Law Commons^™

Extremely Broad Laws, Kiel Brennan-Marquez

Faculty Articles and Papers

Extremely broad laws offend due process. Although the problem has not been lost on courts, their solution to date has been haphazard: casting breadth as a species of uncertainty-ambiguity or vagueness-and repurposing uncertainty-focused doctrine accordingly. The trouble is, breadth and uncertainty are not the same. They have different analytic features and raise distinct concerns, making the tools designed to resolve uncertainty ill-suited to reining in breadth. Vague and ambiguous laws deprive people of notice about what the law requires. They evoke the Star Chamber and Kafka stories-the dread of inhabiting an incomprehensible legal order. With broad laws, the issue is …

Ideology And Argument Construction In Contract Law, Michael Fischl

Faculty Articles and Papers

I will offer an extended illustration of the demystification link here and will focus on promissory estoppel, a doctrine that receives sustained attention in the typical US Contracts class and has been the focus of a great deal of scholarship, critical and otherwise, for decades. Following this introduction, the essay proceeds in two parts. In Part II, I introduce promissory estoppel the way I do in my classes, contrasting mainstream, legal realist, and critical ‘stories’ about the history and role of the doctrine in American contract law. I warn my students – as I am warning readers here – that …

Did South Dakota Make A Strategic Error In Drafting Its Wayfair Statute?, Richard Pomp

Faculty Articles and Papers

In this article, Professor Pomp questions whether South Dakota made a strategic error in drafting its Wayfair statute.

South Dakota, in preparation for its attack on Quill, passed S. 106. The law allows South Dakota to collect its sales tax from certain remote sellers. Pomp notes that Bellas Hess and Quill, in contrast, involved the collection of use taxes.

To aid in his analysis, Pomp considers a hypothetical case: a couple from South Dakota travels to New York City and purchases art from a gallery. The gallery packs and ships the art back to South Dakota. Must the gallery collect …

When Lawyers Screw Up, Leslie Levin

Faculty Articles and Papers

In their book When Lawyers Screw Up: Improving Access to Justice for Legal Malpractice Victims, Herbert Kritzer and Neil Vidmar significantly advance our understanding of these issues. They provide a detailed portrait of lawyer malpractice in the United States and demonstrate why it is so hard for victims to recover damages. Theirs is not an easy undertaking. Legal malpractice often goes undetected. Even when a client learns of lawyer malpractice, the problem is sometimes resolved informally without notifying the LPL insurer of a possible claim.

The authors focus mainly on what can be learned about legal malpractice from malpractice …

Statement, Hearing On Federally Incurred Cost Of Regulatory Changes And How Such Changes Are Made, Richard Parker

Faculty Articles and Papers

Prepared Statement, Hearing on Federally Incurred Cost of Regulatory Changes and How Such Changes are Made: Hearing Before United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Spending Oversight and Emergency Management, 116th Cong. (2019).

The Faux Scholarship Foundations Of The Regulatory Rollback Movement, Richard Parker

Faculty Articles and Papers

With the full participation and consent of Congress, President Trump has embarked upon a radical project to freeze and roll back federal regulations that protect public health, safety, the environment, and the economy. The principal justification for this project, publicly announced by both Congress and President Trump, is the claim that regulations are costing the American economy $2 trillion per year, thereby destroying jobs. This claim derives from two studies that have received wide and credulous circulation in the media, on Capitol Hill, and in the White House. This Article accordingly undertakes a comprehensive evaluation of these two studies. It …

Reflections On Representing Incarcerated People With Disabilities: Ableism In Prison Reform Litigation, Jamelia Morgan

Faculty Articles and Papers

Over the last five decades, advocates have fought for and secured constitutional prohibitions challenging solitary confinement, including ending the placement and prolonged isolation of individuals with psychiatric disabilities in solitary confinement. Yet, despite the valiant efforts of this courageous movement to protect the rights of incarcerated people with disabilities through litigation, the legal regime protecting these rights reflects a troubling paradigm: ableism.

Ableism is a complex system of cultural, political, economic, and social practices that facilitate, construct, or reinforce the subordination of people with disabilities in a given society. In this Essay I argue that current Eighth Amendment jurisprudence in …

The Curious Incident Of The Falling Win Rate: Individual Vs System-Level Justification And The Rule Of Law, Peter Siegelman, Alexandra Lahav

Faculty Articles and Papers

For forty quarters starting in 1985, the plaintiff win rate in adjudicated civil cases in federal courts fell almost continuously, from 70% to 30%, where it remained - albeit with increased volatility - for the next twenty years. This Essay explores the reasons for this decline and the need for systemic explanations for the phenomenon. Approximately 60% of the fall could be attributable to the changing makeup of the federal docket, but that leaves 40% of the fall (that is, a win rate decline of 14 percentage points over a ten year period) unaccounted for. We show that the most …

Savage Equalities, Bethany Berger

Faculty Articles and Papers

Equality arguments are used today to attack policies furthering Native rights on many fronts, from tribal jurisdiction over non-Indian abusers to efforts to protect salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest. These attacks have gained strength from a modem movement challenging many claims by disadvantaged groups as unfair special rights. In American Indian law and policy, however, such attacks have a long history, dating almost to the founding of the United States. Tribal removal, confinement on reservations, involuntary allotment and boarding schools, tribal termination-all were justified, in part, as necessary to achieve individual Indian equality. The results of these policies, justified …

Passive Voter Suppresion: Campaign Moblization And The Effective Disfranchisment Of The Poor, Douglas M. Spencer, Bertrand L. Ross Ii

Faculty Articles and Papers

A recent spate of election laws tightened registration rules, reduced convenient voting opportunities, and required voters to show specific types of identification in order to vote. Because these laws make voting more difficult, critics have analogized them to Jim Crow Era voter suppression laws.

We challenge the analogy that current restrictive voting laws are a reincarnation of Jim Crow Era voter suppression. While there are some notable similarities, the analogy obscures a more apt comparison to a different form of voter suppression-one that operates to effectively disfranchise an entire class of people, just as the old form did for African …

Antitrust As Speech Control, Hillary Greene, Dennis A. Yao

Faculty Articles and Papers

Antitrust law, at times, dictates who, when, and about what people can and cannot speak. It would seem then that the First Amendment might have something to say about those constraints. And it does, though perhaps less directly and to a lesser degree than one might expect. This Article examines the interface between those regimes while recasting antitrust thinking in terms of speech control.

Our review of the antitrust-First Amendment legal landscape focuses on the role of speech control. It reveals that while First Amendment issues are explicitly addressed relatively infrequently within antitrust decisions that is, in part, because certain …

Updating The Constitution: Amending, Tinkering, Interpreting, Richard Kay

Faculty Articles and Papers

The U.S. Constitution is now 230 years old, and it is showing its age. Its text, taken in the sense that its enactors understood it, is, unsurprisingly, inadequate to the needs of a large, populous twenty-first century nation. The Constitution creates a government that is carefully insulated from the democratic preferences of the population. It fails to vest the central government with the tools needed to manage and regulate a vast, complicated, and interrelated society and economy. On the other hand, it guarantees its citizens protection of only a limited set of human rights. Notwithstanding these blatant defects, the means …

From 30,000 Feet Into The Weeds, Richard Pomp

Faculty Articles and Papers

In this article, Professor Pomp makes various predictions regarding the future of the tax law.

Artificial intelligence will continue to change the legal landscape. The IRS uses AI to predict the likelihood of nonpayment, abusive tax returns, underreporting, and nonfiling. It also uses AI to mine social media accounts for evidence of theft and tax fraud. AI also allows firms to analyze large data sets and predict how courts will resolve legal issues in tax cases.

Pomp predicts litigation surrounding the use of market-based sourcing arising from ambiguous terms like “benefit,” “delivery,” and “use.” He also expects litigation resulting from …

Myth Vs. Reality: Airbnb And Its Voluntary Tax Collection Efforts, Richard Pomp

Faculty Articles and Papers

In this report, Professor Pomp debunks the claims presented in several reports commissioned by the American Hotel and Lodging Association (Hotel Association). Despite hotel profits reaching all time highs, the Hotel Association has continued to attack Airbnb.

Part I serves as an introduction to Airbnb and its solution to an administrative challenge confronted by tax jurisdictions. Airbnb operates a platform that links guests looking for short-term rental opportunities with hosts offering such services.

There are potentially millions of hosts who are unaware that they are subject to municipal taxes on short-term rentals. Municipalities lack the resources required to track down …

The Disclosure Of Individual Tax Returns: A Historical Overview, Richard Pomp

Faculty Articles and Papers

In this article, Professor Pomp provides a historical overview of the debate and law surrounding public access to individual tax returns.

To fund the Civil War, the Revenue Act of 1862 imposed an income tax on individuals. At a time which predated reliable mail, the public was notified of their tax liabilities through newspaper advertisements.

In 1870, when the income tax had become unpopular, Congress prohibited the publication of tax returns. Public disclosure was revisited in 1913; by 1918 the public was permitted to view lists of individual taxpayers, though this information was not allowed to be published.

Fueled by …

Artificial Intelligence And Role-Reversible Judgment, Kiel Brennan-Marquez, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Strange Loops: Apparent Versus Actual Human Involvement In Automated Decision Making, Kiel Brennan-Marquez, Karen Levy, Daniel Susser

Faculty Articles and Papers

The era of automated decision making fast approaches, and anxiety is mounting about when and why we should keep "humans in the loop" (HITL). Thus far, commentary has focused primarily on two questions: whether keeping humans involved will improve the results of decision making (rendering those results safer or more accurate), and whether human involvement serves non-accuracy-related values like legitimacy and dignity.

Here, we take up a related, but distinct question which has eluded the scholarship thus far: does it matter if humans appear to be in the loop of decision making, independent from whether they actually are? In other …