Law Commons^™

Consent, Coercion, And Employment Law, Samuel R. Bagenstos

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The Roberts Court has recently handed several high-profile wins in labor and employment law cases to anti-labor and pro-employer forces. This paper argues that those decisions replicate crucial moves made by some infamous Lochner-era cases — and that those same moves continue to underlie key elements of labor and employment doctrine more generally. In particular, these decisions rest on a contestable understanding of free worker choice. This paper begins by examining the key recent Roberts Court decisions and demonstrates that they appear to invoke at least two distinct and conflicting understandings of employee and employer choice. It then turns to …

Custodial Compulsion, Kyron J. Huigens

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In cases that fall under Miranda v Arizona, police interrogators not only give a suspect reasons to confess; they also suggest that the suspect ought to confess. In doing so, interrogators effectively invoke the Wigmorean duty of a citizen to produce any evidence he has in his possession, including his own confession. That is, they invoke the duty against which the Self Incrimination Clause stands, so that the clause is applicable to police interrogations, and is violated where it is not waived. This means that “a Miranda violation” is a violation of the Self Incrimination Clause in the field, just …

Democracy, Law, Compliance, Don Herzog

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Professors Schauer and McAdams both seek a more or less sweepingly general theory of why we obey the law. But we should split, not lump. There are different reasons different actors in different social settings obey different laws–not only, but not least, out of regard for democratic decision making.

Viva Conditional Federal Spending!, Samuel R. Bagenstos

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From the rise of the New Deal through the constitutional litigation over the Affordable Care Act (ACA), conditional federal spending has been a major target for those who have sought to limit the scope of federal power. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, as the Supreme Court narrowed Congress's power to regulate private primary conduct and state conduct in the last twenty years,' conditional spending looked like the way Congress might be able to circumvent the limitations imposed by the Court's decisions. Thus, members of Congress quickly sought to blunt the impact of the Court's decision to …

Does The Individual Mandate Coerce?, Raphael Boleslavsky, Sergio J. Campos

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The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act includes an individual mandate that penalizes individuals who do not purchase health insurance. Critics of the individual mandate, including a majority of justices on the Supreme Court, contend that Congress cannot use its Commerce Clause power to coerce individuals to buy a product. Supporters concede that the mandate coerces but argue that it is otherwise permissible under the Commerce Clause. This article questions whether the individual mandate coerces. It uses a simple economic model to show that, under certain conditions, the individual mandate induces insurers to sell health insurance at a price each …

The Anti-Leveraging Principle And The Spending Clause After Nfib, Samuel R. Bagenstos

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This Article offers an initial assessment of the Supreme Court’s Spending Clause holding in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (NFIB), which addressed the constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act. As Justice Ginsburg pointed out, NFIB marks “the first time ever” that the Court has held that a spending condition unconstitutionally coerced the states. The implications of that holding are potentially massive, and some of the language in the decision, if read broadly, would seriously threaten the constitutionality of a broad swath of federal spending legislation. Notwithstanding some of the Court’s language, this Article contends that the case …

Beyond Separation In Federalism Enforcement: Medicaid Expansion, Coercion, And The Norm Of Engagement, Charlton C. Copeland

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National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius may be known, in both the popular and academic commentaries, as the case about the Affordable Care Act's Individual Mandate provision. History may record it as one of the most significant cases in the jurisprudence of cooperative federalism. In invalidating part of the Medicaid Expansion provision, the Roberts Court became the first to invalidate a federal spending statute as unconstitutionally coercive of state governments. This decision has the potential to impact federal-state cooperative arrangements such as No Child Left Behind, and others far beyond the health care context.

This Article argues that lack …

On The Fortieth Anniversary Of The Miranda Case: Why We Needed It, How We Got It--And What Happened To It, Yale Kamisar

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Last year (the year I gave the talk on which this article is based) marked the fortieth anniversary of Miranda v. Arizona,' one of the most praised, most maligned-and probably one of the most misunderstood-Supreme Court cases in American history. It is difficult, if not impossible, to evaluate Miranda without looking back at the test for the admissibility of confessions that preceded it.

Credible Coercion, Oren Bar-Gill, Omri Ben-Shahar

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The ideal of individual freedom and autonomy requires that society provide relief against coercion. In the law, this requirement is often translated into rules that operate "postcoercion" to undo the legal consequences of acts and promises extracted under duress. This Article argues that these ex post antiduress measures, rather than helping the coerced party, might in fact hurt her. When coercion is credible-when a credible threat to inflict an even worse outcome underlies the surrender of the coerced party-ex post relief will only induce the strong party to execute the threatened outcome ex ante, without offering the choice to surrender, …

Tender Offers By Controlling Shareholders: The Specter Of Coercion And Fair Price, Adam C. Pritchard

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Taking your company private has never been so appealing. The collapse of the tech bubble has left many companies whose stock prices bordered on the stratospheric now trading at small fractions of their historical highs. The spate of accounting scandals that followed the bursting of the bubble has taken some of the shine off the aura of being a public company-the glare of the spotlight from stock analysts and the business press looks much less inviting, notwithstanding the monitoring benefits that the spotlight purports to confer. Moreover, the regulatory backlash against those accounting scandals has made the costs of being …

Looking Back On Planned Parenthood V. Casey, Christina B. Whitman

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Scholarship that tells us what is really at stake in the lives of people affected makes the law honest and responsive. Whether or not it directly shapes doctrine, this type of scholarship can capture imagination and influence judgment. The Michigan Law Review has published some of the best of this work: Yale Kamisar's articles on coerced confessions, Terry Sandalow's essay on affirmative action, Joe Sax and Phillip Hiestand's description of the emotional impact of living in a slum, Martha Chamallas and Linda Kerber's demonstration of how injuries that uniquely befall women have been dismissed as merely emotional wrongs, and, most …

The Product/Process Distinction - An Illusory Basis For Disciplining 'Unilateralism' In Trade Policy, Robert L. Howse, Donald H. Regan

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It has become conventional wisdom that internal regulations that distinguish between products on the basis of their production method are GATT-illegal, where applied to restrict imports (although possibly some such measures might be justified as 'exceptions' under Article XX). The aim of this article is to challenge this conventional wisdom, both from a jurisprudential and a policy perspective. First, we argue there is no real support in the text and jurisprudence of the GATT for the product/process distinction. The notion developed in the unadopted Tuna/Dolphin cases that processed-based measures are somehow excluded from the coverage of Article III (National Treatment) …

Confessions, Search And Seizure And The Rehnquist Court, Yale Kamisar

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About the time William Rehnquist ascended to the Chief Justiceship of the United States, two events occurred that increased the likelihood that Miranda would enjoy a long life. In Moran v. Burbine,' a 6-3 majority held that a confession preceded by an otherwise valid waiver of a suspect's Miranda rights should not be excluded either (a) because the police misled an inquiring attorney when they told her they were not going to question the suspect she called about or (b) because the police failed to inform the suspect of the attorney's efforts to reach him.

On The 'Fruits' Of Miranda Violations, Coerced Confessions, And Compelled Testimony, Yale Kamisar

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Professor Akhil Reed Amar and Ms. Renee B. Lettow have written a lively, provocative article that will keep many of us who teach constitutional-criminal procedure busy for years to come. They present a reconception of the "first principles" of the Fifth Amendment, and they suggest a dramatic reconstruction of criminal procedure. As a part of that reconstruction, they propose, inter alia, that at a pretrial hearing presided over by a judicial officer, the government should be empowered to compel a suspect, under penalty of contempt, to provide links in the chain of evidence needed to convict him.

Remembering The 'Old World' Of Criminal Procedure: A Reply To Professor Grano, Yale Kamisar

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When I graduated from high school in 1961, the "old world" of criminal procedure still existed, albeit in its waning days; when I graduated from law school in 1968, circa the time most of today's first-year law students were arriving on the scene, the "new world" had fully dislodged the old. Indeed, the force of the new world's revolutionary impetus already had crested. Some of the change that the criminal procedure revolution effected was for the better, but much of it, at least as some of us see it, was decidedly for the worse. My students, however, cannot make the …

Prevention Of Antiunion Discrimination In The United States, Theodore J. St. Antoine

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Nearly all rank-and-file employees in private businesses of any substantial size in the United States are protected by federal law against antiunion discrimination. The Railway Labor Act applies to the railroad and airline industries. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) applies to all other businesses whose operations "affect [interstate] commerce" in almost any way. Supervisory and managerial personnel, domestic servants, and agricultural workers are excluded from this federal scheme. Separate federal law covers the employees of the federal government. About thirty of the fifty states have statutes ensuring the right to organize on the part of some or most of …

Free Speech Or Economic Weapon? The Persisting Problem Of Picketing, Theodore J. St. Antoine

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"Peaceful picketing," the United States Supreme Court has said, "is the workingman's means of communication."' One line of analysis is that, as a means of communication, picketing is free speech and is therefore entitled to every constitutional protection afforded other forms of expression. This means that it cannot be subjected to special restrictions, such as antiboycott curbs, simply because it is picketing. The opposing line of analysis is that picketing is not simply speech; it is "speech plus." The "plus" element removes picketing from the realm of pure speech and enables it to be regulated in ways that the Constitution …

Boycott - Medical Association, Horace Lafayette Wilgus

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The opinion of McCardie, J., (without a jury), in Pratt v. British Medical Association (1919), I K. B. 244, (noted in the MICHIGAN LAW REVIEW, June, 1919, p. 704), brilliantly reviewing the English cases, merits a fuller statement of the facts and principles involved than was possible in a short note. The action was by Doctors Burke, Pratt, and Holmes, against the British Medical Association and four of its officers, for damages for conspiracy, slander and libel.

Recovery Of Money Paid Under Duress Of Legal Proceedings In Michigan, Edgar N. Durfee

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THE case of Welch v. Beeching, recently decided by the Supreme Court of Michigan, raises puzzling problems conconcerning the recovery of money paid under pressure of legal proceedings. It is the purpose of this paper to give that case a more adequate setting, in relation to the whole field of law to which it pertains, than was provided by the brief opinion of the court. We shall not attempt to exhaust the authorities, nor to present a rounded treatment of the whole subject touched upon.