Oct 8, 2018 Tom SimmonsLex
Karen Levy, Lauren Kilgour, & Clara Berridge,
Regulating Privacy in Public/Private Space: The Case of Nursing Home Monitoring Laws, 26
Elder Law J. __ (forthcoming 2018) available at
SSRN.
A nursing home can be a dangerous place. Undetected abuse and neglect are common. Frustrated with the inadequacy of government oversight, some families have taken matters into their own hands and installed in-room video monitoring devices. In this way, privatized abuse prevention efforts can identify and rectify that which the camera records. The increasing use of so-called “granny cams” has led to legislative responses in at least six states—Illinois, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Washington, and Utah. These statutory frameworks are thoughtfully examined by Karen Levy, Lauren Kilgour, and Clara Berridge in their forthcoming article, Regulating Privacy in Public/Private Space: The Case of Nursing Home Monitoring Laws.
The covert use of technology such as web-enabled video cameras to “peek in” and also preserve evidence of inadequate care, abuse, or exploitation may be well-intentioned. The overt placement of cameras might help to deter abuse from occurring in the first place. Privacy and autonomy concerns, however, might be overlooked. As these three co-authors explain, the interests of the resident, their roommates, their visitors, and their care workers—even, to some degree, the institutions themselves—merit scrutiny: “These multivalent privacy dynamics create a complicated space for law.” (P. 3.) Indeed, this complex relational space has given rise to strikingly varied legislative fixes. Levy, Kilgour, and Berridge study a relatively unstudied problem with sensitivity and thoroughness. Continue reading "Privacy and Surveillance in Nursing Homes"
Oct 5, 2018 Laurel TerryLegal Profession
In September 2018, Utah launched its small claims court online dispute resolution (ODR) system. Years in the making, a goal of Utah’s new ODR system is to provide greater access to justice for Utah’s citizens. The ODR system has been designed to provide “simple, quick, inexpensive and easily accessible justice” that includes “individualized assistance and information that is accessible across a multitude of electronic platforms.”
This description of Utah’s new ODR program comes from Utah Supreme Court Justice Deno Himonas’s article entitled Utah’s Online Dispute Resolution Program Justice Himonas’s article should be of particular interest to readers who followed the work of the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services or readers interested in developments such as Washington’s Limited License Legal Technician program (LLLT) or New York’s Court Navigator program. Continue reading "Look What’s New! Utah’s Groundbreaking Efforts to Use Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) to Increase Access to Justice"
Oct 4, 2018 Kunal ParkerLegal History
When it comes to immigration to the United States in the twentieth century, there is little question that Mexico has been by far the most important sending country. Colonial conquest and domination, geographic contiguity, cultural links, wealth differentials, state policies on both sides of the border, and the pressing needs of Americans and Mexicans have made it so. We have yet to come to terms with the full significance of the impact of twentieth-century Mexican immigration on the United States’ demographics, politics, economy, society, and culture. What we do know, however, is that U.S. immigration law took form in the twentieth century in significant part to encourage, restrict, manage, and respond to migration from Mexico. Since the 1920s, border control has largely concentrated on the United States’ southern border. Mexicans have peopled all of the myriad legal categories into which twentieth-century immigrants have been slotted: non-immigrants, temporary workers, legal immigrants, and “illegal” immigrants. The debate over undocumented migrants, it scarcely bears mention, rages in Trump’s America, and the xenophobes’ target is Mexico.
Ana Raquel Minian’s important book, Undocumented Lives, provides crucial context to the figure of the Mexican undocumented migrant. Although her story begins earlier and continues after, Minian’s focus is on the period from the mid-1960s, when the bracero program ended, to the mid-1980s, when the U.S. government extended an “amnesty” to undocumented migrants but also closed the U.S.-Mexico border, making what had hitherto been a back-and-forth circular migration of the undocumented between the two countries much more difficult. Undocumented Lives covers a vast range: state policies in Mexico and the United States; explorations of the everyday lives of undocumented migrants and their communities in both countries; and the strategies undocumented migrants employed to win rights and protections for themselves in the United States. One of its goals is to represent undocumented Mexican migrants to the United States as “in between peoples” of a sort, fully incorporated in neither country, suspended in a state of rejection by both, but nevertheless forging a precarious identity. In what follows, I discuss three important contributions of the book and offer some observations about each. Continue reading "Between Mexico and the United States"
Oct 3, 2018 David FagundesIntellectual Property Law
Amy Adler & Jeanne C. Fromer,
Taking Intellectual Property into Their Own Hands, 107
Cal. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2019), available at
SSRN.
It’s no longer news that a major proportion of property regulation happens outside the bounds of the law thanks to social norms and their extralegal enforcement. Yet legal scholars continue to find new and fascinating ways to advance this insight. The latest installment in the conversation about the norm-based regulation of intangible property is Amy Adler and Jeanne Fromer’s Taking Intellectual Property into Their Own Hands.
This sparkling article adds a novel perspective to the dialogue that has been developing for more than a decade about the extralegal regulation of creative production. Most of this work considers how a given group regulates their distinctive works via norms, without recourse to copyright or trademark law. This move has been made with respect to recipes developed by French chefs, roller derby skaters’ nicknames, clowns’ face makeup, tattoo artists’ ink designs, and many others. Continue reading "Creative Vigilantism"
Oct 2, 2018 W.A. EdmundsonJurisprudence
David Adler,
The Centrist Paradox: Political Correlates of the Democratic Disconnect (May 01, 2018), available at
SSRN.
The very idea of a meaningful left-center-right political spectrum always seemed suspect to me. Many commentators have warned against conflating cultural and economic “wings.” The cultural left wants to get the state out of the bedroom (so to speak). The economic left wants to get the state into the boardroom. The cultural right wants to inject the state into the bedroom, to regulate sexual and procreative matters. The economic right wants the state out of the boardroom, sweeping away pesky regulations of the workplace and the market.
Plainly, one might be on the economic right but on the cultural left, or vice versa. It would be a mistake to try to cram these different dimensions into one. Would someone who happened to fall simultaneously on the economic left and the cultural right count as…a centrist? An outlier? (Gene Debs called socialism “Christianity in action“—where does that put him?)
Set this worry aside, and assume that correlations with, say, attitudes about immigration serve to validate the use of a one-dimensional spectrum. Extensive surveys have been conducted that ask respondents where they place themselves. Some of these surveys go on to ask about attitudes toward democracy and elections and the importance of having a strong, decisive leader unfettered by a congress or parliament. David Adler, a young researcher who recently moved from London to Athens, has looked at this data and has uncovered what he calls the “Centrist Paradox.” Anyone who is concerned about the direction democracies are taking ought to take a careful look, too. Continue reading "Does the Center Want to Hold?"
Oct 1, 2018 Shubha GhoshInternational & Comparative Law
“There ought to be a law about that” is a common response to circumstances we don’t like. But outlawing war? We might as well legislate against the flu. A new book called The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World authored by Professors Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro of Yale Law School shows how the endless cycle of war and peace prior to World War I has given way to a New World Order, post World War II. Today, they argue, war is no longer legitimate and might does not make right. But this New World Order comes at a cost as civil wars and internal disputes challenge established national borders (forged themselves by war). Has one form of aggression just replaced another?
Hathaway and Shapiro have produced a readable and provocative book that I like because of its extensive coverage over three self-contained but connected parts. The first part is about Hugo Grotius and the background that led to his groundbreaking book on international law and war. Or perhaps, his book is actually about war as international law, as conquest became the preferred means of resolving conflict among nations. A 17th Century naval battle in the Straits of Singapore between the Dutch and the Portuguese was the catalyst for a legal dispute that Grotius infamously resolved by laying down principles for just war. But these principles expanded beyond their boundaries to support the use of aggression to resolve a wide range of disputes, going beyond the limits of “just war.” Grotius, as Hathaway and Shapiro tell us, laid the foundations for a world order which recognized the nation’s right of conquest, a license to kill within skirmishes, and gunboat diplomacy. Within this order, nations had to remain impartial or take sides; there was no room for intervention through sanctions or mediation. Invariably, nation-states would be forced into conflicts, such as border disputes, debt defaults, or assassinations, with resulting regional or global escalation. World War I was the culmination of the international order that Grotius wrought. Continue reading "All’s Well That Ends Well, Sort of"
Sep 28, 2018 Christina HoHealth Law
Ordinarily, jots feature forthcoming or just published works of scholarship that we find useful or notable. These are no longer ordinary times. As events depart increasingly from our usual frames of reference, I find myself seeking scholarship with a longer historical horizon. In doing so, I have encountered two remarkable books: Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life and The Use of Bodies. These two represent the first and last installments of Agamben’s nine-volume Homo Sacer series, and speak most directly to our work as students of health law as it intersects with the political darkening we are living through today.
After 9/11, Agamben’s State of Exception (2003, translated 2005) was discussed amid the rise of emergency powers. But his work on “bare life” is rarely mentioned by American legal scholars (with some exceptions) even as bodies and bare lives have become ever more politicized and manifestly tied to the problem of sovereign power in the age of Trump. I believe that our work as health law scholars cannot avoid orienting itself in some way to Agamben. Continue reading "Giorgio Agamben and the Task of Health Law in a Biopolitical Age"
Sep 27, 2018 Kristen EichensehrTechnology Law
Bobby Chesney & Danielle Citron,
Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security, 107
Cal. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2019), available at
SSRN.
It’s no secret that the United States and much of the rest of the world are struggling with information and security. The flow of headlines about data breaches, election interference, and misuse of Facebook data show different facets of the problem. Information security professionals often speak in terms of the “CIA Triad”: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Many recent cybersecurity incidents involve problems of confidentiality, like intellectual property theft or theft of personally identifiable information, or of availability, like distributed denial of service attacks. Many fewer incidents (so far) involve integrity problems—instances in which there is unauthorized alteration of data. One significant example is the Stuxnet attack on Iranian nuclear centrifuges. The attack made some centrifuges spin out of control, but it also involved an integrity problem: the malware reported to the Iranian operators that all was functioning normally, even when it was not. The attack on the integrity of the monitoring systems caused paranoia and a loss of trust in the entire system. That loss of trust is characteristic of integrity attacks and a large part of what makes them so pernicious.
Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron have posted a masterful foundational piece on a new species of integrity problem that has the potential to take such problems mainstream and, in the process, do great damage to trust in reality itself. In Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security, Chesney and Citron explain a range of possible uses for “deep fakes,” a term that originated from imposing celebrities’ faces into porn videos, but that they use to describe “the full range of hyper-realistic digital falsification of images, video, and audio.” (P. 4.) Continue reading "Don’t Believe It If You See It: Deep Fakes and Distrust"
Sep 26, 2018 Eric J. MillerCriminal Law
Josephine Ross,
What the #Metoo Campaign Teaches About Stop and Frisk, ___
Idaho L. Rev. ___ (forthcoming 2018), available at
SSRN.
Josephine Ross’s article, What the #Metoo Campaign Teaches About Stop and Frisk, provides a unique and startling insight into the invasive experience of police body searches, and the psychological damage that can result. One of the law’s central roles is to limit the power of government officials (among others) to interfere with the public by prohibiting state officials from engaging in certain offensive acts. This rule-of-law role is especially important when government officials, like the police, are granted enormous material and normative powers to inflict physical harm and stigmatize civilians through the criminal law. The rule of law is even more important when many of the people most likely to come into contact with the police are already vulnerable thanks to their precarious status in society.
A core limit on the rule-of-law check on police power is accountability. Sometimes, prosecutors simply do not want to punish the police, for a variety of reasons. On other occasions, police misconduct is hard to spot, because so much of policing is low visibility. The police know this. Jerome Skolnick’s celebrated formulation of the problem, in his book, Justice Without Trial, called this a battle between the rule of law and the police’s order-maintenance role. All too often, Skolnick (and most policing scholars) revealed, the police depend upon low-level acts of harassment, rather than the criminal law, to maintain order and fight crime. And while that harassment is often high-visibility in relation to the civilian subjects of their authority, it is low-visibility in relation to the legal officials who could call them to account, as well as the general public, who generally do not know (or do not want to know) what the police are up to on the street.
As Josephine Ross reminds us in her fascinating article, these features of low public visibility, low institutional accountability, but high visibility to the tormented victims of harassment are precisely the features that police harassment shares with the sort of sexual harassment called out by the #metoo movement. The #metoo framework reveals that sexual assault and sexual harassment is something that lots of people know about, but no one talks about, except perhaps in whispers. Supervisors are unwilling to regulate their star performers and tolerate a culture of harassment and intimidation in which the onus is on the victims to avoid compromising situations, often at the cost of important, career-enhancing, social interactions. In a culture that tolerates this sort of behavior, the targets of harassment know that complaining has no effect at best, and at worst, produces severe career consequences. Continue reading "Out of Touch and Out of Order: Frisking as a Form of Sexual Harassment"
Sep 25, 2018 Caroline BradleyCorporate Law
Horst Eidenmueller,
Collateral Damage: Brexit’s Negative Effects on Regulatory Competition and Legal Innovation in Private Law (May 7, 2018), available at
SSRN.
The dark side of Brexit is that it illustrates dramatically the contrast between a political context which operates largely on the basis of slogans and a business and economic context where details matter. When Airbus warned of the risks to businesses if the UK crashes out of the EU without a deal, Jeremy Hunt, the Health Minister, described the intervention as inappropriate. Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, has similarly been criticised for pointing out some of the economic disadvantages associated with Brexit.
The bright side of Brexit is that it is producing some excellent scholarship in a range of disciplines as scholars try to understand its causes and potential effects. In this working paper Horst Eidenmueller argues, convincingly, that Brexit will interfere with desirable innovation in private law in Europe, both in the EU and in the UK. This is one of many examples of potential harm from Brexit to the UK and to the remaining Member States of the EU. Continue reading "Implications of Brexit for Innovation in Private Law"
