Yearly Archives: 2017
May 2, 2017 Kristina NiedringhausLibrarianship and Legal Technology
Experiential learning is currently one of the buzz words of legal education. Recent changes to the ABA Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools have focused greater attention on learning outcomes and assessment and increasing opportunities for learning and practicing skills that students will use as attorneys. In fact, ABA Standard 303(a)(3) requires a minimum of 6 credit hours of experiential course work.
Traditionally, experiential learning was widely thought to be the domain of law school clinics and externships, or field placements. However, the increased credit hour requirement for experiential learning has caused law schools to review their curriculum and determine whether sufficient experiential learning opportunities exist to meet the minimum requirement. Accordingly, there is a push to design new courses, or redesign existing courses, to meet a third type of experiential learning termed simulation courses, as described in ABA Standard 304. In order to qualify as a simulation course under the standard, a course should provide an experience “reasonably similar” to client representation although the student is not working with a real client.
Professor Alyson M. Drake’s article calls for the creation or retooling of stand-alone research classes that will meet the requirements to be designated as experiential classes. An increase in the number of research classes categorized as experiential will provide two benefits. First, and most importantly, it can serve to provide additional legal research instruction beyond the first year of law school. It will also support the mission of law schools to expand course offerings that meet the experiential standard.
Although classes in legal research have traditionally been sparse and under-valued in law schools, this approach does not match the necessity for proficiency in legal research needed as a practicing attorney, or the amount of an attorney’s time that is devoted to legal research. Professor Drake notes that newer attorneys spend approximately 35% of their time on legal research. More experienced attorneys spend approximately 18% of their time doing research. In contrast, Professor Drake notes that hiring attorneys often assess new attorney research skills as needing improvement. Providing more legal research instruction, in a format that closely mimics the work of a practicing attorney, will produce students who are better prepared to transition to practice.
Professor Drake’s article provides a very useful overview of the history of this shift in the ABA Standards and legal education in general. Similarly, the article also provides a breakdown of the Standards and how they can be interpreted in regards to experiential education and, in particular, simulation courses. This background and analysis of the standards is quite useful for those seeking to understand the context of the shift toward increased experiential learning as well as those seeking to create experiential learning opportunities in legal research courses.
Finally, Professor Drake discusses several current legal research teaching methods and how they might be retooled to satisfy the requirements of Standard 304. She breaks down the components of different pedagogical structures, highlighting which components are likely to already meet the requirements, which aspects might not, and recommending ways in which those components might be restructured to meet the standard.
Professor Drake begins with the “traditional legal research course,” described as “those where the lecture takes place during class time.” (P. 529.) Some classroom practice is usually included, but the balance between lecture and practicing skills can vary significantly. A traditional class of this sort may be the most challenging to convert to an experiential model. However, Professor Drake offers several changes to a traditional class that could support its meeting the ABA requirements for an experiential class. These include ensuring the balance between lecture and practice weighs most heavily toward practice, using assignments that closely approximate problems likely to occur in practice, and limiting class size so that the professor can provide “direct supervision.”
Professor Drake goes on to discuss key components of flipped, online, and specialized legal research courses and outlines several suggestions for how these courses can be retooled to meet the experiential requirements. Her article is a call to create experiential legal research courses, but it goes farther by providing a roadmap that can be used to design new classes or restructure existing classes. Legal research is a critical lawyering skill; however, it is also an area where hiring attorneys believe new attorney skills are lacking. This gap between the necessity of efficient and effective research and ability at law school graduation creates an opportunity for the growth of legal research courses in the curriculum.
Apr 7, 2017 Jack PreisRemedies
Tun-Jen Chiang,
The Information-Forcing Dilemma in Damages Law (
Wash. U. in St. Louis Legal Stud. Research Paper No. 16-08-03, 2016), available at
SSRN.
There is a rule in the world of remedies that has always struck me as unfair. The rule, generally speaking, is that damages are not available unless they can be proven with certainty. For example, suppose that I own a pub and hire a karaoke DJ for Friday night. Karaoke is popular in my town and I advertise the event widely. On Friday afternoon, however, the DJ breaches and I’m left without entertainment. During the night, patrons show up and ask about the DJ. Many of them express disappointment; some decide to remain and have a couple drinks but some leave right away. I bring suit for $1,000 in damages. Even though liability is clear in this case, I am not likely to recover a dime in damages because my estimate of damages is, in the eyes of the law, little more than conjecture. If this seems unfair to you, you’re in good company. In fact, some courts see it the same way and have tried to soften the “certainty” requirement by awarding damages that seem like a “good guess.” But the “good guess” approach has its own downside. Guesses are sometimes wrong—especially when the guesser stands to benefit from guessing too high. So what is a court to do?
Scholars and jurists have wrestled with this problem for some time but nobody, to my knowledge, has done so as successfully as Tun-Jen Chiang in his new article, The Information-Forcing Dilemma in Damages Law. Unlike prior scholars, Chiang does not attempt to find the sweet spot between the “certainty” and “good guess” approaches. Instead, he takes a step back and tries to understand the problem. The problem is not simply that we have yet to find the sweet spot; it’s that information deficits force courts to fall back on a general sense of fairness. This sense of fairness will, of course, skew different ways in different cases. Chiang helpfully illustrates how courts oscillate between “certainty” and “good guess” approaches as they attempt to implement vague notions of fairness. In one case (or perhaps one period of time), courts move from “certainty” to “good guess” to ameliorate the unfairness to plaintiffs, but then move from “good guess” back to “unfairness” to ameliorate unfairness to defendants. And then the process starts all over again.
The same information deficit foils other attempts to solve the problem. Instead of choosing between a “certainty” or “good guess” approach, legislatures and courts have also experimented with solutions such damages caps or shifting the burden of proof. But these solutions, Chiang shows, are simply further attempts to pinpoint the appropriate level of fairness in a world of inadequate information. But that approach, like others, is prone to oscillation because fairness concerns will always re-assert themselves.
Once Chiang illustrates the real problem—inadequate information—he proposes a solution. Specifically, he argues that
Courts should require a party to produce damages information . . . if and only if two conditions are met. First, the social benefit of having additional information on some issue must outweigh the social cost of collecting the information and presenting it in court . . . . Second, courts should impose the burden of proof on the party that can more cheaply produce the information required. (P. 46.)
At first glance, the first of these two prongs seems unsatisfying. How in the world will a court determine the “social benefit” of presenting evidence of the business my pub lost when the DJ breached, the “social cost” of adducing this evidence? (Note that these costs and benefits are social, not private; if my private benefit exceeds my private cost, I would collect and produce the information without further incentive.) Chiang recognizes the problem, however. He acknowledges that courts will not be able to precisely calculate these costs and benefits. Yet he defends the criterion, persuasively in my view, as a tool for forcing courts to recognize the trade-offs that are inherent in the choice. When these trade-offs are submerged within the doctrine (as they are now), the doctrine oscillates over time because a given result, when stated in stark, black-and-white terms, appears to ignore costs. When a choice is explicitly acknowledged to be balance of costs and benefits, oscillation should be less common because costs are better (and more openly) accounted for.
The second prong of Chiang’s proposed solution does more than simply remind courts what should matter. It specifically instructs courts to consider who can more cheaply produce evidence of loss and penalize that party for failing to do so. But without knowing the nature of the evidence, how can a court know who can more cheaply produce it? Chiang’s solution is to impose a burden of producing evidence of both parties and then allow the court to penalize the party who could have produced more but didn’t. This would set off, as Chiang puts it, a
virtuous cycle where the threat of a penalty on one side (say the plaintiff) indices the plaintiff to produce more and better evidence, which in turn induces the defendant to produce more and better evidence, and so on—the cycle stops only at the point where both parties have produced all cost-effective evidence and therefore do not expect to be found negligent [in the production of evidence] at all. (P. 54.)
Chiang’s solution strikes me as worth a try. If there a cost-effective way for me to find out how many customers I lost at my pub, I should do so. If I don’t do, but instead throw a big damages number at the court, I should not get the benefit of a “good guess” rule. In contrast, if the DJ can cost-effectively determine how much business I lost but did not do so, he should not get the benefit of the certainty rule. What happens if both of us do our best? This is one place where Chiang comes up a bit short, at least on my reading. He does not appear to address that possibility. To his credit, the problem of damages should be less acute in this context because both parties have adduced as much evidence as feasible, thus making the court’s job easier. But there will still be situations when the amount of damages is uncertain even after both parties have done their best. If the court applies a pro-defendant certainty rule at that point, that would seem to diminish the plaintiff’s incentive to produce evidence up front. That is, the plaintiff can only obtain a pro-plaintiff “good guess” rule if (1) the plaintiff is non-negligent and (2) the defendant is negligent. Perhaps the plaintiff’s incentive to adduce as much cost-effective evidence as possible will still be strong enough given that she cannot capitalize on a defendant’s negligence unless she herself is non-negligent. If that is so, Chiang’s solution is a good one, though it would help to more fully explain that point (which is possible because the article still appears to be in draft form).
In sum, scholars, jurists or practitioners who have found themselves perplexed by the prospect of proving damages should read Chiang’s fine article. He helpfully explains why doctrine in this field has oscillated over time and offers an innovative and efficient way to solve the problem. I enjoyed reading it, lots.
Mar 8, 2017 Jaya Ramji-NogalesImmigration
As immigrant communities and immigrants’ rights advocates stare down the barrel of the Trump administration, anti-trafficking appears to be the sole immigration-related issue that might gain bipartisan traction. As has historically been the case with refugees and asylum seekers, Democrats and Republicans may find common ground in concern over the situation of trafficked individuals, especially those subject to sexual trafficking. Refugee advocates and scholars have long raised concerns about the impact of collaborations with strange bedfellows on law and policy-making. Janie Chuang’s article, Giving as Governance? Philanthrocapitalism and Modern-Day Slavery Abolitionism, raises a similar set of worries around the anti-trafficking agenda, introducing a new character to the cast: the philanthrocapitalist. This piece presents a comprehensive and thoughtful set of concerns about the outsized and largely unaccountable role of a new generation of hyperengaged donors in shaping the anti-trafficking policy agenda.
In Prof. Chuang’s words, philanthrocapitalism is a “relatively new form of philanthropy, born of a new generation of the ultra-rich who aspire to use their business skills to fix the world’s social problems.” She explains that these donors play a much more direct role in shaping responses to societal issues than philanthropists in previous eras, who gave money to support third parties’ efforts to effect social change. This is a sound analysis, though it then raises the question of whether these are differences of degree or of kind. Philanthropists have always had some control over policymaking agendas through their selection of projects and varying levels of control through reporting and funding mechanisms. What is different about these new philanthrocapitalists?
Prof. Chuang provides several answers to this question through the case study of trafficking. The most meaningful difference is that for previous generations of philanthropists, external critiques of the organizations they funded were not viewed as criticisms of the donors themselves. This is a distinction in kind; because the policy work is directly identified with a very wealthy donor, philanthrocapitalism quells critique in a new and substantially more dangerous way. Another concern raised by Prof. Chuang, that philanthrocapitalists, as successful market actors, are more likely to focus on changing individual behaviors of actors rather than the “structures that undergird global labor markets and labor relations,” is apt, but a difference of degree. Other philanthropists, past and current, have often been marked by a similar hesitance to fund projects that undermine the foundations of their financial success; the same is true for government funding and policymaking. Similarly, Prof. Chuang’s charge that philanthrocapitalists lack accountability constraints is one that could be applied, though less powerfully, to non-governmental organizations funded by philanthropies. These organizations are not subject to democratic processes, and the accountability mechanisms that exist are limited to those created and enforced by donors.
Set in the context of the anti-trafficking movement, Prof. Chuang argues that the dominance of philanthrocapitalism has had particularly pernicious results. She explains that philanthrocapitalists have promoted a discourse equating trafficking and forced labor with slavery. Though powerful rhetorically, this framing focuses attention on the actions of individuals, both traffickers and the trafficked. It thereby absolves the state and corporations for their roles in constructing and perpetuating global economic structures that push individuals to migration as an economic strategy. The “modern-day slavery” frame also enables a crime-control approach to traffickers, and a victimhood approach to the trafficked, who become subjects of rescue and pity rather than agency-bearing individuals.
Prof. Chuang explains that the anti-trafficking movement is currently grappling with the choice between a criminalization approach or a broader strategy that would challenge global systems of exploitation. The corollary concern, of course, is that philanthrocapitalists have outsized power to influence this decision. Prof. Chuang identifies several problems with their dominance of the marketplace of ideas. First, philanthrocapitalists have deep faith and investment in the ability of markets to determine the effectiveness of social programs. In other words, they’re using capitalist tools to fix the shortcomings of the capitalist system. Again, it seems that other philanthropies and state programs would fall into a variation of this critique; these actors are similarly unlikely to present radical challenges to “the current economic and political status quo of global capitalism.” However, a starker difference arises from philanthrocapitalists’ embrace of market-based tools; in particular, Prof. Chuang notes their embrace of quantifiable metrics to assess social programs. This approach, which risks essentializing the complexities of social problems, seems to present a difference in kind from the approaches of other philanthropists, who might encourage the use of metrics but not likely to the exclusion of other assessment methods. An even more concerning shift in kind is the concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals who may own or donate generously to media outlets. The core of Prof. Chuang’s critique of philanthrocapitalism lies here in the consolidation of policymaking authority by a few powerful individuals who are able to effectively quell traditional avenues of criticism and accountability.
Prof. Chuang completes her analysis with a specific case study of the Walk Free Foundation (WFF), which exemplifies many of the concerns she raises earlier in the paper. WFF aims to “end modern slavery” through the use of indicators, namely its annual Global Slavery Index, to measure the problem; the coordination of funds via a public-private partnership; and the vehicle of corporations as change agents. While Prof. Chuang’s critique of the use of ill-defined and unevenly applied indicators to set governance agendas was compelling, her concern about the abandonment of categories separately defined and regulated under international law in favor of the term “modern-day slavery” assumed a rationality to the law and its categories that this reader was less inclined to take at face value.
Otherwise, Prof. Chuang’s concerns are borne out in concrete example. WFF seeks to criminalize the behavior of traffickers and encourage ethical corporate behavior but fails to even raise, let alone enforce, two crucial tools in protecting workers against exploitation: labor standards and inspections. Prof. Chuang also raises a broader point about development discourse: WFF assumes that as economic development increases, slavery will decrease, an approach that points the finger at the global South for the problem of trafficking while absolving the global North of responsibility for global economic inequality that makes migration a crucial economic strategy for the poor. She traces the disturbing muting of critical perspectives and lack of accountability with regard to the work of WFF, though her proffered counterexample, of Humanity United allowing NGOs to set the agenda, retained versions of these accountability and democratic legitimacy problems.
Prof. Chuang closes with a powerful critique of philanthrocapitalism: that needs are determined from the top down, with a preference for dramatic and quick results rather than long-term projects leading to sustainable systematic change. She has made a convincing case to support this argument, though many of her criticisms can also be levied, to a lesser degree, against traditional philanthropies and state-based governance and policymaking. The quest for bottom-up policymaking is noble and necessary, but the challenges of creating real democratic accountability in setting the anti-trafficking agenda remain substantial, as they do more broadly when it comes to global governance of migration.
Feb 7, 2017 Elizabeth AdelmanLibrarianship and Legal Technology
Learning the substantive law has always been the foundation of a legal education. As job prospects for attorneys tightened, a focus on practitioner skills began trending in legal education. There is an expectation that law schools will produce practice-ready attorneys. Despite this expectation, why are Johnny and Jane unable to research?
Professor Caroline L. Osborne’s research findings have confirmed what many legal educators surmise about the state of legal research education. Her findings demonstrate that legal research education is undervalued in law schools. “For those involved in legal education, the goal is to provide students with the tools they need to succeed . . . . ” (P. 407.) In a carpenter’s arena, the value of the hammer is universally understood. The value of legal research as an essential tool of the legal trade, on the other hand, is not well understood in legal education. This lack of understanding persists, despite the MacCrate report and its ilk, codified ethical obligations of attorneys, and promulgated research competency standards. With this in mind, Professor Osborne presents each contributing factor to the devaluation of legal research education so that the reader is equipped to ponder solutions.
The MacCrate Report was published in 1992, and served as one of the first comprehensive assessments of necessary skills for attorneys and of the legal profession. It declares that legal research skills are fundamental: “It can hardly be doubted that the ability to do legal research is one of the skills that any competent legal practitioner must possess.” (P. 163.) Similarly, Best Practices for Legal Education acknowledges legal research as “essential.” (P. 58.)
The ethical obligations of attorneys further obligate Johnny and Jane. Model Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 1.1, which has been adopted in whole or in part by all fifty states, holds the lawyer to a certain level of competence:
A lawyer shall provide competent representation to a client. Competent representation requires the legal knowledge, skill, thoroughness and preparation reasonably necessary for the representation.
Comment 2 to Model Rule 1.1 points out that competent representation requires a lawyer to possess “important legal skills” that are typical in all legal problems. Comment 8 further articulates the need to maintain competence, in part, by requiring technology competency, including those technology skills which are essential for performing research:
To maintain the requisite knowledge and skill, a lawyer should keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology, . . .
Technology is a major factor in the devaluation of legal research education. It has enabled the creation of and easy access to massive amounts of information. It has also transformed how we perform research. While the ubiquity of information has made research appear easier, it has actually become a more sophisticated task. To further complicate the picture, Osborne points out that today’s students seem to lack the ability to evaluate information and to think critically.
The ethical standards outlined above are bolstered by Legal Research Competencies and Standards for Law Student Information Literacy, developed and approved by the American Association of Law Libraries in 2012. These standards were promulgated to inform best practices in legal education curricular design and to provide a baseline competency for attorneys in practice settings.
Notwithstanding the existence of these industry standards, Professor Osborne discusses contributing factors for the devaluation of legal research education in law school curricula. Her survey results show, for example, that only 16% of responding institutions have a stand-alone research classes as opposed to being integrated into the legal writing curriculum. She also points out that law school writing programs have been strengthened while the emphasis on research has lessened. Combined, these factors have had an unfortunate impact on legal research education. “[T]he cost of graduating fluent writers should not be the legal research curriculum.” (P. 404.)
Despite what the industry demands, Osborne opines that the current state of legal education—including pass/fail grading, fewer credits awarded compared with other 1L courses, integration with and diminished presence in the writing curriculum—sends the message to law students that legal research education is unimportant. Her thesis is backed up by the findings of a recent BARBRI State of the Legal Field survey: “Faculty placed very little importance on research, with just 4 percent citing it as the most important skill for recent law school graduates . . . .” In our role as legal educators, “we fail to signal the importance of legal research in the practice of law.” (P. 409.)
In this article, Professor Osborne conveys a very important message to legal educators: we should consider ourselves on notice that our actions and our curricula demonstrate a decreased importance of legal research education to our students. As a result, Johnny and Jane are leaving law school without this fundamental tool despite the expectation that they graduate with both the substantive knowledge and the skills to be practice ready and to maintain or exceed industry standards.
Jan 13, 2017 Eric BiberEnvironmental Law
Kellen Zale,
When Everything is Small: The Regulatory Challenge of Scale in the Sharing Economy,
San Diego L. Rev. (forthcoming 2016), available at
SSRN.
There has been a lot of literature about the so-called “sharing” economy lately, in particular focusing on the conflicts over whether and how that economy will fit within the existing regulatory systems at the local, state, and federal levels. And at first blush, the question of whether Uber drivers should be regulated as taxis or not doesn’t seem to have much of a connection with the standard concerns of environmental law—particularly the regulation of large industrial sources of pollution.
But as Kellen Zale’s excellent article points out, the problems that the sharing economy poses to existing regulatory systems are ones that we have seen before, and ones that we will see again. Zale notes that the sharing economy poses regulatory challenges precisely because of its scale of a large number of small activities—thousands and thousands of individual drivers working for Uber or Lyft, or of homeowners renting through Air BnB. Large numbers of individually small activities are incredibly difficult to regulate effectively, and that regulation can impose substantial social costs. As a result, the law has traditionally exempted many small scale actions from regulation. On the other hand, the accumulation of all of these individually small actions can impose significant harms on neighbors, communities, and the environment. For instance, the congestion and noise impacts of large numbers of Air BnB rentals have been a source of major complaint in some tourist communities. Zale also identifies how the sharing economy is but one example of this phenomenon—a growth of the impacts from individually small activities to the point at which regulation is required—and discusses how it can be discerned in a range of areas, including landlord-tenant law.
I particularly enjoyed Zale’s efforts to identify solutions to the challenges posed by the sharing economy—options including co-regulation (in which the private industry is part of enforcement efforts in cooperation with the government), the use of private standards, and simple fee structures. While Zale certainly does not exhaust the range of possible options, her efforts are an important starting point for developing policy responses.
While Zale’s work focuses on the sharing economy, I think the issues she identifies, the questions she asks, and the policy ideas she develops will be important for environmental law far beyond the sharing economy. The future of the next century will be increasingly a story of rising human pressures on our planet as a result of the accumulation of billions of individual decisions about how to use resources and what lifestyles to live. In major urban areas in the United States, much current air pollution is the result of activities as small as filling gasoline tanks in cars, painting houses, dry cleaning clothes, and burning wood in fireplaces. Some of these challenges can be covered by upstream regulation (e.g., reformulating paints to reduce emissions, more efficient gas tanks). Others will require more direct intervention in individual activities (e.g., enforcing requirements on separating recycling materials from trash, restricting the use of fireplaces). Ensuring that these regulations will be politically palatable and fair in the burdens they impose on individuals will require the development of many creative solutions along the lines Zale develops. I am glad she has helped start that conversation.
