Law Commons^™

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

Articles

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 …

Winks, Whispers, And Prosecutorial Discretion In Rural Iowa, 1925-1928, Emily Prifogle

Articles

Through the eyes of Charles Pendleton’s memoirs, this article walks through a rural community with a county attorney to consider how race, religion, gender, and sexuality influenced rural prosecutorial discretion in the early twentieth century. Rural communities like those in Buena Vista County, Iowa, where the article is centered, experienced “the law” through distinctly isolated geographies and social networks that lacked anonymity and thus shaped available methods of conflict resolution. But anonymity did not mean homogeneity. Ethnic, racial, and religious diversity created divisions within a community where social distance between individuals was small. Both onymity and diversity shaped who should …

A New Corporate Tax, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

If we can regulate our corporations simply through the medium of taxation, we can destroy every trust in a fortnight. It would be a great deal better for the Finance Committee to turn its attention to the imposition of such a tax upon corporations and the persons who actually need regulation, who are exercising powers that are injurious to the American people, destroying competition and invading our prosperity, than to attempt to levy a revenue tax upon all the little shareholders of all the little corporations throughout the length and breadth of the United States.

Edwards V. Vannoy: Brief Of Law Professors And Social Scientists As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioner, Phoebe C. Ellsworth, Richard O. Lempert

Appellate Briefs

Amici are law professors and social scientists whose research and teaching address the Sixth Amendment right to a unanimous jury verdict and the demonstrated benefits that right produces. They have a strong interest in ensuring that this Court understands the full extent of those benefits when determining whether the rule announced in Ramos v. Louisiana, 140 S. Ct. 1390 (2020), requiring jury unanimity in state and federal criminal trials, applies retroactively to cases on federal collateral review. In particular, they have an interest in affirming the wisdom of the Ramos rule and demonstrating that the rule is necessary to …

A Case For Higher Corporate Tax Rates, Edward G. Fox, Zachary D. Liscow

Law & Economics Working Papers

In this report, Fox and Liscow argue that, while conventional wisdom holds that we should lower taxes on corporations because of international competition, two recent changes militate in favor of higher corporate taxes, which would close the deficit, fund social programs, and reduce inequality. First, changes in tax law have increasingly targeted the corporate tax at economic “rents,” the supersized returns that businesses receive when they enjoy advantages like market power. Because taxing rents is progressive and does little to harm economic activity, a higher rate is justified. Second, shifts in the American economy have allowed companies to earn more …

Covid-19, Single-Sourced Diagnostic Tests, And Innovation Policy, Deb Chaarushena, Osman Moneer, Nicholson W. Price Ii

Articles

At the heart of the United States, disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic is a failure of diagnostic testing. That something so fundamental to medical care could be so botched evokes incredulity. From primary care offices to critical care settings, every patient encounter begins with a diagnostic workup. Diagnostic testing tools are key parts of the physician’s toolkit, and confirmatory testing is essential. But in the greatest public health challenge of the 21st century, the failures of diagnostic testing have been laid entirely bare.

A Better Madden Fix: Holistic Reform, Not Band-Aids, To Modernize Banking Law, Matthew J. Razzano

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

Historically, state usury laws prohibited lending above certain interest rates, but in 1978 the Supreme Court interpreted the National Bank Act (NBA) to allow chartered banks to issue loans at rates based on where they were headquartered rather than where the loan originated. States like South Dakota virtually eliminated interest rate ceilings to attract business, incentivizing national banks to base credit operations there and avoid local usury laws. In 2015, however, the Second Circuit decided Madden v. Midland Funding, LLC and reversed long-standing banking practices, ruling that non-chartered financial institutions were not covered by the NBA and were therefore subject …

What's Left Of The Affordable Care Act?, Helen Levy, Andrew Ying, Nicholas Bagley

Articles

We assess the progress of the Affordable Care Act a decade after it became law. Although most of it remains intact, some parts have been repealed and others have not been implemented as expected. We review how and why the law has aged. Legal challenges have done less damage than is commonly appreciated, with the exception of the Supreme Court case that thwarted full expansion of Medicaid. Most of the important changes have other sources. Some parts were born to fail. Others were dismantled in response to interest-group pressure. Still others have failed to thrive for any number of reasons. …

Thin And Thick Conceptions Of The Nineteenth Amendment Right To Vote And Congress's Power To Enforce It, Richard L. Hasen, Leah M. Litman

Articles

This Article, prepared for a Georgetown Law Journal symposium on the Nineteenth Amendment’s one-hundred-year anniversary, explores and defends a “thick” conception of the Nineteenth Amendment right to vote and Congress’s power to enforce it. A “thin” conception of the Nineteenth Amendment maintains that the Amendment merely prohibits states from enacting laws that prohibit women from voting once the state decides to hold an election. And a “thin” conception of Congress’s power to enforce the Nineteenth Amendment maintains that Congress may only supply remedies for official acts that violate the Amendment’s substantive guarantees. This Article argues the Nineteenth Amendment does more. …

May The State Punish What It May Not Prevent?, Gabriel S. Mendlow

Articles

In Why Is It Wrong To Punish Thought? I defended an overlooked principle of criminalization that I called the Enforceability Constraint. The Enforceability Constraint holds that the state may punish transgressions of a given type only if the state in principle may forcibly disrupt such transgressions on the ground that they are criminal wrongs. As I argued in the essay, the reason why the state is forbidden from punishing thought is that the state is forbidden from forcibly disrupting a person’s mental states on the ground that they are criminally wrongful (as opposed to, say, on the ground that they …

"Do Lawyers Need Economists?" Review Of Economic Transplants: On Lawmaking For Corporations And Capital Markets, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Reviews

Katja Langenbucher’s outstanding book seeks to address the question of why and in what ways have lawyers been importing economic theories into a legal environment, and how has this shaped scholarly research, judicial and legislative work? Since the financial crisis, corporate or capital markets law has been the focus of attention by academia and media. Formal modelling has been used to describe how capital markets work and, later, has been criticized for its abstract assumptions. Empirical legal studies and regulatory impact assessments offered different ways forward. This excellent book presents a new approach to the risks and benefits of interdisciplinary …

The Power Of A Clean Slate, J.J. Prescott, Sonja B. Starr

Articles

Tens of millions of Americans have criminal records, including about 20 million with felony convictions. Conviction records automatically trigger countless collateral legal consequences, such as occupational restrictions that bar employers from hiring qualified candidates. Moreover, research overwhelmingly shows that bearing a criminal record raises significant barriers to employment, housing, and various other opportunities. These persistent obstacles can overwhelm an individual’s efforts at reintegration and can aggravate poverty, inequality, and racial disparities in our society. And because factors like unemployment and housing instability contribute to crime risk, these effects in turn make society less safe.

Fee-Shifting Statutes And Compensation For Risk, Maureen S. Carroll

Articles

A law firm that enters into a contingency arrangement provides the client with more than just its attorneys' labor. It also provides a form of financing, because the firm will be paid (if at all) only after the litigation ends; and insurance, because if the litigation results in a low recovery (or no recovery at all), the firm will absorb the direct and indirect costs of the litigation. Courts and markets routinely pay for these types of risk-bearing services through a range of mechanisms, including state fee shifting statutes, contingent percentage fees, common-fund awards, alternative fee arrangements, and third-party litigation …

Jones V. Mississippi: Brief Of Erwin Chemerinsky, Eric M. Freedman, Craig Futterman, Martin Guggenheim, Bernard E. Harcourt, Shani M. King, Jeffrey L. Kirchmeier, Issa Kohler-Hausmann, Leah Litman, Christopher Seeds, Alison Siegler, Carol Steiker, David A. Strauss, Carlos Manuel Vazquez, Gideon Yaffe, Steven Zeidman As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioner, Leah Litman

Appellate Briefs

Amici are scholars of federal courts and/or criminal law, studying the operation and purposes of federal jurisdiction and criminal law. Although they have divergent legal and political outlooks, amici share a keen interest in the federal courts and criminal law, having published extensively on these topics and collected decades of experience examining issues implicated in this case.

Amici share a concern that the lower court’s judgment threatens the rule of law this Court announced in Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460 (2012) 4 and affirmed in Montgomery v. Louisiana, 136 S. Ct. 718 (2016) that life without the …

Disaggregating Ineffective Assistance Of Counsel Doctrine: Four Forms Of Constitutional Ineffectiveness, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

For years, experts have blamed Strickland v. Washington’s lax standard for assessing trial attorney effectiveness for many of the criminal justice system’s problems. But the conventional understanding of Strickland as a problem for ineffectiveness claims gives the decision too much prominence because it treats Strickland as the test for all such claims. That is a mistake. Properly understood, the Supreme Court has recognized four different constitutional forms of trial attorney ineffectiveness, and Strickland’s two pronged test applies to only one of the four. If litigants and courts would notice this complexity and relegate Strickland to its proper place, it would …

Reassessing Aspects Of The Contribution Of African States To The Development Of International Law Through African Regional Multilateral Treaties, Tiyanjana Maluwa

Michigan Journal of International Law

For decades, debates about Africa’s contribution to the development of international law have been dominated by two opposing schools of thought. First, that European colonial powers deliberately erased Africa and Africans from the history of the creation and use of international law. Second, that, on the contrary, over the last six decades (since the emergence of the newly independent African states in the late 1950s and early 1960s), Africa has contributed to the making of international law and has not been merely a passive recipient of a Eurocentric international law.

This article underscores the role of the postcolonial periphery in …

Valuing All Identities Beyond The Schoolhouse Gate: The Case For Inclusivity As A Civic Virtue In K-12, Sacha M. Coupet

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Increasing social and political polarization in our society continues to exact a heavy toll marked by, among other social ills, a rise in uncivility, an increase in reported hate crimes, and a more pronounced overall climate of intolerance—for viewpoints, causes, and identities alike. Intolerance, either a cause or a consequence of our fraying networks of social engagement, is rampant, hindering our ability to live up to our de facto national motto, “E Pluribus Unum,” or “Out of Many, One” and prompting calls for how best to build a cohesive civil society. Within the public school—an institution conceived primarily …

The Sexual Misconduct Of Donald J. Trump: Toward A Misogyny Report, Ruthann Robson

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The numerous allegations of sexual misconduct—unwanted, unwelcome, often aggressive sexual behavior—levied against Donald Trump merit attention and redress. Despite obstacles to civil remedies, there has been some litigation, but it has mostly been unsatisfactory. The many allegations reported in the media have not been amenable to judicial, legislative, executive, or political resolution. Women, including women who allege Trump committed sexual misconduct against them when they were minors, have generally not been afforded the remedies to which they are entitled.

Because litigation and media accounts have proven inadequate to the task of addressing Trump’s sexual misconduct, there should be a government …

Front Matter, Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

Front matter for Volume 9, Issue 2 of the Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review.

Redefining Accredited Investor: That's One Small Step For The Sec, One Giant Leap For Our Economy, Jeff Thomas

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

It may sound trivial, yet how we define accredited investor (AI) is critical. Among other things, U.S. securities laws and regulations make it easier for AIs to invest in privately held companies through “exempt offerings,” which are offerings not “registered” under the 1933 Securities Act. This results in AIs having investment opportunities that are unavailable to non-accredited investors (non-AIs). Moreover, the amount raised in exempt offerings has been increasing both absolutely and relative to the amount raised in registered offerings. In fact, the Director of the SEC’s Division of Corporate Finance recently indicated that “[c]ompanies raised $2.9 trillion in private …

Pub. L. No. 86-272 And The Anti-Commandeering Doctrine: Is This Anachronism Constitutionally Vulnerable After Murphy V. Ncaa?, Matthew A. Melone

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

State taxing authority suffers from little of the structural impediments that the Constitution imposes on the federal government’s taxing power but the states’ power to tax is subject to the restrictions imposed on the exercise of any state action by the Constitution. The most significant obstacles to the states’ assertion of their taxing authority have been the Due Process Clause and the Commerce Clause. The Due Process Clause concerns itself with fairness while the Commerce Clause concerns itself with a functioning national economy. Although the two restrictions have different objectives, for quite some time both restrictions shared one attribute—a taxpayer …

The Proxy Problem: Using Nonprofits To Solve Misaligned Incentives In The Proxy Voting Process, Leah Duncan

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

Proxy advisory firms and their influence on the proxy voting process have recently become the subject of great attention for the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) among other constituencies. A glance at recent proxy season recaps and reports, many of which devote space to discussing proxy advisory firm recommendations, reveal the significance of this influence on institutional voting. As Sagiv Edelman puts it, “proxy advisory firms exist at the nexus of some of the most high-profile corporate law discussions—most notably, the shareholder voting process, which has recently been the subject of much scholarly and legal debate.” The SEC has responded …

Gatekeeping The Gatekeepers: The Need For A Licensing Requirement For Crowdfunding Portals In The Wake Of The Dreamfunded Decision, Nick Worden

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

Most people are familiar with crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and GoFundMe—sites that allow users to part with their money in exchange for products or donate their capital to organizations they believe in. However, these sites have one trait in common: they do not offer contributors equity or a promise for future profits. For a long time, selling equity meant complying with the costly requirements of federal securities laws, which was cost-prohibitive for many small businesses; it was illegal for businesses to offer equity over a site in the way businesses on Kickstarter offered products. The Jumpstart Our Business Startups …

Putting The Fetus First — Legal Regulation, Motherhood, And Pregnancy, Emma Milne

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The fetus-first mentality advocates that pregnant women and women who could become pregnant should put the needs and well-being of their fetuses before their own. As this Article will illustrate, this popular public perception has pervaded criminal law, impacting responses to women deemed to be the “irresponsible” pregnant woman and so the “bad” mother. The Article considers cases from Alabama and Indiana in the United States and from England in the United Kingdom, providing clear evidence that concerns about the behavior of pregnant women now hang heavily over criminal justice responses to women who experience a negative pregnancy outcome or …

Symbolism Over Substance: The Role Of Adversarial Cross-Examination In Campus Sexual Assault Adjudications And The Legality Of The Proposed Rulemaking On Title Ix, Hunter Davis

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Traditionally, it has been understood that campus sexual assault adjudications need not take on the formalities of the justice system. Since the consequences faced in campus adjudications are considerably less than punishments faced in the justice system, less process is owed under the Due Process Clause. However, in September 2018, the Sixth Circuit reconceived what constitutes due process in campus sexual assault adjudications in the case of Doe v. Baum. The court found that in cases involving conflicting narratives at public universities, the accused or his agent must have the ability to cross-examine his accuser in the presence of …

Disability And Reproductive Justice, Samuel Bagenstos

Articles

In the spring of 2019, disability and abortion rights collided at the Supreme Court in a case involving an Indiana ban on “disability-selective abortions.” In a lengthy concurrence in the denial of certiorari, Justice Thomas argued that the ban was constitutional because it “promote[s] a State’s compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.” Just a few months earlier, disability and reproductive rights issues had intersected in a very different way in the debate over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Disability rights advocates drew attention to an opinion then-Judge Kavanaugh had written …

Introduction To The Symposium On Soft And Hard Law On Business And Human Rights, Steven R. Ratner

Articles

This symposium turns to a major debate within a field of international law that has moved from the periphery to center stage in just a few decades—business and human rights, or BHR: Can and should international law's approach to the human rights impacts of business activity shift from today's mostly soft-law framework to a multilateral treaty regime? While advocates for and against such a treaty debate this point at the UN Human Rights Council and other venues, this symposium examines the problem from four theoretical perspectives. Each contribution offers insights for practitioners and scholars alike, but they suggest no easy …

Why R&D Should Be Allocated To Subpart F And Gilti, Stephen E. Shay, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Patrick Driessen, J. Clifton Fleming Jr., Robert J. Peroni

Articles

This article responds to the notice of proposed rulemaking under sections 861 and 904 (REG105495-19) published in the Federal Register December 17, 2019 (the proposed regulations). The proposed regulations would not allocate U.S. shareholder deductions for research and development or experimentation (R&D or R&E) expenditures under section 174 (R&D deductions) to a gross income inclusion under section 951 (subpart F inclusion) or section 951A (global intangible low-taxed income)1 from a controlled foreign corporation for foreign tax credit limitation purposes.

Fixing The Problem Of Incompetent Defense Counsel Before The International Criminal Court, Matthew Catallo

Michigan Journal of International Law

Throughout the latter half of the twentieth-century, defense counsel arguing before international criminal tribunals provided notoriously ineffective assistance. This note examines whether defense counsel similarly fail to provide competent assistance at the International Criminal Court––and if they do so for similar reasons. In examining the ICC’s procedural and regulatory framework, this note highlights the systemic inequities at the Court that favor the prosecution and devalue the defense, thereby hindering the acquisition of competent defense counsel and promoting the retention of incompetent defense counsel.

To address these iniquities, this note promotes various administrative reforms, all of which could be implemented without …

Reforming State Corporate Income Taxes Can Yield Billions, Darien Shanske, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, David Gamage

Articles

In this installment of Academic Perspectives on SALT, the authors argue that the current crisis is the perfect time to make revenueraising reforms to state corporate income taxes — reforms that would have been desirable policy improvements even during an economic upturn, but that are even more clearly good policy moves in light of the current and upcoming state economic and budgetary crises.