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On Kamisar, Killing, And The Future Of Physician-Assisted Death, Norman L. Cantor

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

In a famous 1958 article, Yale Kamisar brilliantly examined the hazards of abuse and of slippery slope extensions that subsequently, for 46 years, served to thwart legalization of physician-assisted death (PAD). This paper shows that during the same period law and culture have effectively accepted a variety of ways for stricken people to hasten death, with physicians involved in diverse roles. Those ways include rejection of nutrition and hydration, terminal sedation, administration of risky analgesics, and withholding or withdrawal of medical life support.

If these existing lawful modes of hastening death were widely acknowledged, the pressure to legalize voluntary active …

Hyperownership In A Time Of Biotechnological Promise: The International Conflict To Control The Building Blocks Of Life, Sabrina Safrin

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

This article addresses the corrosive interplay between the patent-based and the sovereign- based systems of ownership of genetic material. In patent-based systems, genetic material is increasingly “owned” by corporations or research institutions which obtain patents over such material. In sovereign-based systems, the national government owns or extensively controls such material. As more patents issue for synthesized genes in developed countries through the patent system, more raw genetic material is legally enclosed by the governments of developing nations, which house most of the world’s wild or raw genetic material. This interactive spiral of increased enclosure results in the sub-optimal utilization, conservation …

Trumps, Inversions, Balancing, Presumptions, Institution Prompting, And Interpretive Canons: New Ways For Adjudicating Conflicts Between Legal Norms, Carlos E. Gonzalez

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

This article begins by reviewing the axiomatic principles that govern courts when dealing with cases in which two legal norms are interpreted as standing in conflict. The article then makes three distinct contributions.

First, the article explicates the central justification behind the use and perpetuation of the extant principles. In briefest terms, the extant principles are best justified as an attempt to resolve cases in which legal rules stand in conflict in a way that enhances or preserves the democratic legitimacy of law. They do this by favoring norms created by entities of relatively strong democratic legitimacy over norms created …

How American Workers Lost The Right To Strike, And Other Tales, James Gray Pope

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

This essay recounts the origins of five statements of labor law made by the Supreme Court, each of which has had a devastating impact on the American labor movement. The five statements are: (1) Workers have no right of self-defense against employers that commit unfair labor practices (NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation); (2) Employers enjoy the right permanently to replace economic strikers (NLRB v. Mackay Radio & Telegraph Company); (3) The National Labor Relations Board has no power to deter unfair labor practices (Consolidated Edison Company v. NLRB); (4) Employers may exclude union organizers from their property (Lechmere, Inc. v. …

The Relation Between Autonomy-Based Rights And Profoundly Disabled Persons, Norman L. Cantor

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

“The Relation Between Autonomy-based Rights and Profoundly Mentally Disabled Persons” Competent persons have fundamental rights to decide about abortion, methods of contraception, and rejection of life-sustaining medical treatment. Profoundly disabled persons are so cognitively impaired that they cannot make their own serious medical decisions. Yet some courts suggest that the mentally impaired are entitled to “the same right” to choice regarding critical medical decisions as competent persons. This article discusses the puzzling question of how to relate autonomy-based rights to never-competent persons. It argues that while profoundly disabled persons cannot be entitled to make their own medical decisions, they have …

The Bane Of Surrogate Decision Making: Defining The Best Interests Of Never-Competent Persons, Norman L. Cantor

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

The medical fate of never-competent persons cannot be resolved according to the approach governing previously competent persons -- surrogate focus on self-determination via advance instructions or projections of what the now-incompetent person would want in the circumstances. For never-competent medical patients, the commonly stated approach to surrogate decision making is best interests of the incapacitated ward.

This article examines and questions the conventional wisdom regarding a "best interests of the patient" standard. When a parent is the surrogate decision maker, the medical course chosen need not be the best course, so long as it is a plausible medical option and …

Morals-Based Justifications For Lawmaking: Before And After Lawrence V. Texas, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

Morals-Based Justifications for Lawmaking: Before and After Lawrence v. Texas looks in depth at the dissonance between the Supreme Court’s rhetorical support for morals-based lawmaking and the Court’s jurisprudence. In taking this approach, the article responds to a central post-Lawrence question regarding the sufficiency of a government’s moral agenda as a justification for restricting individual rights. It turns out, on close review of the cases going back to the mid-1800s, that the Court has almost never relied explicitly on a morals rationale to sustain an allegedly rights-infringing government action.

The article develops several explanations for this avoidance of explicit morals …

What Is Fiscal Responsibility? Long-Term Deficits, Generational Accounting, And Capital Budgeting, Neil H. Buchanan

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

This article assesses three basic approaches to assessing the future effects of the government’s fiscal policies: traditional measures of the deficit, measures associated with Generational Accounting, and measures derived from applying Capital Budgeting to the federal accounts. I conclude that Capital Budgeting is the best of the three approaches and that Generational Accounting is the least helpful. Acknowledging that there might be some value in learning what we can from a variety of approaches to analyzing fiscal policy, I nevertheless conclude that Generational Accounting is actually a misleading or--at best--empty measure of future fiscal developments. The best approach to providing …

Equality Without Tiers, Suzanne Goldberg

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

No abstract provided.

Wiretapping's Fruits, The First Amendment, And The Paradigms Of Privacy, Bernard W. Bell

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

No abstract provided.

Animals--Property Or Persons?, Gary L. Francione

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

When it comes to our moral and legal obligations to nonhuman animals, we suffer from “moral schizophrenia.” We claim to recognize that animals have morally significant interests in not suffering and that it is morally wrong to inflict “unnecessary” suffering on animals. Although we have laws that purport to reflect these moral sentiments, the overwhelming portion of the pain, suffering, and death that we impose on animals cannot be regarded as necessary in any sense. Our moral schizophrenia is related to the status of animals as property, which means that, as a practical matter, animal suffering will be regarded as …

Valuation Averaging: A New Procedure For Resolving Valuation Disputes, Keith Sharfman

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

In this Article, Professor Sharfman addresses the problem of "discretionary valuation": that courts resolve valuation disputes arbitrarily and unpredictably, thus harming litigants and society. As a solution, he proposes the enactment of "valuation averaging," a new procedure for resolving valuation disputes modeled on the algorithmic valuation processes often agreed to by sophisticated private firms in advance of any dispute. He argues that by replacing the discretion of judges and juries with a mechanical valuation process, valuation averaging would cause litigants to introduce more plausible and conciliatory valuations into evidence and thereby reduce the cost of valuation litigation and increase the …

It's Personal But Is It Mine? Toward Property Rights In Personal Information, Vera Bergelson

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

"It's Personal But Is It Mine? Toward Property Rights in Personal Information" discusses the disturbing erosion of privacy suffered by the American society in recent years due to citizens' loss of control over their personal information. This information, collected and traded by commercial enterprises, receives almost no protection under current law. I argue that, in order to protect privacy, individuals need to secure control over their information by becoming its legal owners. In this article, I confront two fundamental questions that have not been specifically addressed in the privacy literature before: why property is the most appropriate regime for regulating …

The Conviction Of Andrea Yates: A Narrative Of Denial, Sherry F. Colb

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

This piece discusses the case of Andrea Yates, the woman who confessed to drowning her five children to death and was subsequently convicted of murder (though the conviction has since been overturned). In this piece, Colb contends that Andrea Yates was convicted because of the jurors’ emotional/psychological response to the possibility that post-partum psychosis could cause an otherwise decent person to commit such brutal acts. As a symptom of denial, Colb argues, the jury rejected the insanity defense and thereby reassured itself that only evil people could do what Yates did. If that were the case, then it would be …

Treaties In Collision: The Biosafety Protocol And The World Trade Organization Agreements, Sabrina Safrin

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

In the event of a conflict between the requirements of the Biosafety Protocol, a multilateral agreement governing the trade in genetically modified organisms, and the requirements of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and associated agreements (collectively WTO Agreements), which treaty's requirements prevail? This question lies as the legal heart of the perceived conflict between trade globalization and environmental protection. This issue is particularly timely given the present trade dispute between the United States and European Union over the European Union’s restrictions on the importation of genetically modified agricultural commodities.

In this piece, I analyze the relationship between these …

The Public Justification Approach To Statutory Interpretation, Bernard W. Bell

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

Legislative history seems inextricably intertwined with the concept of legislative intentexamining legislative history makes sense only if one wishes to determine legislative intent. The contestants on both sides of the current battle over using legislative history may agree on little, but they seem to agree on this point. Legislative history’s devotees argue that determining legislative intent is the goal of statutory interpretation, and the legitimacy of referring to legislative history seems to follow without much argument. That is, legislative history merely serves as a tool to find illusive legislative intent, but, in itself, lacks significance. Those who attack legislative history …