Apr 28, 2021 Sam F. HalabiInternational & Comparative Law
Conceptually, “terrorism” is complicated. Although a definition is simply stated – terrorism is the unlawful use of violence for political ends, usually against civilians – the “unlawful” component of the definition and the “civilian” component blur quickly. An attack by a non-uniformed independence fighter on a police station closely aligned with military operations treads the line. So does the civilian who is willing to give coded warnings to fighters when regime forces enter a neighborhood. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, or so they say.
Notwithstanding the legal gray zones, there are national and international legal regimes dedicated to stamping out the practice. Enter Pooja R. Dadhania’s Paper Terrorists: Independence Movements and the Terrorism Bar, which tackles a discrete, specific ambiguity in the law of terrorism and proposes a practical, reasonable, and immediate measure that can be taken to bring clarity to at least a thread of the far more intricate tapestry. Her article is one I like a lot, and it is one with which I encourage scholars of this difficult area of the law to engage. Continue reading "Clarifying the Legal Consequences of “Terrorism”"
Apr 27, 2021 Kaiponanea MatsumuraFamily Law
Millions of Americans are in cohabiting relationships marked by varying degrees of intimacy and dependency. Although at least some of these relationships are functionally similar to marriage, the law has had a limited role in regulating them. Nonmarital partners are ineligible for benefits like family leave, Social Security, favorable tax treatment, and more. Moreover, marital property rules do not apply to them, meaning that economically vulnerable partners may find themselves with nothing at the relationship’s end. In most states, one legal tool available to nonmarital partners is contract. Since the California Supreme Court’s Marvin v. Marvin decision over forty years ago, the vast majority of jurisdictions have allowed partners in intimate relationships to enter into contracts governing property, as long as sex is not consideration for the contract. The problem, most scholars observe, is that the vast majority of couples either do not bother to make agreements in the first place or do not express them in the form of a concrete exchange. Taking courts at their word, scholars assume that courts will enforce nonmarital contracts when they find them.
Albertina Antognini’s latest article, Nonmarital Contracts, disrupts this account. Through a painstakingly detailed examination of the entire universe of cases involving express contracts between nonmarital partners, Antognini shows that courts very rarely enforce agreements between opposite-sex partners exchanging domestic labor for money or other property, the very type of exchange that Marvin theoretically greenlighted. Thus, contract fails to make much of an impact, but for a different reason than is commonly assumed: the very courts that proclaim a right to contract in theory decline to enforce them in reality. Continue reading "Restating the Law of Nonmarital Contracts"
Apr 26, 2021 SpearItCriminal Law
Garrett Felber’s book, Those Who Know Don’t Say, offers a fresh and fearless new intellectual and activist history of the Nation of Islam (NOI), which situates a critique of the carceral state as central to the Black Freedom movement. Felber is a historian, who has become a recent cause celebre among academics for his firing by the University of Mississippi as retaliation for calling out the school’s allegiances to racist donors over public service. His firing has been a buckshot warning that academic freedom and free speech are not as free as we might think. In response, over 5,000 scholars and professors signed on to an “open letter” to his school demanding he be reinstated.
While Felber might be viewed as terminable by his home institution, his research is anything but, and instead, opens up academic study in new and exciting directions. Grounded in excavations of archival sources, court documents, and religious records, he offers meticulous, high-caliber scholarship that revises a portion of civil rights history and the NOI’s place in that history. The author shows that Muslims in America have been subject to surveillance and Islamophobia for decades. This, in turn, has helped fuel the Muslim community’s decisively antagonistic view of the prison system. Continue reading "Unveiling Religion’s Challenge to the Carceral State"
Apr 23, 2021 Brooke D. ColemanCourts Law
Marcus Alexander Gadson, Stolen Plausibility, __ Geo. L. J. __ (forthcoming, 2021).
I often explain to my brilliant first-year law students that, unlike most of their education before law school, originality is not required, nor is it always rewarded. Creativity is certainly key to being a successful lawyer but hewing to convention is critical too. I recall my discomfort as a law clerk when I first copied and pasted a summary judgment rule paragraph from my judge’s prior order into the order I was drafting. It feels odd, but it is something we do in the legal profession. We borrow language, ideas, and arguments all the time.
Which is why Marcus Gadson’s Stolen Plausibility is so striking. Examining post-Twombly and Iqbal decisions, Gadson finds that plaintiffs have adapted by using other parties’ complaints and investigations to fill in the facts required for plausibility. This makes sense. In discrimination cases, for example, a plaintiff who cannot make it to discovery is unlikely to obtain the facts required to plead a plausible claim. Yet if other parties have already established key facts through an investigation, it makes sense for the aggrieved plaintiff to borrow those facts. There seems no good reason to re-invent facts just as there was no good reason for me to rewrite my judge’s standard summary judgment rule paragraph. Continue reading "Something Borrowed"
Apr 22, 2021 Robert RosenCorporate Law
Roy Shapira,
A New Caremark Era: Causes and Consequences, 98
Wash. U. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2021), available at
SSRN.
It is well known that corporate compliance departments’ effectiveness depends on the quality of information they receive. In A New Caremark Era: Causes and Consequences, Professor Roy Shapira argues that providing information to attorneys for plaintiffs also can enhance compliance. Delaware courts have broadened and are broadening shareholder inspection rights, interpreting DGCL §220. When plaintiff attorneys take advantage of this procedural change, their cases can survive motions to dismiss. Shapira traces out the substantive consequences of this expansion of access: It puts teeth into their Caremark arguments.
Demonstrating a confidence in their abilities to prevent fishing expeditions and quickly dismiss strike suits, and generally to engage in what Shapira calls “micro-management,” Delaware courts minimize the costs to corporations of expanding discovery. Also demonstrating a confidence in corporations’ abilities to properly respond to discovery requests, Delaware courts also have found that the absence of records can demonstrate a violation of Caremark duties. As a result, corporations increasingly will paper their decision-making. Even if this is only window-dressing, Shapira insightfully explains that when it is known that these papers are discoverable, internal compliance will be enhanced. Continue reading "If It Is Discoverable, It May Count: From Shareholder Rights to Inspect Books and Records to Implementing Caremark Duties"
Apr 21, 2021 David HoffmanContracts
Theresa Arnold, Amanda Gray Dixon, Hadar Tanne, Madison Sherrill and G. Mitu Gulati,
‘Lipstick on a Pig’: Specific Performance Clauses in Action, __ Wisconsin L.R. __ (forthcoming, 2020), available at
SSRN.“Lipstick on a Pig”: Specific Performance Clauses in Action, forthcoming in the Wisconsin Law Review, is a good example of how to pack a deep insight into a short essay. The authors—Theresa Arnold, Amanda Dixon, Hadar Tanne, Madison Sherrill and Mitu Gulati—have made a real contribution. That they were able to do so about an old topic—damages or injunctions in contract law—illustrates the continuing value of the Wisconsin-school tradition of looking at real contracts to teach us something about the state of doctrine.
As readers will be well-aware, we teach specific performance as a disfavored remedy, available rarely outside of the unique goods and real estate contexts. But, as the authors cogently show, this is a puzzle: the damages preference is both comparatively exceptional and theoretically hard to defend. It’s also hard to know if it’s a majoritarian default. The existing literature on the prevalence of specific performance opt-in clauses in contracts is sparse, being limited to Eisenberg and Miller’s (2015) finding that lawyers drafted specific performance clauses in around 50% of a small sample of M&A clauses from 2002. Continue reading "Folk Wisdom about Remedies"
Apr 20, 2021 Kristin HickmanAdministrative Law
Agency reliance on subregulatory guidance to advise the public is a perennial topic of discussion among regulatory practitioners and administrative law scholars. We want agencies to be forthcoming in sharing their thoughts regarding the laws that they administer, yet we fret that they rely inappropriately on subregulatory guidance to avoid their procedural responsibilities, and we struggle to balance the two.
The use of artificial intelligence in the administration of government statutes and programs is another hot topic these days, and rightly so. Optimism abounds that agencies will be able to harness the machines to make administration fairer and more efficient, yet of course we should think critically as well about the problems that relying on computer algorithms to achieve administrative ends may raise. In Automated Legal Guidance, Joshua Blank and Leigh Osofsky extend their wonderful work on “simplexity” in tax administration to put these concepts together and offer a critique of government reliance on artificial intelligence to provide guidance to the public. Continue reading "Artificial Intelligence Meets Simplexity"
Apr 19, 2021 Kim BrooksTax Law
Handbooks are the best. A good one tells you something about how the discipline is organized, identifies major debates, showcases thoughtful researchers, and captures the momentum of the field. Brauner’s editorial work on the Research Handbook on International Taxation achieves all those advantages.
The volume has twenty chapters, organized in five parts. Part I, Fundamentals, digs into some of the issues that situate the discipline as a whole. Is there such a thing as international tax law? How did we get here? Who is responsible? And is there an international doctrine of tax fairness that can serve as a platform for constructive engagement? Continue reading "A Hand Up in International Tax: Brauner’s Research Handbook on International Taxation"
Apr 16, 2021 Marcia L. McCormickWork Law
Increasingly sophisticated data analytics paired with machine learning is changing the world, and workplace applications are already a thriving industry. Over the last five years or so, legal scholars have increasingly explored the legal implications of these new technologies. Most of that work has focused on concerns related to privacy or discrimination, and quite a bit focuses on use of this technology in hiring. This focus only reaches part of the “people analytics” industry–it leaves out the application of predictive analytics to first analyze and then shape worker behavior and the working environment.
In Preventing #MeToo: Artificial Intelligence, the Law and Prophylactics, James P. de Haan tackles this kind of application of AI in the workplace by looking at how predictive analytics could be used to prevent harassment. It’s a great time to be thinking of this potential application for at least three reasons. The effects of the #MeToo movement have caused employers to pay more attention to preventing harassment, the technology appears to be soon in reach, and thinking about this application might help us think carefully about other ways AI might be used to shape worker behavior and the working environment. Continue reading "An Early Warning on an Early Warning System: Avoiding Minority Report, Workplace Edition"
Apr 15, 2021 Allison Anna TaitTrusts & Estates
For those who pay attention to trust law developments, it’s clear that a vast transformation in trust law is taking place. American states like Wyoming, Alaska, Nevada, Delaware, and South Dakota are rewriting their laws to permit trusts that promise perpetual duration, maximum asset protection, and continued settlor control in order to compete with offshore jurisdictions for billions of dollars in trust business. Even for those who don’t usually take notice of trusts, trust law and the uses of the trust as a mechanism to create and perpetuate wealth inequality is becoming better understood. Katarina Pistor, for example, has aptly explained how trusts are “one of [the] most ingenious modules for coding capital” in Anglo-American law. Moreover, economists like as Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, have increasingly started to look at the roles of trusts in building a landscape of wealth inequality.
Into this conversation step Mark Bennett and Adam Hofri-Winogradow with their new article entitled, The Use of Trusts to Subvert the Law: An Analysis and Critique. Their aim is to widen the scope of the debate and inquire into what constitutes a proper normative theory of the trust. This type of inquiry has been fraught, the authors remark, in part because the normative nature of the trust is law-subverting – a poorly kept secret but one that nobody wants to discuss in polite company. Continue reading "Trust Law Secrets, Revealed"
