American history, but also offers new purchase on this feature of contemporary law and politics. Continue reading "Secession, Then and Now"
Apr 9, 2015 Mark SeidenfeldAdministrative Law
Those of us who write in administrative law often get stuck in the ruts created by the categories set out in the Administrative Procedures Act—especially rulemaking, adjudication and judicial review. Therefore, it is refreshing and often path breaking when an article appears that delves into an important aspect of administrative action that cuts across those ruts rather than following them. That is all the more true when the article is as well executed as The Permit Power Revisited: The Theory and Practice of Regulatory Permits in the Administrative State by Eric Biber and J.B. Ruhl.
Nominally, The Permit Power Revisited is a response to a piece Richard Epstein wrote, almost twenty years ago, lambasting administrative permitting as a “racket” rife with agency abuse. But the article does not so much respond to that piece; rather it lays out what the permit power encompasses and how agencies use it to fill gaps that otherwise would exist in regulatory schemes. In doing so, The Permit Power Revisited categorizes permits along a continuum and demonstrates how judicious choice of permitting along that continuum can contribute to effective and responsive regulation. Continue reading "The Place of Permits in the Quiver of Administrative Action"
Apr 8, 2015 Kerri StoneWork Law
In “Beyond Title VII: Rethinking Race, Ex-offender Status, and Employment Discrimination in the Information Age,” Professor Kimani Paul-Emile sets forth a compelling analysis of the harm and prejudice engendered toward minority populations by employers’ use of criminal background inquiries. She then proposes a novel regulatory scheme whereby employers would evaluate job applicants for employment fitness prior to factoring in any type of criminal background.
Whether or not one ultimately comes down on the side of regulating employer criminal background inquiries and subsequent actions taken on the basis of those inquiries, there is undeniable appeal in at least considering this scheme, which Professor Paul-Emile calls the Health Law Framework. Her framework is interesting because it transcends the traditional realm of regulation in this area—Title VII and the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA)—and borrows from the arena of health law, specifically the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), to forge a thoughtful, integrated proposed mechanism for regulating employer use of criminal background inquiries. Continue reading "Reaching Outside the Box to Ensure Equal Opportunity"
Apr 7, 2015 Kerry RyanTrusts & Estates
David Horton,
Wills Law on the Ground: Empirically Assessing Probate Reform, 62
UCLA L. Rev. (forthcoming, 2015),
available at SSRN.
This article contains a fascinating study of a year in the life of a probate court in one California county. Professor Horton uses his data to examine the fit between existing wills doctrine (derived from the small number of disputed estates that become reported appellate decisions) and routinized probate administrations. In other words, how does wills law on the books compare to “Wills Law on the Ground”? Horton frames his analysis within the existing debate in the field between “formalists” (who favor strict compliance with wills act rules even if intent-defeating) and “functionalists” (who reject formalism for its own sake favoring an intent-serving-standards-based wills act). Most state lawmakers and judges sit squarely in the former category; whereas, the latter faction includes the brain trust behind the Restatement (Third) of Property: Wills (Restatement) and the Uniform Probate Code (UPC). Part I of Horton’s article aptly describes several areas in will execution (attestation, holographic wills, and harmless error) and will construction (ademption by extinction and antilapse) where the contrast between the two camps is most stark.
Part II describes Horton’s empirical methodology and reports the results. The study examined every probate administration in Alameda County, California (CA) from January 2008 to March 2009 relating to decedents dying in 2007. After discarding abandoned matters and those involving pour-over wills, the dataset consisted of 571 cases. Fifty-seven (57) percent of these decedents died with a will and 43 percent without. After providing descriptive statistics on testate versus intestate estates (cost, length, litigation, beneficiaries), Horton analyzes how the data informs the issues that drive a wedge between formalists and functionalists. Continue reading "Law on the Books Meets Law in Action"
Apr 6, 2015 Benjamin C. ZipurskyTorts
In addition to serving as the editor of Philosophical Foundations of the Law of Torts (OUP 2014), John Oberdiek has provided his own contribution, an excellent and penetrating chapter entitled Structure and Justification in Contractualist Tort Theory. (Full disclosure: John Goldberg and I have a co-authored chapter in the volume.) In it, Oberdiek offers a careful, original, and important analysis that brings together tort theory and the moral and political theory of contractualism, especially as developed by today’s leading contractualist, Thomas M. (“Tim”) Scanlon.
Economic theories of tort law derive from a roughly utilitarian framework for thinking about normative questions and numerous corrective justice accounts derive from a broadly-speaking Kantian framework. If one felt stuck between economic accounts that were too reductive and corrective justice accounts that were too focused upon abstract Kantian rights, one might ask whether social contract theory has anything to offer tort theory. George Fletcher’s Fairness and Utility in Tort Theory answered “yes,” and famously contributed Rawlsian ideas to tort theory. As Oberdiek helpfully explains, Gregory Keating’s work over the past twenty years has developed strong Rawlsian themes in tort theory in a more extensive and defensible manner than Fletcher’s evocative but concededly underdeveloped article. In negligence, products liability, and the law of nuisance, for example, Keating has admirably constructed a tort theory based on Rawlsian themes of fairness and reciprocity. Continue reading "Contractualism and Tort Law"
Apr 3, 2015 Susan MorseTax Law
Andrew Bird, Alexander Edwards, & Terry J. Shevlin,
Does the U.S. System of Taxation on Multinationals Advantage Foreign Acquirers? (January 15, 2015), available at
SSRN.
Did Burger King submit to acquisition by a Canadian donut chain for tax reasons? Or, at least, once Burger King and Tim Hortons decided to merge, did they choose to have a Canadian parent for tax reasons? A recent empirical study by Andrew Bird, Alexander Edwards and Terry Shevlin suggests that one tax factor—the existence of “locked out” offshore earnings—increases the likelihood that a non-U.S. acquirer will acquire a U.S. target. Bird, Edwards and Shevlin analyze thousands of merger transactions, without regard to whether the transactions might be labeled “inversions.” Their paper contributes to the considerable literature that tests the idea that accounting and tax disparities affect firm prices and transaction decisions.
Bird, Edwards and Shevlin examine several thousand public company firms with a parent corporation incorporated in the United States, for example under Delaware law. Each of the firms in the sample was acquired between 1995 and 2010. The paper considers the possibility that these target U.S. firms might have been acquired by U.S. or non-U.S. acquirers. Bird, Edwards and Shevlin find that when a U.S.-parented target corporation has more offshore “locked-out earnings,” the target firm is more likely to merge with a non-U.S. acquirer rather than a U.S. acquirer. Continue reading "Non-U.S. Acquirers: Clients for U.S. Targets’ “Locked-Out” Earnings?"
Apr 2, 2015 Nicole HuberfeldHealth Law
A longstanding and confounding divide exists between treatment of the individual and care for the collective. While the former is deemed health care, the latter is called public health, and American medicine has long maintained this dichotomy (a story that Paul Starr told decisively in The Social Transformation of American Medicine). This divide exists not only in the medical establishment but also in the law pertaining to it. While the field called health law tends toward being subject matter inclusive, it paradoxically has excluded public health law as a separate discipline. In part, this dichotomy may result from public health’s focus on the whole community rather than individual relationships, rights, and treatments. But also, this divide is strengthened by the historic primacy of private law rather than public law in health care, a hierarchy that has reinforced bias toward protecting medical stakeholders’ rights in their professional space. In addition, the law has sidestepped race, gender, economic, and other disparities in health care, allowing inequalities to fester. Though health care reform took on some of these issues, health disparities are a persistent problem. Fortunately, Professor Wiley is battling these old lines with her new work.
Health Law as Social Justice makes a convincing case that health law includes more than health care finance, bioethics, and regulation of related entities and markets. Instead, Wiley argues, health law and public health must be intertwined to effectively battle health disparities. The article contends that such a merger could be facilitated by drawing on the social justice movement and its understanding of the societal factors that affect certain industries and their corresponding fields in the law. Wiley argues that America’s deeply entrenched health disparities can only be uprooted by the communitarian considerations inherent in the booming study of social determinants of health, which she urges can translate to policy reform, effective advocacy, and legal change through broadened health care law inquiries. Continue reading "Addressing the Health Care/Public Health Dichotomy through Justice"
Apr 1, 2015 Jaya Ramji-NogalesLexImmigration
Moria Paz,
Between the Kingdom and the Desert Sun: Human Rights, Immigration, and Border Walls (Stanford Public Law Working Paper No. 2526521), available at
SSRN.
What is the relationship between international human rights law and migration? Though many might assume a simple one – human rights protect migrants – the reality is much more complex, raising profound questions about state sovereignty, politics, and the nature of international law. In her new paper, Human Rights, Immigration and Border Walls, Moria Paz maps out the central tension of this relationship, providing an insightful and balanced description of deep structural problems with the current human rights approach to migration.
Paz defines clearly for the reader the tension between sovereignty and individual rights that underpins the relationship between human rights and migration. She argues that the two normative doctrinal approaches available to resolve questions of migration necessarily clash. According to Paz, the human rights approach locates the right to a minimum level of human dignity in the individual, whether or not that individual has complied with formal immigration requirements. Yet these rights exist in a statist international legal regime that provides states with absolute authority to decide who can enter, “under what conditions, and with what legal consequences.” In other words, states and their members have the right to decide who can become a member of their political community and how the state’s resources will be allocated. This tension is, of course, grounded in age-old questions about international law’s ability to constrain state behavior. Yet the highly politicized nature of migration law sharpens this perennial conflict, leading to interesting and unexpected outcomes. Continue reading "The Borders of Human Rights"
