Yearly Archives: 2014
Dec 16, 2014 Bertrall RossElection Law
Jennifer Nou,
Sub-Regulating Elections,
Sup Ct. Rev. (forthcoming 2014),
available at SSRN.
What should courts do when bipartisan agencies deadlock on an interpretation of a statute? That conundrum recently arose when the Election Administration Commission (EAC) addressed the meaning of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Specifically, the EAC had to decide whether an Arizona requirement that voter registrants provide proof of their citizenship violated the NVRA, as a refusal to “accept and use” the federal mail-in registration form. The two Democrats on the four-person Commission found that the proof-of-citizenship requirement constituted a refusal to use the federal form while the two Republicans found that it did not. When the federal Court of Appeals reviewed the agency action, the judges seemed to have three options: Defer to the interpretation of the Democratic commissioners; defer to the interpretation of the Republican commissioners; or defer to neither and independently construe the statute. In this context of deadlock, there was no clear justification for deferring to either interpretation. Choosing to defer to one partisan interpretation over the other might subject the court to a Bush v. Gore-like charge of bias. But the decision to independently construe the statute would have had costs as well. It would have denied the court expert guidance in its determination of the meaning of the statute. None of the three options were particularly appealing.
In her innovative and illuminating article, Sub-Regulating Elections, Professor Jennifer Nou engages this problem of deadlock in election administration, and suggests a broad, creative solution. The two principal election agencies, the EAC and the Federal Election Commission (FEC), have similar designs in that they both have even numbered commissioners (four for the EAC and six for the FEC) with the two major political parties equally represented. In the current context of political polarization where decisions about the meaning of election statutes often have high stakes, the problem of deadlock has become endemic to election administration. One response would be to change the design of these commissions by making them odd-numbered or eliminating the requirement of partisan balance. But as Nou correctly notes, these design changes are unlikely anytime in the near future.
Nou instead proposes a novel solution to the problem of deadlock. This solution is responsive to what she sees as the failures of the prevailing judicial approach to agency deadlock found in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. When deadlock occurs, the D.C. Circuit breaks the tie by giving heightened Chevron deference to the decision of a bloc of commissioners to dismiss the complaint. This response to deadlock reduces incentives for bipartisan agreement because both blocs of commissioners can veto the actions of the other. This might be a good thing depending on how one conceives the role of these agencies. A cynic might suggest that the agencies’ design features of an equal number of commissioners from each party and a majority vote rule to accept a complaint were intended to create just this sort of deadlock in order to narrow the scope of agency action. Reinforcing vetoes of agency action with Chevron deference is therefore the right response. But a more optimistic account of the agency design would suggest that the bipartisan design and majority vote rule was intended to ensure a deliberative process of decision-making guided by expertise rather than partisanship.
If that more optimistic account of agency design is the right one, then it would be better for the court to apply a doctrinal approach that both incentivizes bipartisanship and provides opportunities for judicial reliance on agency expertise. Nou’s doctrinal solution represents such an approach, and thus implicitly favors a more optimistic account of agency design. Nou’s solution asks the court to apply an alternative Skidmore deference standard and “pierce the veil” of the administrative agency. When agencies deadlock, courts in their assessment of the meaning of the statute should not give heightened Chevron deference to the interpretation of one bloc of commissioners. Instead, Nou argues that the less deferential, more probing Skidmore deference standard should be applied to the judgments of agency staffers that work below the commissioners. Under the Skidmore deference standard, courts look to the “‘thoroughness’ of the agency actor’s consideration, the reasoning’s ‘validity’ and ‘consistency,’ and, more generally, any factors which give an interpretation power to persuade, if lacking power to control.” While some view Skidmore deference as a tool courts use when they want to independently decide the meaning of statutes, Nou imagines the standard as a means to break through deadlock and provide courts with expert guidance in the interpretation of statutes.
Nou would pierce the agency veil when the commissioners deadlock, allowing the court to look to and rely on the expert judgment of agency staffers within the commission. The persuasiveness of the expert judgments of agency staffers would depend on factors related to the political insulation of the decision maker. Such indicia of political insulation would include “tenure and salary protection, methods of appointment, and the degree of professionalization.” The stronger the indicia of political insulation of the agency actor, the more the court should be willing to defer to that election official’s expert judgment, as found in sub-regulatory informal guidance documents, opinion letters, or advisory committee recommendations.
Granting deference to these agency staffers will not only provide courts with reasoned expert guidance in their interpretation of statutes, but it could also foster cooperation among the commissioners. Fearing that deadlock will result in their judgments being bypassed by the court, the commissioners would have greater motivation to overcome their differences and reach agreement. This might lead to the conditions that allow for a more deliberative agency decision-making process in which the commissioners are able to put aside partisanship and decide on the basis of the available information what interpretation best advances the goals of the statute. Ultimately, we might see a shift toward more bipartisan agencies as a design to ensure agency action driven by expertise rather than partisanship.
Nou’s article is excellent in multiple aspects, but what ultimately makes it stand out is Nou’s extremely sophisticated and thoughtful marrying of election and administrative law. She provides a fascinating new lens through which to understand both areas of law as she paves the path toward the development of “more robust theories of federal election administration.” And perhaps most importantly, she provides a solution that aside from its innovation is one that we can imagine courts putting in place. If they did, we might finally see what many consider to be dysfunctional bipartisan agencies begin to function again.
Nov 17, 2014 Jill FamilyImmigration
Immigrant children are the subjects of varying narratives. To some, immigrant children fleeing Central America are invaders, while others view these children as innocent bystanders who are reaching out to the United States for protection from unimaginable violence. The narrative matters and it influences public perception. In Defining American: The DREAM Act, Immigration Reform and Citizenship, Elizabeth Keyes takes a close look at the narratives pursued in support of the DREAM Act and identifies danger posed by a narrative that promotes legal status and eventual citizenship for worthy and blameless immigrants. Keyes takes a narrative that seems unobjectionable and uncovers a major negative consequence. Creating the worthy category necessarily creates a category of individuals undeserving under the law.
The Development, Relief, and Education for Minors Act, or DREAM Act, has been on the congressional agenda for almost 15 years, but has yet to make its way to the President for signature. The DREAM Act would put certain individuals who currently lack legal immigration status on a path to legal status, with the potential of eventual US citizenship. The criteria generally include entrance to the United States before the age of 16, achievement of certain educational milestones or military service, continuous residence in the United States, and possession of “good moral character.” In the face of legislative defeat of the DREAM Act, the Obama administration used similar criteria to implement the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which does not provide legal immigration status but does provide work authorization and a promise that the US government will not pursue deportation for two years.
Keyes focuses her attention on a narrative used to promote the DREAM Act and its policies of inclusion and formal recognition of attachment to the United States. Keyes identifies a “strategy of citizenship based on worthiness,” and then examines the hidden costs of that strategy. Keyes argues that promoting the DREAM Act as benefitting blameless immigrant youth with stories that connect with the traditional American dream narrows the category of those who generally are deemed worthy of citizenship.
By examining the efforts of those supporting the DREAM Act, Keyes identifies an overarching narrative that connects the story of DREAM Act eligible youth to the quintessential story of the American dream. Keyes explains that the “typical DREAMer narrative is one of success against great odds.” Immigrant youth, through no fault of their own, were brought to the United States without permission. Despite these beginnings, the DREAM Act would recognize those who have overcome the odds and achieved a high school diploma or more. These immigrants played no role in creating the fact of their illegal status—they are blameless—and their commitment to the American values of success and hard work establishes their worthiness as well. Keyes also notes that this narrative emphasizes the patriotism of the youth, either through qualifying military service or more generally through attachment to the United States. Those arguing in favor of the DREAM Act focus on how these immigrant youth already feel American and that their lack of citizenship is a formality. The idea is that these individuals are already citizens in their hearts, if not in the formal records of the US government. The narrative also promotes virtue by excluding all of those with criminal backgrounds except for the most minor offenses.
While Keyes recognizes that this narrative is not disingenuous and that it serves the noble purpose of pushing for legal status for a deserving and racially diverse group of foreign nationals, Keyes opens our eyes to the danger of pursuing a narrative that divides immigrants into categories of worthy and not worthy. In Keyes’ words: “The worthiness narrative that makes the DREAM movement compelling raises a challenging question: If worthiness is the way that these immigrants of color are able to claim citizenship—if the politics demand that high burden—does that open the door to denying citizenship to those deemed unworthy?”
This is, indeed, a challenging question, and Keyes guides us throughit. Keyes points out that the DREAM Act narrative of blameless children inherently creates a category of parents who are to blame, and generally sets a high bar for sorting immigrants worthy of gaining legal status from those who are unworthy. This has consequences for the debate over immigration reform generally, which would potentially provide a path to legal status for a wider group of individuals, including those who are arguably “to blame” for their current illegal status. Also, Keyes explains that the narratives of worthiness, virtue and patriotism make it possible to argue that those who have not achieved educational objectives or whose connections to the United States are not as lengthy are too different from the deserving group, the DREAM Act kids, to merit their own path to legal status. Keyes is not optimistic that the DREAM Act narrative will have positive trickle down effects for other immigrant groups. She views any coattails as very short.
Keyes presents us with a conundrum worthy of further inquiry. The dangers Keyes identifies illuminate the difficulties of line drawing once immigration advocates accept the broad proposition that some are more or less worthy of formal status within American society. As Keyes identifies, this phenomenon affects more than just the debate over who should be eligible to earn legal status. It also implicates birthright citizenship, as proponents of eliminating birthright citizenship have seized upon a narrative that those who benefit from US citizenship at birth simply because of geographic location in the United States at birth are not as deserving as those who earned US citizenship through perceived greater connections to the United States.
Keyes’ article leaves unanswered the question of where Keyes would draw the line between worthy and unworthy, or whether she would not draw a line at all. Keyes leaves us to wonder what alternative narratives DREAM Act proponents should pursue. Nevertheless, Keyes’ article opens our eyes to the downsides of the DREAM Act narrative and puts us in a position to examine questions that naturally follow her analysis. While political effectiveness may demand narratives that make immigration reform more palatable for some, Keyes reminds us that powerful narratives may have powerful unintended consequences.
Oct 20, 2014 Felix MormannEnergy Law
“Green Go!” The U.S. battle cry in the Mexican-American War that, according to some etymologists, earned Americans their nickname as “gringos” offers a fitting description of the Department of Defense’s growing interest in sustainable energy generation and use. In The Military-Environmental Complex, Sarah E. Light takes stock of the military’s complicated, often conflicted relationship with environmental objectives and explores the drivers behind the armed forces’ recent promotion of sustainable energy. Building on the military-industrial complex’s history of fostering technology innovation while also enabling abusive rent-seeking, Light offers recommendations to ensure that the emerging military-environmental complex strikes a socially beneficial balance between mission objectives and broader environmental goals.
From an environmentalist perspective, the military’s many statutory and regulatory exemptions from environmental laws that conflict with its national security mission raise concerns that military and sustainability objectives are inherently at odds with one another. But Light makes a convincing case that both types of objectives may, in fact, be more aligned than is commonly recognized.
As the nation’s single largest consumer of energy, the Department of Defense has a natural interest in enhancing the efficiency of its energy use. The case for more efficient and, hence, more sustainable energy technologies and practices is even more compelling for forward operating bases whose fuel costs are orders of magnitude higher than at our local gas station, not to mention the risks to soldiers who must escort fuel convoys through the theater of war. In Light’s words, “[e]nergy costs – both economic and political – are high, and … the DoD’s costs can be measured not in dollars, but in lives.” Accordingly, the armed forces characterize climate change as a “threat multiplier” and energy efficiency as a “force multiplier.” Energy efficiency and on-site renewable energy generation, among others, have the potential to unleash the military from the “tether of fuel.”
Just in case such intrinsic motivation may prove insufficient, a suite of congressional and presidential mandates both require and enable the military to bolster its sustainability efforts. Of particular interest to Light’s analysis are military-specific statutory authorities that allow the Department of Defense to serve as financier, testbed, and customer of innovative energy technologies. The article notes the Pentagon’s long-term contracting authority for energy procurement for up to 30-year terms, enhanced-use leases with in-kind remuneration such as power from a privately owned and operated solar facility on military land, and energy-savings performance contracts.
Viewed through the lens of technology innovation, the military’s recent interest in sustainable energy builds on the military-industrial complex’s track record as a catalyst for novel technologies that have since become fixtures of civilian life, including GPS navigation, transistors, semiconductors, and the internet. Once more, Light tells us, the Department of Defense is stepping in to provide critical funding and technological validation, and to create markets bridging the notorious valley of death between successful demonstration and first commercialization of new technology, this time for the benefit of solar panels, battery storage, and other emerging energy technologies. These striking parallels raise the question of what exactly it is that distinguishes Light’s military-environmental complex from the traditional military-industrial complex. Is it the (ancillary) environmental benefits that energy-optimizing technologies deliver in addition to enhancing the military’s mission objectives? And what is the relationship between the two complexes?
If there’s a critique of Light’s insightful piece it is that she remains somewhat vague on this pivotal point. Her closing recommendations suggest a vision for the military-environmental complex that battles as much against the undue influence and pork barrel politics marring the military-industrial complex as it combats climate change and other environmental problems. In the process, the article lays out the framework for a more equitable, more efficient, and more environmentally oriented version of the traditional military-industrial complex. One can see why Light chose to hone in on the environmental or, rather, energy aspects of the military complex. A broader framing, however, could help ensure that her thoughtful recommendations regarding the political process, innovative procurement authorities, and agency coordination, among others, will be considered beyond the environmental aspects of the military-industrial complex. Light’s proposed research agenda to further investigate the impact of military R&D funding and procurement on the development and diffusion of emerging clean energy technologies gives cause for hope that her follow-up work will more closely engage with and seek to answer these critical questions. I, for one, look forward to learning what she finds.
Sep 16, 2014 Stephen UriceArt and Cultural Property Law
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
Ding-dong
Hark! now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell.
–William Shakespeare, The Tempest
During the War of 1812, Philadelphia’s Academy of Fine Arts petitioned a Nova Scotia admiralty court to release works of art bound for it from Italy aboard an American merchant ship captured by the British and brought to Halifax. The court granted the petition distinguishing, for the first time in a published judicial opinion, cultural property from other chattel, stating that works of art are “entitled to favour and protection.” By creating an exception for paintings and prints, the court gave cultural property a special legal status, the contours and extent of which remain elastic. Two centuries after the Nova Scotia court christened the field of cultural property law, Valentina Vadi has written an insightful article seeking to determine whether a norm of customary international law is developing to distinguish and provide special legal treatment for a particular kind of cultural property: sunken warships.
Sunken ships are an especially complicated form of cultural property. A ship’s wreckage and cargo are often historically and aesthetically important and immensely valuable monetarily; their archaeological context preserves unique and irreplaceable information; their human remains implicate practices and traditions relating to treatment of the dead; and some pose environmental hazards to flora and fauna (both of which are deemed cultural property under a 1970 UNESCO cultural property convention). Because new technologies are facilitating the discovery, identification, and recovery of shipwrecks, it is reasonably foreseeable that disputes over them will continue. Thus, the growing scholarship on shipwrecks is timely, and Valentina Vadi’s inquiry, in particular, responds to an important question.
Claims involving sunken ships fall into an especially complex web of legal issues, and this web is nowhere more complex than in cases involving sunken military vessels. One would be hard pressed to identify other disputes that present an equivalently complicated set of laws. These cases bring into play ancient legal doctrines of salvage and finds; international conventions, treaties, and agreements; federal and state law; and customary international law. Complicating matters further, the range of stakeholders in these cases stretches far beyond the apparent ones – the flag state, the country where the wreck is located, and the modern-day discoverer – to include archaeologists, historians, collectors, scientists, amateur divers, environmentalists, descendants of the dead, journalists, and insurance underwriters, for starters.
The legal and ethical issues presented in shipwreck cases depend, in part, on the type of ship involved. Wrecks may be of passenger vessels (for example, the Titanic –sunk 1912, rediscovered 1985), merchant ships (the Kyrenia shipwreck – sunk 4th century BCE, rediscovered 1967), or, the focus of Vadi’s article, military ships (the Nuestra Señora de Atocha – sunk 1622, rediscovered 1985). That said, however, even classifying a wreck as a sunken military vessel takes a court into murky waters with some arguing that a warship loses that characteristic when it is no longer under military command and no longer functioning as a military vessel. Others argue that a military vessel retains its distinct character even on the ocean floor. Other fundamental issues are also unsettled. For example, what constitutes the wreck: the ship alone or the ship and its cargo? When human remains are discovered does the site require special treatment as a burial ground? Vadi addresses these concerns in describing two fundamental questions raised in recent cases.
The first is the determination of abandonment. Common law principles of salvage apply only to ships that have not been abandoned: the ship’s owner has the prerogative to refuse salvage. An abandoned ship, however, is subject to the law of finds, not to the law of salvage. By promising a financial award to the salvor, salvage law creates an incentive to risk life and property to save life and property. Title to salvaged property does not transfer to the salvor, however, until a court orders a salvage award. In the law of finds, as any six-year old knows, finders-keepers: those who recover an abandoned ship and cargo obtain good title to the recovered property. Thus, whether there is, or should be, a presumption of abandonment, favoring salvors, or a presumption of non-abandonment favoring the ship’s flag state remains unsettled. Second, when a sunken warship is discovered in the territorial waters of another nation tension develops with flag nations typically asserting continuing dominion and control of the wreck, a position in conflict with coastal nation sovereignty.
In determining whether there is an emerging norm of customary international law applicable to sunken warships Vadi observes that existing multilateral treaties provide only modest guidance. The extent to which provisions for military ships in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas extends to sunken warships is not clear; moreover UNCLOS addresses cultural heritage issues only generally. And while UNESCO’s 2001 Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage does address sunken military vessels, very few major maritime countries are states parties. Thus, Vadi turns primarily to case law and scholarship through the lens of four “paradigms:” sovereign immunity, property rights, cultural heritage, and humanitarian concerns. Vadi details the law and significance of each of these issues and, perhaps more importantly, describes how they overlap, reinforce one another, and conflict. While noting that an active debate remains as to whether a customary international norm exists granting sunken warships special protection, she concludes that “opinio juris and state practice are gradually coalescing” in that direction.
For those who study cultural property law, Vadi’s article provides a good reminder of the complexity of the issues presented in cases involving (often long-forgotten) sunken military vessels. For those in other fields, Vadi opens a door to understanding the range of factual, legal, and procedural matters these wrecks present to litigants and courts. For all readers, especially in her discussion of the cultural heritage paradigm, Vadi indicates why in cultural heritage disputes ethical considerations are often as pressing as legal ones.
Cite as: Stephen Urice,
Those Are Pearls That Were His Eyes, JOTWELL
(September 16, 2014) (reviewing Valentina Vadi,
War, Memory, and Culture: The Uncertain Legal Status of Historic Sunken Warships Under International Law, 37
Tul. Mar. L. J. 333 (2013)),
https://lex.jotwell.com/those-are-pearls-that-were-his-eyes/.
Aug 4, 2014 Jan PaulssonInternational Arbitration
Although its publication may come a bit late for our summer reading, Professor Michael Reisman’s Herch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures have finally (with the co-authorship of Christina Skinner) been released by CUP in the form of a long-awaited 222-page monograph, including a detailed and valuable index. Occasionally the passage of a decade (in this case somewhat more) between the spoken word and its reformulations in print leads to an attenuation of the bluntness of the message. Innocents whose sensibilities with respect to the realities of international adjudication may have been assaulted in the course of those three wintry evenings in Cambridge can now verify that the carryings-on reviewed by the authors are still captured with uncompromising directness, as the subtitle suggests. Given the essentially consensual nature of all international adjudication, this study should be given concerned attention in relation not only to permanent courts but also to arbitrators whose mandate is limited to a single case.
On one view, we really shouldn’t be the least shocked. After all, States repeatedly find it legitimate to put their own soldiers in harm’s way, and presumably think the slaughter of young people from neighboring countries is justified, in order to secure territorial ambitions or to maintain what they think of as their “credibility”. What then is a bit of forged evidence (or even a case entirely based on it) among urbane friends, when used for the same purpose but on the legal battlefield?
Public international tribunals are notoriously poor fact-finders, and the larger their membership the greater their fecklessness. Naturally this deficit reveals itself when the factual inquiry involves allegations of forged evidence. And some of the causes of paralysis in such instances are common to the more general pattern of inadequacy: the absence of effective powers of compulsion, the stubborn disinclination to hear witnesses or even to engage neutral experts versed in matters of which the putative fact-finders are at best amateurs, and indeed the frequent selection of judges and arbitrators whose career paths as lawyers never required them to venture outside the realms of high abstraction. But something far more sinister is at work here, namely the implicit acceptance that la raison d’Etat sanctifies everything, and the implicit sub rosa code that the international community should turn a blind eye to “practices that would be condemned in developed national legal systems but have hitherto been ignored by international tribunals and international scholarship”. The legal profession’s reaction has been “baffling”, the authors write, and identify the stakes as follows:
… cases of fraudulent evidence which have been practiced on public international courts and tribunals … mar the noble vision and ennobling practice of sovereign States voluntarily submitting their disputes to courts and tribunals for peaceful resolution in accordance with international law; in raising doubts about the accuracy of international decision, they diminish the future willingness of States to resort to tribunals. Moreover, corruption of the truth often extends beyond the hearing room of a single case: in an interdependent world, lies which manage to distort judicial or arbitral decision in one case can contaminate many others. Judge Schwebel, to whom this book is respectfully dedicated, put it concisely: “they undermine the essence of the judicial function.”
The authors examine in detail a number of incidents before international fora, some of them very familiar cases which their research reveals as having had somber undersides. The culpable States are a motley crew, including some usually thought of as enjoying a high degree of institutional maturity. Their brazenness and cynicism in many of these instances are startling, but less so than the studied indifference of many judges, arbitrators, diplomats, and (for all their verbosity in pronouncing on the logic and doctrinal orthodoxy of judgments and awards) commentators.
One understands the impulse behind invocations of la raison d’Etat: a public objective the pursuit of which is said to be so indispensable as to justify unsavory means. The terrible problem is that expediency and hypocrisy are habit-forming, and before you know it the indispensable public end becomes anything which suits the purposes of officials who adorn themselves with the raiments of the State. Needless to say, they undermine the stance of legions of highly principled public servants who understand that must is lost when such behavior is condoned or ignored: trust in the institutions charged with ensuring the rule of law in the international community.
Reisman and Skinner are telling us that we have a serious problem, not how to solve it. They would clearly have preferred an international system in which adjudicators do not sidestep the inconvenient discovery of fraudulent behavior by disputants by allowing them to plead their cases on alternative grounds which do not rely on the discredited evidence. This practice means that there is little disincentive for unscrupulous attempts to deceive the decision-maker, but such has been the (low) road taken and the authors do not suggest that the dynamics of the process leave grounds to hope for a change. They note proposals for regulating the conduct of international advocates, but for various reasons do not find them realistic. The dynamics of the international processes and the divided loyalties they create (often resolved against the notion of a duty of candor to the tribunal) are described in ways of which this brief note cannot give a substantive account, but only affirm that this is previously unexplored and disturbing territory.
Public international adjudication it but one form of international dispute resolution in which the decision-makers’ authority is ultimately and necessarily based on the consent of the disputants. One must therefore wonder what aspects of these “dirty stories” tend to replicate themselves in the much larger field of international arbitrations involving private parties, and whether this question posed by the authors could be posed replacing the word “states” with the generic “parties”:
Are we entitled to conclude that from the perspective of international tribunals, they have no ancillary duty to police the honesty of states and their representatives but rather to rely on the cleansing dynamic of the adversarial process, to work through the evidence, as best they can, and to reach the right conclusion?
Some will answer as Judge Stephen Schwebel did in Nicaragua v United States:
Deliberate misrepresentations by the representatives of a government party to a case before this Court cannot be accepted because they undermine the essence of the judicial function. This is particularly true where, as here, such misrepresentations are of facts that arguably are essential, and incontestably are material, to the Court’s judgment.
All of us are left to ponder how the international community could find effective ways to reject what “cannot be accepted”, if that phrase is to covey anything more than a noble sentiment.
