Yearly Archives: 2020
May 19, 2020 Deborah DinnerLegal History
On June 30, 1900, hotel laundress Nettie Blom operated a machine called a mangle, which used steam power to iron linens. In a tragic moment, the machine pulled in her hand and crushed it. How do we understand the historical and moral meanings of Blom’s injury? Do they lie in the excruciating pain she suffered during the accident or in its aftermath? In Blom’s loss of capacity to earn her livelihood? Or in her inability to continue to do the things she once enjoyed doing with her hand, from household crafts to engaging in a caress? Nate Holdren’s deeply thoughtful and important book, Injury Impoverished, which tells the story of the rise of a workers’ compensation regime in the early twentieth century, begins with Blom’s story and these questions.
In exploring their answers, Holdren investigates how individual workers, union leaders, insurance executives, major employers, and state administrators thought about the employment relationship. Ideas rather than narrative drive the book’s structure. Holdren draws explicitly on multiple political and legal theories to analyze evolving social and legal conceptions of disability, risk, and employment. In particular, Holdren uses the political theorist Nancy Fraser’s argument that justice requires both egalitarian redistribution and recognition, or treatment with dignity and respect. Holdren reminds the reader of “the old strike slogan . . . people need both bread and roses.” (P.12.) He argues persuasively that the workers’ compensation laws made partial strides toward distributive equity, while sacrificing recognition for workers’ full humanity. Continue reading "The Injustices of Workers’ Compensation"
May 15, 2020 Allan ErbsenCourts Law
Jonathan R. Nash & Michael G. Collins,
The Certificate of Division and the Early Supreme Court, 94
S. Cal. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2021), available at
SSRN.
The Constitution does not resolve foundational questions about the purpose and mechanics of the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction. Should the nation’s highest court focus on resolving conflicts between lower courts, correcting errors, or opining on especially salient issues? And who should decide which appeals the Supreme Court will hear: the Justices by exercising discretion, Congress by enacting mandatory criteria, or lower courts by certifying issues for review? The Constitution’s flexibility regarding these questions creates leeway for experimentation.
A forthcoming article by Jonathan Nash and Michael Collins explores a fascinating jurisdictional experiment from the Court’s formative years. The experiment addressed tie votes arising from the quirky composition of circuit courts. Modern circuit courts sit in panels of three and primarily hear appeals. But for several decades circuit courts sat in panels of two and exercised both appellate and original jurisdiction. Panels typically consisted of one district judge and one Supreme Court Justice. The prospect of disagreement between the judge and Justice required a tiebreaking procedure. Continue reading "Discretion, Division, and the Supreme Court’s Docket"
May 14, 2020 Dotan OliarIntellectual Property Law
Kristelia García,
Super-Statutory Contracting, __
Wash. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2020), available at
SSRN.
Economic activities often conflict: a rancher’s stray cattle may reduce the value of a neighboring farmer’s crops, or a tech company’s file-sharing app may reduce the value of music labels’ records. When conflicts arise, society needs to decide which party’s interest to protect, and whether to do so with a property right or a liability rule. The law and economics literature teaches that lawmakers should devise entitlements while taking into account post-allocation transaction costs, with the goal of ensuring that resources end up in the hands of parties who put them to their most productive use.
Scholars have accordingly debated the relative performance of property rights and liability rules. In a seminal article, Rob Merges famously argued that one should not worry too much about transaction costs accompanying property rights. Should these prove prohibitive (as in the case of radio stations who need to license rights to many musical compositions that they wish to play over the air), and the property right choice inefficient, IP owners are likely to “contract into liability rules”; that is, they will privately arrange liability-rule-based licensing schemes (such as ASCAP) to lower licensees’ costs of access.
In a wonderful new article, Kristelia García reviews recent market dynamics that lend support to the mirror-image argument; namely, that one should not overstate the arguable inefficiencies of liability rules. Continue reading "Opting Out of Liability Rules"
May 13, 2020 Andrew HalpinJurisprudence
The subject of legal reasoning has stimulated an enormously wide variety of books and essays, articles and comments, offering the reader systematic exposition, technical illumination, practical guidance and critical commentary. The reader is clearly unsatisfied. The production of material continues without any sense that the latest contribution is about to close the debate and complete our understanding. Maks Del Mar’s recent book is not likely to provide the last word on legal reasoning. It does provide a novel perspective on where the elusiveness of legal reasoning might lie. It seems that we cannot capture the subject because however learned we might become in the techniques of reasoning with the law that we have, there is always the problem that imaginary laws might be invoked to disturb the precedents and doctrines, the templates and patterns, into which we fit existing legal materials.
That is a gross oversimplification and mischaracterization of Del Mar’s book, in at least three respects. First, for Del Mar, an imaginary realm of law does not exist outside of existing legal materials but rather legal materials possess an imaginative capacity. Secondly, legal reasoning does not get subverted by stretches of the imagination; instead, the imagination is a core faculty employed in legal reasoning. And thirdly, despite the limitation suggested by its subtitle, this is not simply a book about imagination, nor simply a book about legal reasoning. Continue reading "Imaginary Laws"
May 12, 2020 Craig KonnothHealth Law
Political and social discourse is often characterized by an oppression Olympics. Which group, which characteristic, can assert that they are “more authentic, more oppressed, and thus more correct“? This dynamic appeared in full force during the Democratic primary. Was Pete Buttigieg more oppressed because of his homosexuality? Elizabeth Warren for being a woman? Kamala Harris for being a black woman? As a recent article by Khiara Bridges shows us, thinking about oppression in this way misses the nuance of how different forms of oppression intersect with one another. In Race, Pregnancy, and the Opioid Epidemic, Khiara Bridges weaves together some of today’s most perplexing issues.
Bridges begins with a puzzle. White privilege, as commonly understood, is supposed to promote the life outcomes of white individuals (and, conversely, undermine those of people of color). If that is the case, how can we explain the opioid crisis that has disproportionately undermined the life expectancy of white individuals? The problem can be stated more universally, beyond the opioid context: “[W]hen bad things happen to white people—when the jobs and the industries on which they once relied disappear, when their preferred university denies them admission, when they lose a promotion to a nonwhite candidate, when they die from suicide and drug overdoses at unprecedented rates—we are left to believe that white people experiencing these negative consequences did not have white privilege[.]” (P. 774.) Some might even argue that white privilege never existed to begin with. Perhaps other axes of oppression—sex or poverty—have more oppressive force than race. Continue reading "Intersectionality in the Opioid Crisis: Anti-Black Racism and White, Pregnant, Opioid Users"
May 11, 2020 Albertina AntogniniFamily Law
For those of us who spend any appreciable amount of time online—and lately, that is likely many of us—it has been difficult to miss Jia Tolentino’s recently published book, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, which has enjoyed some measure of digital fame, appearing even on President Obama’s Instagram “Favorite Books of 2019” post. Despite its renown, it is perhaps not yet a “must read” for family law scholars and teachers, which is the genesis for this Jot: it is a book I liked lots, with a number of less-than-obvious connections to, and implications for, family law.
The book is organized into nine different essays that survey a series of contemporary topics ranging from the Fyre Festival debacle, as symptomatic of the modern economic condition, to the history of the University of Virginia, Tolentino’s alma mater, as it relates to sexual assault on campus. Tolentino is a beautiful writer—her sentences are tightly coiled around key insights and her cleverness never gets in the way of her clarity or coherence. In carrying us outside of the terrain of legal texts, Trick Mirror provides a novel vantage point from which to consider themes that lie at the core of family law. I focus here in particular on how Tolentino mines the ubiquity of performance in our public and private lives—her essays follow its stronghold from marriage, to social media, to the lack of meaningful representation. Questions of performance similarly permeate family law, plaguing its very existence: inquiries into performance have the power to decide what families are and which families matter at the same time that they can expose it all as a sham, revealing the whole system to be “no more than a sustained pattern of conduct.” Continue reading "Reflections on Family Law"
May 8, 2020 Maneesha DeckhaEquality
The rule of law is a ubiquitous if elusive policy and legal term deployed worldwide. It is also a founding narrative of British colonialism. It thus strikes some as anathema to equality. But given its foundational stature in numerous legal orders, when equality-promoting measures are perceived as promoting the rule of law, they can receive the validation they may desperately need. Conversely, when such measures are seen to offend the rule of law, they risk being dismissed as constitutionally illegitimate. What we understand the rule of law to be, then, vitally matters to substantive equality goals. Currently, a formal or thin conception prevails in many jurisdictions. In this narrow conceptualization, the rule of law is directed at maintaining formal separation of powers and a system of positive laws where all exercise of public authority has a legal source, and no one is above the law.
Many equality initiatives, however, to be seen to have rule of law backing and thus legal legitimacy, need a thicker account of the rule of law, one that can keep pace with changing social mores and normative commitments. How, then, to move our legal systems toward this thicker conceptualization? In The Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines, Soft Law, and the Procedural Rule of Law, Jodi Lazare deftly contributes one answer to this all-embracing question with her analysis of a particular tool meant to ensure women’s substantive equality: the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines (“the Advisory Guidelines”) in Canada. Continue reading "Thickening Rather than Abandoning the Rule of Law: Revisiting What Counts as “Law” through a Controversy about What Should Guide Judges in Awarding Spousal Support"
May 7, 2020 SpearItCriminal Law
“With the Fourth Amendment gone, eyes are on the First,
That’s why I’m spittin cyanide each and every verse”
These lyrics from Paris’ 2003 album, Sonic Jihad, seemingly anticipate a future of curtailed free speech for African Americans. The growing practice of using rap lyrics against criminal defendants represents one way this is occurring in the United States today. In the song, the reference to the Fourth Amendment’s absence refers to policies that include aggressive stop and frisk campaigns, the proliferation of “no-knock” warrants, and police shootings of Blacks, among other afflictions. Simply living in a “high crime” area—what is often the hoods, ghettos, and barrios of the United States—is a factor that works to the detriment of the defendant when it comes to police establishing reasonable suspicion to stop, and possibly frisk, an individual. For Paris, this gutting of the Fourth Amendment has cleared space on the chopping block for free speech.
Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America, by Erik Nielson and Andrea L. Dennis, explains how prosecutors use rap lyrics against criminal defendants at trials and sentencings. The book highlights a modern legal tactic that reads like a magic trick. In the hocus-pocus, a prosecutor introduces an author’s poetry into evidence against the author himself, in order to disappear the author into the criminal justice complex. Nielson and Dennis spill the secrets behind this trick, arguing that this “evidence” should be excluded under evidentiary rules. Using lyrics as evidence in this way is bewildering. It effectively treats the defendant’s lyrics as a biography for whatever purpose the prosecution needs. Even more mystifying is that a product of free speech, rap, is being used to curtail free speech itself, which has stark racial implications since the tactic focuses almost exclusively on minority defendants and a predominantly Black art form. Continue reading "The New Rap Sheet: Prosecuting Crimes, Chilling Free Speech"
May 6, 2020 Da LinCorporate Law
The shareholder base of modern U.S. public companies is diverse. At one end of the spectrum are large asset managers like BlackRock, which by itself has almost $7 trillion in assets under management. At the far other end are ordinary people—so-called “retail” investors. And between these two ends lie a hodgepodge of institutions, including public pension funds, hedge funds, insurance companies, and university endowments. Should corporate law assume that these shareholders all share a common goal?
According to Professor Ann Lipton’s timely and clear-eyed article, Shareholder Divorce Court, the answer is an emphatic “no.” While corporate law has traditionally elided the messy reality of shareholder heterogeneity by assuming that all types of shareholders have the same interest—wealth maximization—the landscape has changed. But as courts in recent years have adjusted and accommodated shareholder preferences that deviate from wealth maximization, they have created a new problem: smaller, less diversified shareholders may now be forced to accept suboptimal transactions that are not designed to promote their interests. Lipton’s account is important. In making her case and exploring how the right of appraisal can be reconfigured to act as a remedy, Lipton excavates yet another consequence of Delaware’s newfound confidence in the efficacy of the shareholder franchise. Continue reading "Corporate Law Can No Longer Ignore Shareholder Heterogeneity"
May 5, 2020 Francesca BartlettLegal Profession
Margaret Thornton’s work has had a defining role in the landscape of socio-legal scholarship in Australia and across the common law world for the last generation. She has long critiqued the neo-liberal turn of our major institutions (especially in the academy and legal profession) with an emphasis on profit maximisation. She coined the term “Benchmark Male” to capture a prevailing notion of an “ideal worker” with supposed attributes often unattainable for women and others struggling under the yoke of gendered roles and assumptions. In The Flexible Cyborg in 2016, Thornton described the results of her qualitative empirical work, which found that technology enabled “temporal flexibility dovetailed with the feminisation of labour in the late twentieth century” resulting in women lawyers simply doing more (full time work and domestic duty). Thus, she has long documented how an economy enabled by the uptake of technology has “colonised new sites” including the personal sphere. Her latest contribution, Towards the Uberisation of Legal Practice, is also concerned with working patterns and gendered effects but provides a more upbeat reflection on an aspect of modern legal practice driven (to an extent) by a desire for “being happy.”
Thornton bases her discussion on a relatively small, empirical project comprising of 38 interviews with Australian and English lawyers within “NewLaw” firms. However, the interviews were in-depth discussions, which ultimately generated rich insights concerning lawyer experience and opinion. By focusing on the process as well as the outcome of disruption of traditional legal career patterns and expectations, her project zeroed in on the following questions:
Why lawyers had left traditional practice, established a new firm or had chosen to become independent contractors, and what working flexibly mean for them, how comfortable they were with the technology and what measures were being undertaken to prevent work from encroaching on their private life. (P. 48.) Continue reading "Happiness in NewLaw—Assessing the Lifestyle Claims of Alternative Legal Practices in Australia"
