Yearly Archives: 2019
Mar 12, 2019 Mark KendeConstitutional Law
Brandon L. Garret,
Wealth, Equal Protection, and Due Process, Duke Law School Public Law & Legal Theory Series No. 2019-14 (Jan. 14, 2019), available at
SSRN.
It is a constitutional law truism that wealth and class are not suspect classifications, nor does the government have a substantive due process obligation to fund abortions or provide most government benefits. This is because our Constitution is generally seen as containing negative rights, not affirmative obligations. But there are exceptions. For example, the Sixth Amendment means that the government must pay for an indigent criminal defendant’s attorney. In his new article, Wealth, Equal Protection, and Due Process, Brandon Garrett argues that there are more exceptions than we usually think there are. Garrett shows that the Supreme Court has ruled that poor individuals are entitled to fair government treatment, creating a wider swath of government obligations to fund than we generally assume. The article’s reasoning and conclusions are powerful, especially at a time of great social inequality. Moreover, Garrett’s careful doctrinal analysis commendably avoids overreach.
Specifically, the article develops a concept called “equal process.” This term highlights the synergy between equal protection and due process in certain cases. Though not a completely new idea, the nomenclature is a useful descriptive tool, especially given some of the doctrinal complexity in this area. Garrett focuses in part on the underappreciated legacy of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bearden v. Georgia. In that case, the Court held that a judge could not reverse the grant of probation to a defendant, because of an unpaid fine or costs, unless the judge concluded after a hearing that the defendant willfully refused to pay, or had made an inadequate effort to obtain the resources. The judge also had to find that there were no suitable alternative remedies. In effect, the Court ruled that such a reversal must satisfy due process by fairly accounting for the defendant’s potentially suspect financial status. Continue reading "Constitutional “Equal Process” and the Problem of Poverty"
Mar 11, 2019 David OrentlicherHealth Law
Charles Silver, David A. Hyman, & Bernard Black,
Fictions and Facts: Medical Malpractice Litigation, Physician Supply, and Health Care Spending in Texas Before and After HB 4, __
Tex. Tech. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming), available at
SSRN.
It is difficult to convene a discussion of cost containment in health care without someone calling for tort reform. In the view of many in the medical community and the general public, malpractice suits play a key role in driving up health care costs. Litigation is expensive, and the threat of being sued causes doctors to order lots of unnecessary tests—the defensive medicine problem. Tort reform also is popular with elected officials. Most states have caps on damages; pre-trial medical review panels are common too.
But the gap between the theory and reality of malpractice reform is large. Confirming findings from earlier studies, Silver, Hyman, and Black report in their careful analysis of Texas data that tort reform fails to deliver on its promises. Moreover, it may be causing significant harm. Continue reading "The Myths and Reality of Tort Reform"
Mar 8, 2019 Aya GruberCriminal Law
Kate Levine’s article Discipline and Policing is the embodiment of timeliness. Its argument, in a nutshell, is that the progressive program to reform policing by making police officers’ individual disciplinary records (PDRs) transparent is ineffective if not counterproductive, exacerbates racial disparities, and promotes carceral logic. This thesis lies at the intersection of two fascinating criminal justice conversations of the day. The first involves the explosion of scholarly and political exposition on how to reform policing from the bottom up—exposition that has dislodged top-down Fourth Amendment doctrinalism from its stranglehold on academic attention.The second regards the growing trend of powerful political actors, plutocrats, and others in authority to invoke progressive civil libertarian and anti-incarceration arguments when faced with accusations of private and public wrongdoing. In turn, progressives call for swift, summary, and merciless discipline in such cases.
The bedfellows have become very strange, indeed. We live in a world where the most authoritarian U.S. president in decades touts the importance of the presumption of innocence, champions sentence reduction, and critiques police violence. Of course, he does so selectively and calls out the FBI for its raids on his nefarious associates but lauds ICE for raiding the family homes of law-abiding immigrants. We live in a world where liberal talking heads night after night praise federal law enforcement officers and prosecutors for casting wide investigative nets, flipping witnesses by threatening long sentences, and seizing lawyer-client documents. Progressive analysts declare with utmost indignance that Trump should cooperate with Mueller because “innocent people have nothing to hide and nothing to fear from police interrogation.” Continue reading "The Left’s Law-and-Order Agenda"
Mar 7, 2019 Roger M. MichalskiCourts Law
Abbe R. Gluck, Ashley Hall, & Gregory Curfman,
Civil Litigation and the Opioid Epidemic: The Role of Courts in a National Health Crisis, 46(2)
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 351–366 (2018), available on
SSRN.
Susan Sontag documented how illness becomes metaphor, wrapped in “punitive or sentimental fantasies.” The bubonic plague is no longer a mere disease but an instrument of wrath and moral judgment on the failings of a community. A popular mythology morphed tuberculosis into a romanticized episode afflicting the reckless, poor, sensual consumed by their repressed passions. Cancer turns into the disease of the capitalistic affluent; AIDS becomes a social category to punishing deviance. In these cultural myths disease expresses and causes character and thus contains moral judgment. Disease becomes shameful, a stigma to hide and wrap in guilt. Sontag argued that such myths can survive irrefutable human experience and medical knowledge. Treating illness as metaphor is obviously dangerous and misguided. Sontag calls on us to de-mystify illness and become resistant to metaphoric thinking.
The illness of our time is the opioid epidemic. We are in the process of characterizing and metaphorizing it. Litigation plays an important role in this process. As the debate about (oh what to call it?) non-party/national/universal/cosmic/high-volume/prospective-repetition injunctions has reminded us, to give something a name is to classify it and with that classification comes conceptual and normative baggage. Opioid litigation similarly continues to be part of a definitional battle. Is this about an epidemic, crisis, loss of moral fiber, white middle-class decline, crime-wave, plague, or something else? Litigation and procedural vehicles lean on these different conceptions and, in turn, shape how we view that thing out there in the world.
I was reminded of the problem of categorization and Sontag’s account when reading Civil Litigation and the Opioid Epidemic: The Role of Courts in a National Health Crisis. The article is an excellent primer on the role of courts in “impos[ing] blame–and with it, enduring responsibility” for the harm caused by the opioid epidemic. Continue reading "A Primer on Opioid-Epidemic Litigation"
Mar 6, 2019 Christopher M. BrunerCorporate Law
Ofer Eldar & Andrew Verstein,
The Enduring Distinction between Business Entities and Security Interests, 92
S. Cal. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2019), available at
SSRN.
While business entities have existed for centuries, their essential nature and forms of utility remain contested matters today. Over recent years, the asset partitioning theory of business entities has become highly influential, yet even for those inclined to accept it, fundamental questions remain unresolved. As Ofer Eldar and Andrew Verstein observe in the paper cited above, security interests likewise function to partition assets for the benefit of particular creditors, yet we lack a nuanced account of when one approach might be preferable to the other. In their paper, Eldar and Verstein develop a compelling foundation for such an account, analyzing these differing modes of asset partitioning and providing a fresh perspective on legal and market dynamics prompting financial innovations that, at least at first glance, appear to “blur the distinction between security interests and entities.”
Eldar and Verstein argue that, while business entities and security interests alike possess capacity to order creditors’ claims in a manner unachievable through contracts, a critical distinction remains. Whereas business entities create a “floating” priority scheme in the sense that an entity “can always update it to undermine the priority of existing creditors by pledging the assets to additional creditors,” security interests create a “fixed” priority scheme favoring “the first perfected secured interest over other claims in the assets.” This, they conclude, is why both forms of asset partitioning persist. “Security interests and entities coexist in the world and in particular structures because they offer different and irreplaceable priority schemes for creditors.” Continue reading "Asset Partitioning and Financial Innovation"
Mar 5, 2019 Sam F. HalabiInternational & Comparative Law
Innovation policy—a relatively new phrase for an old set of top-down competitiveness approaches (e.g. “industrial policy,” “science policy,” “research policy,” and “technology policy”)—is necessarily a combination of centralized investment, structure of private-sector incentives, and public policy priorities.This combination has always been unwieldy, multivariate, and politically charged. As a result, constituencies favoring one or other approaches (e.g. longer patent protection, more funding of public universities and research infrastructure, tariff or non-tariff import measures) have lacked a unifying framework through which to analyze shared problems.
In Innovation Policy Pluralism, Daniel J. Hemel and Lisa Larrimore Ouellette provide that framework. With a focus on intellectual property law, Hemel and Ouellette take the universe of innovation instruments—patents, prizes, grants, tax credits, purchase leverage, public licensing and other alternatives—and create a coherent method by which to assess and value them. Dissecting these options into “innovation incentives” and “allocation mechanisms,” Hemel and Ouellette urge policy-makers to consider alternatives under which these incentives and mechanisms may be matched, mixed, or layered. Continue reading "Does TRIPS Stop International IP Free-Riders?"
Mar 4, 2019 Susan MorseTax Law
I am on alert for tax law changes as I teach Federal Income Tax this semester for the first time since the passage of the 2017 tax act. They seem to appear out of nowhere, rather than as part of a predictable pattern. What can explain seemingly disconnected provisions, scattered throughout the Code and enacted without an explicit policy explanation?
Linda Sugin takes on this question in The Social Meaning of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, published in 2018 at the Yale Law Journal Forum. Her critical perspective makes an effort to divine the worldview embedded in the TCJA based on the content of the enacted law. Sugin’s engineering effort shows the following “American priorities and values revealed by the TCJA:
- The traditional family is best;
- Individuals have greater entitlement to their capital than to their labor;
- People are autonomous individuals;
- Charity is for the rich; and
- Physical things are important.” (P. 404.)
Sugin reviews dozens of provisions to support her arguments. A sampling follows to offer a sense of her argument. Continue reading "Morality and the 2017 Tax Act"
Mar 3, 2019 Very Fakeditor
REVISED3: I am on alert for tax law changes as I teach Federal Income Tax this semester for the first time since the passage of the 2017 tax act. They seem to appear out of nowhere, rather than as part of a predictable pattern. What can explain seemingly disconnected provisions, scattered throughout the Code and enacted without an explicit policy explanation?
Linda Sugin takes on this question in The Social Meaning of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, published in 2018 at the Yale Law Journal Forum. Her critical perspective makes an effort to divine the worldview embedded in the TCJA based on the content of the enacted law. Sugin’s engineering effort shows the following “American priorities and values revealed by the TCJA:
- The traditional family is best;
- Individuals have greater entitlement to their capital than to their labor;
- People are autonomous individuals;
- Charity is for the rich; and
- Physical things are important.” (P. 404.)
Sugin reviews dozens of provisions to support her arguments. A sampling follows to offer a sense of her argument.
The TCJA, argues Sugin, reveals its traditional family bias through a number of provisions, including rate bracket changes and the replacement of the dependent care credit (helpful for two-working-parent families) with an increase in the generally-available child tax credit. Another change imposes a $500 fine on a tax preparer who fails to diligence a taxpayer’s claim of head of household status—a filing position designed to help low—and middle-income single-parent families. This last provision prompts tax preparers to be skeptical when a client says she is a single parent. No such incentive is presented when two clients say that they are married. Continue reading "OL Codes Test Two"
Mar 3, 2019 Very Fakeditor
REVISED: I am on alert for tax law changes as I teach Federal Income Tax this semester for the first time since the passage of the 2017 tax act. They seem to appear out of nowhere, rather than as part of a predictable pattern. What can explain seemingly disconnected provisions, scattered throughout the Code and enacted without an explicit policy explanation?
Linda Sugin takes on this question in The Social Meaning of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, published in 2018 at the Yale Law Journal Forum. Her critical perspective makes an effort to divine the worldview embedded in the TCJA based on the content of the enacted law. Sugin’s engineering effort shows the following “American priorities and values revealed by the TCJA:
- The traditional family is best;
- Individuals have greater entitlement to their capital than to their labor;
- People are autonomous individuals;
- Charity is for the rich; and
- Physical things are important.” (P. 404.)
Sugin reviews dozens of provisions to support her arguments. A sampling follows to offer a sense of her argument.
The TCJA, argues Sugin, reveals its traditional family bias through a number of provisions, including rate bracket changes and the replacement of the dependent care credit (helpful for two-working-parent families) with an increase in the generally-available child tax credit. Another change imposes a $500 fine on a tax preparer who fails to diligence a taxpayer’s claim of head of household status—a filing position designed to help low—and middle-income single-parent families. This last provision prompts tax preparers to be skeptical when a client says she is a single parent. No such incentive is presented when two clients say that they are married. Continue reading "Test Effect of OL tags"
Mar 1, 2019 Christopher WalkerAdministrative Law
Amy Semet,
An Empirical Examination of Agency Statutory Interpretation, 103
Minn. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2019), available at
SSRN.
Inspired by Lisa Bressman and Abbe Gluck’s pioneering empirical study on how congressional staffers approach drafting statutes, I spent months in 2013 surveying federal agency rule drafters on how they interpret statutes and draft regulations. Among its many methodological limitations, my study focused exclusively on agency rulemaking. Agencies, of course, interpret statutes in a variety of other regulatory contexts, including adjudication, enforcement, guidance, permitting, and monitoring—just to name a few. Indeed, it’s fair to say that most agency statutory interpretation takes place outside of the rulemaking context.
Thanks to an exciting new voice in administrative law, we now have some more light shining into this black box of agency statutory interpretation. In An Empirical Examination of Agency Statutory Interpretation, Amy Semet turns her attention to agency adjudication and, in particular, how the multi-member National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) approaches statutory interpretation. To conduct this empirical assessment, Semet reviews more than 7,000 cases that the NLRB heard over two dozen years (1993-2016) and three presidential administrations (Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama). This study provides a treasure trove of insights into agency statutory interpretation. Here are a few of the highlights: Continue reading "Looking Inside Multi-Member Agency Statutory Interpretation"
