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This is Lawrence Solum's legal theory weblog. Legal Theory Blog comments and reports on recent scholarship in jurisprudence, law and philosophy, law and economic theory, and theoretical work in substantive areas, such as constitutional law, cyberlaw, procedure, criminal law, intellectual property, torts, contracts, etc.

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Wednesday, November 30, 2005
 
Scruton Interview Check out The Joy of Conservatism: An Interview with Roger Scruton (Part I) over at Right Reason. Here's a taste:
    The problem for conservatism is to reconcile the many and often conflicting demands that these various forms of life impose on us. The free-market ideologues take one instance of spontaneous order, and erect it into a prescription for all the others. They ask us to believe that the free exchange of commodities is the model for all social interaction. But many of our most important forms of life involve withdrawing what we value from the market: sexual morality is an obvious instance, city planning another. (America has failed abysmally in both those respects, of course.) Looked at from the anthropological point of view religion can be seen as an elaborate (and spontaneous) way in which communities remove what is most precious to them (i.e. all that concerns the creation and reproduction of community) from the erosion of the market. A cultural conservative, such as I am, supports that enterprise. I would put the point in terms that echo Burke and Chesterton: the free market provides the optimal solution to the competition among the living for scarce resources; but when applied to the goods in which the dead and the unborn have an interest (sex, for instance) it wastes what must be saved.


 
Markel on Executing the Innocent Check out Innocents Lost by Dan Markel on Slate. Here's a taste:
    The nontrivial risk of error and the irrevocable nature of the death penalty are only two reasons policy-makers sympathetic to the tropes of retributive justice should oppose the death penalty. As I've argued elsewhere and at greater length, retributivists are properly obsessed with accurately sorting the innocent from the guilty. It follows that the state committed to the virtues of impartial retributivism (rather than mere hotblooded revenge) should favor not only sobriety and restraint, but also modesty in punishment. The state should refuse to impose a punishment that prevents it from later acknowledging—and making amends for—its own wrongful acts to its own unintended victims.
Check it out!


 
Seidman on the Israeli Supreme Court, the Palestinian Uprising, and Administrative Review Guy I. Seidman (Interdisciplinary Center Herzliyah - Radzyner School of Law) has posted Judicial Administrative Review in Times of Discontent: The Israel Supreme Court and the Palestinian Uprising (Israel Affairs, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Most democracies offer some form of judicial review of administrative action. In common law systems, such review is preformed by a national court system of general jurisdiction; in civil law systems, it is typically performed by a system of specialized administrative-law courts. Judicial willingness to actively review executive action and policy varies among different nature and across subject matters. It is typically especially limited in military matters, especially in times of War. Essentially all Western court systems pursue a low-key, highly deferential policy of review in military matters, limiting their intervention to extreme cases, and deciding well after the winds of war have subsided. Until recently this was of little practical significance. For over 50 years, since World War II ended, most of the West enjoyed a long period of peace and tranquility. But things have changed. Yet in recent years, a series of events has shaken Western complacency. Starting with the horrors of 9/11 in the United States, the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and major terror attacks in Madrid and elsewhere, Western nations have become painfully aware of the need to adopt stricter security policies - which, in turn, meant a growing number of restrictions on basic human rights, and greater government oversight of private activities. Western nations have thus come to face the democratic dilemmas that we, in Israel, have known for too long, and have taken steps for which we, in Israel have been criticized for too long. The Israeli Supreme Court is often discussed in studies comparing court activism and judicial protection of human and civil rights. Where the Israeli experience seems of particular comparative interest is in the Court's response to the dilemmas facing the judiciary on finding a balance between respecting legitimate national security concerns and protecting valued civil and human rights - maintaining the values of democracy and the integrity of the legal and political system in times of war. I believe that in this, the Israeli Court achieved unique results. While somewhat deferential to the military, especially in times of ongoing military activities, the Court has coped well to a continuous state of emergency since 1948, and has, for the most part, been a clear and steady voice in curbing executive excess, especially when it infringed on individual liberties. This paper has four parts. Part II highlights the lesser known structural and jurisdictional background that enabled the Israeli Supreme Court to develop its public law jurisprudence. Part III uses leading cases of the Israeli Supreme Court to illustrate the complexly and diversity inherent to judicial review of the military in Israel, and the significant achievements of the Court from 1948 to the year 2000. Part IV focuses on the Supreme Court's judicial response to petitions relating to the Palestinian uprising of 2000 in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the most violent period in four decades of Israeli control over the territories. The concluding Part V attempts to summarize the paper and place all its parts in perspective, with an overall evaluation of the Court's performance in the tumultuous recent years.


 
Frischmann on Demsetzian Copyright Brett M. Frischmann (Loyola University of Chicago, Law School) has posted Evaluating the Demsetzian Trend in Copyright Law on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Copyright law provides an excellent case study with which to study and evaluate Harold Demsetz's theory of property rights. Regardless of how one feels about the relationship between property and intellectual property, it is hard to escape the fact that intellectual property rights have expanded and grown more property-like and more privatized in recent decades. There has been an undeniable Demsetzian trend in copyright law. In this article, I critique the Demsetzian trend in copyright law and challenge some of the fundamental premises upon which the normative arguments for continued privatization and propertization of intellectual resources rest. First, I focus on the perceived benefits of internalizing externalities. I argue that externalities do not necessarily distort incentives or, more generally, the market allocation of resources. For many externalities, there is no efficiency benefit to internalization (whether internalization is accomplished by Pigouvian taxes/subsidies or property rights). In the end, the benefits of internalization must be carefully assessed rather than assumed. The view that increasing the degree of internalization through private property rights inevitably leads to increased incentives to invest in creation or distribution is not well-established in either theory or practice. Second, I focus on the frequently invoked solution of efficient licensing and the "logic" that property rights should be extended "into every corner in which people derive enjoyment and value . . . [so that] signals of consumer preference [may] trigger and direct [producers'] investments" (Goldstein, 1994). I argue that there is a fundamental flaw in this logic that undermines the efficient licensing hypothesis. Social demand for individuals' access to and use of copyright protected works often exceeds private demand. Purchasers'/licensees' willingness to pay reflects only their private demand and does not take into account value that others might realize as a result of their use. As I explain, many uses of copyrighted works generate value for third-parties. Finally, drawing from the first two points, I argue that, from a Coasean perspective, both externalities and property rights have symmetrical and reciprocal potentials to distort the market allocation of resources. A priori and devoid of context, one cannot say that the potential distortions caused by a property right, externality, or incremental change in a property right have a net positive or negative effect on social welfare.


 
Curran on Comparative Law & Language Vivian Grosswald Curran (University of Pittsburgh - School of Law) has posted Comparative Law and Language (OXFORD HANDBOOK OF COMPARATIVE LAW, Reinhard Zimmermann and Mathias Reimann, eds., Oxford University Press, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Comparative law is law's cybernetics, or 'theory of messiness.' It attempts to steer through the messiness of the foreign by reordering it into the language of the familiar without betraying the original. It is needed urgently in contexts of unrecognized metamorphosis, and today metamorphoses are burgeoning in murky areas outside of law's traditional categories of either the national or the international. The less apparent, the less visibly foreign, the foreign is, the more comparative law has a task of translation involving the formation of a vocabulary to transmit new configurations that resist detection and articulation. This essay examines the centrality of translation to processes of language and meaning construction, and links translation to comparative law as a model for the study of similarity and difference, the universal and the particular. The debate in comparative law over the relative importance of similarity and difference among legal systems has its counterpart in linguistics in conflicting views about whether commonalities among languages are fundamental or marginal. These issues situate both language and comparative law between mutually contradictory aspirations of universalism and pluralism which have stalked the evolution of both fields. Despite appearances of the ascendancy of universalism in today's world, it is not difference and pluralism that are receding, but, rather, that former domains of pluralism and difference recede, while others emerge. Like language, inevitably imprecise and perpetually in flux, comparative law can not be frozen once and for all, to be captured for future application if only it is developed with sufficient acuity and insight. It shares what Isaiah Berlin attributed to philosophy and distinguished from the scientific: it does not carry within itself the method of its own solution, and therefore must be reinvented in each generation, destroying its own past rigidities and methods of decoding and transmitting, in order to construct a new modality of analysis, a new vocabulary better adapted to changed meaning. Comparative law shares with language the pitfalls of miscommunication and misunderstanding, as well as the potentials of learning to see, to communicate and to shed light in that elusive, inevitable, shifting and ever-reconfiguring space that, like language, it occupies between the same and the other.


Tuesday, November 29, 2005
 
Utset on Time-Inconsistent Misconduct Manuel A. Utset (University of Utah - S.J. Quinney College of Law) has posted A Model of Time-Inconsistent Misconduct: The Case of Lawyer Misconduct (74 Fordham L. Rev. __ (2005) (forthcoming)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This article develops a model of time-inconsistent misconduct to explain incremental misconduct by lawyers-i.e., repeated, marginal misconduct that over time can lead to a moral unraveling or disintegration. A person engages in time-inconsistent misconduct when: (1)she has determined that a particular type of misconduct has negative expected returns and made a long-term decision to abstain from such misconduct; (2)nonetheless, when provided with the opportunity, she reverses her long-term preference to abstain and engages in misconduct; and (3)the reversal is due to a preference for immediate gratification (and not to the acquisition of new information). A person will engage in such misconduct in each period in which the incremental gain from misconduct (i.e., the added incremental utility due to the immediacy of a reward or from avoiding an immediate cost) exceeds the incremental loss (i.e., the actual net expected loss from that one act of misconduct). For example, the prospect of receiving an immediate reward can lead a lawyer to repeatedly take prohibited or unethical actions, a phenomenon that I refer to as "nibbling opportunism". At the same time, the prospect of incurring an immediate cost can lead a lawyer to repeatedly procrastinate following through with a required action. Time-inconsistent misconduct harms both the third-party victims and the lawyer-i.e., each time that the lawyer engages in misconduct she incurs an incremental loss that from a long-term perspective she wanted to avoid, and which in the aggregate can be very large. Accounting for time-inconsistent misconduct is important, among other reasons, because the rules needed to deter such misconduct are different from those needed to deter the time-consistent misconduct assumed in standard models. The time-inconsistent misconduct model also generalizes to other types of misconduct, such as criminal misconduct and group misconduct.


 
Blumm, Dunning, and Reed on Public Trust Michael C. Blumm , Harrison Dunning and Scott W. Reed (Lewis & Clark Law School , University of California, Davis and Stanford Law School) have posted Renouncing the Public Trust Doctrine: An Assessment of the Validity of Idaho House Bill 794 (Ecology Law Quarterly 461, Vol. 24, No. 3, 1997) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Under the influence of powerful irrigation and timber lobbies, the state of Idaho enacted a law in 1996 which renounced the application of the public trust doctrine to water rights and public land decisionmaking, in an effort to overturn several decisions of the Idaho Supreme Court. This article explains the genesis of that law, exposes its flaws, and questions its validity. In particular, we maintain that the rights that Idaho legislature attempted to terminate are in fact inalienable, sovereign rights that a state cannot renounce. We also argue that a state cannot, consistent with the federal law, terminate public rights in lands conveyed to the state under the equal footing doctrine. Finally, we contend that the Idaho statute violates the state constitution's declaration of the public character of water within the state. The article notes that its analysis may have use beyond the state of Idaho, as several other western states have constitutional provisions that could be interpreted to incorporate the public trust doctrine.


 
Call for Papers: Pramatism in Granada
    The Conference "III MEETING ON PRAGMATISM: AGENCY, INFERENCE, AND THE ORIGINS OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY" http://www.ugr.es/local/nef/Meeting/index.html will take palce in Granada, Spain, on April 19-21, 2006. Invited speakers include John McDowell, Robert Brandom (Pittsburgh, U.S.) and Mathieu Marion (Quebec, Canada). Submissions are welcomed until January 31, 2006. manuel de pinedo departamento de filosofía universidad de granada 18011 granada (spain) http://www.ugr.es/~pinedo/


Monday, November 28, 2005
 
Hasen on the Future of Election Law Election law guru Rick Hasen has posted No Exit? The Roberts Court and the Future of Election Law on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This article, prepared for a symposium on voting rights in the South Carolina Law Review, examines the future of election law in the Roberts Court. Even before the death of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and the announced retirement of Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, election law scholars had declared that the Supreme Court had reached "doctrinal interregnum." In the campaign finance arena, the Court's jurisprudence was becoming increasingly incoherent; voting rights law was said to be "at law with itself;" partisan gerrymandering claims in flux; and the question of Supreme Court oversight of the "nuts-and-bolts" of elections after Bush v. Gore a big mystery. With the change of two Justices on the Supreme Court, exit from doctrinal incoherence and uncertainty becomes possible. The replacement of Chief Justice Rehnquist with new Chief Justice John Roberts and the replacement of Justice O'Connor with a new Justice appointed by President Bush could provide an opening for major changes in Supreme Court election law doctrine. This is especially true with Justice O'Connor's departure, because she has held the swing vote in key election law cases. What sort of changes should we expect from the Roberts Court? Making predictions is exceedingly difficult when the swing votes likely will be held by those who have not expressed (or not expressed recently) views on these subjects, and concern for respecting (even wrong-headed) precedent could prove a strong force. And Justices' views certainly may change over time. Still, I work under the assumption that a conservative president who had apparently committed himself to appointing Justices in the mold of Justices Thomas and Scalia is unlikely to appoint Justices who in fact move the Court to the left, and could well move the Court to the right in key election law cases. The result is that 5-10 years from now, the ground rules for American political competition could undergo a major change. Within the next decade, we could well see deregulation of campaign financing, a limiting of Congressional power to impose national solutions to problems of minority voting rights, and an upholding of state power to redistrict for partisan gain and impose increasingly draconian election administration tools enacted in the name of fraud prevention. The ability of states to manipulate election rules for partisan gain may present the greatest danger, as the Court exits from that corner of the political thicket. For those who look to courts for the promotion of political equality, the signs are not encouraging.
Highly recommended!


Sunday, November 27, 2005
 
Legal Theory Lexicon: Fact and Value
    Introduction Law students quickly learn that normative argument is an integral part of the law school experience. And sooner or later, they are likely to encounter what is called the fact/value distinction. Of course, the relationship between fact and value is a deep and complex philosophical topic. Even a survey of the basic topics would take us far afield into the heart of metaethics and across the field of normative moral philosophy. Nonetheless, we can take a quick look at three important ideas with which every legal theorist should have a basic familiarity.
    Hume on Deriving an Is from an Ought The locus classicus for the distinction between fact and value is David Hume's famous observation about the derivation of an "is" from an "ought." Here is the famous passage from Hume's Treatise on Human Nature, Section 1, Book III:
      I cannot forbear adding to these reasonings an observation, which may, perhaps, be found of some importance. In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark'd, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz'd to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it shou'd be observ'd and explain'd; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention wou'd subvert all the vulgar [poorly reasoned] systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv'd by reason.
    What is Hume up to? One might start with the idea that Hume's point is about the form of moral arguments. If all the premises are "is" propositions, then perhaps Hume is claiming that some sort of logical fallacy has been committed if the conclusion of the argument is an ought statement. Consider this example:
      Premise: Withdrawing from Iraq is a policy that would save human lives and improve the condition of the Iraqi people.
      Conclusion: Therefore, the United States ought to withdraw from Iraq.
    We might think that there is a missing premises, which would be of the form:
      Premise: The United States policy towards Iraq ought to aim at saving lives and improving the condition of the Iraqi people."
    But there is a problem with this interpretation of Hume's point. One can easily produce a version of the argument that contains only is premises, but that looks more or less valid. For example:
      Premise: Withdrawing from Iraq is a policy that would save human lives and improve the condition of the Iraqi people.
      Premise: The policy that would save lives and improve the condition of the Iraqi people is the most choice worthy policy.
      Conclusion: Therefore, the United States ought to withdraw from Iraq.
    I'm sure that you, gentle reader, have run ahead of me, and are at this very point objecting that the second premise includes a covert "ought" statement. And perhaps it does, but the point of the exericse is that Hume's point is not just about the formal qualities of moral arguments. For his point to get off the ground, it must have substantive metaethical punch--it must be grounded on some theory about what counts as a fact and what counts as a value.
    G.E. Moore on the Naturalistic Fallacy The second classical source for the fact/value distinction is G.E. Moore's discussion of the so-called naturalistic fallacy and his open-question argument. The core idea of the naturalistic fallacy is that one cannot identify "goodness" with any natural property. That is, it would be a mistake to identify goodness with the natural property of pleasure or happiness or health. Why is it a fallacy? Moore thought that the fallacy could be brought out by the open-question argument. So suppose, someone says that withdrawing from Iraq would be good if and only if withdrawing from Iraq would produce more pleasure than any alternative course of action, and that this is so, because goodness just is the maximization of pleasure. Moore claims that it is nonetheless an open question whether this is so. "Is pleasure good?" is an open question, as is, "I concede that withdrawing from Iraq will produce the most pleasure, but nonetheless is is a good thing to do?" Moore's point was that if these questions are open in the sense that they are not nonsensical questions, then it cannot be the case that goodness is the maximization of pleasure. Moore claimed that for any natural property that might be used to define goodness, the open-question argument will still be available. Moore's conclusion was that goodness must be a non-natural basic property that is somehow directly perceived by some human faculty of moral intuition.
    The Entanglement of Fact and Value It is not uncommon for relatively sophisticated legal thinkers to accept that the fact/value distinction is a well-established truth of metaethics, but this would be a vast oversimplification. In fact, both the Humean and Moorean versions of the fact/value distinction are hugely controversial. One relatively simple demonstration of the difficulties that face any attempt to argue that facts and values belong to two mutually-exlusive realms can begin with what the distinction between thick and thin ethical terms. (Thin ethical terms would include "right" and "good," they are thin because they don't seem to carry any particular descriptive or factual content.) A good example of a thick ethical term might be "cruel." Actions can be described as cruel, and there is likely to be a good deal of intersubjective agreement on the question whether a particular action is cruel or not. Moreover, when asked why an action is cruel, the answer will certainly include a number of fact, e.g. the action caused pain, the pain was unnecessary to accomplishment of the actions purpose, and so forth. Cruel has a clear factual component. But cruel also involves moral values. So, for example, it would be quite odd to say, "His action was cruel, but it was nonetheless good." Such an assertion would naturally lead to the question: "So what was good about it that justified the cruelty." Of course, there are many possible answers to this challenge, but one of them is not: "Oh, there was nothing else that made it good; it was just a cruel action." Contrast this to, "His action was cruel, and therefore it was wrong." Imagine now the query: "Yes it was cruel, but what was wrong with that." And now the reply, "Huh? What was wrong with it was that it was cruel. Didn't you hear me?" Anyone who believes there is a sharp line that separates the realm of facts from the realm of values must produce an account of thick ethical terms, because such terms seem to straddle the line.
    Of course, there are many many thick ethical terms. For law students, the really interesting thing is that many legal concepts are closely related to (or are themselves) thick ethical terms. A good example is "murder." Whether or not an action is "murder" in the ordinary, nonlegal sense of that term is clearly a question that involves the entanglement of fact and value. "Was it murder?" leads to "Was someone killed?", "Was the killing in self defense?" and so on. If we conclude that an action was murder, then ordinarily we also conclude that the action is morally wrong--even thought in rare circumstances, murder might be morally justified. Murder is a concept in which law, fact, and value all seem to be entangled. As a law student, you might begin to look for fact/value distinctions and for the entanglement of fact and value. My guess is that you will see these ideas operating everywhere, but especially in torts and criminal law!
    If thick moral terms establish the entanglement of facts and values, that is only one step towards an adequate account of the fact-value distinction. For the purposes of law students with an interest in legal theory, awareness of the issues is probably sufficient. If you develop a deep interest in the foundations of normative jurisprudence, you will want to pursue these topics in much greater depth.
    Conclusion Arguments about what the law should be are normative; normative legal theory might be considered a particular branch of political and moral philosophy. So legal theorists need to be aware of the fact/value distinction. As a rule of thumb, be wary of arguments that seem to confuse facts and values or to derives oughts from ises. If you do decide to cross the line, then be aware of the criticisms that may come your way!


Saturday, November 26, 2005
 
Legal Theory Bookworm The Legal Theory Bookworm recommends Arguing Marbury V. Madison, edited by Mark V. Tushnet. Here is a blurb:
    Marbury v. Madison, decided in 1803, is the foundation stone of the American doctrine of judicial review. Remarkably, the case was decided without the parties having presented an oral argument to the Supreme Court. This book begins with a unique transcript of an oral argument in the case, conducted before a bench of four distinguished federal judges. The transcript is followed by essays on Marbury’s intellectual background, its significance in U.S. constitutional history, and the way in which we might think of constitutional theory and judicial review in terms sensitive to the historical and political contexts in which the practice persists. Distinguished commentators question some of the claims made in the essays, and offer their own perspectives on Marbury’s importance.
The contributors include: David Strauss, Suzanna Sherry, Susan Low Bloch, Barry Friedman, Douglas Reed, Stephen Griffin, Vicki Jackson, Louis Seidman, and Mark Tushnet.


 
Download of the Week The Download of the Week is James Madison's Celebrated Report of 1800: The Transformation of the Tenth Amendment by Kurt Lash. Here is the abstract:
    It has become commonplace to describe the Rehnquist Court as having staged a "Federalism Revolution." Although the current status of the Revolution is in dispute, historical treatment of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence under Chief Justice Rehnquist no doubt will emphasize a resurgence of federalism and limited construction of federal power. Cases like Gregory v. Ashcroft, New York v. United States, United States v. Lopez, Printz v. United States, Alden v. Maine, and United States v. Morrison all share a common rule of interpretation: Narrow construction of federal power to interfere with matters believed best left under state control. The textual hook for this rule of strict construction has been the Tenth Amendment. The Court's reliance on the Tenth Amendment has been the source of unrelenting scholarly criticism, particularly because the amendment itself literally does nothing more than announce a mere "truism": Those powers not delegated are reserved. It says nothing about whether delegated powers are to be broadly or strictly construed. As I have written in two previous articles, Founders such as James Madison believed that the Ninth Amendment, not the Tenth, established a rule of strict construction. In this article, I address how it came to pass that the Tenth Amendment, and not the Ninth, became accepted as an independent rule of strict construction. Ironically, it was Madison himself who drafted the document that would establish the Tenth Amendment as the primary guarantor of constitutional federalism. Madison's 1800 "Report on the Virginia Resolutions" denounced the Alien and Sedition Acts as exceeding Congress's enumerated powers and thus intruded upon the retained rights of the states in violation of the Tenth Amendment. His Report became a canonical document in the 19th century states' rights movement and transformed the Tenth Amendment into a symbolic declaration of limited federal power.
Download it while its hot!


Friday, November 25, 2005
 
Friday Calendar
    St Anne's College, Oxford: Ed Flippen, "US Electricity Deregulation after California, Enron and the Worst Blackout in US History"
    Oxford Centre for Competition Law & Policy: Edward Flippen, US Electric Deregulation after California, Enron, and the Worst Blackout in US History


 
Ristroph on Proportionality as Limit on Government Power Alice Ristroph (University of Utah - S.J. Quinney College of Law) has posted Proportionality as a Principle of Limited Government (Duke Law Journal, Vol. 55, 2005) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This article examines proportionality as a constitutional limitation on the power to punish. In the criminal context, proportionality is often mischaracterized as a specifically penological theory-an ideal linked to specific accounts of the purpose of punishment. In fact, a constitutional proportionality requirement is better understood as an external limitation on the state's penal power that is independent of the goals of punishment. Proportionality limitations on the penal power arise not from the purposes of punishment, but from the fact that punishing is not the only purpose that the state must pursue. Other considerations, especially the protection of individual interests in liberty and equality, restrict the pursuit of penological goals. Principles of proportionality put the limits into any theory of limited government, and proportionality in the sentencing context is just one instance of these limitations on state power. This understanding of proportionality gives reason to doubt the assertion that determinations of proportionality are necessarily best left to legislatures. In doctrinal contexts other than criminal sentencing, proportionality is frequently used as a mechanism of judicial review to prevent legislative encroachments on individual rights and other exercises of excessive power. In the criminal sentencing context, we should recognize a constitutional proportionality requirement as a limit on penal power.


 
Nicolas on the Number of Justices on the Supreme Court Peter Nicolas (University of Washington School of Law) has posted Nine, of Course: A Dialogue on Congressional Power to Set by Statute the Number of Justices on the Supreme Court (New York University Journal of Law & Liberty, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    In this article, I hypothesize that 28 U.S.C. Section 1, which sets the number of justices on the United States Supreme Court at nine, is not a constitutionally valid exercise of congressional power. Rather, I theorize, under the design of the Constitution, the number of justices on the Supreme Court at any given time will vary depending on the number of justices the President chooses to nominate and how many of those, if any, members of the Senate opt to confirm. In the manuscript, I consider and reject potential sources of congressional power to enact the statute, including the Necessary and Proper Clause of Article I and the Regulations Clause of Article III. I then consider how the constitutionality of the statute would be determined, including who would have standing to bring a challenge. Finally, I examine the consequences of my hypothesis.


 
Piomelli on Collaborative Lawyering Ascanio Piomelli (University of California, Hastings College of the Law) has posted The Democratic Roots of Collaborative Lawyering on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This Article reinterprets collaborative lawyering - and its call for progressive lawyers to collaborate with clients and communities to jointly pursue social change - as part of a participatory democratic tradition of active self-government by engaged citizens. Rejecting conventional views that collaborative lawyering primarily grows out of postmodernist social theory, the Article details this lawyering's deep affinity with John Dewey's modern recasting of Athenian and Jeffersonian ideas and with the early 1960s' practice of Ella Baker, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and New Left activists. It argues that a democratic lens reveals the distinctive values underlying collaborative lawyers' commitment to ordinary citizens' robust participation in collective efforts to reshape society - values that are at odds with competing visions of democracy and lawyering that place expert professionals at the center of such efforts.


 
French on the Problem of the Future Susan Fletcher French (University of California, Los Angeles - School of Law) has posted Perpetual Trusts, Conservation Servitudes, and the Problem of the Future on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This short article explores the similarities between perpetual private trusts and conservation servitudes granted in perpetuity, the adequacy of existing doctrines to handle future changes in circumstances, the deference due to donor intent, and concludes that legal changes will be needed to give private trust beneficiaries more power to determine how trust assets will be used and to protect the public interests in conservation servitudes and the continuing utility of the land subject to them.


 
Symposium Announcement: International Law & the State of the Constitution at Columbia
    International Law and the State of the Constitution New York City, February 24-25, 2006 25th Annual Federalist Society Student Symposium Columbia Law School is honored to be hosting this year's symposium on its 25th anniversary. We join a tradition of symposia dedicated to exploring the most pressing and important issues in law and public policy. We have chosen the topic of international law, broadly defined, for this year's symposium, and we are certain it will provide a fantastic set of panels and debates. International law has dominated the Supreme Court's docket in recent terms in two distinct, but related, forms. The first involves issues that are inherently international in nature—for example the power of the Executive, and protections offered by the Constitution in the war on terror—where the Court has always struggled with its role in the international realm. The second involves the increasing frequency with which the Court involves international law in its decisions in ways it historically has not. The use of foreign sources in the interpretation of the Constitution is the most pressing concern voiced by conservative jurists, and continues to provoke controversy when it is employed to defend reversal of settled U.S. law. This year's symposium will address the various applications of both of these concerns. We have invited the most accomplished professors and jurists from a variety of points on the ideological spectrum to deliver insight into these important questions. We hope you will join us in New York City on Friday and Saturday, February 24-25, 2006. The speakers include
      Judge Frank Easterbrook, 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Dennis Jacobs, 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William H. Pryor, 11th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge A. Raymond Randolph, DC Circuit Court of Appeals Dean Alex Aleinikoff, Georgetown University Law Center Professor Akhil Amar, Yale Law School Professor Curtis Bradley, Duke University School of Law Professor Steven Calabresi, Northwestern University Law School Professor Lori Damrosch, Columbia Law School Professor Martin Flaherty, Fordham Law School Professor Thomas Franck, New York University Law School Professor Vicki Jackson, Georgetown University Law Center Professor John McGinnis, Northwestern University Law School Professor Thomas W. Merrill, Columbia Law School Professor Gerald Neuman, Columbia Law School Professor Catherine Powell, Fordham Law School Professor Jeremy Rabkin, Cornell University Professor Michael Ramsey, University of San Diego Law School Professor Jeremy Waldron, Columbia Law School Professor Ruth Wedgewood, Johns Hopkins University Professor John Yoo, Boalt Hall (UC Berkeley) School of Law


Thursday, November 24, 2005
 
Thursday Calendar
    Oxford Jurisprudence Discussion Group: Josep Lluís Martí Marmol, The Epistemic Conception of Deliberative Democracy Defended
    Oxford Public International Law Discussion Group: Thomas Skouteris, 'The New Tribunalism': Liberal Sensibilities in the Age of Adjudication
    Oxford Financial Law Discussion Group: Professor Niamh Moloney, "The Hedge Fund Challenge as a Test Case for EC Securities Regulation"
    University College, London, Centre for Law and the Environment and the Journal of Environmental Law: The Hon. Sir Francis Jacobs, ‘The European Court of Justice and the Environment: What Role for the Court in a Global Drama?’
    University College, London, Current Legal Problems Lecture: Professor Jeremy Phillips (UCL), ‘How to Win at Monopoly: Applying Game Theory to the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights’


 
Thanksgiving This Thanksgiving, I would like to thank the many teachers and mentors who have enabled and enriched my life as teacher, scholar, and thinker.
    Thanks to Mr. Chevalier of Repetto School in Monterey Park, my home room teacher in seventh grade--the first of many teachers who made learning an adventure rather than a chore.
    Thanks to Congressman Brad Sherman, my best friend in 8th grade, who convinced me to join the Mark Keppel High School Debate Team.
    Thanks to Jewel Bridges, my high school debate coach, who really had no idea what to do with me.
    Thanks to Marilyn Young, who played a recording of Larry Tribe in the final round of the college national debate championships. At age 14, when I learned that Tribe was then a young professor at Harvard Law School, I decided that I wanted to be a law professor--a lucky if somewhat improbable dream.
    Thanks to Mr. Katz, my high school American History teacher, who had 16 and 17 year olds reading classic articles from history and political science about constitutional history. I took it for granted.
    Thanks to Geoff Goodman, Dennis Winston, and King Schofield, to John DeBross, John Wallen, and Lee Garrison, to Donn Parson, David Zarefsky, James Unger, and Lee Polk, to Jay Hurst and David Kent, and many many others on the "national circuit." I learned so much.
    Thanks to Rogers Albritton--the best teacher I've ever had.
    Thanks to Warren Quinn, Gregory Kavka, and Jean Hampton. Warren, Greg, and Jean were extraordinary philosophers, associated with the UCLA philosophy department in the late 70s and early 80s. All three are now gone, long before their times. Each of them encouraged me when I needed encouragement.
    Thanks to Philippa Foot--I use something I learned from Philippa almost every day of my professional life.
    Thanks to John Rawls, who was generous beyond all reason. He set the standard to which I aspire.
    Thanks to Frank Michelman and Lea Brilmayer. First year contracts: Lea taught the first semester; Frank taught the second. Perhaps some of my readers will be able to guess that there was quite a contrast. Ex ante versus ex post, anyone?
    Thanks to Andy Kaufman, Charles Nesson, Charles Fried, Roberto Unger, Lloyd Weinreb, Louis Kaplow, Arthur Miller, and David Westfall. Most especially, thanks to Steve Marzen, from whom I learned the law.
    And to Archibald Cox--who single-nandedly provided a window into what was best about legal education in another era.
Best wishes for a joyous Thanksgiving! And thank you for reading!


 
Shiffrin on Bollinger on Academic Freedom Check out Steve Shiffrin's Bollinger, Academic Freedom, and Tolerance on Left2Right. Here's a taste:
    According to Bollinger, the goal of university education is to produce tolerant and non-authoritarian citizens, citizens who have “the imaginative range and the mental courage to take in, to explore, the full complexity of the subject. To set aside one's pre-existing beliefs, to hold simultaneously in one's mind multiple angles of seeing things, to actually allow yourself seemingly to believe another view as you consider it. . . .” It strikes me that this perspective on academic freedom is overly narrow. We can all agree that professor have responsibilities. They must teach within the confines of the subject they are teaching. They must respect students whose views are different than those of the professor. In many courses they should be expected to explore, so far as possible, “the full range of the complexity of the subject.” (Bollinger, I believe is not so naïve as to believe that the full range can really be explored in every course. What he means to counter is one-sided or partisan teaching). But, in requiring this of every course, Bollinger goes too far. Is it wrong for a teacher in a seminar on law and economics to explore the subject without having a unit on challenges to law and economics?
Read the whole post!


Wednesday, November 23, 2005
 
Wednesday Calendar
    Heythop Philosophy Society (London): John Skorupski (St Andrews), Welfare and Morality
    Philosophy of Education (London): Mitja Sardoc (IOE), Liberal Civic Education Re-examined
    Northwestern Law & Economics: Kathy Spier, Professor of Law and Professor of Management and Strategy, Northwestern University, "Strategic Judgment Proofing"
    University Collgege, London, International Law Association: Dr Matthew Craven, SOAS; Catriona Drew, SOAS; Dr Susan Marks, Cambridge University; Dr Gerry Simpson, LSE, ‘The Empire Strikes Back? Colonialism, empire, self-determination and international law’


 
Lash on Madison's Tenth Amendment Kurt Lash (Loyola, Los Angeles) has posted James Madison's Celebrated Report of 1800: The Transformation of the Tenth Amendment (forthcoming George Washington Law Review) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    It has become commonplace to describe the Rehnquist Court as having staged a "Federalism Revolution." Although the current status of the Revolution is in dispute, historical treatment of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence under Chief Justice Rehnquist no doubt will emphasize a resurgence of federalism and limited construction of federal power. Cases like Gregory v. Ashcroft, New York v. United States, United States v. Lopez, Printz v. United States, Alden v. Maine, and United States v. Morrison all share a common rule of interpretation: Narrow construction of federal power to interfere with matters believed best left under state control. The textual hook for this rule of strict construction has been the Tenth Amendment. The Court's reliance on the Tenth Amendment has been the source of unrelenting scholarly criticism, particularly because the amendment itself literally does nothing more than announce a mere "truism": Those powers not delegated are reserved. It says nothing about whether delegated powers are to be broadly or strictly construed. As I have written in two previous articles, Founders such as James Madison believed that the Ninth Amendment, not the Tenth, established a rule of strict construction. In this article, I address how it came to pass that the Tenth Amendment, and not the Ninth, became accepted as an independent rule of strict construction. Ironically, it was Madison himself who drafted the document that would establish the Tenth Amendment as the primary guarantor of constitutional federalism. Madison's 1800 "Report on the Virginia Resolutions" denounced the Alien and Sedition Acts as exceeding Congress's enumerated powers and thus intruded upon the retained rights of the states in violation of the Tenth Amendment. His Report became a canonical document in the 19th century states' rights movement and transformed the Tenth Amendment into a symbolic declaration of limited federal power.
Highly recommended.


 
Lazarus on Deliberative Democracy & Environmental Law Richard James Lazarus (Georgetown University Law Center) has posted Congressional Descent: The Demise of Deliberative Democracy in Environmental Law (Georgetown Law Journal, Vol 94, No. 2, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    In recent years, the formal environmental lawmaking dimension of Congress has become effectively moribund. Earlier Congresses were, by contrast, celebrated for enacting sweeping, demanding environmental laws and for passing significant and increasingly detailed amendments in response to subsequent developments in executive branch agencies, federal courts, and the states. Now, Congress passes almost no coherent, comprehensive environmental legislation and displays no ability to deliberate openly and systematically in response to changing circumstances and new information. Instead, when Congress does now exercise its lawmaking authorities to influence environmental protection policy, it does so primarily through the appropriations process: the sphere of its responsibility that, ironically, has proven to be the least conducive to the kind of deliberative democracy that justifies legislative supremacy in environmental lawmaking. This article describes the ascent and descent of Congress in environmental law, discusses the troublesome implications for environmental law of the increasing dominance of the appropriations process in congressional lawmaking, identifies the major causes of these developments, and concludes by offering some possibilities for congressional reform.


 
Call for Papers: "Making Ethics Visible"
    Call for Proposals The 2nd Midwest Environmental Ethics Conference: "Making Ethics Visible" St. Paul, Minnesota May 6, 2006 Conference Sponsors: --Department of Philosophy, University of St. Thomas --Program on Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Ethics, University of Minnesota --Minnesota Department of Natural Resources --Minnesota Association for Environmental Education Featured Speakers: --J. Baird Callicott, Professor of Philosophy, University of North Texas --Andrew Light, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Washington --Peter Bell, Chair, Metropolitan Council of the Twin Cities The organizing committee for the 2nd Midwest Environmental Ethics Conference invites proposals from academic philosophers, natural resource professionals, environmental education practitioners, and interested community members for papers, panels, roundtables, workshops, and other presentations that address the role of environmental ethics in community decision-making. The committee specifically invites proposals that address the conference theme -- "Making Ethics Visible" -- by answering the following question: "how can your academic discipline, professional expertise, or personal insight contribute to making ethical practices, principles, and/or assumptions visible in community decision-making about the environment?" Proposals that address the environment of the Midwest and/or environmental education are especially encouraged. Presenters may also wish to address one or more of the following related questions: --what ethical practices, principles, and assumptions are involved in community decision-making about the environment? how are theoretical issues in environmental ethics related to actual communities, issues, and decision-making processes? --who constitutes the "community" in community decision-making? who gets to make the decisions, and how is this decided? who is affected by these decisions, and what role do these parties have in the decision-making process? are the values promoted in environmental decisions shared by the affected communities? --how does community decision-making function at different temporal and spatial scales? what role can future generations play? what role can people in distant lands play? what is the relationship between local, regional, and global communities? what is the relationship between communities of interest and communities of place? --how are ethical conflicts resolved? which methods of conflict resolution have proven most effective, and why? --what role can environmental educators play in community decision- making? how should environmental ethics be incorporated into environmental education? how do environmental ethics and the ethics of education interact in the delivery of environmental education? Morning keynote addresses by J. Baird Callicott and Andrew Light will be followed by a panel discussion with Peter Bell and other policy- makers that will model how to make ethics visible in community decision-making, using the issue of suburban sprawl as a case study. Following lunch, four hour-long concurrent sessions will promote an interdisciplinary dialogue between academics, professionals, environmental educators, and community members. A variety of session proposals will be considered -- including papers, panels, roundtables, discussions, and workshops -- but all presentations will be limited to 30 minutes, so that 30 minutes of audience discussion and participation can follow. Conference organizers will chair the concurrent sessions and will review all proposals prior to acceptance. Send one-page proposals by 6 January 2006 to: Heidi Giebel Department of Philosophy, #JRC 241 University of St. Thomas St. Paul, MN 55105 Email: hmgiebel@stthomas.edu Phone: 651-962-5367 Please include the title of your proposed presentation, your institutional affiliation (if any), and your contact information. Requests for audio-visual equipment must accompany the proposal. Electronic submissions are encouraged. Registration materials will be made available on or around 15 February 2006. We will also have a web site linked to http:// www.stthomas.edu/phil/ and http://www.agricola.umn.edu/ethics/


 
Program Announcement: PhD in Information, Communication, and the Social Sciences
    Doctor of Philosophy in Information, Communication, and the Social Sciences The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) is now accepting applications from candidates worldwide who want to study the Internet and its social impact full-time at a doctoral level from October 2006. We aim to admit four to six students a year, starting in 2006-07. The first closing date for fully completed applications is the 20th of January 2006 for admission in October 2006. We are a department of Oxford University, chartered to pioneer the multidisciplinary study of the evolution and social implications of the Internet and related information and communication technologies. The OII informs and grounds its research in fruitful collaboration with policy makers, technologists, businesspeople, teachers, scholars and civil society more widely. We seek to understand the most relevant social puzzles, problems, and opportunities associated with the Internet as it transforms the fundamentals of work, politics, education, entertainment, and social collaboration and conflict. Candidates must demonstrate the talent, creativity, and enthusiasm necessary to perform outstanding research that will make a difference—to ask original, concrete questions and adopt incisive methodologies for exploring them, in order to help positively shape the development of digital networked space and those whose lives are affected by it. The OII’s four key areas of research provide the focal points for studies within the DPhil in Information, Communication, and the Social Sciences: Technology and institutional innovation. This area includes productivity in the private and public sphere; the management, functioning and delivery of government services and processes; and e-democracy and e-government developments. Backgrounds in sociology, management, government, and political science would help to explore issues such as: In what ways is the Internet transforming politics, government and organizational performance? How do governments use information technology to improve public service delivery and enhance democratic processes—or to strengthen autocratic regimes? What social and organizational factors constrain and drive developments in e-government and e-democracy? Science, learning and networks. Here the focus is on the use of ICTs within academic and research communities, especially on innovations in education and the social, legal and ethical shaping of what is becoming known as e-Science. Backgrounds in education, computer science, ethics, and law would be particularly appropriate for examining questions like: In what ways is the Internet being used to transform science, learning, and education? What new legal, ethical, and institutional issues are being raised by advanced Internet and Grid technologies? Will advanced developments in e-Science define the next breakthrough in ICTs? e-Society. The application of ICTs in many aspects of everyday life is the heart of this theme, such as in personal interactions and activities in the household and workplace in a mobile, networked society. Backgrounds in sociology, media and cultural studies, economics, political science and other relevant social sciences are welcomed to gain fresh insights into questions like: Who uses and who does not use the Internet and what difference does this make? Is the Internet a technology of freedom or control, enhancing social and personal freedom or eroding privacy and civil liberties? How can the Internet’s impact be accurately and meaningfully measured and explained? What social factors are shaping ICTs and their broad societal implications? Shaping, governing and regulating the Internet and related ICTs. This focal point investigates frameworks that liberate or constrain the range of choices that can be made about the use, design and development of ICTs, including the architecture of the Internet and how it is governed. Backgrounds in law, computer science, technology policy, and media studies would be especially relevant to issues such as: How far should, and can, citizen behaviour in cyberspace be regulated and controlled? Who does, and who should, govern the Internet? What shifts between public and private gatekeepers are underway, or could emerge in the future? What options are there for what the Internet could look like in the next 10–20 years, and which of these futures are most desirable and attainable? For further information, see http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/teaching/


Tuesday, November 22, 2005
 
Tuesday Calendar
    Georgetown Law: Vicki Jackson, Habeas Corpus
    NYU Colloquium in Law, Economics & Politics: Richard Pildes (New York University School of Law) with Daryl Levinson (Harvard Law School), "Separation of Parties, Not Powers"
    Oxford Human Rights Discussion Group: Kate Hofmeyr and Tarunabh Khaitan, Judicial Enforcement of Positive Rights in India and South Africa: A Comparative Perspective
    Oxford EC Law Discussion Group: Pavlos Eleftheriadis, The Idea of a European Constitution
    Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre: Henry Carr, Intellectual Property in the New Millennium: Claims & Shapes: New Boundaries in IP Law


 
Tauber on the Bill of Rights in the Territories Alan Tauber (University of South Carolina) has posted The Empire Forgotten: The Application of the Bill of Rights to U.S. Territories on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    "The Empire Forgotten: The Application of the Bill of Rights to U.S. Territories" examines the history of the Insular Cases, a series of cases decided by the United States Supreme Court at the turn of the twentieth century, dealing with the extension of the Bill of Rights to recently acquired territories of the United States. It begins with an examination of the history of territorial acquisition by the United States, starting with the Northwest Territories and continuing up through the Treaty of Paris at the end of the Spanish-American War. Through this historical examination, the paper traces the various laws and treaties made by Congress, and how the Treaty of Paris, unlike prior treaties, lacked a provision guaranteeing rights to citizens of the newly acquired territories. It was this lack that lead to the decisions by the United States Supreme Court, holding that the full Bill of Rights, specifically the right to a jury trial, did not apply to these newly acquired "insular" territories. Part III of the paper begins with an examination of the Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford, the first application of the Bill of Rights to United States territory not yet a state. It notes that in that case, Chief Justice Taney held that the Bill of Rights, and specifically the right to a jury trial, applied in U.S. territories. It then moves on to an examination of the "Uniform Duties Clause Cases," in which the Court first addressed the Government's relationship to the insular territories, and ruled that they were not part of "the United States" as that term was used in the Constitution. It then moves on to examine the Insular Cases themselves, and the creation of the Territorial Incorporation Doctrine, which holds that the Constitution only applies fully to territories that Congress has incorporated into the United States. Since Congress has not incorporated the insular territories, the Court held that the right to a jury trial did not apply. It traces the evolution of the Territorial Incorporation Doctrine from its first articulation in Justice White's concurring opinion in Downes v. Bidwell through its eventual adoption by the full Court in Balzac v. Porto Rico (sic). The paper then examines the distinction between procedural and fundamental rights, only the latter of which have been incorporated. It notes that the Court held that the right to a jury trial is procedural, rather than fundamental, and therefore citizens of the insular territories could not claim this right. The paper moves on to a discussion of the racist language and assumptions underlying the Territorial Incorporation Doctrine before moving on to an examination of several solutions to the problem of this unequal application of the Bill of Rights. Four possible solutions are suggested, and the benefits and detriments of each are explored before the paper finally concludes that the best action to solve for this unequal application of the Bill of Rights is for Congress to fully incorporate the Insular Territories.


 
Professional Suicide? Updated and Moved to the Top of the Blog Check out Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs by Robert S. Boynton on Slate. A taste:
    "Here goes nothing. I shouldn't be doing this. I'll be going up for tenure soon," reads the first post of the blog that University of Chicago political scientist Daniel Drezner started in September 2002. Sure enough, this past October, Drezner was denied tenure. And although his department claimed that blogging hadn't been a factor in the decision, junior academics across the blogosphere were traumatized.
Update: Here is Drezner's reply. A short excerpt:
    I'm pretty sure that the contribution of blogs to academic output can be measured using pre-existing standards -- with one exception and one caveat. The exception is that maybe the whole of an academic blog is greater than the sum of its parts. Precisely because a blog can contribute to public discourse, scholarly research, and teaching pedagogy at the same time, it encourages a greater mkix of ideas and information than would otherwise be possible. Whether this is true I will leave for the commenters.


 
Tussey on File Sharing Deborah S. Tussey (Oklahoma City University School of Law) has posted Music at the Edge of Chaos: A Complex Systems Perspective on File Sharing (Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, 2005) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Peer-to-peer file sharing arose in the context of a system for production and distribution of music recordings. This article applies complexity theory and systems analysis to that system. It describes the music system as a complex system displaying universal characteristics of such systems, including nonlinearity, emergence, and unpredictability. P2P is an emergent phenomenon, which has fed back into the system and produced emergent responses, notably the iTunes business model and moderate digital rights management. These responses suggest that the music system is successfully adapting to the digital environment and has positioned itself "at the edge of chaos" where complex systems are most sustainable. Nonetheless, numerous proposals for legislative responses to file sharing are on the table. This article suggests several guidelines for successful regulation of complex systems such as the music system and applies those guidelines to current copyright reform proposals. I conclude that such proposals are premature and suggest that the current regulatory structure be left essentially intact for several years to allow the system reasonable time to adapt. During that period, Congress should monitor system conditions to ensure open competition and utilize independent observers to perform a thorough system analysis which could guide legislative intervention if it later proves necessary.


 
Bateup on Constitutional Dialogue Christine Bateup (New York University - School of Law) has posted The Dialogic Promise: Assessing the Normative Potential of Theories of Constitutional Dialogue (71 Brooklyn Law Review, 2006) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    In recent years, the metaphor of "dialogue" has become increasingly ubiquitous within constitutional theory - both in the United States and globally - as a way of describing the nature of interactions between courts and non-judicial actors in the area of constitutional decision-making, particularly in relation to the interpretation of rights. This Article provides a critical account of theories of constitutional dialogue in order to determine which of these theories hold the greatest normative promise. Theories of dialogue face two hurdles to normative success. First, they must accomplish their goal of resolving the democratic objection to judicial review. Second, and legitimacy aside, they must be able to provide an attractive normative vision of the role of judicial review in democratic constitutionalism. This Article maintains that while theories of constitutional dialogue do make important contributions to our understanding of judicial review, most fail to provide satisfying normative visions of dialogue on these dual levels of analysis. This Article concludes that the greatest potential for achieving a normatively satisfying understanding of constitutional dialogue emerges when the contributions of equilibrium and partnership theories of dialogue are synthesized. Equilibrium theories focus on the judiciary's capacity to facilitate society-wide debate, while partnership theories draw attention to more distinct "judicial" and "legislative" functions that the different branches of government respectively perform. The dynamic fusion of these models not only makes the greatest contributions to our understanding of modern constitutionalism and the practice of judicial review, but also offers the greatest potential for designing improved dialogic constitutional systems in the future.


 
Lazarus on Natural Laws, Human Nature, and Environmental Law Richard James Lazarus (Georgetown University Law Center) has posted Human Nature, the Laws of Nature, and the Nature of Environmental Law (Virginia Environmental Law Journal, Vol. 24, No. 3, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This article explores the roles that human nature, the laws of nature, and the nature of the nation's lawmaking institutions have all played in the emergence and evolution of domestic environmental law and how the interrelated difficulties presented by each are reflected in the kinds of legal issues that surround environmental lawmaking. The article also discusses how these same difficulties impede environmental lawmaking by obscuring from lawmakers, judges, and the general population what is truly important about environmental law. Part I considers the ways in which the need for environmental law derives from the tendency of human nature to cause adverse environmental consequences and the ways in which the laws of nature make it more difficult to prevent those consequences absent the imposition of external legal rules. Part II describes how our nation's lawmaking institutions are similarly challenged by the laws of nature. This includes a discussion of how the kinds of laws necessary to bridge the gap between human nature and the laws of nature are systematically difficult for our lawmaking institutions to develop in the first instance and to maintain over time. Part III takes a closer look at one of the nation's most important legal institutions - the United States Supreme Court - and briefly discusses both its past shortcomings in environmental lawmaking and its potential in the future.


 
Epstein & Segal on the Dynamics of Supreme Court Ideology The Washington Post has a nifty op/ed, Changing Room The Court's Dynamics Have a Way of Altering a Justice's Approach to the Law by Lee Epstein and Jeffrey A. Segal
    Samuel Alito, in all likelihood, will be a conservative justice and will reach decisions in accord with that label. But there's a "but" -- actually several, all recent or current justices: David Souter, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor, to name five justices for whom, to greater or lesser extent, ideological labels proved misleading. The "but" offers important insights into why some nominees, once they become justices, sometimes don't behave as predicted and how the court's dynamics can affect their views. In the case of Souter, initial judgments about how he might vote were downright wrong. The clear expectation, based largely on his lower court record, was that Souter would be a rather consistent conservative voter -- even more to the right than Reagan appointees Kennedy and O'Connor, at the time of their nominations. Souter, of course, is a rather consistent voter -- on the court's liberal wing.
Epstein & Segal are among the best political scientists who study judicial attitudes. Check it out!


Monday, November 21, 2005
 
Monday Calendar
    Boston College Law: Joan MacLeod Heminway, Professor of Law, University of Tennessee College of Law; Visiting Professor of Law, Boston College Law School.
    Columbia Legal Theory Workshop: Abner Greene of Fordham Law School, Excerpts from "Against Obligation:A Theory of Permeable Sovereignty"
    Columbia Law & Economics: Louis Kaplow, Harvard Law School, "Taxation of Families"
    Georgetown Environmental Research Workshop: Professor J.B. Ruhl, Florida State University School of Law, "The Effects of Wetlands Mitigation Banking On Humans--A Case Study of Ecosystem Services Policy Failure"
    Aristotelian Society, London: Antony Duff, Answering for Crime. If you are interested in criminal law theory, don't miss a chance to hear Duff!
    Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies: Dr Matthew Gibney, Security, Citizenship and the Law: regulating boundaries: Beyond the bounds of responsibility : Western States and measures to prevent the entry of refugees
    UCLA Law: Dennis Ventry, Visiting Scholar in Taxation, UCLA School of Law, Program in Business Law & Policy, For Richer, For Poorer: How Tax Policymakers have Protected and Punished American Families, 1913-2005
    University of Texas Law: Albert Yoon, Northwestern University, "Offer-of-Judgment Rules and Civil Litigation: An Empirical Study of Automobile Insurance Litigation in the East"


 
Call for Papers: BSET 2006
    CALL FOR PAPERS The BRITISH SOCIETY for ETHICAL THEORY 2006 CONFERENCE University of Southampton, UK 10-12 July 2006 Invited Speakers:
      Roger Crisp (Oxford University) Mark Timmons (University of Arizona)
    Papers are invited for the annual conference of the British Society for Ethical Theory, to be held at the University of Southampton. The subject area is open within metaethics and normative ethics. Papers on topics in applied ethics or the history of ethics may also be considered provided they are also of wider theoretical interest. Papers, which should be unpublished at the time of submission, should be in English, no longer than 6500 words, readable in at most 45 minutes and in a form suitable for blind review. Please send your submission electronically, and include an abstract, as well as your full name, address and academic affiliation. Those who submitted papers for our previous conferences - successfully or otherwise - are welcome to submit again (though not of course the same papers!). Please tell us if you are a postgraduate student: submissions from postgraduates are encouraged as our aim is that some such should be represented at the conference. Selected conference papers will be published in the journal "Ethical Theory and Moral Practice". Please make clear in any covering letter whether you want your paper considered for publication here as well as for the conference programme. The deadline for submissions is 6th December, 2005. Papers and accompanying particulars should be emailed to Dr. Elinor Mason: Elinor.Mason@ed.ac.uk Note that ONLY electronic submissions will be accepted. Further particulars regarding registration will be available in due course from: BSET homepage: www.bset.org


Sunday, November 20, 2005
 
Legal Theory Calendar
    Monday, November 21
      Boston College Law: Joan MacLeod Heminway, Professor of Law, University of Tennessee College of Law; Visiting Professor of Law, Boston College Law School.
      Columbia Legal Theory Workshop: Abner Greene of Fordham Law School, Excerpts from "Against Obligation:A Theory of Permeable Sovereignty"
      Columbia Law & Economics: Louis Kaplow, Harvard Law School, "Taxation of Families"
      Georgetown Environmental Research Workshop: Professor J.B. Ruhl, Florida State University School of Law, "The Effects of Wetlands Mitigation Banking On Humans--A Case Study of Ecosystem Services Policy Failure"
      Aristotelian Society, London: Antony Duff, Answering for Crime. If you are interested in criminal law theory, don't miss a chance to hear Duff!
      Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies: Dr Matthew Gibney, Security, Citizenship and the Law: regulating boundaries: Beyond the bounds of responsibility : Western States and measures to prevent the entry of refugees
      UCLA Law: Dennis Ventry, Visiting Scholar in Taxation, UCLA School of Law, Program in Business Law & Policy, For Richer, For Poorer: How Tax Policymakers have Protected and Punished American Families, 1913-2005
      University of Texas Law: Albert Yoon, Northwestern University, "Offer-of-Judgment Rules and Civil Litigation: An Empirical Study of Automobile Insurance Litigation in the East"
    Tuesday, November 22
      Georgetown Law: Vicki Jackson, Habeas Corpus
      NYU Colloquium in Law, Economics & Politics: Richard Pildes (New York University School of Law) with Daryl Levinson (Harvard Law School), "Separation of Parties, Not Powers"
      Oxford Human Rights Discussion Group: Kate Hofmeyr and Tarunabh Khaitan, Judicial Enforcement of Positive Rights in India and South Africa: A Comparative Perspective
      Oxford EC Law Discussion Group: Pavlos Eleftheriadis, The Idea of a European Constitution
      Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre: Henry Carr, Intellectual Property in the New Millennium: Claims & Shapes: New Boundaries in IP Law
    Wednesday, November 23
      Heythop Philosophy Society (London): John Skorupski (St Andrews), Welfare and Morality
      Philosophy of Education (London): Mitja Sardoc (IOE), Liberal Civic Education Re-examined
      Northwestern Law & Economics: Kathy Spier, Professor of Law and Professor of Management and Strategy, Northwestern University, "Strategic Judgment Proofing"
      University Collgege, London, International Law Association: Dr Matthew Craven, SOAS; Catriona Drew, SOAS; Dr Susan Marks, Cambridge University; Dr Gerry Simpson, LSE, ‘The Empire Strikes Back? Colonialism, empire, self-determination and international law’
    Thursday, November 24
      Oxford Jurisprudence Discussion Group: Josep Lluís Martí Marmol, The Epistemic Conception of Deliberative Democracy Defended
      Oxford Public International Law Discussion Group: Thomas Skouteris, 'The New Tribunalism': Liberal Sensibilities in the Age of Adjudication
      Oxford Financial Law Discussion Group: Professor Niamh Moloney, "The Hedge Fund Challenge as a Test Case for EC Securities Regulation"
      University College, London, Centre for Law and the Environment and the Journal of Environmental Law: The Hon. Sir Francis Jacobs, ‘The European Court of Justice and the Environment: What Role for the Court in a Global Drama?’
      University College, London, Current Legal Problems Lecture: Professor Jeremy Phillips (UCL), ‘How to Win at Monopoly: Applying Game Theory to the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights’
    Friday, November 25
      St Anne's College, Oxford: Ed Flippen, "US Electricity Deregulation after California, Enron and the Worst Blackout in US History"
      Oxford Centre for Competition Law & Policy: Edward Flippen, US Electric Deregulation after California, Enron, and the Worst Blackout in US History


 
Legal Theory Lexicon: Conduct Rules and Decision Rules
    Substantive rules of law (such as the rules of torts, contract, and property) are usually assumed to be addressed to two audiences. As conduct rules, the substantive law is addressed to everyone (citizens, officials, and noncitizens). Thus, property law tells us who has dominion over which resources. If this land is mine, then the law communicates the message that I can use my land and exclude others from its use. These very same legal rules also serve as decision rules, they tell courts how to resolve disputes. We usually assume that the content of the conduct rules are the decision rules are identical, but this need not be the case. Professor Meir Dan-Cohen of U.C. Berkeley proposed a very famous thought experiment. He asked us to imagine acoustic separation between ordinary citizens, who would only "hear" the conduct rules, and officials (such as judges), to whom the decision rules would be addressed. This leads naturally to the following thought: should decision rules and conduct rules have the same content or should they differ. And if they differ, how could the law prevent acoustic leakage, e.g. prevent ordinary citizens from learning about the content of the decision rules?
    Example? Here's a pretty clear example. Suppose that we have a conduct rule that says, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." This might be a good conduct rule, because we want citizens to inform themselves about the content of the law, and we certainly don't want citizens deliberately insulating themselves from knowledge of the law in order to create a defense if they charged with its violation. But at the same time, we might prefer that ignorance of the law would serve as an excuse, at least some of the time, when it comes to actually convicting and punishing defendants. Punishment is expensive and injurious, and sometimes no really good purpose will be served by punishing someone who is reasonably ignorant of the law's content.
    But how can we excuse ignorance of the law without altering the conduct rule? One way to accomplish this goal would involve some obfuscation by judges. Opinions might state boldly: "Ignorance of the law is no excuse," while simultaneously excusing ignorant defendants on the ground that "knowledge of the legal status of the intentional content is part of the mental state that is an element of the crime." The first formulation is easily accessible to ordinary folks; the second is couched in language that may be opaque except to those trained in the law.
As a second year law student, I was given Meir-Dan Cohen's Decision Rules and Conduct rules: On Acoustic Separation in Criminal Law, 97 Harvard Law Review 625 (1984) to evaluate for publication in the Review. I still remember vividly the meeting of the articles office in which I advocated publication of the article. One editor took the position that the article should be published if it would have the same influence on legal theory as Hohfeld, Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, 23 Yale L.J. 16 (1913), has produced. Rather a tough standard, don't you think? Professor Dan-Cohen's article is a classic of contemporary legal theory. You won't regret reading it!


Saturday, November 19, 2005
 
Legal Theory Bookworm The Legal Theory Bookworm recommends Sandra Day O'Connor : How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice by Joan Biskupic. Here's a blurb:
    In the late 1980s, as the Supreme Court justices were discussing a case, Antonin Scalia ranted against affirmative action. Sandra Day O'Connor, the first and then still the only woman on the High Court, replied, "Why, Nino, how do you think I got my job?" This is one of the few revelatory moments in Biskupic's bio of the retiring O'Connor as sharp-tongued, humorous and utterly realistic. It's also, as Biskupic shows in a close study of O'Connor's jurisprudence, a bit misleading: for most of her career on the Court, the conservative O'Connor voted against affirmative action. With access to justices' once private papers, longtime court observer Biskupic, now with USA Today, sheds light on the internal workings on the Court, but not much on the internal workings of the very private O'Connor's mind and heart. Biskupic does show the justice gaining confidence and force on the Court, particularly after her fight against breast cancer in 1988. As O'Connor faces retirement, Biskupic clarifies her judicial legacy, sometimes seeing the glass as half full, sometimes as half empty: praising her lack of ideology but also noting a lack of vision in a justice who often "step[s] to the brink, and then back[s] away"—a mixed legacy that will be debated for years to come.


 
Download of the Week The Download of the Week is Information Asymmetries and the Rights to Exclude by Lior Strahilevitz. Here is the abstract:
    This article addresses a central question in property theory: In a world where an owner can exercise the right to exclude third parties from his resource in any of several ways, what causes him to adopt a particular exclusionary strategy? Orthodox property scholarship has focused a great deal of attention on those exclusion rights that arise under trespass law. This paper suggests that much can be gained from thinking about exclusion with a bigger tent approach, one that is sensitive to the ways in which non-trespass-based exclusion rights substitute for in rem, trespass-based rights. Non-trespass-based exclusion rights include exclusionary vibes, which are communicative signals that make undesirable third parties feel unwelcome, as well as exclusionary amenities, which impose a disproportionate tax on the undesirable by bundling permission to use a resource with an obligation to pay for a separate, polarizing resource. It turns out that information asymmetries often drive owners' decisions about what exclusion strategies to adopt. Where third parties seeking to use property possess private information about their own preferences, behaviors, and intentions, and the owner cannot discover this private information at a low cost, the owner is likely to delegate the exclusion function to the would-be entrants by employing non-trespass based exclusion strategies. By contrast, where there is little private information involved, or private information can be discovered by the owner at a low cost, the owner is more likely to employ trespass-based exclusion rights. This relationship between information asymmetries and the choice of exclusion strategies suggests new possibilities for creative government intervention in those settings where particular exclusion strategies conflict with public policy interests. It is well understood that the government can impose outright prohibitions, proscribing some forms of exclusion and permitting other forms. This is the strategy the government has adopted in the housing discrimination arena. Alternatively, the government can adopt subtler but equally effective strategies that regulate access to private information as a means of altering owners' incentives to exclude. Megan's Law is the most prominent and far-reaching example of the subtle approach, although many aspects of information privacy law affect owners' incentives in much the same way. In short, by rendering private information public or public information private, the state can alter, sometimes radically, the mix of exclusion strategies that resource owners employ.
Download it while its hot!


Friday, November 18, 2005
 
Leiter on Hiring Tactics Read Brian Leiter's post A New Hiring Tactic: Reader Reaction Sought. Here is ataste:
    [T]here has been much talk about a new recruitment tactic by Northwestern, described to me by colleagues at Illinois and Texas as follows: Northwestern offers to fly back a "hot" candidate prior to the "meat market" on the condition that if Northwestern makes the candidate an offer, the candidate commits to accept that offer against any others, except for two or three super elite schools on a pre-agreed list (e.g., Yale or Stanford).
There are already some good comments, including this one from Adam Winkler:
    Only a risk averse candidate would take this offer. NW is doing this to target candidates that otherwise will be expected to be offered jobs at better schools. The candidates will know that they are being considered by numerous other better schools, thus why would they turn away those possibilities for NW? Perhaps a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush, but we're likely talking about 8-10 in the bush. Also, NW has the additional problem of being relatively unattractive to candidates due to its tenure record, constant defection of junior faculty, and the informal Ph.D. requirement for tenure -- the latter imposed even on candidates with nothing more than a J.D. If memory serves, NW has lost candidates in recent years to schools considerably lower in the prestige rankings -- e.g., David Walker going to Boston University instead. I would not be at all surprised if NW lost its chance to get candidates through this process.


 
Friday Calendar


 
Lipshaw on "Rational Frogs" Jeff Lipshaw has posted a draft of Reason, Self-Deception and Rational Frogs: Reconciling Comprehension and Responsibility in Law and Business Ethics on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This is my attempt to dig deeply into the descriptive and normative aspect of the study and teaching of business law and ethics. The possibility of conflation of the descriptive and normative is reflected in no discipline as much as law. The coincidence of legal positivism (a view I largely endorse) and the adoption of a social science approach has, it seems to me, not only created some bad social science, but has left a significant void in the way legal academics (and perhaps lawyers) look at ethical duties and responsibilities, particularly in business. I want to explore the significance of that conflation in a context familiar to a substantial number of graduates of American law schools: ethics. I am particularly concerned with two topics that go to the heart of what business lawyers do: (a) justifying harm to others, and (b) resolving inter-firm or inter-personal conflicts, where there may be wide variances in legitimately-held professional and personal values. Hence, this is an epistemological search for a satisfying secular business ethic. Although it appears to me this will approach book length, I have finished (at least, I hope, to the point of a moderately professional standard) a preface, an introductory Chapter 1 that at least outlines the entire argument, and Chapter 2, which is the bulk of the theory that will be applied in later chapters. At this point, I am willing to make it public for purposes of scholarly reaction.


 
McGowan on Open Source Check out There's no such thing as free software (And it's a good thing, too) by David McGowan on First Monday. Here's a taste:
    At the end of the day, F/OSS development is about smart people using generally applicable legal tools to help them arrange their affairs as they please. Partisan rhetoric—on both sides--can tend to obscure that fact, but that is a reason to ignore the rhetoric rather than to suspect the tools. Simplicity is elegant in law as well as elsewhere, and it is the simplicity and straightforwardness of the approach that we should celebrate. Give people rights in their work, let them use those rights to realize their vision, let creativity flourish, and let the chips fall where they may. It is not really freedom, but it is really cool. So next time someone says “free as in freedom,” or talks about speech and beer, remember: There is no such thing as free software, and it's a good thing, too.


 
Lazarus on Property Rights in the Supreme Court Richard James Lazarus (Georgetown University Law Center) has posted The Measure of a Justice: Justice Scalia and the Faltering of the Property Rights Movement within the U.S. Supreme Court on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This article takes the measure of Justice Scalia's ability to produce significant opinions for the Court, by focusing on the Court's property rights cases during the past several decades. Much of the analysis relies on the Official Papers of Justice Harry Blackmun, which provide a virtual treasure trove of information revealing the Court's deliberative process when Blackmun was on the Court from 1971 to 1994. The article concludes that Justice Scalia may have appeared an effective champion of pro-property rights rhetoric to those outside the Court, but he has been much less effective within the Court in furthering that agenda. He not only repeatedly failed in his efforts to build a workable majority coalition on the Court, but he instead pushed away potential allies. The upshot was, in the first instance, precedent heavy on strong rhetoric yet light on staying power. In combination with other causes, the ultimate result was a splintering of those Justices, which included more than a simple majority, intuitively sympathetic to property rights claims and the reconstruction of a new majority more often led by Justice John Paul Stevens that returned the law to where it had been prior to Justice Scalia's joining the Court.


 
Blumm & Ritchie on Ownership of Wildlife Michael C. Blumm and Lucus Ritchie (Lewis & Clark Law School and Lewis & Clark College - Law School) have posted The Pioneer Spirit and the Public Trust: The American Rule of Capture and State Ownership of Wildlife (Environmental Law, Vol. 35, No. 4, 2005) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    The law of capture, a central feature in Anglo-American property law, has deep historical roots, running at least to Rome, where capturers could create private property in res nullius resources like wildlife (ferae naturae) if they did so consistent with Roman law (imperium). When transfered to English common law, capture doctrine was laden with pervasive restrictions imposed by royal prerogatives, as the English king was said to own wildlife that had been unowned in Rome. Thus, royal forests and hunting franchises imposed substantial limits on wildlife capture. In early America, the lack of royal prerogatives seemed for a time to sanction a free-wheeling rule of wildlife capture unknown in England. For example, the English rule allowing landowners to exclude capturers was largely discarded, at least with respect to unfenced lands. But as the overharvesting consequences of expansive capture rules became apparent, American courts rediscovered and "republicanized" the royal prerogatives into the concept of state ownership of wildlife. This 19th century development was grounded on both sovereign power and public ownership principles, or "sovereign ownership," a concept endorsed by the Supreme Court in 1896. Although during the 20th century the Supreme Court repeatedly limited the state ownership of wildlife where it conflicted with federal law–and finally overturned the case that endorsed the doctrine in 1979–today nearly every state claims ownership of wildlife. This article examines this phenomenon and explains both the limits and utility of the state ownership doctrine in the 21st century. We claim that although modern notions of the police power justify expansive state regulation of wildlife, the state ownership doctrine retains vitality because it may bolster or enlarge police power regulation by 1) imposing affirmative duties to protect wildlife, 2) empowering states to collect damage for damages to wildlife, and 3) offering an affirmative defense against landowner claims of constitutional takings due habitat protections.


 
Jacobi on Medicaid John Jacobi (Seton Hall School of Law) has posted Dangerous Times for Medicaid on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Medicaid has become a cornerstone of our health finance system. It covers over 50 million Americans. Many are otherwise uninsurable because of their poverty and/or their disabilities. Others rely on Medicaid because the deteriorating employment-based insurance system increasingly fails to cover low income workers and their families. Medicaid’s costs are rising in large part due increased enrollment, and not increasing per-person costs. This paper examines proposed short and long term cost-cutting "reforms" to Medicaid, including those that would shift programmatic power from the federal to the state level, and "ownership society" measures that would reduce or abolish Medicaid's assurance of coverage of a defined array of medically necessary services. This paper argues that some (although not all) of the proposed reforms would lessen our commitment to care for the poor and disabled, in some cases pushing vulnerable people out of public coverage. It argues that the state of private coverage is such that these ejected beneficiaries would become uninsured. Ironically, the Medicaid reforms would, in addition to weakening Medicaid, also weaken the safety net for the uninsured. Some of the long term structural reforms threaten to push Medicaid beneficiaries out of the program to a reduced safety net.