Law Commons^™

Assessing Visions Of Democracy In Regulatory Policymaking, Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Christopher J. Walker

Articles

Motivated in part by Congress’s failure to legislate, presidents in recent years seem to have turned even more to the regulatory process to make major policy. It is perhaps no coincidence that the feld of administrative law has similarly seen a resurgence of scholarship extolling the virtues of democratic accountability in the modern administrative state. Some scholars have even argued that bureaucracy is as much as if not more democratically legitimate than Congress, either in the aggregative or deliberative sense, or both.

The Moral Ambiguity Of Public Prosecution, Gabriel S. Mendlow

Articles

Classic crimes like theft and assault are in the first instance wrongs against individuals, not against the state or the polity that it represents. Yet our legal system denies crime victims the right to initiate or intervene in the criminal process, relegating them to the roles of witness or bystander—even as the system treats prosecution as an institutional analog of the interpersonal processes of moral blame and accountability, which give pride of place to those most directly wronged. Public prosecution reigns supreme, with the state claiming primary and exclusive moral standing to call offenders to account for their wrongs. Although …

Differentiating The Corporation: Accountability And International Humanitarian Law, David Hughes

Michigan Journal of International Law

Corporations are significant global actors that are continuing to gain international legal status. Regulatory efforts have closely followed persistent claims that various forms of corporate activity are adversely affecting individual welfare and societal objectives. Such observations are perhaps most acute during instances of armed conflict. The history of corporate misdeeds occurring within or contributing to the perpetuation of warfare is now well-documented. However, the relationship between international humanitarian law—the legal field governing the conduct of war—and corporations receives less attention than other areas of international law where the treatment of business entities have made important advancements. This article considers the …

Publish, Share, Re-Tweet, And Repeat, Michal Lavi

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

New technologies allow users to communicate ideas to a broad audience easily and quickly, affecting the way ideas are interpreted and their credibility. Each and every social network user can simply click “share” or “retweet” and automatically republish an existing post and expose a new message to a wide audience. The dissemination of ideas can raise public awareness about important issues and bring about social, political, and economic change.

Yet, digital sharing also provides vast opportunities to spread false rumors, defamation, and Fake News stories at the thoughtless click of a button. The spreading of falsehoods can severely harm the …

Member States' Due Diligence Obligations To Supervise International Organizations, Kristina Daugirdas

Book Chapters

There are two reasons to consider member states’ obligations to supervise international organisations as a distinct category of due diligence obligations. First, due diligence obligations typically require states to regulate third parties in some way. But it is harder for states to regulate international organisations than other private actors because international law protects the autonomy of international organisations. Second, such due diligence obligations merit attention because they may compensate for the dearth of mechanisms to hold international organisations accountable when they cause harm. This chapter canvasses member states’ existing obligations vis-à-vis international organisations, and argues in particular that the International …

Lawyers Democratic Dysfunction, Leah Litman

Articles

As part of the symposium on Jack Balkin and Sandy Levinson’s Democracy and Dysfunction, this Article documents another source of the dysfunction that the authors observe—elite lawyers’ unwillingness to break ranks with other elite lawyers who participate in the destruction of various norms that are integral to a well-functioning democracy. These network effects eliminate the possibility of “soft” sanctions on norm violators such as withholding future professional advancement. Thus, rather than enforcing norms and deterring norm violations, the networks serve to insulate norm violators from any meaningful accountability.

Progressive Textualism In Administrative Law, Kathryn E. Kovacs

Michigan Law Review Online

Nicholas Bagley’s article The Procedure Fetish is destined to be a classic. In it, Bagley systematically dismantles administrative law’s obsession with procedure. He decimates the arguments that procedure is necessary to legit-imize the administrative state and avoid agency capture. He nullifies the con-tention that administrative law is neutral by showing how proceduralism inhibits regulation and “favors a libertarian agenda over a progressive one.” Bagley urges progressives to abandon “gauzy claims about legitimacy and accountability” and approach procedure with skepticism.

The Procedure Fetish addresses the normative question of what adminis-trative law ought to require. Bagley writes about how progressives should solve …

Grants, Nicholson Price Ii

Articles

Innovation is a primary source of economic growth and is accordingly the target of substantial academic and government attention. Grants are a key tool in the government’s arsenal to promote innovation, but legal academic studies of that arsenal have given them short shrift. Although patents, prizes, and regulator-enforced exclusivity are each the subject of substantial literature, grants are typically addressed briefly, if at all. According to the conventional story, grants may be the only feasible tool to drive basic research, as opposed to applied research, but they are a blunt tool for that task. Three critiques of grants underlie this …

Tort Justice Reform, Paul David Stern

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article calls for a comprehensive reform of public tort law with respect to law enforcement conduct. It articulates an effective and equitable remedial regime that reconciles the aspirational goals of public tort law with the practical realities of devising payment and disciplinary procedures that are responsive to tort settlements and judgments. This proposed statutory scheme seeks to deter law enforcement misconduct without disincentivizing prudent officers from performing their duties or overburdening them with extensive litigation. Rather than lamenting the dissolution of Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics or the insurmountability of qualified immunity, reform …

Reputation And Accountability: Another Look At The United Nations’ Response To The Cholera Epidemic In Haiti, Kristina Daugirdas

Articles

The cholera outbreak in Haiti offers a useful case study of reputation as a disciplinarian of international organizations. On the one hand, UN officials and member states alike have emphasized the need to repair the organization’s damaged reputation. On the other hand, the UN secretariat declined to take certain steps that might have averted—or at least mitigated—that reputational damage in the first place. This contribution argues that the United Nations’ response to cholera in Haiti showcases some important limitations and complications of reputation as a disciplinarian. Reputation will function as a less effective disciplinarian of organizations in the context of …

The Procedure Fetish, Nicholas Bagley

Michigan Law Review

The strict procedural rules that characterize modern administrative law are said to be necessary to sustain the fragile legitimacy of a powerful and constitutionally suspect administrative state. We are likewise told that they are essential to public accountability because they prevent factional interests from capturing agencies. Yet the legitimacy-and-accountability narrative at the heart of administrative law is both overdrawn and harmful. Procedural rules have a role to play in preserving legitimacy and discouraging capture, but they advance those goals more obliquely than is commonly assumed and may exacerbate the very problems they aim to fix. This Article aims to draw …

Mdl As Public Administration, David L. Noll

Michigan Law Review

From the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the opioid crisis, multidistrict litigation—or simply MDL—has become the preeminent forum for devising solutions to the most difficult problems in the federal courts. MDL works by refusing to follow a regular procedural playbook. Its solutions are case specific, evolving, and ad hoc. This very flexibility, however, provokes charges that MDL violates basic requirements of the rule of law.

At the heart of these charges is the assumption that MDL is simply a larger version of the litigation that takes place every day in federal district courts. But MDL is not just different in scale …

Improving Employer Accountability In A World Of Private Dispute Resolution, Hope Brinn

Michigan Law Review

Private litigation is the primary enforcement mechanism for employment discrimination laws like Title VII, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and many related state statutes. But the expansion of extrajudicial dispute resolution—including both arbitration and prelitigation settlement agreements—has compromised this means of enforcement. This Note argues that state-enacted qui tam laws can revitalize the enforcement capacity of private litigation and provides a roadmap for enacting such legislation.

Post-Accountability Accountability, Nicole Stelle Garnett

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Over the past few decades, parental choice has exploded in the United States. Yet, despite early proponents’ hopes that parental choice would eliminate the need to regulate school quality—since parents’ choices would serve an accountability function—demands to use the law to hold chosen schools accountable for their academic performance are central features of education-reform debates today. This is an opportune time to consider the issue of academic accountability and parental choice. Parental choice has gained a firm foothold in the American educational landscape. As it continues to expand, debates about accountability for chosen schools will only intensify. The questions of …

Do You See What I See? Problems With Juror Bias In Viewing Body-Camera Video Evidence, Morgan A. Birck

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In the wake of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, advocates and activists called for greater oversight and accountability for police. One of the measures called for and adopted in many jurisdictions was the implementation of body cameras in police departments. Many treated this implementation as a sign of change that police officers would be held accountable for the violence they perpetrate. This Note argues that although body-camera footage may be useful as one form of evidence in cases of police violence, lawyers and judges should be extremely careful about how it is presented to the jury. Namely, the …

Theories And Solutions On Wolf Pack Activism, Kimberly Goldman

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

Section I will describe the key players involved in wolf pack activism and their conflicting motives, including both the members of wolf packs and those affected by them. Given that not all shareholders have common interests, this will include an analysis of the motives of various types of shareholders and an analysis of how these diverse motives may affect the wealth sustainability of companies. Section II will explain the phenomenon of wolf packs in corporate governance by describing the circumstances that lead to their formation and the various regulations (or lack thereof) pertaining to them. Section III will describe divergent …

Removing Camouflaged Barriers To Equality: Overcoming Systemic Sexual Assault And Harassment At The Military Academies, Rebecca Weiant

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The Education Amendments of 1972 introduced requirements to protect female students from discriminatory policies at post-secondary institutions. A portion of those amendments, commonly known as Title IX, require that no students be subjected to discrimination based on their sex by any educational institution or activity receiving federal financial assistance. An exemption under § 1681(a)(4), however, explicitly prohibits application of Title IX to any educational institution whose primary purpose is to train individuals for military service or the merchant marine. Although those students are still subject to stringent conduct standards, the service academies themselves are tethered to sex discrimination policies only …

The Lottery Docket, Daniel Epps, William Ortman

Michigan Law Review

We propose supplementing the Supreme Court’s caseload with a “lottery docket” of cases selected at random from final judgments of the circuit courts. The Court currently possesses almost unfettered authority to set its own agenda through its certiorari jurisdiction. By rule and custom, the Court exercises that discretion by selecting cases that it sees as important, in a narrow sense of that term. The Court’s free hand in agenda setting has obvious benefits, but it has drawbacks as well. It deprives the Court of critical information about how the law operates in ordinary cases. It signals to circuit courts that …

Internal Administrative Law, Gillian E. Metzger, Kevin M. Stack

Michigan Law Review

For years, administrative law has been identified as the external review of agency action, primarily by courts. Following in the footsteps of pioneering administrative law scholars, a growing body of recent scholarship has begun to attend to the role of internal norms and structures in controlling agency action. This Article offers a conceptual and historical account of these internal forces as internal administrative law. Internal administrative law consists of the internal directives, guidance, and organizational forms through which agencies structure the discretion of their employees and presidents control the workings of the executive branch. It is the critical means for …

A Comment On Privacy And Accountability In Black-Box Medicine, Carl E. Schneider

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Human institutions and activities cannot avoid failures. Anxiety about them often provokes governments to try to prevent those failures. When that anxiety is vivid and urgent, government may do so without carefully asking whether regulation’s costs justify their benefits. Privacy and Accountability in Black Box Medicine admirably labors to bring discipline and rationality to thinking about an important development — the rise of “black-box medicine” — before it causes injuries regulation should have prevented and before it is impaired by improvident regulation. That is, Privacy and Accountability weighs the costs against the benefits of various forms of regulation across the …

Supervising Outsourcing: The Need For Better Design Of Blended Governance, Nina A. Mendelson

Book Chapters

We are long past the “vending machine”-style privatization of government functions – where the government contracts to buy a discrete product or service at a set price, whether aircraft components or landscaping. Government is increasingly enlisting, or collaborating with, private entities for functions long perceived as distinctly public. Private entities may make policy explicitly (through standards that agencies later adopt) or implicitly (through the third party verification of compliance with regulatory objectives). For example, the Department of Health and Human Services relies on the recommendations of an American Medical Association committee of specialist physicians to establish Medicare physician payments, while …

From Environmental Rights To Environmental Rule Of Law: A Proposal For Better Environmental Outcomes, Jessica Scott

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

With the recent lead contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan, the unfavorable United States country report of the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation seems prescient. The Special Rapporteur’s report highlighted the problem of drinking water contaminated from lead pipes and the disproportionate burdens Black Americans face in accessing safe drinking water. The report argues that the U.S. should address these issues by explicitly recognizing a human right to safe drinking water and sanitation under U.S. law.

Like the Special Rapporteur, much of the literature and some environmental advocates call for environmental …

Privacy And Accountability In Black-Box Medicine, Roger Allan Ford, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Black-box medicine—the use of big data and sophisticated machine-learning techniques for health-care applications—could be the future of personalized medicine. Black-box medicine promises to make it easier to diagnose rare diseases and conditions, identify the most promising treatments, and allocate scarce resources among different patients. But to succeed, it must overcome two separate, but related, problems: patient privacy and algorithmic accountability. Privacy is a problem because researchers need access to huge amounts of patient health information to generate useful medical predictions. And accountability is a problem because black-box algorithms must be verified by outsiders to ensure they are accurate and unbiased, …

Separations Of Wealth: Inequality And The Erosion Of Checks And Balances, Kate Andrias

Articles

American government is dysfunctional: Gridlock, filibusters, and expanding presidential power, everyone seems to agree, threaten our basic system of constitutional governance. Who, or what, is to blame? In the standard account, the fault lies with the increasing polarization of our political parties. That standard story, however, ignores an important culprit: Concentrated wealth and its organization to achieve political ends. The only way to understand our current constitutional predicament—and to rectify it—is to pay more attention to the role that organized wealth plays in our system of checks and balances. This Article shows that the increasing concentration of wealth and political …

The Global Architecture Of Financial Regulatory Taxes, Carlo Garbarino, Giulio Allevato

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Article endeavors to broaden the analysis of available policy tools to address the problems created by financial crises and discusses how, in addition to direct regulation, certain tax measures having a regulatory nature may operate to address the so-called “negative externalities” often associated with those crises. There is a negative externality when an economic agent making a decision does not pay the full cost of the decision’s consequences. In such cases, the cost to society as a whole is greater than the cost borne by the individuals creating the economic impact. In practice, negative externalities result in market inefficiencies …

Identifying The Start Of Conflict: Conflict Recognition, Operational Realities And Accountability In The Post-9/11 World, Laurie R. Blank, Benjamin R. Farley

Michigan Journal of International Law

On December 19, 2008, the Convening Authority for the United States Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay referred charges against Abd al-Rahim Hussein Muhammed Abdu Al-Nashiri for his role in the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. The charge sheet alleged that al-Nashiri committed several acts—including murder in violation of the law of war, perfidy, destruction of property—”in the context of and associated with armed conflict” on or about October 12, 2000 in connection with the bombing. At the time of the attack, the statement that the United States was engaged in an armed conflict would have been a surprise …

After Atrocity: Optimizing Un Action Toward Accountability For Human Rights Abuses, Steven R. Ratner

Michigan Journal of International Law

It is a great honor for me to be here to deliver the John Humphrey Lecture. Humphrey led one of those lives within the UN that shaped what the organization has become today—as one of the first generation of UN civil servants, he was to human rights what Ralph Bunche was to peacekeeping, or Brian Urquhart to UN mediation. To read his diaries, so beautifully edited by John Hobbins, is to see a world that has in many ways vanished, a nearly entirely male club, mostly of Westerners, that hammered out new treaties and mechanisms over fine wine and cigars …

Admit Or Deny: A Call For Reform Of The Sec's "Neither-Admit-Nor-Deny" Policy, Priyah Kaul

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

For four decades, the SEC’s often-invoked policy of settling cases without requiring admissions of wrongdoing, referred to as the “neither-admit-nor-deny” policy, went unchallenged by the courts, the legislature, and the public. Then in 2011, a harshly critical opinion from Judge Jed Rakoff in SEC v. Citigroup incited demands for reform of this policy. In response to Judge Rakoff’s opinion, the SEC announced a modified approach to settlements. Under the modified approach, the Commission may require an admission of wrongdoing if a defendant’s misconduct was egregious or if the public markets would benefit from an admission. Many supporters of the neither-admit-nor-deny …

Accountability And Independence In Financial Regulation: Checks And Balances, Public Engagement, And Other Innovations, Michael S. Barr

Articles

Financial regulation attempts to balance two competing administrative goals. On the one hand, as with much of administrative law, accountability is a core goal. Accountability undergirds the democratic legitimacy of administrative agencies. On the other hand, unlike with much of administrative law, independence plays a critical role.' Independence helps to protect financial regulatory agencies from political interference and-with some important caveats-arguably helps to guard against some forms of industry capture. In addition, with respect to the Federal Reserve (the Fed), independence serves to improve the credibility of the Fed's price stability mandate by insulating its decisionmaking from politics and, in …

Taking Public Access To The Law Seriously: The Problem Of Private Control Over The Availability Of Federal Standards, Nina A. Mendelson

Articles

In the 1930s, Harvard professor Erwin Griswold famously complained about the enormous numbers of New Deal regulations that were obscurely published on individual sheets or in “separate paper pamphlets.” Finding these binding federal rules was difficult, leading to “chaos” and an “intolerable” situation. Congress responded, requiring that agencies publish all rules in the Federal Register and in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). Currently, recent federal public laws, the entire U.S. Code, the Federal Register, and the CFR are all freely available online as well as in governmental depository libraries. But with respect to thousands of federal regulations, the clock …