Yearly Archives: 2019
Jul 26, 2019 Ted SichelmanIntellectual Property Law
- Paul R. Gugliuzza, The Supreme Court at the Bar of Patents, 95 Notre Dame L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2020), available at SSRN.
- Paul R. Gugliuzza, Elite Patent Law, 104 Iowa L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2019), available at SSRN.
Christopher Langdell’s “case” method of teaching the law has dominated the law school classroom for over a century. In this pedagogical approach, students typically read appellate opinions, and professors tease “rules” from the opinions—often in concert with the so-called Socratic method, which enlists students to aid in this abstractive process. This approach is said to make students “think like lawyers,” but what’s typically ignored in the process is the role lawyers actually play in the very cases under consideration. Instead, the working assumption is that judges are presented with arguments and facts up high from anonymous sets of ideal lawyers, who never miss a key argument or forget a relevant fact.
Of course, the actual world of lawyering is much messier, and lawyers range from the glorious and gifted to the struggling and essentially incompetent. But exactly how does this variation in attorney quality affect case outcomes? This all-too-important question has scarcely been addressed, much less answered, by systematic academic study. In an outstanding duo of articles, Paul Gugliuzza shines newfound light on the issue by examining the role of “elite” advocates in the certiorari process at the U.S. Supreme Court. Continue reading "How Elite Lawyers Shape the Law"
Jul 25, 2019 Rebecca TushnetTechnology Law
Tarleton Gillespie’s important book Custodians of the Internet unpacks the simultaneous impossibility and necessity of content moderation, highlighting nuance rather than answering questions. Within big companies, content moderation is treated like custodial work, like sweeping the floors—and recent revelations reinforce that the abjectness of this work seems to contaminate those who do it. The rules are made by people in positions of relative power, while their enforcement is traumatic, poorly-paid, outsourced scutwork. But for major platforms, taking out the trash—making sure the site isn’t a cesspool—is in fact their central function.
Gillespie urges us to pay attention to the differences between a content policy—which is a document that both tries to shape the reactions of various stakeholders and is shaped by them—and actual content moderation; both are vitally important. (Facebook’s newly announced “Supreme Court” is on the former side: it will make important decisions, but make them at a level of generality that will leave much day-to-day work to be done by the custodial staff.) Every provision of a content policy represents a horror story and also something that will definitely be repeated. Gillespie is heartbreakingly clear on the banality of evil at scale: “a moderator looking at hundreds of pieces of Facebook content every hour needs more specific instructions on what exactly counts as ‘sexual violence,’ so these documents provide examples like ‘To snap a bitch’s neck, make sure to apply all your pressure to the middle of her throat’—which Facebook gives a green checkmark, meaning posts like that should stay.” (P. 112.) Continue reading "The Constant Trash Collector: Platforms and the Paradoxes of Content Moderation"
Jul 24, 2019 Bethany BergerLexNative Peoples Law
States are the paradigmatic perpetrators of harms to indigenous rights, but this is changing. Increasingly, as Professor Sergio Puig points out, multinational corporations are the source of such harms, ranging from research extraction to commodification of indigenous knowledge and culture. Scholars and advocates typically turn to either domestic law or international human rights law to address these harms, and often treat international economic processes as themselves antithetical to indigenous rights. Professor Puig, however, convincingly lays out the ways that international economic law creates protections for indigenous rights, and analyzes needed enhancements for those protections. More radically, he argues that protecting indigenous rights is not contrary to economic globalization, but is core to justifying its legitimacy. International Indigenous Economic Law powerfully breaks down silos between human and indigenous rights and economic law, and will be valuable reading for scholars and advocates from these different fields.
Global economic development, Professor Puig shows, has left many indigenous peoples behind. While comprising only 5% of the world’s population, indigenous peoples make up 15% of the world’s poor, and a third of the world’s one billion “extremely poor.” Although their traditional territories encompass some of the earth’s most valuable resources, resource development more often leads to displacement and impoverishment than to indigenous prosperity. When indigenous law scholars have studied these harms, they turn to human rights law to solve them, and often treat economic development as a threat. Professor Puig, however, argues that this focus ignores valuable tools provided by economic law, including tools that are more easily enforced against non-state actors than traditional human rights instruments. International economic scholars, in contrast, largely ignore indigenous rights, or at best treat them as exceptions to international economic law. But, Professor Puig demonstrates, international economic instruments themselves have long paid attention to indigenous rights, often in surprisingly progressive ways. Continue reading "Indigenous Harms from Global Development—Can International Economic Law Provide a Cure?"
Jul 23, 2019 Michael E HerzAdministrative Law
It is a truism that agency organizational charts are at least in part aspirational or idealized. The political appointees at the top lack perfect control over the career employees beneath them in the hierarchy. When all are rowing in the same direction, such agency costs matter little and may go unnoticed. But suppose they are not. What if they barely perceive themselves as in the same boat?
Right now, in many or most federal agencies, it seems that the always present gap between political and career officials is extraordinarily, perhaps unprecedentedly, wide. We see calls for and examples of outright defiance. The historical moment raises the question: Can direct disobedience by agency rank and file ever be justified?
Here, in Civil Servant Disobedience, Jennifer Nou offers an answer. Continue reading "Gandhis of the Deep State"
Jul 22, 2019 Martin H. MalinWork Law
The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) prohibits employers and labor organizations from coercing others in several respects. Section 8(a) (1) prohibits employers from coercing employees with respect to their right to engage in concerted activity for mutual aid and protection and to refrain from such activity. Section 8(b)(1)(A) prohibits labor organizations similarly and Section 8(b)(4) prohibits labor organizations from coercing any person with one of four prohibited objects, the most significant being forcing that person to cease doing business with another person, i.e. engage in a secondary boycott. But the NLRA does not define coercion and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and courts have made mostly intuitive judgments about what is coercive. In The Content of Coercion, Michael Oswalt seeks a path to an empirical basis for analyzing whether employer or labor organization conduct is coercive. Although I disagree with several of Oswalt’s conclusions for labor law doctrine, I admire this work for its path-breaking analysis.
Oswalt observes that the NLRA began as the union-supportive Wagner Act but was counterbalanced by the employer-friendly Taft-Hartley amendments. The result was a “fundamentally hybridized statute that protects the right to freely choose [whether to organize] as it also defends the right to freely meddle [in that choice], setting the stage for a conundrum that has haunted labor law ever since: how much free speech is too much for free choice?” (P. 1592.) The answer is when speech becomes coercive because coercion overcomes rational decision making. But, lacking a definition of coercion, the NLRB has resorted to analytical shortcuts. Threats over which a party has control are coercive but predictions of what could happen, absent other unfair labor practices, are not. Picketing is coercive but hand-billing is not. Continue reading "Coercion in Labor Law: A Fresh Perspective"
Jul 19, 2019 Shubha GhoshInternational & Comparative Law
Presented as the Foulsten Siefken Lecture at Washburn Law School, Professor Okediji’s article, A Tiered Approach to Traditional Knowledge, has implications beyond its focus on traditional knowledge. That’s why it is an article I like lots, as we say in these pages. Its publication in the Washburn Law Journal was accompanied by several thoughtful commentaries, which along with the principal article form a valuable symposium. I like the commentaries a lot too. But I will focus on the main course rather than the tempting side dishes.
Traditional knowledge consists of know-how passed on within local communities carrying forth understandings about healing, cooking, and other fruitful uses of the natural environment. Traditional knowledge is different from traditional cultural heritage, which consists of folklore and artifacts that convey communal interpretations about the world. A common issue raised by both traditional knowledge and traditional cultural heritage is whether their content should in some sense be owned either for the purposes of commercial exploitation or for preservation. Since the legal and political issues are different for the two categories, authors tend to narrow their attention to one or the other. Here, Professor Okediji focuses on traditional knowledge. Continue reading "Layering Property, Disseminating Knowledge"
Jul 18, 2019 Jamila Jefferson – JonesProperty
Frank Rudy Cooper reminds us that, “We are born unable to protect ourselves, we become feeble with age, we must fear natural disasters, and our social institutions might work against us.” Vulnerability is the inescapable condition of all humankind that compels us to construct various means of mitigating that vulnerability through “resilience.” The creation and accumulation of property is one of the ways in which we buffer ourselves against our own fragile natures and the threatening forces of the world around us.
In her recent article, Professor Lua Kamál Yuille confronts vulnerability and property-centered modes of resilience in a compelling reframing of the modern street gang as a creator of “identity property.” (P. 467.)
We know that gangs fill institutional and societal gaps, replacing family, school, and work. Yuille, however, explores this gap-filling role through the lens of Martha Albertson Fineman’s “vulnerability theory.” She situates the gang’s creation and maintenance of its “identity property” firmly in the milieu of “resilience”—“the accumulation of sufficient resources to allow individuals to confront, adapt to, ameliorate, compensate for, or contain vulnerability.” (P. 475.) Continue reading "Should Government Compensate Street Gangs for the Loss of “Identity Property?”"
Jul 17, 2019 Dara E. PurvisFamily Law
Yuvonne Lindgren,
Trump’s Angry White Women: Motherhood, Nationalism, and Abortion, __
Hofstra L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2019), available at
SSRN.
In June, columnist E. Jean Carroll added her name to the list of women who have alleged that President Donald Trump sexually assaulted them, describing him raping her in the dressing room of a department store over two decades ago. In response, Trump said that Carroll was “not my type.” The controversy revived a discussion from the 2016 election asking how a man with multiple credible allegations of sexual assault, recorded on audio boasting that he grabbed women “by the pussy,” received a significant proportion of women’s votes— according to exit polls, fifty-two percent of the votes of white women.
In Trump’s Angry White Women: Motherhood, Nationalism, and Abortion, forthcoming in the Hofstra Law Review, Yvonne Lindgren provides a fascinating explanation rooted in the fights around abortion. She traces a shift in the anti-abortion movement’s tactics after Roe v. Wade to focus on protecting a specific traditional vision of white motherhood through to today’s political and legal conflicts. In her telling, this change in anti-abortion rhetoric laid the groundwork for modern conservative arguments that claim white nationalist motherhood as their standard in broader culture wars. Lindgren’s argument is not only persuasive in its own right, but also helps to explain other movements in the law to limit women’s autonomy within the family and promote a narrow idea of appropriate motherhood. Continue reading "Abortion, Motherhood, and Donald Trump"
Jul 16, 2019 Steve GoldLexEnvironmental Law
There are two problems with cost-benefit models for environmental policymaking: the model inputs and the model outputs. This is not exactly news. Researchers and reporters have documented honest overestimates of regulatory costs, honest undercounts of regulatory benefits, and dishonest attempts to cook the cost-benefit books. The authors of the articles reviewed here avoid such easy targets. Instead, they strike at the heart of the welfarist policymaking preference that promotes and privileges cost-benefit analysis.
Richard Revesz challenges the orthodoxy that distributional effects should not motivate regulatory choices. Bernard Harcourt assails the myth that cost-benefit analysis offers an objective motivation for regulatory choices. Continue reading "Two Chapters in the GIGO Mess Epic"
Jul 15, 2019 Eli WaldLegal Profession
Over the past fifty years, the study of the legal profession has become a robust and exciting field, featuring rich doctrinal, empirical and theoretical inquiries as well as interdisciplinary insights. The growing body of scholarship includes globe-spanning comparative studies, ranging from the past and present of somewhat similar common law systems (several recent jots have covered fascinating regulatory trends and de-regulation developments in the UK), to more distinct legal professions.
Samuel Levine’s two-volume book, Jewish Law and American Law—A Comparative Study, makes an important contribution to comparative law studies of criminal and constitutional law (volume 1), and analyses of law and narrative, legal history and law and public policy (volume 2). Lawyers, law students, and scholars of the legal profession are likely to be particularly interested in Section Five of volume 1, consisting of five chapters comparing the Jewish and U.S. legal systems. In a concise and enlightening fashion, Professor Levine explores numerous legal profession topics, offering contextual insights and raising ideas for future analysis. Continue reading "Learning from Others: The U.S. Legal Profession and Comparative Law"
