Law Commons^™

Rethinking Discrimination Law, Sandra F. Sperino

Michigan Law Review

Modern employment discrimination law is defined by an increasingly complex set of frameworks. These frameworks structure the ways that courts, juries, and litigants think about discrimination. This Article challenges whether courts should use the frameworks to conceptualize discrimination. It argues that just as faulty sorting contributes to stereotyping and societal discrimination, courts are using faulty structures to substantively limit discrimination claims. This Article makes three central contributions. First, it demonstrates how discrimination analysis has been reduced to a rote sorting process. It recognizes and makes explicit courts' methodology so that the structure of discrimination analysis and its effects can be …

Deconstructing 'Just And Proper': Arguments In Favor Of Adopting The 'Remedial Purpose' Approach To Section 10(J) Labor Injunctions, William K. Briggs

Michigan Law Review

Congress, through the 1947 addition of section 10(j) to the National Labor Relations Act, authorized district courts to grant preliminary injunctive relief for unfair labor practices if they deem such relief "just and proper." To this day a circuit split persists over the correct interpretation of this "just and proper" standard. Some circuits interpret "just and proper" to require application of the traditional equitable principles approach that normally governs preliminary injunctions. Other circuits interpret "just and proper" to require an analysis of whether injunctive relief is necessary to preserve the National Labor Relations Board's remedial power This Note examines the …

Using Public Disclosure As The Vesting Point For Moral Rights Under The Visual Artists Rights Act, Elizabeth M. Bock

Michigan Law Review

In 2010, the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit confronted the novel question of when moral rights protections vest under the Visual Artists Rights Act. In Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc. v. Bichel, the First Circuit determined that the protections of the Visual Artists Rights Act begin when a work is "created" under the Copyright Act. This Note argues that this decision harms moral rights conceptually and is likely to result in unpredictable and inconsistent decisions. This Note proposes instead that these statutory protections should vest when an artist determines that his work is complete and presents …

A New Approach To Section 363(F)3, Evan F. Rosen

Michigan Law Review

Section 363(f) of the Bankruptcy Code provides five circumstances in which a debtor may be permitted to sell property free of all claims and interests, outside of the ordinary course of business, and prior to plan confirmation. One of those five circumstances is contained in § 363(f)(3), which permits such a sale where the "interest is a lien and the price at which such property is to be sold is greater than the aggregate value of all liens on such property." While it is far from certain whether § 363(f)(3) requires a price "greater than the aggregate [face value] of …

Impeding Reentry: Agency And Judicial Obstacles To Longer Halfway House Placements, S. David Mitchell

Faculty Publications

Part I of this article details the Bureau of Prisons' rules and policies governing inmate placement, including the most recent iteration. Part II examines Chevron27 and the Bureau of Prisons' extraordinary justification exception rule. Part III turns to the threshold matter of obtaining judicial access to challenge the Bureau of Prisons' new rule, with Part III.A arguing that the federal courts should relax their standards when faced with exceptions to the exhaustion requirement and Part III.B arguing for the adoption of a federal public importance exception to the mootness doctrine. The article concludes that these changes will further Congress' dual …

Does The Packers And Stockyards Act Require Antitrust Harm?, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The Packers and Stockyards Act was enacted in 1921. Congress was plainly influenced by the 1919 publication of a Federal Trade Commission Report on the meatpacking industry. Consistent with the FTC’s jurisdiction and concerns, the Report dealt with deceptive and unfair practices as well as practices that were believed to violate the antitrust laws. The language of the PSA does much the same, mixing the two. Of its seven specific prohibitions, three contain antitrust-like provisions requiring a lessening of competition. Two others reach unfair and tort-like conduct without any requirement of harm to competition. The remaining two reach both anticompetitive …

Securities Law In The Roberts Court: Agenda Or Indifference?, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

To outsiders, securities law is not all that interesting. The body of the law consists of an interconnecting web of statutes and regulations that fit together in ways that are decidedly counter-intuitive. Securities law rivals tax law in its reputation for complexity and dreariness. Worse yet, the subject regulated-capital markets-can be mystifying to those uninitiated in modem finance. Moreover, those markets rapidly evolve, continually increasing their complexity. If you do not understand how the financial markets work, it is hard to understand how securities law affects those markets.

But That Is Absurd! Why Specific Absurdity Undermines Textualism, Linda Jellum

Articles

No abstract provided.

Passive-Voice References In Statutory Interpretation, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court regularly references grammar rules when interpreting statutory language. And yet grammar references play a peculiar role in the Court's statutory cases—often lurking in the background and performing corroborative work to support a construction arrived at primarily through other interpretive tools. The inevitable legisprudential question triggered by such references is, why does the Court bother? If grammar rules provide merely a second, third, or fourth justification for an interpretation reached through other interpretive canons, then what does the Court gain—or think it gains—by including such rules in its statutory analysis?

This essay examines these questions through the lens …

Misunderstanding Congress: Statutory Interpretation, The Supermajoritarian Difficulty, And The Separation Of Powers, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Every lawyer's theory of statutory interpretation carries with it an idea of Congress, and every idea of Congress, in turn, carries with it an idea of the separation of powers. In this article, the author critiques three dominant academic theories of statutory interpretation--textualism, purposivism, and game theory--for their assumptions about Congress and the separation of powers. She argues that each academic theory fails to account for Congress's dominant institutional features: "the electoral connection," the "supermajoritarian difficulty," and the "principle of structure-induced ambiguity." This critique yields surprising conclusions, rejecting both standard liberal and conservative views on statutory interpretation.

"Plain" meaning, it …

Two Kinds Of Plain Meaning, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Is plain meaning so plain? This is not meant to be a philosophical question, but one deserving serious legal analysis. The plain-meaning rule claims to provide certainty and narrow statutes' domains. The author agrees with, as a relative claim, comparing plain meaning with purposivism. She does not agree that plain-meaning analysis is as easy as its proponents suggest. In this piece, the author teases out two very different ideas of plain meaning--ordinary/popular meaning and expansive/legalist meaning--suggesting that doctrinal analysis requires more than plain-meaning simpliciter. Perhaps more importantly, she argues that plain meaning, as legalist meaning, can quite …

Falling Through The Crack: How Courts Have Struggled To Apply The Crack Amendment To Nominal Career And Plea Bargain Defendants, Maxwell Arlie Halpern Kosman

Michigan Law Review

Under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, a defendant is normally obligated to attend all of the proceedings against her. However Rule 43(b)(2) carves out an exception for organizational defendants, stating that they "need not be present" if represented by an attorney. But on its face, the language of 43(b)(2) is ambiguous: is it the defendant or the judge who has the discretion to decide whether the defendant appears? That is, may a judge compel the presence of an organizational defendant? This Note addresses the ambiguity in the context of the plea colloquy, considering the text of several of the …

Against Constitutional Mainstreaming, Bertrall L. Ross

Bertrall L Ross

Courts interpret statutes in hard cases. Statutes are frequently ambiguous, and an enacting legislature cannot foresee all future applications of a statute. The Supreme Court in these cases often chooses statutory interpretations that privilege the values that it has emphasized in its recent constitutional jurisprudence. In doing so, the Court rejects alternative interpretations that are more consistent with the values embodied in more recently enacted statutes. This is constitutional mainstreaming—an interpretive practice that molds statutes toward the Court’s own preferred values and away from values favored by legislative majorities.

In addition to providing a novel descriptive framework for what the …

Book Review - 'The Language Of Statutes' By Lawrence M. Solan, Brian Christopher Jones

Brian Christopher Jones

No abstract provided.