Yearly Archives: 2019
May 6, 2019 Jack PreisRemedies
Stephen A. Smith,
Rights-Threats, Wrongs and Injustices: The Common Law Causes of Action, 27
N.Z.U.L. Rev. 1033 (2017), available at
SSRN.
It is a familiar quip that a right without a remedy is no right at all. A recent article by Stephen A. Smith shows, however, that there is such a thing as a remedy with no right—something I might call a “rightless remedy.” In Rights-Threats, Wrongs and Injustices: The Common Law Causes of Action, Smith explicates a category of judicial orders (i.e., remedies) that are not tied to any underlying legal right or wrong. In doing so, Smith tells us something important about both rights and remedies.
To appreciate Smith’s insights, it is first important to understand his taxonomy. The phrase “cause of action” can mean many things, but to Smith and other scholars writing in this area, a “cause of action” is a set of facts that justify a judicially-administered remedy. Understood as such, a cause of action is not necessarily co-extensive with substantive law. The substantive law contains instructions for citizens (e.g., “do not hit others,”) but cause-of-action law (sometimes called “remedial law”) contains instructions for courts (e.g. “if a person proves to you that she has been hit, order the hitter to pay her damages”). Causes of action will usually track the substantive law closely, and for that reason we often take it for granted that, where a wrong has been committed, a court will issue a remedy. But there are certainly situations in which remedial law does not authorize judicial intervention, even when a wrong has been committed (such as, for example, when a court declines to issue an injunction because it will impose an undue hardship on the defendant). Far less common (or even ignored until Smith showed otherwise) are situations in which a remedy issues where no wrong has been committed—but that is an issue we will get to in a bit.
Smith’s project is to explain, as a categorical matter, the circumstances in which courts will issue a remedy. Two of these—rights-threats and wrongs—are easily recognizable to legal scholars and practitioners. When your neighbor threatens to cut down your tree (i.e., threatens to infringe one of your rights), a court will put down this threat by ordering your neighbor not to do so. Relatedly, if your neighbor cuts down your tree before you can make it to court (i.e., commits a legal wrong), a court will order the neighbor to pay you damages. Neither of these grounds for relief upsets our common understanding of remedial law. But Smith’s third ground—injustice—introduces a new variation of remedial law.
An injustice, in Smith’s telling, is a judicially administered remedy that is not based on a rights-threat or a wrong. Smith offers several examples, but a useful one for our purposes is restitution in the case of defectively transferred funds. If I mistakenly transfer money to your account, a court will order you to return the money—even though you have done nothing wrong. One might counter that retaining money mistakenly transferred to you is wrongful, but Smith convincingly shows why that is false. There is no underlying duty to return such money because people who receive such money often have no knowledge of it, or even if they do, have no way to determine with any certainty—short of judicial intervention—to whom to return the money. Thus, in the case of mistakenly transferred funds, the traditional role of the court is not to enforce an underlying duty through a remedy, but simply to correct the injustice by ordering the money be returned.
Having shown that a remedy in injustice cases is, to use my term, a “rightless remedy,” Smith turns to the question of why such a phenomenon should exist in private law. Part of the reason is contained in the point above: people frequently cannot be expected to have sufficient knowledge to comply with such a duty. Thus, if society wishes the money to be returned (to continue with the example from above), it can only accomplish this by a judicial order.
Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Instead of an order, we could accomplish the same result with a judicial declaration that a certain sum of money was mistakenly transferred. The declaration would thus trigger a substantive duty to return the funds—but only if we recognize a substantive duty to correct injustices. So the real nub of the issue is: why we don’t recognize an underlying duty to correct an injustice?
Smith’s answer, which I find the most interesting part of his paper, is as follows:
To say that someone has a duty to do X is to say, roughly, that regardless of how costly or inconvenient X is, X must be done. Duties are correlative to rights, and rights, to borrow Ronald Dworkin’s terminology, are trumps. Thus we say (and the law confirms) that we have rights to physical integrity—and correlative duties to respect physical integrity—because we believe that, with rare exceptions, non-consensual interferences with another’s physical integrity are never permissible.
“Correcting injustices” is different than “not injuring”: it is a valuable thing to do, but it is not, or at least should not be, a duty. Private law duties are basically duties not to interfere with others’ persons, property, or liberty, and duties to keep contractual promises. The actions that are required to correct injustices have a different orientation. A failure to compensate a loss or to reverse an enrichment is not an interference with the beneficiary’s personal property or liberty; nor is it breaking a promise. It is simply a failure to correct an injustice. Correcting an injustice is valuable but failing to do so is not a wrong in the sense that stealing or lying or breaking promises is wrong. As a society, we regularly trade off the value of correcting injustices against other values. The courts clearly play a crucial role in correcting injustices….Yet it is clear that criminals are often not brought to court (or not pursued at all) because courts and prosecutors are in short supply.…[I]f our goal was to ensure that every injustice was corrected, there would be almost no limit to the number of courts, judges, lawyers, police officers and so on that the State ought to provide.” (P. 29.)
Summing up his point, Smith puts it thus: “Private law duties correlate to individual rights, but no one has a right that justice be done, and certainly not a right that another private individual ensure that justice be done.” (P. 30) This is not to say that the state may not concern itself with injustices, or that it may not refer them to the courts for resolution when it finds them. The fact that restitution cases are resolved by courts is enough to prove this point. But such adjudication is not, in a fundamental sense, the adjudication of rights. Instead, it is something that Smith calls the provision of “justice services”—the correction of an unjust circumstance that has arisen without any wrong being committed.
Smith’s article is both enlightening and thought-provoking. In explaining the phenomenon of rightless remedies—i.e., court orders untethered to underlying substantive rights—Smith shows us something important about both rights and remedies. In particular, he shows us how substantive rights are correlated with wrongs but always correlated with remedies. In doing so, Smith deepens our understanding of the complex relationship between the common law itself and institutions that both create and maintain it (i.e., the courts).
Cite as: Jack Preis,
Rightless Remedies, JOTWELL
(May 6, 2019) (reviewing Stephen A. Smith,
Rights-Threats, Wrongs and Injustices: The Common Law Causes of Action, 27
N.Z.U.L. Rev. 1033 (2017), available at SSRN),
https://lex.jotwell.com/rightless-remedies/.
Apr 22, 2019 Kristina NiedringhausLibrarianship and Legal Technology
Every law student is told repeatedly to check that the cases they are relying on are still “good” law. They may even be told that not using a citator such as Shepard’s, KeyCite, or BCite could be malpractice and multiple ethics cases would support that claim. But how reliable are the results returned by these systems?
Paul Hellyer has published the surprising results of an important study investigating this question. Hellyer looked at 357 citing relationships that one or more of these three citators labeled as negative. “Out of these, all three citators agree that there was negative treatment only 53 times. This means that in 85% of these citing relationships, the three citators do not agree on whether there was negative treatment.” (P. 464.) Some of the differentiation between systems could be attributed to one system incorrectly marking a relationship as negative when it is not. This might be considered a less egregious mistake if one presumes that the researcher would review the flagged case and find no negative treatment, although it is a costly mistake in a field where time matters. However, Hellyer accounts for the false positive (or negative, in this case) problem and the results of his study are distressing.
We are told that the citators are reliable. I, along with numerous law professors and judges, have told students and attorneys that failure to use a citator could lead to anything from a judicial tongue lashing to disciplinary action to malpractice charges. As Hellyer points out (P. 450), the marketing for citators assures us that the systems produce reliable results. For example, KeyCite is marketed as “the industry’s most complete and accurate citator” and that you can be “confident you’re relying on valid law.” Similarly, the Shepard’s product page proclaims, “Is it good law? Shepardize® and be sure.” Bloomberg BNA is less boastful in its promotion of BCite stating, “Easy to use indicators…allow you to immediately (emphasis added) see how other cases have treated your case.”
Let’s look at some more data from Hellyer’s study, which he believes is “the largest statistical comparison study of citator performance for case validation” and the first to include BCite. (P. 450.) In addition to just looking at how the citators labeled the relationships, Hellyer assesses the case opinions to determine the nature of the citing relationship and whether it was correctly labeled by the citator. He differentiates between negative relationships that were not identified in any way and those that misidentified the relationship. An example of this would be if a case was in fact overturned but the citator labeled it as something else, such as “distinguished by.” When Hellyer examined whether the citators agreed on the subset of negative treatment, all three systems agreed on about only 11% of references.
Hellyer’s article is an important read for anyone who relies on a citator for case validation or, determining whether a case is still “good” law. The results are fascinating and his methodology is thorough and detailed. Before delving into his findings, Hellyer reviews previous studies and explains his process in detail. His dataset is available upon request. The article has additional value because Hellyer shared his results with the three vendors prior to publication and describes and responds to some of their criticisms in his article, allowing the reader to make their own assessment of the critique.
Even more interesting than the broader statistics, are Hellyer’s details of specific errors. He acknowledges that omission errors, as opposed to misidentification errors, were unpublished cases that might present less of a problem for attorneys. However, Hellyer goes on to examine the misidentification errors and concludes that all three citators exhibit the greatest issues not in identifying the cases but in the editorial analysis of what the citing relationship means. For example, in Hellyer’s dataset there were four cases later overruled by the United States Supreme Court. All three citators misidentified at least one citing relationship and one of them misidentified three of the four cases as something other than being overruled. Hellyer’s examination of these cases revealed how these misidentification errors can filter through to other citing relationships and create further errors. (Pp. 467-471.)
Analysis of citing relationships, and whether those relationships are positive and negative, is essential to the legal system and reliance on “good” law, or case validation, is the critical first step. Hellyer states that the results of his analysis mean “that when you citate a case that has negative treatment, the results you get depend mainly on which citator you happen to be using.” (P. 465.) This is a stunning assessment of a vital resource that is so widely and heavily relied upon by the legal community.
Cite as: Kristina Niedringhaus,
Is it a “Good” Case? Can You Rely on BCite, KeyCite, and Shepard’s to Tell You?, JOTWELL
(April 22, 2019) (reviewing Paul Hellyer,
Evaluating Shepard’s, KeyCite, and BCite for Case Validation Accuracy, 110
Law Libr. J. 449 (2018)),
https://lex.jotwell.com/is-it-a-good-case-can-you-rely-on-bcite-keycite-and-shepards-to-tell-you/.
Mar 19, 2019 Jaya Ramji-NogalesImmigration
International and domestic laws aimed at protecting children involved in human smuggling generally operate under the assumption that these children are vulnerable and defenseless prey to dangerous and violent criminals, for whom they work against their will. In her recent article, “Circuit Children”: The Experiences and Perspectives of Children Engaged in Migrant Smuggling Facilitation on the US-Mexico Border, sociologist Gabriella Sanchez uses original qualitative fieldwork to upend or at least nuance this claim that sits at the heart of current anti-smuggling laws. The children whose stories she tells offer a much more complex picture of their role in helping others navigate the U.S.-Mexico border.
While many scholars have decried the carceral turn in human smuggling laws, Sanchez offers a key piece of evidence demonstrating the fundamental problems with this move to criminalization. It is, as has been far too obvious of late, easy for politicians and governments to demonize actors in the migratory process, both migrants and those who help them to move. But the carceral approach masks the structural forces that render migration both necessary and nearly impossible to undertake lawfully for individuals who do not win the birthplace lottery. Sanchez’s body of work highlights the humanity and dignity of the individuals who facilitate migrant journeys—who might, from a different perspective, be viewed as part of a modern-day Underground Railroad. Though she refrains from hitting the reader over the head, the unmistakable take-away from her work is that these individuals are not the source of the problem; they are doing the best they can in the face of structural and geopolitical forces beyond their control.
Sanchez’s empirical research fills a crucial gap in the literature. Undocumented migration is by its very nature challenging to study; people moving outside the bounds of the law are not easy to track let alone interview. Sanchez engages with this challenge head-on to gather insights into the realities of human movement across borders that are often at odds with the assumptions animating laws that criminalize human smuggling. Her previous scholarship challenges popular depictions of migrant smugglers as ruthless criminals, using empirical work to demonstrate the symbiotic relationships and social networks that often connect migrants and those who facilitate their journeys. If migrants’ perceptions of smugglers rarely enter the legal or even scholarly discourse, it is rarer still to hear from children who participate in facilitating human movement across borders.
The voices of these children tell a story that, in Sanchez’s words, defies “the state-centric notion that the facilitation of informal, clandestine mobility strategies inherently constitutes a crime” as well as the assumption that “smuggling is the exclusive domain of organized crime.” Her interviews with 18 children aged 14 to 17 in Ciudad Juárez reveal conscious decisions to engage in smuggling that enabled them to support their families financially. These children empathized with the migrants, and appreciated the personal, social, and economic capital they gained through their smuggling work. Sanchez recognizes the risks faced by these children, but notes that they viewed law enforcement, especially U.S. Border Patrol, as the most fearsome danger.
Sanchez’s interviews raise the voices of a small group of children in one specific location. The story they tell cannot possibly be universal, but it raises important questions about the criminalization of migrant smuggling. Sanchez emphasizes that children involved in smuggling face serious risks, but refutes essentializing claims that all of these children are forced against their will to work for transnational organized crime. Their perspectives beg for further study, and starkly highlight the need for a reassessment of law’s carceral approach to migrant smuggling.
Cite as: Jaya Ramji-Nogales,
Out of the Mouths of Babes, JOTWELL
(March 19, 2019) (reviewing Gabriella Sanchez,
"Circuit Children": The Experiences and Perspectives of Children Engaged in Migrant Smuggling Facilitation on the US-Mexico Border, 11
Anti-Trafficking Review 103 (2018)),
https://lex.jotwell.com/out-of-the-mouths-of-babes/.
Feb 14, 2019 Eric BiberEnvironmental Law
The recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this fall has made clear the urgent need to address climate change. What should be the primary policy tool that we use to address the problem? Economists have vociferously advocated for the use of carbon taxes or cap-and-trade permit systems, on the grounds that they provide the most efficient way to decarbonize global economies. Yet carbon taxes have had little success in the political arena. Many of the existing policies that countries and states have used to address carbon emissions have been regulations or subsidies, not market-based approaches. Is this a fundamental misstep on the part of policymakers?
In her recent article, Energy, Governance, and Market Mechanisms, Alice Kaswan argues that this is not a misstep, and that in fact there are good reasons—political, democratic, even economic—to prefer non-market-based instruments to advance decarbonization. Her article is ambitious in its scope but effective in raising important questions about what approach is best.
Kaswan raises a couple of key points about why non-market-based mechanisms may be superior to address the transition to a decarbonized economy. First, she argues that government coordination of climate policies can allow the achievement of multiple goals in addition to reducing carbon emissions at the least cost (which is what market-based tools excel at). For instance, we might be concerned about the distributional impacts of a transition to a decarbonized economy and adding on social equity measures to market-based tools may not be as effective as a fully integrated approach. Similarly, there are a lot of additional issues we are concerned about in energy production than simply carbon emissions (e.g., bird mortality from wind turbines, or long-term waste disposal from nuclear power), and a price on carbon alone cannot help us resolve those tradeoffs.
Second, Kaswan argues that long-term planning is an essential component of a transition to a carbon-free energy system, given the interconnectedness of a wide range of elements of our energy systems and the long timeframes for many investments in those systems. According to Kaswan, market-based tools may not be the most effective in managing these kinds of planned transitions—particularly if carbon prices are low, and so far we have only observed relatively low carbon prices in practice.
Third, Kaswan argues that public participation would be more robust for non-market-based regulatory measures, and that this public participation will result in a more equitable and more accountable approach to carbon reductions. And finally, Kaswan argues that non-market-based mechanisms appear to be more politically realistic than stringent market-based tools—something that has been quite apparent this fall as the French protest against a new gas tax and Washington state voters turned down a carbon tax proposal.
One law review article will not be able to conclusively answer any of these difficult questions about the role of market-based mechanisms in climate policy—the challenge spans the entirety of the modern economy, across countries with very different political and cultural settings, and an incredible range of technical problems. But Kaswan’s piece is a vital starting point for the now-vibrant debate about which policy approaches will be more successful, and an important counterpoint to a policy discourse that has mostly been dominated by advocates of carbon pricing. Even if you don’t agree with her arguments, Kaswan’s analysis should give you important points to consider.
Feb 1, 2019 Ezra RosserPoverty Law
Andrew Hammond,
Pleading Poverty in Federal Court,
Yale L. J. (forthcoming). Available at
SSRN.
In United States v. Kras, the Court rejected the argument that a poor person petitioning for protection from creditors should not have to pay a filing fee in order to access the bankruptcy system. The majority held that an able-bodied person could make the payment because the $50 fee was only $1.92 per week if spread over six months and $1.28 if spread over nine months. Justice Blackburn noted that such a fee at the time was “less than the price of a movie and little more than the cost of a pack or two of cigarettes.” Justice Thurgood Marshall’s dissented, observing:
It may be easy for some people to think that weekly savings of less than $2 are no burden. But no one who has had close contact with poor people can fail to understand how close to the margin of survival many of them are….A pack or two of cigarettes may be, for them, not a routine purchase but a luxury indulged in only rarely. The desperately poor almost never go to see a movie, which the majority seems to believe is an almost weekly activity. They have more important things to do with what little money they have….
For the poor, fees, even supposedly “nominal” fees, matter. In the civil law context, Congress has established a $350 filing fee to access the federal courts and the Judicial Conference tagged an additional $50 administrative fee onto that. (P. 12.) While the non-poor may be able to treat the combined $400 fee as a mere inconvenience, such an amount can serve to bar poor civil litigants from the federal courts.
Andrew Hammond’s article, Pleading Poverty in Federal Court, shows that there is considerable variation in how federal courts consider requests by the poor for fee waivers in civil litigation. Courts not only use different forms to collect ability-to-pay information but they also apply different standards when determining whether fees should be waived. By focusing attention on federal court in forma pauperis motion practices, Hammond’s article sheds light on how the poor can be negatively impacted by routine court practices that might ordinarily be treated as merely administrative. Hammond makes a convincing argument that federal courts should have uniform standards for what information is collected and for the level of need that is associated with a fee waiver. Blending empirical work—a significant contribution of the article is that it catalogues the in forma pauperis forms used by all 94 federal district courts—with an appreciation for the struggles faced by poor litigants, Pleading Poverty in Federal Court is a well-written, targeted intervention that hopefully will improve the ability of the poor to access the federal courts.
The article includes a number of eye-opening details. The Southern District of Alabama asks litigants to provide the makes and models for their “automobiles, boats, [and] motorhomes.” (P. 18.) Puerto Rico’s district court asks movants if they have income from horse racing and gambling. (P. 21.) These variations are arguably less striking than the fact that different judges in the same federal district court can have different standards and practices when it comes to their review of in forma pauperis motions. As Hammond notes, “Some judges might use 100% of the federal poverty guidelines (FPL) as their threshold. Others will use 200%. Some will simply have their law clerk review the form and make a determination based on the information provided.” (P. 27.) Even putting aside the problem of variation across districts, there are many problems with leaving in forma pauperis discretion to each judge in the same district court. It can make the question of whether a poor litigant can get into the courtroom wholly arbitrary, tied to whether the assigned judge is someone who gives waivers easily or someone who rarely gives a waiver. Moreover, review of in forma pauperis motions forces judges to “make complicated, arcane poverty determinations—often reconciling a dozen categories of income with a dozen categories of expenses,” which Hammond argues is not a good use of the scarce time of an Article III judge. (P. 28.) (While I appreciate Hammond’s point, part of me is glad that this process forces judges to confront the poverty of some of the litigants, to look at the details of their lives. Such examinations may often be technically irrelevant to the proceeding but they may nevertheless help judges see both trends and the full person before them.)
In addition to the complications for federal judges associated with variation in the standards used by district courts when it comes to in forma pauperis motions, Pleading Poverty in Federal Court highlights the impact overly detailed information collection can have on poor litigants. Though Hammond’s article focuses on federal court practices, it includes a similarly impressive catalogue and overview of how state courts consider in forma pauperis motions. Just as in the federal courts, variation abounds across state courts. But Hammond also observes that states have adopted a number of practices that simplify the process of applying for a fee waiver, including establishing presumptive eligibility for fees to be waived based on: (a) a pre-determined multiple of the federal poverty line, (b) receipt of particular means-tested welfare benefits, or (c) representation by legal aid attorneys. (P. 40.) Moving away from overly intrusive information collection towards a system that partly piggybacks on the means-testing work of other entities, supplemented by a simpler form, would help judges and poor litigants. Khiara Bridges shows in The Poverty of Privacy Rights that the law strips the poor (but not the middle and upper class) of their privacy—often as a condition of receiving means-tested benefits—in ways that use information as a means of control. Although looking at a particular area of civil procedure as it relates to the poor and not the entire legal landscape, Hammond’s argument that “a streamlined, shorter form makes the process more sophisticated and more accurate, while preserving the dignity of poor people” (P. 57) fits nicely alongside Bridges’ work.
Some of the best poverty law articles—for example, Lucie E. White’s Subordination, Rhetorical Survival Skills, and Sunday Shoes: Notes on the Hearing of Mrs. G. and Barbara Bezdek’s Silence in the Court: Participation and Subordination of Poor Tenants’ Voices in Legal Process—get their strength from qualitative observations of the courtroom experiences of the poor. Pleading Poverty in Federal Court adds an empirical dimension to such participant-centered works. By pulling back the curtain on federal court practice and the high level of variation in what courts require of poor litigants, as well as their different standards for granting fee waivers, the article provides a valuable contribution to the literature on how the poor experience the law. Hammond shows how reforming a single element of civil procedure, standardizing federal in forma pauperis practice, can help open federal courthouse doors to the poor a bit more.
