Monthly Archives: June 2015
Jun 12, 2015 Paul OhmTechnology Law
Thank you to the Jotwell editors for indulging me as I stretch their mission statement (and quite possibly their patience) by highlighting not an article nor even a conventional work of scholarship but rather a piece of software as the “thing I like (lots)”: mitmproxy, a tool created by Aldo Cortesi who shares authorship credit with Maximilian Hils and a larger “mitmproxy community.”
mitmproxy does just what it says on the tin (assuming you know how to read this particular kind of tin). It’s a Man-In-The-Middle Proxy server for the web. In English, this means that this tool allows you to reveal, with finely wrought control, exactly what your browser is saying and to whom. It is an X-ray machine for the web, one which lays many of the Internet’s secrets bare. Let me extol the many virtues of this well-designed piece of software, and after I do that, let me explain why I think this strikes me as an important contribution to legal scholarship. Continue reading "An Internet X-Ray Machine for the Masses"
Jun 10, 2015 SpearItCriminal Law
Like the Chimera of Greek mythology, American penal thought has its own powerful and elusive forces. In the world of punishment, proportionality occupies a similar space in the American imagination. The fancy of proportionality is to balance the severity of punishment with the severity of crime. On its own, the task is herculean, yet in practice, success becomes absolutely elusive due to consequentialist considerations that continue to shape law and policy.
In this article, Lacey and Pickard show why proportionality cannot deliver on its promise of equalizing punishment. In the ‘neo-classical’ articulation, punishment has come to be understood as a morally appropriate equivalent to an offense, which in theory is constrained by the requirement of proportionality. However, the authors argue that proportionality generates in itself no concrete limits to punishment, and that the question of “how much” remains open to the sways of convention, political decision, and expediency. Continue reading "Rethinking Proportionality in Punishment"
Jun 9, 2015 Elizabeth ThornburgCourts Law
Opponents of civil litigation portray it as one massive resource suck, focusing on its transaction costs and ignoring its social benefits–not only fair and accurate resolution of disputes, but also the potential for improved compliance with the laws governing civil society. Thus the current round of discovery rule amendments recite the usual claims about the expense of discovery, despite empirical research showing that discovery costs are actually quite modest in most cases. A number of civil procedure academics question the need for those new limits, even considering only costs.
Discovery’s benefits, while harder to measure, come in a number of forms. My last Jotwell essay highlighted the egalitarian information-sharing function of discovery. Steve Burbank’s forthcoming article, Proportionality and the Social Benefits of Discovery: Out of Sight and Out of Mind?, reminds us that lawsuits, including discovery, reflect the deliberate congressional policy choice of enforcing law through private litigation. And now Joanna Schwartz’s excellent article, Introspection Through Litigation, adds to the “benefits” side of the analysis. While Burbank focuses on benefits external to the litigants themselves, Schwartz calls our attention to a litigant-centered phenomenon: self-study, based on information unearthed and marshaled in the process of being sued. Continue reading "Discovery and Self-Improvement"
Jun 8, 2015 William FunkAdministrative Law
Adrian Vermeule, ‘
No’ (Review of Philip Hamburger, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?
),
Texas L.Rev. (forthcoming), available at
SSRN.
Last year, the University of Chicago Press published “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” by Philip Hamburger, the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at the Columbia University School of Law. A book by a named professor at a top-ten school published by a respected academic publisher with a provocative title would seem to be a must-read book for adlaw aficionados. His conclusion is that administrative law is unlawful, root and branch, because it is unlawful for administrative agencies to issue any rule or order that binds private parties. This is more than provocative; it is radical. Radically wrong. So wrong, one might wonder how it came to be published, and in any case so wrong that no one would take it seriously. Not so fast. In March, Justice Thomas cited it extensively in his concurrence in Department of Transportation v. Ass’n of American Railroads, 2015 WL 998536 (2015) to support his conclusion that the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 is an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority, concluding:
We have too long abrogated our duty to enforce the separation of powers required by our Constitution. We have overseen and sanctioned the growth of an administrative system that concentrates the power to make laws and the power to enforce them in the hands of a vast and unaccountable administrative apparatus that finds no comfortable home in our constitutional structure.
In his review of the book, Adrian Vermeule, the John H. Watson Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, steps up to be the Dr. Van Helsing to drive the stake through the heart of this vampire. He minces no words:
The book makes crippling mistakes about the administrative law of the United States; it misunderstands what that body of law actually holds and how it actually works. As a result the legal critique, launched by five-hundred-odd pages of text, falls well wide of the target.
And that’s just the beginning. Continue reading "Is Administrative Law Unlawful? NO!"
Jun 5, 2015 Matt BodieWork Law
Where does the employee end and the employer begin? In The New Cognitive Property, Orly Lobel confronts us with employers’ ever-expanding reach into the craniums of their employees, both past and present. The article continues Lobel’s groundbreaking work into the intersections between employment law, intellectual property, and what she terms “human capital law.” Employers are bringing new legal tools to bear against employees to keep their ideas within the firm and prevent them from using their talents outside their current workplace. And as her research makes clear, the costs may be borne not only by these workers, but by our society and its capacity to innovate.
Lobel’s 2013 book Talent Wants to Be Free explained, for a more general and business-oriented audience, how restrictions on employees such as covenants not to compete, trade secrets, and the work-for-hire doctrine limit employees’ capacity to develop and use their human capital. As a result, workers are less able to develop this capital and less likely to want to do so. These themes are updated and further developed in The New Cognitive Property, which spends a great deal of time on the legal mechanisms themselves. Her discussion of human capital restrictions circa 2015 is an eye-opening read even for those well-versed in the traditional employer tools in this area. You may know about the shop-right doctrine, but did you know that employers are laying claim to employees’ ideas that are too abstract to be patented? You have likely heard about trade secret law, or even “inevitable disclosure,” but how about the criminalization of trade secret law, where one employee was sent to jail for emailing himself code that was largely open-source? And while covenants not to compete have a long and familiar lineage, Lobel brings us up to date with a dizzying array of post-employment restrictions: non-solicitation, non-dealing, non-poaching, and non-hiring clauses. Using a series of vivid examples, The New Cognitive Property artfully explores the manifold ways in which employers are claiming more and more of their employees’ human capital for themselves. Continue reading "We Are What We Work"
Jun 3, 2015 Solangel MaldonadoTrusts & Estates
The primary goal of the law of wills is to allow individuals to decide how to distribute their property upon death. Yet, the vast majority of states prohibit minors under the age of 18 from distributing their property through a will. Interestingly, few scholars have questioned the reasons underlying this categorical denial of testamentary capacity to minors.
In his 2014 article, Rethinking the Testamentary Capacity of Minors, Professor Mark Glover examines the possible rationales for the rule and concludes that none of these justifications warrant denying all minors testamentary freedom. First, he addresses the justification most often cited by courts—the need to protect minors from the consequences of their own foolish decisions. Although no one would dispute that children do not always consider the potential consequences of their decisions (neither do adults), Professor Glover quickly illustrates that the testamentary context is probably the one area in which children need the least protection from the consequences of their imprudent decisions. To put it bluntly, a will only takes effect upon the testator’s death. As such, a child testator (like other testators) will not be alive to suffer the consequences of her foolish testamentary decisions. Continue reading "Too Young for a Will?"
Jun 2, 2015 Mark GeistfeldTorts
The interaction between medical malpractice law and the provision of health care is the subject of an ongoing policy debate. Do physicians practice “defensive medicine” to avoid being sued? Does the high cost of liability insurance or the looming threat of unfounded malpractice claims drive physicians from particular specialties or regions of the country? These issues have dominated the debate for years. Recently, another issue has gained prominence. Does malpractice law deter physicians from adopting innovative procedures? This is probably more important than the question of whether tort law induces the practice of “defensive medicine.” Whereas “defensive medicine” ordinarily increases the cost of health care via the provision of unnecessary medical treatments, the deterrence of medical innovations has a direct impact on health outcomes.
Gideon Parchomovsky and Alex Stein argued in 2008 that tort law deters medical innovations because the legal standard of required or reasonable care is defined by customary medical practices. A physician who innovates necessarily departs from custom. When her innovations cause harm, she faces the prospect of incurring malpractice liability for her apparently “unreasonable” behavior. That physicians might forego non-customary treatments in order to shield themselves from potential tort liability has been confirmed by a series of empirical studies conducted by Michael Frakes and others. Frakes and his colleagues have found that after a state has rejected local customs in favor of national standards for defining the required care, local surgery rates converge toward the national rate. When the standard of reasonable care was defined by local customs, physicians who followed these practices could avoid the threat of liability that they would face if they instead followed national norms. When jurisdictions shifted the legal measure of proper care from local to national customs, a significant number of physicians began to comply with the national practices. Apparently, this change in behavior was motivated by the change in tort law’s test of reasonable care, not by any independent medical evaluation of whether compliance with the local or national custom was in the best interests of the patient. Continue reading "Does Tort Law Stifle Innovative Medical Treatments?"
Jun 1, 2015 Daniel ShaviroTax Law
For good reasons on balance, the best academic work in tax (and other) law has moved far away in recent decades from focusing primarily on which answers to particular questions are legally correct. Not only have scholars wanted to pursue larger game than just the current, inevitably flawed, state of the law, but it is often hard to say what “legal correctness” means. Writing about policy, rather than just about legal correctness, not only broadens the menu of possible topics, but permits one to devise clearer criteria for assessing the merits of competing arguments.
There is, however, a downside to thus broadening, diversifying, and deepening the menu of favored topics. Having a positive influence on real world legal outcomes, especially if one can get there without having to tailor one’s analysis or conclusions in the manner of either a politician or a hired litigator, is both good in itself and something that we ought to care about—both as lawyers and as academics—as a matter of professional responsibility.
It is therefore a great thing to see tax academics and other members of the broader tax policy community actually swaying the outcome of a Supreme Court case in a good way. This happened in Comptroller v. Wynne, decided on May 18, 2015, in which an unusual Supreme Court majority composed of three conservatives (Alito, Kennedy, and Roberts) and two liberals (Breyer and Sotomayor) converged to strike down a Maryland income tax rule as discriminatory against interstate commerce. The majority opinion not only extensively cited work by tax scholars, but really relied on it, not just to decide the case at hand, but also to clarify the often-vexed law of how one should define discrimination under the dormant commerce clause. The Court drew on two amicus briefs (one by Michael Knoll and Ruth Mason and the other lead-authored by Alan Viard) which arose out of and/or applied academic work by both sets of authors, and gave both coherent economic content and usable formulations to the potentially nebulous idea of tax discrimination. Continue reading "Discrimination Against Interstate Commerce vs. Double Taxation"
