Law Commons^™

Toward A Fundamental Right To Evade Law? Protecting The Rule Of Unequal Racial And Economic Power In Shelby County And State Farm, Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

To rationalize its ruling on voting rights, Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder develops a constitutional vision of passivity in the face of institutionalized power to violate the law. This essay compares Shelby County to State Farm Mutual Automobile v. Campbell, a 2003 Supreme Court ruling involving a different subject area, state punitive damage awards. In both, the Court asserts newly articulated judicial power to override other branches, not to protect human rights, but rather to expand institutionalized immunity from those rights. On the surface, the Court’s rejection of state sovereignty in State Farm (protecting multistate corporations from high punitive damages) …

How The "Unintended Consequences" Story Promotes Unjust Intent And Impact., Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

In the guise of critical analysis of the limits of law reform, the familiar phrase “unintended consequences” serves to rationalize rising inequality and to undermine democratic accountability. This paper examines how the phrase promotes a story of disentitlement, using the recent financial crisis as an example. By naturalizing inequality as power beyond law’s reach, this phrase’s message that benign law is likely to bring unequal consequences dovetails with a seemingly contradictory message that benign intent, rather than harmful impact, is what primarily counts for evaluating inequality.

As part of a LatCrit XV symposium taking a “bottom-up” view of the recent …

How Money For Legal Scholarship Disadvantages Feminism, Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

A dramatic infusion of outside money has shaped legal theory over the last several decades, largely to the detriment of feminist theory. Nonetheless, the pervasive influence of this funding is largely ignored in scholarly discussions of legal theory. This denial helps reinforce the marginal position of feminist scholarship and of women in legal theory. Conservative activists and funders have understood the central role of developing community culture and institutions, and have helped shift the prevailing framework for discussion of many questions of theory and policy through substantial investments in law-and-economics centers and in the Federalist Society. Comparing the institutional resources …

Introducing Classcrits: Rejecting Class-Blindness, A Critical Legal Analysis Of Economic Inequity, Athena D. Mutua

Journal Articles

In 2007, two workshops at the University at Buffalo launched a project bringing together legal scholars interested in exploring the relationship between law and economic inequality. This article provides an overview of the workshops’ key understandings and discussions. The essay suggests that these understandings, informed by critical legal scholarship, constituted a set of shared assumptions among the participants and informed the groups’ rejection of class blindness, a society-wide blindness to the existence and use of economic power. Discussing some of the functional similarities of gender, race and class blindness, the article argues that feminist and critical race scholars’ critiques of …

Efficiency And Social Citizenship: Challenging The Neoliberal Attack On The Welfare State, Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

In the face of rising economic inequality and shrinking welfare protections, some scholars recently have revived interest in T.H. Marshall's theory of "social citizenship." That theory places economic rights alongside political and civil rights as fundamental to public well-being. But this social citizenship ideal stands against the prevailing neoliberal ("free market") ideology, which asserts that state abstention from economic protection generates societal well-being. Using the examples of AFDC and workers' compensation in the 1990s, I analyze how arguments about economic efficiency have worked to characterize social welfare programs as producers of public vice rather than public virtue. A close examination …

Insurer Moral Hazard In The Workers' Compensation Crisis: Reforming Cost Inflation, Not Rate Suppression, Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

This article challenges the standard story of the insurance crisis that led to the near-collapse and major reform of a number of states’ workers’ compensation programs in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the prevailing account, insurance costs rose due to expanding costs of benefits for injured workers’, much of which was blamed on wasteful or abusive "moral hazard" by workers and their lawyers and doctors. Because state regulators had substantial power to control insurance rates, this account claims governments tried to suppress prices in the face of rising benefit costs in a misguided attempt to avoid political trade-offs between labor …

The Illusion Of Efficiency In Workers' Compensation "Reform", Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

From the late 1980s to 1990s, most states enacted major revisions to their workers' compensation systems. These law changes aim to restrict benefits for injured workers in response to perceptions that rising workers' compensation insurance costs had reached crisis levels by the late 1980s. This article analyzes the main features of these benefit reforms, and shows how these reforms reveal the problems of the predominant economic efficiency rationales underlying recent retrenchment of social welfare programs in general.

Using workers' compensation as an example, I argue that a premise central to much of contemporary law and policy - the distinction between …

Cultural Criticism Of Law, Guyora Binder, Robert Weisberg

Journal Articles

Professors Binder and Weisberg expound a "cultural criticism" of law that views law as an arena for composing, representing, and contesting identity, and that treats identity as constitutive of the interests that motivate instrumental action. They explicate this critical method by reference to "New Historicist" literary criticism, postmodern social theory, and Nietzchean aesthetics. They illustrate this method by reviewing recent scholarship of two kinds: First, they explore how legal disputes take on expressive meaning for parties and observers against the background of legal norms regulating or recognizing identities. Second, they examine "readings" of the representations of character, credit, and value …

Beyond Criticism, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

During the 1980’s, Critical Legal Studies was frequently criticized for offering no policy prescriptions. This essay explained critical scholars’ reluctance to propose policy as a reflection of their epistemological and political critiques of instrumentalist policy analysis. Because critical scholars saw both causal relationships and interests as highly contingent on normative assumptions, they were skeptical of claims that well-intentioned law reforms would benefit the interests of the poor and the powerless. Valuing democratic participation, critical legal scholars were also reluctant to define the interests of the powerless for them. The essay proceeded to argue that critical legal scholars should see instrumentalism …