Law Commons^™

Ordinary Clients, Overreaching Lawyers, And The Failure To Implement Adequate Client Protection Measures, Leslie C. Levin

Faculty Articles and Papers

Every year, thousands of individual clients are victimized by overreaching lawyers who overcharge clients, refuse to return unearned fees, or steal their money. For more than forty years, the American Bar Association (ABA) has considered, and often proposed, client protection measures aimed at protecting clients from overreaching lawyers. These measures include requirements that lawyers use written fee agreements in their dealings with clients and rules relating to fee arbitration, client protection funds, insurance payee notification, and random audits of trust accounts. This Article examines what happened to these ABA recommendations when the states considered them and assesses the current state …

The Politics Of Bar Admission: Lessons From The Pandemic, Leslie C. Levin

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Never Let A Good Crises Go To Waste, Richard Pomp

Faculty Articles and Papers

A problem with temporary tax study commissions is that by the time their findings are released, changes in the political environment may have rendered their suggestions worthless. Permanent standing commissions are needed. The temporary crisis of the current pandemic, an opportunity for tax reform, illustrates this point.

In this article, Professor Pomp argues for the creation of a permanent state body tasked with managing tax reform. It would perform research and analysis, educate legislatures about how current law operates, initiate proposals, and draft legislation. Being permanent, such a body would be proactive enough to respond to a temporary crisis.

In …

My Dinner With Ruth, Richard Pomp

Faculty Articles and Papers

In this whimsical piece, Professor Pomp describes the experience of dining with Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she served on the D.C. Circuit. Invited to dinner by Marty Ginsburg, a tax legend, Pomp’s initial uncertainty of how to engage Judge Ginsburg in small talk quickly vanished due to her Socratic and sincere interest in his work. Pomp, while reflecting on the dinner conversation, recalls feeling that he was in the presence of greatness. This article portrays what was not only Justice Ginsburg’s supreme intellect, but her warm, nurturing humanity as well.

What Can The Oecd Learn From The States?, Richard Pomp

Faculty Articles and Papers

In this article, Professor Pomp argues that the OECD should look to the American states for insight into taxing cross-jurisdictional corporations. In the early 20th century, the states had to respond to the challenge of taxing domestic interstate corporations. While these corporations posed no tax problem at the federal level, states had to respond to the reality of corporations shifting profits into neighboring tax havens. They needed a better alternative to federal transfer pricing and sourcing rules. In the 1930’s, some states began combining domestic related entities.

The growth of multinational corporations created new problems for both the states and …

A Report To The Connecticut Office Of Policy And Management Regarding A Proposed Payroll Tax, Richard Pomp

Faculty Articles and Papers

This Report analyzes a 5% payroll tax that would be imposed on employers in the amount of the Connecticut wages they pay to their employees. An anticipated response to this tax is that employers would shift this tax to their employees by reducing their wages by the cost of the tax. In this case, there would also be a reduction of the existing personal income tax rates by 5 points, but only if there were a reduction in wages. The effect would be to eliminate the 3% and 5% brackets, and would only be applicable to wages; it would not …

Incitement In An Era Of Populism: Updating Brandenburg After Charlottesville, Richard A. Wilson, Jordan Kiper

Faculty Articles and Papers

We live in an era of populism, characterized by political polarization, inciting speech on social media, and an escalation in hate crimes. The regulatory framework for direct incitement to imminent lawless action established fifty years ago in Brandenburg is showing signs of severe strain. One of the central frailties of Brandenburg’s three-part test is the lack of guidance on how courts should evaluate the probability that an inciting speech act will cause an imminent offense. In the absence of clear direction on analyzing risk, judges often rely on outdated heuristics and misleading metaphors. This article is the first to draw …

The Hartford Guidelines On Speech Crimes In International Criminal Law, Richard Ashby Wilson, Matthew Gillett

Faculty Articles and Papers

The Hartford Guidelines on Speech Crimes in International Criminal Law are a comprehensive survey of individual criminal responsibility for harmful speech acts under international criminal law. The Guidelines offer a restatement of current international law concerning speech crimes with a view to assisting international agencies, national authorities and other actors contemplating appropriate regulatory responses to inciting speech and associated human rights violations. As such, they provide legal actors with an urgently needed, authoritative and systematic legal framework for regulating and sanctioning speech that violates international legal standards. Speech crimes are a decidedly unsettled area of international criminal law. There is …

On Social Network Position In Employment Law: Conjectures For Charlie, Sachin Pandya

Faculty Articles and Papers

This paper, part of a Festschrift for Charles A. Sullivan, shows how arguments from two of Sullivan's papers on employment law would fare in a world in which employers can easily see a worker's or job applicant's relative position within a social or professional network. The paper then uses Sullivan's corpus of legal scholarship to illustrate some challenges to using social network evidence in employment law.

Punishing The Innocent, Richard Parker

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Why More Employers Are Getting Salt-Y On Remote Work Arrangements, Richard Pomp, Jeffrey A. Friedman

Faculty Articles and Papers

This article explores the consequences of the extreme increase in remote work, due to the pandemic, on state taxation. Discussed in the article is state sourcing and apportioning of nonresident wage income, employer withholding tax obligations, and corporate tax nexus.

The authors predict an increase in litigation as a result of states seeking to retain the ability to tax nonresident wages. For example, New York considers employees to be working in-state (and thus subject to taxation) even when they are not physically present in New York so long as they are working remotely for reasons of personal convenience. But, the …

Reputational Economies Of Scale, Miguel F.P. De Figueiredo, Daniel Klerman

Faculty Articles and Papers

For many years, most scholars have assumed that the strength of reputational incentives is positively correlated with the frequency of repeat play. Firms that sell more products or services were thought more likely to be trustworthy than those that sell less because they have more to lose if consumers decide they have behaved badly. That assumption has been called into question by recent work that shows that, under the standard infinitely repeated game model of reputation, reputational economies of scale will occur only under special conditions, such as monopoly, because larger firms not only have more to lose from behaving …

Andrew Wheeler’S Trojan Horse For Clean Air Act Regulation, Richard Parker, Amy Sinden

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Responding To Covid: How To Deal With Nearly $100 Billion In Wasted Incentives, Richard Pomp

Faculty Articles and Papers

This article urges policymakers to cut down on ineffective and costly tax expenditures. Tax expenditures aim to incentivize beneficial economic outcomes; the tax jurisdiction surrenders the right to a portion of its tax base in anticipation of economic benefits. While tax expenditures are not inherently bad or good, many believe that most tax incentive programs would fail a cost-benefit analysis.

Ideally, tax incentives target economic activity that would not occur in the absence of the incentive. And to be considered a success, the benefit of the activity must outweigh the cost of the incentive. For example, if the goal of …

Things Not Worth Doing Are Especially Not Worth Doing Poorly: The Maryland And Nebraska Taxes Of Digital Advertising, Richard Pomp

Faculty Articles and Papers

In this article, Professor Pomp reviews and critiques the recent attempts by Maryland and Nebraska to tax digital advertising.

Maryland has proposed a gross revenue tax on digital advertising with a progressive rate structure. Though the tax is based on Maryland revenue, the rate is determined by global revenue. While resembling an exemption with progression approach, commonly utilized in income taxes to assess a taxpayer’s ability to pay, gross receipts taxes like this one are not concerned with ability to pay. And the approach discriminates against taxpayers engaged in interstate commerce, since out-of-state business activity leads to a higher rate …

Rethinking The Relationship Between Punishment And Policing, Kiel Brennan-Marquez

Faculty Articles and Papers

Responding to Gabriel Mendlow, Why Is it Wrong To Punish Thought?, 127 YALE L. J. 2342 (2018).

The Politics Of Lawyer Regulation: The Case Of Malpractice Insurance, Leslie C. Levin

Faculty Articles and Papers

This Article examines the politics of lawyer regulation and considers why some states will adopt lawyer regulation that protects the public, when others will not. It uses the debates over how to regulate uninsured lawyers as a lens through which to examine the question. Clients often cannot recover damages from uninsured lawyers who commit malpractice, even when those lawyers cause serious harm. Yet only two states require that lawyers carry malpractice insurance. This Article uses case studies to examine the ways in which six states recently have addressed the issue of uninsured lawyers to understand this regulatory failure. It uses …

The End Of Mandatory State Bars?, Leslie C. Levin

Faculty Articles and Papers

The country’s thirty-one mandatory state bar associations are facing an existential threat following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. ACSME, 138 S. Ct. 2448 (2018). In Janus, the Court considered the constitutionality of compelling public employees to pay agency fees to a labor union. In the process, the Court effectively upended the reasoning of earlier Supreme Court precedent that enabled mandatory state bars to compel bar dues payments from objecting lawyers and expend dues to fund traditional bar functions. Mandatory state bars—which function both as regulators and as traditional bar associations—are now defending themselves against claims in several …

Report To The Wisconsin Office Of Lawyer Regulation: Analysis Of Grievances Filed In Criminal And Family Matters From 2013-2016, Leslie C. Levin, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Articles and Papers

In many states, the highest number of docketed grievances arise out of criminal and family law matters. This report analyzes the 4,898 grievances filed with the Wisconsin Office of Lawyer Regulation (“OLR”) in family or criminal law matters during the period from 2013-2016. The OLR provided the data, enabling analysis of the grievances by gender, age, length of time since law school graduation, type of matter, prior experience with diversion or discipline, and geographical location. The data also revealed the frequency of allegations by practice matter, the types of allegations that led to discipline, and the frequency with which lawyers …

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 …