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Towards a new branch of law and economics?

Yair Listokin, Law and Macroeconomics (2019).
Ronen Avraham

Ronen Avraham

Not every day do we encounter a work of research that enables us to study the law through a whole new lens. Indeed, over the last fifty or so years, legal scholars have discovered new ways to apply well-established bodies of knowledge to the research of law, helping us to both give normative meaning to existing rules and formulate new ones. No better example of this “interdisciplinary revolution” comes to mind than the world of law and economics, which in all fairness should be deemed the world of law and microeconomics. Prior to the publication of Yair Listokin’s book, Law and Macroeconomics, we as researchers have applied economic insight to legal research solely by examining specific actors’ response to incentives provided by law—a microeconomic perspective.

Listokin’s book challenges this paradigm with an invitation to consider how Macroeconomic thinking should also affect the way we understand and interpret the law, when unique conditions call for such an interpretation. It is an invitation to broaden our perspective: away from the world of local incentives intended to optimize behavior of specific players, into ways we can harness the law to address problems such as unemployment, total output, and economic growth.

Particularly relevant today, Listokin’s book shows that when countries and economies face the terrible days of recession—and they have already exhausted the possibility to stimulate the economy through traditional monetary and fiscal policies—making use of the law for macroeconomic purposes provides a powerful tool, albeit one that might contradict more traditional forms of legal analysis. Consider one of the examples given in chapter 11 of the book, in which a real estate developer intends to build a block of apartments and is facing push back from a local neighbor worried of noise and depreciation of his home’s market value. Such examples have been discussed tirelessly in legal literature over the last decades, and every law student who graduated from the basic Law and Economics introductory course can recite Coase’s and Calabresi & Melamed’s seminal work on transaction costs, and property and liability rules; in short, a microeconomic analysis requires the judge to consider several factors in making the decision of granting the plaintiff an injunction. Among these considerations, the judge may attempt to balance the harm imposed upon the plaintiff by the defendant with the cost imposed on the defendant by refraining from harm.

Alternatively, the judge may realize that the parties will likely reach a deal—ensuring the neighbors’ entitlements are well-protected and that transaction costs (broadly defined) between the parties are small enough. It is possible the court will be convinced that granting an injunction is efficient, under the assumption that the neighbor will be able to set a price tag on the harm the project will impose on him.

The important thing to notice is that this analysis rests upon the assumption that to achieve an efficient decision, the court needs to take into account only the interests and incentives of the two parties in dispute, as these are the only interests and incentives relevant to the case. At this point, Listokin asks us to imagine such a case coming before the court not in ordinary economic times, but during a recession—when unemployment is high, and interests’ rate is already at its lowest levels. In such grim economic reality—with construction projects already a scarce commodity—postponing the construction project by way of an injunction will probably lead to the unemployment of the developer’s employees. This in turn will further diminish overall consumer spending and negatively affect growth. It is apparent that the parties cannot be trusted to account for such massive costs, as they do not directly internalize them. It follows that the court cannot simply leave it for the parties to reach an efficient outcome even if transaction costs between them are low, and must take a much more active role in settling the dispute for the benefit of all involved. It is therefore wise for the judge—from a macroeconomic perspective, rather than a microeconomic one—to favor defending the neighbors’ entitlements by use of a liability rule, namely ordering the developer to pay damages and continue with the construction of the project in order to stimulate the economy.

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One can imagine several ways that one would apply the ideas in Listokin’s book to judicial decisionmaking. Going back to the earlier example, one might argue the court can take into account unemployment considerations through the familiar term of negative externalities, which already made its way into conventional legal thinking. By granting an injunction, the argument will follow, the court will allow the neighbors to externalize costs to the developer’s employees. The judge is therefore obliged, even by way of ‘traditional’ microeconomic thinking, to consider the interests of the employees when giving its ruling. Although tempting, I find such attempts to conceptualize Listokin’s work unhelpful because they mask first and second order effects. Listokin’s point is not that there is a second-order externality which policy makers fail to account for and that not accounting for it distorts the analysis. My colleague Dick Markovitz has been correctly arguing something similar to that for decades. Rather, Listokin argues that in times of recession, these Macro externalities dwarf any gains and losses traditional, parties-focused, microeconomic analysis of law has been analyzing. Turning a blind eye to this critical macroeconomic element will result, in our example, in a poor understanding of the merits of liability rules during a recession and why such rules should be applied by the courts. This is exactly what differentiates between a microeconomic and a macroeconomic analysis of the law, and a major part of what makes Listokin’s book so exciting.

It is with the last point, the appliance of macroeconomically-merited rules by the court, with which I would like to end this review. It must be admitted that Listokin’s intellectually challenging proposal to integrate macroeconomic notions into the ruling of the law might pose an institutional problem: how will judges, most of them lacking in economic education, be able to apply this knowledge into their rulings? Listokin proposes that whenever a law is promulgated as an open-ended legal standard lawyers should educate the judge so that she takes into account macroeconomic considerations, or else we might conclude it has erred in its decision.

Although Listokin’s proposal is an elegant solution enabling us to create legitimacy for the introduction of macroeconomically efficient decisions into the law, it is still questionable whether judges will know which decisions are macroeconomically efficient. I would like to offer a different approach to this problem. In my view, the solution lies in crafting certain laws as rules rather than standards; These will be “on-the-shelves” laws, taking effect whenever they are macroeconomically called for—that is, mostly in times of recession, as certain economic criteria are met (such as unemployment levels or negative growth rate). The laws, articulated as rules, will aim to achieve macroeconomic goals by directly instructing the court on how it should make its ruling; legislation will instruct courts—under specified circumstances—to grant damages rather than injunctions, discharge debtors’ debt (as also discussed on chapter 11 of the book), modify utility regulation rules, deny petitions aimed against government spending that would otherwise be inhibited by procurement rules, disregard regulations normally imposed by zoning rules that postpone spending and growth, or apply whichever other macroeconomic policy seen fit by the legislator. That policies change automatically in bad times is not foreign to our legal system. The Unemployment Insurance Extended Benefits program provides extended benefits using automatic triggers such as state-wide unemployment rates. FEMA can use the Disaster Relief Fund to alleviate the suffering and damage which result from disasters once the President has declared an emergency or a major disaster had occurred. Legislatures could provide similar stand-by authority to courts.

But then, the question that must follow is whether such laws can be used other than in times of recession. Indeed, Listokin himself admits that the high complexity involved with trying to implement macroeconomic ideas within the law might render such at attempt efficient only in times of despair, after fiscal and monetary policies have ran their course. Yet the ideas first brought forth in Listokin’s book ignite our imagination as to how we can design the law to address other issues macroeconomic scholars concern themselves with—such as price levels, economic growth, and more. While Listokin’s book focuses mainly on recession, its ideas offer a new platform for exploring such macroeconomic subjects and open a door for a whole new field of law and economics research.

Cite as: Ronen Avraham, Towards a new branch of law and economics?, JOTWELL (October 26, 2020) (reviewing Yair Listokin, Law and Macroeconomics (2019)), https://lex.jotwell.com/towards-a-new-branch-of-law-and-economics/.

Rethinking National Injunctions

Russell L. Weaver, Nationwide Injunctions, 14 FIU L. Rev. 103 (2020).

In a delightful article recently published in the Florida International Law Review, Professor Russell Weaver has done a great service to us all by helpfully summarizing the current state of the law concerning nationwide injunctions, drawing on and summarizing recent scholarship and numerous cases in the field. His article should prove to be of great value to the practitioner and the professor alike and, given its length and clarity (at seventeen pages, Prof. Weaver’s article packs quite a punch), those teaching in the area may even consider assigning it to their students. I probably will, because although many of my students seem to grasp the logic of compensatory damages due to some exposure in their first-year contracts and torts classes, they often seem mystified, at least initially, when it comes to injunctions, which is to say nothing of nationwide injunctions!

Part of this mystery, it seems, stems from the fact that injunctions grew up in courts of equity, whereas damages (primarily) grew up in common law courts, and the first-year curriculum (outside of a few contracts cases on specific performance) largely focuses on the latter at the expense of the former. This means that although students are familiar with the idea that compensatory damages should generally try to return an injured party to the position it would have occupied but for the wrongful harm inflicted by the wrongdoer, they have a harder time understanding why an injunction should be issued before a wrongful harm has ever come to pass. But the difficulties do not stop here. Unlike damages, which can be measured in dollars, they also find measuring the “amount” of an injunction to be counterintuitive. In theory, a court should award the “amount” of injunction needed to prevent the plaintiff from suffering from a potential future wrongful harm. But even talking about injunctions in this way seems odd, for injunctions cannot be “counted” in the same way that dollars can, and therefore determining the proper scope of an injunctive remedy is incredibly difficult.

Which brings us to another point: in theory, the scope of an injunction should not exceed the scope of the threatened harm, so that (for example) a company-wide injunction would only be appropriate where a company-wide wrong is taking place. In practice, however, it is easy to game the system, especially in the area of national injunctions, which has seen tremendous growth over the past several decades. This is so because plaintiffs can (and frequently do) seek, for example, a nationwide injunction in one jurisdiction, fail to obtain it, and then bring suit in another jurisdiction several years later. Then, in this new jurisdiction, plaintiffs win, and have their “win” extended throughout the United States (including, it should be noted, the jurisdiction in which their original suit previously failed). Although these cases are extremely interesting, productive, and fun to talk about in class, they are difficult to summarize (much less make sense of) for the students, not to say anything of the professor’s ability to understand them!

Enter Professor Weaver. Not only does his article do a fabulous job summarizing the current state of the law, but he helpfully spends a good deal of space discussing the policy implications of nationwide injunctions, canvassing the pros and cons of allowing district and circuit courts to set policy on the national legal stage.

So, for instance, against the argument that nationwide injunctions might be necessary to promote uniform laws designed to protect large numbers of otherwise powerless individuals from “unconstitutional” government policies, Prof. Weaver balances the argument that these lower-court decisions are sometimes found to have been “wrong,” in that the actions deemed “unconstitutional” by a district or circuit court is found to have been, according to the Supreme Court, perfectly legal, with the result that the uniformity that was imposed by lower courts was, in point of fact, without a legal basis. Similarly, Prof. Weaver discusses how, on the one hand, allowing a lower court to make a decision for the entire nation may promote “judicial economy” by having a “single judge hear and decide the issue” before it, which, in turn, can save the judicial resources of all the other courts around the country who no longer need to “consider and decide the same issue.” (P. 111.) On the other hand, however, Prof. Weaver points out that such judicial economy comes at a price: specifically, allowing the precipitous review of important national issues without adequately developing the issue in other districts and circuits. Sometimes, as where a more complete and thorough understanding of the issues can be developed in multiple district and circuit courts, a little inefficiency can be a good thing!

Prof. Weaver discusses a number of other important issues created by nationwide injunctions as well (the potential for nationwide injunctions to politicize courts, encourage forum shopping by litigants, and over-empowering individual district and circuit judges), and I would encourage any interested readers to check out and read his entire article. Not only is it a quick and delightful read, but it is one that I your remedies students will likely enjoy as well. It is probably the most accessible summary of these issues I have seen in a single place.

Cite as: Marco Jimenez, Rethinking National Injunctions, JOTWELL (October 14, 2020) (reviewing Russell L. Weaver, Nationwide Injunctions, 14 FIU L. Rev. 103 (2020)), https://lex.jotwell.com/rethinking-national-injunctions/.

Is Resilience Resilient?

Robert L. Fischman, Letting Go of Stability: Resilience and Environmental Law, 94 Ind. L.J. 689 (2019).

All it took was a frequently lethal, highly infectious, globally distributed virus. In anxious self-protection, Homo sapiens drastically curtailed the planet-altering behaviors we call “economic activity.” The non-human parts of our ecosystems responded. Above cities, toxic and murky air cleared. Fossil fuel extraction sputtered; greenhouse gas emissions slowed. Wild animals returned to places from which they had long been exiled. Birds singing for mates vied more with each other and less with the drone of humanity. Even Earth’s own seismic rumbling sounded more distinctly against a diminished background of people’s percussive pounding.

The pandemic pause accomplished, however briefly, results that have eluded all the world’s environmental policy makers. These results reminded us just how tight the correlation is between the human economy and human environmental impact–and, by negative implication, exploded the myth that “sustainability” can be a pragmatic and achievable goal of environmental law. The Earth has shown that to sustain normal levels of human population and economic growth, ecosystems must absorb massive, deeply disruptive, perturbations. In Letting Go of Stability, Professor Robert Fischman rejects the sustainability shibboleth and thoughtfully explores the potential of resilience, rather than sustainability, to provide a conceptual anchor for environmental law in the decades ahead.

Fischman, as he acknowledges, is not the first to question the merit of sustainability or to highlight the potential of resilience as a guiding principle of environmental law. Letting Go of Stability stands firmly on the shoulders of at least two scholarly traditions in the scientific, social-scientific, legal, and environmental planning literature: the development of adaptive management techniques for natural resources and the consideration of system resilience for legal regulatory design in many policy contexts. Using an admirable mix of theory and case description, Fischman argues that the scientific study of resilience in ecosystems offers specific lessons that will help society to address the persistent “fundamental questions of environmental law.”

Why resilience? Fischman observes that environmental law, like much of law, implicitly has endorsed the goal of stability, seeking, for example, predictable and consistent production of ecosystem services. But to expect stability is unrealistic. Ecosystems, and their interactions with people that form numbingly complex “social-ecological systems,” are intrinsically and unpredictably dynamic. Hence, Fischman contends, instead of trying to maintain social-ecological systems in some desired equilibrium state, it makes more sense for law to aim to protect systems’ ability to restore a desired equilibrium in response to stress. That is, to keep systems resilient.

Fischman would, accordingly, have environmental law focus more on process and less on results. But as a goal, resilience is atypical and slippery. Resilience, after all, is a property that inheres in a system rather than an output that results from a system. And human beings (especially adherents of a certain school of legal and economic theory) just love designing systems to maximize output.

Fischman appreciates that for the most part, we value ecosystems not for what they are, but for what we get from them–whether nesting birds or irrigation water. Nevertheless, he argues, the goal of resilience should not and would not be indifferent to outputs. Process for process’s sake, Fischman emphasizes, is not nearly sufficient as a policy goal. Achieving resilience may not maximize or stabilize the production of a particular system output, but it can enhance human and environmental welfare by narrowing variability and reducing the probability of significant disruption. “The greatest challenge for resilience as an environmental law objective,” Fischman writes, “is that it will not fulfill the expectation of sustaining what we like.” (P. 718.) The solace is that “[r]esilience will promise less but deliver more of what it promises.” (P. 709, emphasis in original.)

Moreover, Fischman astutely observes that there are some types of promises that environmental law based on resilience could fulfill more easily than is possible in a legal regime focused on stable outputs. Using the example of a degraded stream in Indianapolis, Fischman describes how resilience could be used not just to achieve narrowly-conceived environmental quality objectives but to reimagine and reconfigure the entire social-ecological system of the stream and its surrounding community. Resilience need not always buttress an existing equilibrium; sometimes a resilience frame moves policy toward a change large enough to push a system into a new and better equilibrium.

Can the attribute of resilience also push environmental law itself to a new and better equilibrium? In addition to being an overarching policy objective, should resilience be a design element of environmental law as well? The final section of Letting Go of Stability ponders these “meta” questions.

Of course, our legal system as a whole is built for resilience: by Constitutional design, common-law tradition, and institutional reality, it resists change, even to a fault. So how would design for resilience inform and improve environmental law particularly? Fischman argues that the features that make real-world systems resilient are uniquely applicable to environmental law because of environmental law’s heavy emphasis on process and the polycentric nature of environmental policy puzzles. As he notes, the existing body of environmental law already incorporates some features of resilient systems, such as statutes that allow relatively large amounts of regulatory discretion and that require agencies periodically to reassess their prior decisions. Optimistically, he envisions that designing resilience into environmental law will entail “inviting new voices to the table,” thereby enhancing environmental justice and “substantially increas[ing] the constituency of Americans who recognize how they benefit from environmental law.” (P. 722.)

This article does not focus on particular policy prescriptions. But Fischman’s vision is not purely theoretical. He is clear that the shift to a resilience theory of environmental law, if properly executed, would have significant substantive implications. For example, he writes, “[b]urdens of proof in common law and administrative settings need root-to-branch reassessment in light of the resilience framework.” (P. 725.) He is certainly right about the need; let us hope that an enlightened generation of legislators, judges, and administrators seize the opportunity.

Letting Go of Stability grew out of Fischman’s inaugural lecture as the George P. Smith, II Distinguished Professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. This thought-provoking article demonstrates that the appointment was wisely made.

Cite as: Steve Gold, Is Resilience Resilient?, JOTWELL (September 30, 2020) (reviewing Robert L. Fischman, Letting Go of Stability: Resilience and Environmental Law, 94 Ind. L.J. 689 (2019)), https://lex.jotwell.com/is-resilience-resilient/.

Medicaid Algorithmic Opacity and a Transparent Solution

Hannah Bloch-Wehba, Access to Algorithms, 88 Fordham L. Rev. 1265 (2020).

In Access to Algorithms, Professor Bloch-Wehba unleashes both the First Amendment and FOIA (the Freedom of Information Act, along with its state counterparts) on algorithmic governance opacity. She argues that the law of access encompassed by FOIA and the free press clause can help promote a public debate of algorithmic decision-making by governments as well as provide avenues by which individuals–especially under-resourced individuals–might find redress for the sometimes catastrophic output of automated systems.

Algorithmic decision-making in the context of law enforcement (such as sentencing and bail) has been mapped by and Bloch-Wehba’s article touches on algorithmic criminal law determinations here as well. In addition, she unpacks algorithmic operations which affect government employees, specifically using “value-added assessments” to quantify teacher effectiveness, which has been challenged by teachers’ unions. But her attention to algorithmic denials of Medicaid benefits has heretofore received scant attention.1 Especially because elderly Medicaid applicants and recipients seeking long term care benefits are almost by definition under-resourced individuals, the opacity of algorithmic decision-making in this context deserves careful examination. But the very opacity of algorithmic operations which generate denials or reductions of public benefits presents a challenge for scholars as well as the citizens who bear the brunt of the automated decisions.

Governmental decision-makers tend to hold their algorithms close to their chest. Making matters worse, much algorithmic decision-making software is privately controlled. The trend is toward outsourcing. The private companies which develop the algorithms are obviously keen to retain their value and not simply leak their mechanics into the public domain. Secrecy is an even more acute problem when the algorithms themselves are outsourced to and controlled by private vendors. The problems of faulty decisions as well as bias embedded in the machine can be difficult to unearth and correct.

Bloch-Wehba examines two Medicaid examples in reported federal court opinions. In the first, APS Healthcare, Inc., a private “waiver administrator” slashed the Medicaid waiver benefits of a group of West Virginians with severe developmental disabilities. The company’s algorithm generated a budget which allocated benefits to individual Medicaid recipients on a year-by-year basis, using data from interviews and other assessment tools. The actual workings of the algorithm that slashed the plaintiffs’ benefits was proprietary. One plaintiff with cerebral palsy had her benefits cut from $130,000 to $72,000. As a result, she lost her community placement, declined, and became at serious risk to institutionalization.

Before an Administrative Law Judge, the West Virginia plaintiffs’ fair hearing was denied based on deference to the computer program–without investigation into the conclusions it had reached. Thankfully, the district court correctly perceived the procedural due process problems and reversed.

In a second Medicaid case arising in Idaho, plaintiffs challenged the decisions of a secret methodology to set individual budgets for home and community-based waiver benefits. In this case, the algorithm–“an Adult Budget Calculation Tool”–was government-sourced, but the state resisted disclosure of its methodology, claiming it was a trade secret. The state then offered a compromise: it would disclose the reasoning behind the plaintiffs’ benefit reductions but subject to a gag order that would prohibit redisclosure to anyone else. Although the plaintiffs ultimately prevailed, Bloch-Wehba identifies the invocation of a trade secret defense and the state’s “atomized disclosure” settlement offer as “highly problematic.” (P. 1279.)

After detailing the scope of the problem, Bloch-Wehba identifies a creative and effective solution. She emphasizes that the law of access provides a particularly useful tool in de-cloaking government methodologies to deny rights, property, or liberty. The law of access expands standing. It facilitates access to algorithms not only for the directly affected but also the general public–even scholars and journalists.

Here is a uniquely practical solution to a serious problem. One need not be a plaintiff to demand that algorithmic veils of opacity be lifted. She explains: “If the processes for government decision-making were already public, litigants would not have to fight tooth and nail to gain access to an explanation of why their benefits were slashed, their employment was terminated, or their release from prison was delayed.” (P. 1295.) To advance toward these practical ends, she maps the nuances of FOIA exemptions commonly in play in these sorts of contexts.

While undoubtedly practical, at the same time, Access to Algorithms resonates with foundational questions of value and justice. Although “algorithmic governance portends a new era in government decision-making, it must be accompanied by new forms of transparency to protect the vital role of public oversight in our democratic system.” (P. 1314.) Readers of her important article will surely agree.

  1. But see Katie Crawford & Jason Schultz, AI Systems as State Actors, 119 Colum. L. Rev. 1941 (2019) (taking note of algorithmic decision making in the context of disability benefits as well as Medicaid).
Cite as: Tom Simmons, Medicaid Algorithmic Opacity and a Transparent Solution, JOTWELL (September 16, 2020) (reviewing Hannah Bloch-Wehba, Access to Algorithms, 88 Fordham L. Rev. 1265 (2020)), https://lex.jotwell.com/medicaid-algorithmic-opacity-and-a-transparent-solution/.

Towards a Unified Theory of ADR

Andrew B. Mamo, Three Ways of Looking at Dispute Resolution, 54 Wake Forest L. Rev. 1399 (2019), available at SSRN.

Advocates of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) often talk about the “ADR Movement” as if it were…well…an actual movement. We know what the phrase means, or at least we think we do. Since the 1970s, the popularity of extra-judicial mechanisms for conflict resolution–arbitration, mediation, negotiation, and restorative justice–has risen sharply. Over the same period, these procedures have become highly professionalized areas of study and practice. But is there a coherent “ADR Movement,” with a capital “M,” based upon a unified legal philosophy?

Not so much. In his comprehensive article, Three Ways of Looking at Dispute Resolution, Andrew Mamo carefully unravels the divergent philosophical strains that have supported the expansion of ADR over the past half-century. He explains the history of ADR against the broader backdrop of American legal and political history.

One of the reasons that this article is such a helpful contribution to the history of American civil procedure is the increasing centrality of ADR. Whether there is an “ADR Movement” or not, ADR’s constituent parts have become vastly more important in recent years. The general academic consensus has long been that trials are no longer the central means of conflict resolution in the United States. Some scholarly analysis suggests that well over 95% of all civil lawsuits end in settlement before trial. There are many possible explanations for this trend. Some point to judges taking a highly managerial approach to encourage settlement; others point to the increased professionalization of mediation services; and others point to the substantive benefits of arbitration over litigation for many types of commercial disputes. While criminal disputes present different sets of problems, scholars have observed both the increase in criminal plea bargaining (a form of negotiation), as well as the potential benefits of restorative justice mechanisms over traditional jury trials.

One might expect to find some sort of common denominator among these various trends. But as the title of his article suggests, Professor Mamo traces modern “ADR” to three distinct political philosophies.

First, he identifies a “liberal, state-centric, rights-based approach.” This approach looks at the relationship of ADR processes to traditional litigation, particularly in the context of court-annexed mediation and arbitration programs that primarily aim to lighten overcrowded court. Mamo traces this branch to the 1976 “National Conference on the Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice” convened by Chief Justice Warren Burger where Professor Frank Sander famously introduced the concept of a multidoor courthouse–the idea that courts should “sort” disputes almost like a Harry Potter-esque sorting hat. Some disputes would go to the mediation room, others to the arbitration room, and others to courtrooms for trial. In this conception, ADR serves primarily to support and alleviate traditional legal processes; it exists parallel to litigation.

Second, he identifies a “neoliberal, individualistic, interest-based approach.” This branch originates from the economic theories of the 1980s that emphasized free market capitalism and private bargaining in the absence of governmental or judicial oversight. Mamo ties the “win-win” negotiation strategies promulgated by Professor Roger Fisher (co-author of the celebrated book Getting to Yes) to broader beliefs in value maximization and economic efficiency that dominated the era. In this conception, ADR serves primarily to benefit the individual disputing parties; it exists outside of the legal system.

And third, he identifies an “anti-liberal, communitarian, relationship-based approach.” This branch originates from the belief that community-centered solutions to conflict–in the form of neighborhood justice centers, restorative practices, and victim-centered strategies–can create normatively better outcomes than either law-centered solutions or private-party centered solutions. Mamo traces this view even further back in American history, to early utopian and religious communities in New England, which favored systems of community norms over legal rules. In this conception, ADR serves as a more wholistic, socially conscious alternative to litigation; it exists not to benefit the government or the disputing parties, but the community.

Mamo shows how, today, ADR tries to rely on all three of these three divergent justifications: existing to help the court system, the parties, and society at large. In some ways, the “ADR Movement” rejects legal norms and procedure, preferring party autonomy and individual interests. Parties choose their own , agree to their own set of rules, and essentially determine the manner in which their conflict will be resolved. In other ways, ADR embraces court-centered or community-centered values. If a dispute goes to arbitration, that’s one fewer case for the public courts to handle on the taxpayers’ dime. If a dispute is sent to some sort of restorative practice, that theoretically benefits the broader community.

This article shows the ideological diversity within the so-called “ADR Movement.” If you attend an ADR conference, you’re likely to see Professor Mamo’s article come to life in different corners of the meeting room. You’ll find corporate lawyers drafting mandatory arbitration clauses. You’ll find self-described “peacemakers” and “conflict healers.” You’ll find in-house lawyers designing employee mediation programs to keep disputes private. You’ll find community leaders who privately resolve neighbor disputes. Big Law arbitration partners. Administrators of court-annexed arbitration programs. Hostage negotiators. Divorce mediators. Ombudsmen. All these folks can somehow fit under the “ADR” umbrella, albeit through divergent philosophical justifications.

In some ways, Professor Mamo is perfectly situated to tell this complicated story. First, he’s a trained historian, which allows him to place ADR in its full context. And second, he’s a Clinical Instructor in the Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program at Harvard Law School, an institution that has had a disproportionate impact on the development of ADR dating back to scholars like Fisher and Sander. (He will join the faculty of Northern Illinois University College of Law next year). Harvard is one of a handful of law schools–including places like Cardozo, Missouri, Ohio State, Oregon, and Pepperdine–that invested heavily in the teaching and study of private dispute resolution in the 1980s and 90s. Sometimes labeled as “alternative” dispute resolution and relegated to “skills” courses in some corners of legal academia, ADR has become absolutely central to the ways in which American law is experienced. Indeed, these institutions were far ahead of the curve in gauging its importance to the curriculum.

ADR’s rise over the past five decades has been remarkable. But Professor Mamo elegantly reminds us that the field’s rise is best understood not necessarily as a unified “movement” and rather as a confluence of aligned interests or even historical accident. ADR contains multitudes.

Cite as: Brian Farkas, Towards a Unified Theory of ADR, JOTWELL (August 10, 2020) (reviewing Andrew B. Mamo, Three Ways of Looking at Dispute Resolution, 54 Wake Forest L. Rev. 1399 (2019), available at SSRN), https://lex.jotwell.com/towards-a-unified-theory-of-adr/.

Re-Centering Federal Indian Law

Maggie Blackhawk, Federal Indian Law as Paradigm Within Public Law, 132 Harv. L. Rev. 1787 (2019).

What can Federal Indian Law offer public law as a whole? Supreme Court justices have famously dismissed Indian Law cases as “chickenshit” and “pee wee” cases,1 and scholars have worked for generations to justify the meager recognition of tribal sovereign interests within public law. Maggie Blackhawk’s wonderfully generative Federal Indian Law as Paradigm, however, convincingly argues that Indian law, far from an idiosyncratic backwater, is central to the history of public law in the United States and can provide valuable lessons for framing its future.

First, Blackhawk masterfully synthesizes the work of many scholars (including her own work on the Petitions Clause) to show the role federal Indian affairs has played in the history of government power. Indian affairs were central for the founding generation, figuring prominently in the debates over the Constitution and the early work of Congress and the Executive Branch. Concerns about foreign interference with tribal diplomacy, for example, inspired the first understanding that the Senate’s advice and consent role with respect to treaties included only approval after the fact rather than participation in negotiations.

Indian affairs also shaped many of important early contests between the federal government and the states. Fletcher v. Peck (1810) was the first case in which the Supreme Court struck down a state statute, and the state and presidential resistance to the Court’s invalidation of Georgia law in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) almost upended the ship of state.  Indian affairs also contributed to the modern form of federal power. The executive branch first exercised extensive administrative powers by the mid-1800s in implementing treaties and Indian affairs statutes, while cases like Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) and United States v. Rogers (1846) provided early judicial assertions of extraconstitutional national power. For some of the examples in the paper more work is necessary to show that treatment of federal power in Indian affairs actually influenced later public law doctrines and structures. But altogether Blackhawk powerfully makes her case that colonizing tribal nations and lands was not just America’s other original sin, it was and remained a constitutive governmental and judicial proving ground.

The next section of the paper is even more original. Blackhawk argues that understanding the paradigmatic status of federal Indian law can provide an important new frame for understanding and addressing injustice. As many have written, the black-white, slavery-freedom, segregation-integration paradigm of race relations has stymied understanding of racism in America. An equal rights framework, moreover, has limited legal efforts to address it and contributed to a conceptual separation between rights and structure in constitutional law.

Blackhawk argues that a federal Indian law paradigm can address these problems. First, the most egalitarian moves in federal Indian law have always been structural and have always ensured that tribal nations have distinct forms of power rather than simply equal rights. Indeed, well before claims of “reverse discrimination” were used to undermine civil rights, “[n]ational constitutional rights [served] as a tool to further the colonial project against Native peoples.” (P. 1798.) Federal Indian law and policy also reveal a long history of recognition of distinct forms of power that the standard paradigm might condemn as creating unequal rights. Recentering federal Indian law as paradigmatic, Blackhawk argues, might therefore normalize and encourage legal protection for collective rights, such as union organizing, or obligations of consultation and representation, rather than individual remedies.

This is a long, incredibly rich, article, and one could quibble with some of its assertions. For example, although the modern Supreme Court often stands in the way of efforts by Congress and the Executive to recognize tribal power, this has not always been the case, and the Court long played an essential role in preventing state and executive overreach. So federal Indian law provides no more evidence that the congressional and executive branches are better “suited to protect against majority tyranny” than any other field does. (P. 1796.) Second, blanket statements such as “[b]y contrast to other ‘minority’ communities, rights are feared in Indian Country rather than sought,” (P. 1859), elides Blackhawk’s own rejection of a structure-rights dichotomy and overlooks the important role that rights have played for Native people as well. But again, these are quibbles, and do not detract from the contributions of the piece.

In short, Federal Indian Law as Paradigm is a wonderful accomplishment, one that can provide a new basis for understanding the public law grounding of federal Indian law, and the federal Indian law grounding of public law as a whole.

  1. Bob Woodward & Scott Armstrong, The Brethren 359, 58 (1979) (quoting, respectively, Justices Brennan and Harlan).
Cite as: Bethany Berger, Re-Centering Federal Indian Law, JOTWELL (July 24, 2020) (reviewing Maggie Blackhawk, Federal Indian Law as Paradigm Within Public Law, 132 Harv. L. Rev. 1787 (2019)), https://lex.jotwell.com/re-centering-federal-indian-law/.

Private Debt and Public Violence

At the time that I am writing this Jot, in late May 2020, the unemployment rate has climbed above 14%; COVID-19 has once again exposed persistent racial health disparities, and in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor,  communities across the U.S. are rising in protest. Real too is that our country’s small (and largely regressive) provision of economic support, to those whose tentative hold on security was ripped out from under them this Spring, has all but dissolved. Given this searing new reality, one might think that counsel from scholars about the absurdity and cruelty of placing the burden of economic desperation on poor communities themselves would no longer be needed.  Who would think, today, that the very communities of color reeling the most should shoulder the cost of their economic survival? Surely we are thinking more radically and more generously than that. But history does not counsel optimism.  We know that neoliberal inequality functions through a pernicious combination of potent racialized myths and vigorous punitive and extractive legal systems.

So in this jot, written at this particular moment, and as one very small response to all that is unfolding around us, I want to highlight two pieces of scholarship that lay bare the viciousness of one aspect of those neoliberal systems: Tonya Brito’s The Child Support Debt Bubble and Abbye Atkinson’s Rethinking Credit as Social Provision. Both pieces critique social welfare policy that puts the burden of economic security onto the shoulders of those least able to sustain it. Without question, both pieces are exquisitely well done, and if this were normal times, my jot would focus entirely on what these papers argue and their undeniable strengths. And certainly all that is in order, but what I want to focus on, after summary and praise, is the relationship between private debt and public violence.

Brito’s The Child Support Bubble builds on years of qualitative research on the reality of child support collection from poor, predominantly Black men. Brito merges qualitative and quantitative evidence with rich legal knowledge and incisive analysis to easily convince her reader that our systems levy absurd amounts of debt onto the shoulders of poor Black men who will never be able to satisfy that debt. Policies that charge exorbitant interest rates and refuse to lower child support amounts, even when fathers are incarcerated, lead to an absurd and inescapable debt. This leads—much like criminal system debt—to constant involvement of punitive agencies in the lives of these men. It leads also to the further privatization of social welfare support in the form of rules that transfer child support payments not to the mothers of these men’s children but to the government agencies that provide meager amounts of welfare support. In the final section Brito runs a simulation, marshalling the numbers and rules to convince us that the whole thing is rigged to make sure that these fathers will never, ever escape. Brito’s melding of story, legal analysis, structural unpacking and quantitative data leaves her reader convinced that our child support system is nothing more than a trap—both for the poor fathers who will never escape the debt and for the poor mothers and children who will never get the economic support they need. And not only is it a trap, but it is a distraction, one that “obscure[s] the fact that our social welfare system does not sufficiently meet the needs of poor families.” (P. 987.)

Atkinson’s Rethinking Credit as Social Provision, reveals another false and distracting trap. Like the very best of critical scholarship, Atkinson makes visible that which is somehow both totally obvious and somehow hidden. She delivers several of these insights. First for credit to work, a borrower has to borrow from her wealthier future self. Second, credit as social welfare policy assumes that the giving of credit will result in that richer future self. Third, the possibility of higher future income depends not really on the mythic bootstrap-pulling capacity of the borrower but instead on the overall strength of the economic opportunities available to that particular borrower. Fourth, viewing credit as social welfare policy is unrealistic “for low-income Americans in light of wage stagnation and persistent insecurity with respect to employment, income and expenses.” (P. 1148.) And finally, when borrowers default the system acts extractively – pulling whatever wealth exists out of poor communities and into the hands of higher income lenders. Race, of course, has everything to do with this. Extractive debt systems target poor African American and Latinex communities. Despite all this, however, policy makers, both on the right and the left, have come to focus on credit as a significant tool in what Atkinson labels a privatized form of social welfare provision, but Atkinson ultimately views that as a harmful distraction. She urges that “it is time for credit to leave the conversation around social provision for low-income Americans . . .  and [to] redirect our collective focus toward the fundamental, persistent, and underlying challenge of ever-increasing economic, and consequently social, inequality.” (P. 1162.)

Ultimately both Brito and Atkinson share a similar message. A social welfare policy that wields myths of individual rights and responsibilities to mask the ways in which structural racism limits opportunity; a social welfare policy that pulls families apart; a social welfare policy that has more to do with punishment than support, and a social welfare policy that maintains and strengthens inequality by pulling wealth out of those communities – is no social welfare policy at all. We need instead, as both counsel, social welfare policy that directly addresses economic inequality. But we need to remember this is not just about ineffective social welfare policy. It is about racial subordination, maintained by violence. How? Because when racialized myths and distraction fail to maintain inequality, neoliberalism turns to state violence. To see this link clearly we only need remember Walter Scott, an African American man killed by a white police officer in April of 2015 in South Carolina. Scott had been jailed multiple times for failure to pay child support. On that day, once again, there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest. We cannot know what was in Scott’s mind as he ran from the officer that day, but he no doubt knew that for him, the best-case scenario was jail and the worst was his death at the hands of the state. And that death can all too easily be traced back to debt.

Wendy Anne Bach, Private Debt and Public Violence, JOTWELL (July 10, 2020) (reviewing Abbye Atkinson, Rethinking Credit as Social Provision, 71 Stan. L. Rev. 2093 (2019) and Tonya Brito, The Child Support Debt Bubble, 9 UC Irvine L. Rev 953 (2019)), https://lex.jotwell.com/private-debt-and-public-violence.

The Internet of Beliefs and Strategies: How NGOs Fight Energy Projects in a Digitally Connected World

David B. Spence, Regulation and the New Politics of (Energy) Market Entry, 95 Notre Dame L. Rev. 327 (2019), available at SSRN.

A burgeoning literature explores the siting challenges, equity issues, and justice concerns associated with energy project development. The important role that NGOs like the Sierra Club, 350.org, or the Environmental Defense Fund play in the ensuing conflicts is widely acknowledged, yet the dynamics of NGO mobilization are relatively underexplored.  Professor David Spence’s fine article, Regulation and the New Politics of (Energy) Market Entry, goes a long way toward closing that gap, offering critical insights into NGO strategy, framing, and coordination.

Professor Spence starts by laying out the tensions resulting from the U.S. energy economy’s reliance on private investments to build and maintain the infrastructure necessary to meet the American public’s demand for energy services. These investment decisions are guided by statutes and regulations that reflect the evolving prioritization among three fundamental objectives that make up the so-called energy trilemma: affordability, reliability, and environmental performance. Historically, the first two objectives dominated but, more recently, climate change and other environmental prerogatives have emerged as the driving forces behind much energy investment.

Next, the article surveys the wide range of regulatory barriers to entry facing new energy projects in the form of frequently fragmented licensing regimes across municipal, state, and federal levels of governance. As Professor Spence astutely observes, the horizontally and vertically overlapping nature of this licensing process offers NGOs and other opposing parties a plethora of points for intervention, enabling conflicts to play out along multiple fronts simultaneously. The intensity of conflicts over energy infrastructure siting, the article argues, has been amplified by two related “centrifugal forces”: the rise of digital connectedness and the growing hyperpolarization of our society.  Feeding off each other, both phenomena foster the heightened media presence and emotional intensity of recent conflicts over energy projects, such as the Keystone XL pipeline or the Cape Wind project.

At the heart of Professor Spence’s article lies a data set that comprises more than three hundred energy projects that became the targets of opposition from over four hundred NGOs between 2000 and 2017. It is a testament to the author’s open-minded and balanced thinking that these projects run the technological and environmental gamut, from oil-and-gas exploration to pipelines to LNG terminals, from coal-fired power plants to nuclear reactors to wind and solar installations. The same attention to diversity and detail carries over to the way the article distinguishes among various types of NGOs, from local and state to national and international organizations.

Professor Spence uses his impressive data set to test a variety of hypotheses geared toward better understanding the tactical and issue-related decision-making of NGOs. The findings are compelling and offer novel insights into NGO strategies. The article highlights three specific patterns to support its thesis that polarization and digital interconnectedness have exacerbated the frequency and intensity of energy project siting conflicts in the twenty-first century.

First, mass mobilization around risk-based arguments emerges as the default strategy for NGO opposition to energy project development. Claims about the economic or environmental justice impacts of projects, for example, were far less likely to be part of NGO messaging and strategy. Professor Spence persuasively argues that risk-based anchoring of NGO campaigns is a likely product of the ease of instantaneous communication to a large audience facilitated by our growing digital interconnectedness.

The second pattern observed in the data cautions readers to take NGOs’ risk-based communications with a grain of salt, at least for certain types of projects. In the context of wind farms, smart meters, transmission lines, fracking operations, and nuclear power, many NGOs made claims about associated health risks that are not supported by scientific consensus. Professor Spence points out that such risk-related overrepresentations are significantly more prevalent among local NGOs, compared to their national counterparts.

Both the general propensity of NGOs to mobilize around risk and the tendency to misrepresent health risks observed among some NGOs may, according to Professor Spence, reflect a natural adaptation to today’s “post-truth” politics. In this brave new political landscape, increasingly insulated communities of belief have supplanted societally representative deliberations in search of truth.

The third pattern discernable from the data suggests a growing degree of coordination among NGOs, likely facilitated by our digital connectedness. Tactical coordination would explain the similarity between local and national NGOs’ strategies related to litigation, political action, and issue arguments across a range of projects. There are, as Professor Spence notes, limits to this kind of collaboration among (and even within) NGOs, such as when local chapters of a national NGO oppose clean energy infrastructure because of a project’s local environmental impacts, placing themselves in direct conflict with the parent organization’s general approval of and possible campaign for clean energy projects.

With Regulation and the New Politics of (Energy) Market Entry, David Spence has taken a major step toward helping us understand the strategic decision-making behind NGO opposition to energy infrastructure development.  Given the quality of his data set and his analytical acuity, we can only hope that this piece will be his first of many forays into the world of NGOs. I for one would love to see what insights Professor Spence’s data can offer on the way other factors may influence NGO decision-making and strategy. Does it matter, for example, whether a project is sponsored by local as opposed to national or international firms? What impact, if any, do different models for public participation during the licensing process have? Do macroeconomic shocks, such as the financial crisis, correlate with discernable changes in NGO decision-making and strategy? I could go on but trust that my point is made: more, please!

Cite as: Felix Mormann, The Internet of Beliefs and Strategies: How NGOs Fight Energy Projects in a Digitally Connected World, JOTWELL (June 19, 2020) (reviewing David B. Spence, Regulation and the New Politics of (Energy) Market Entry, 95 Notre Dame L. Rev. 327 (2019), available at SSRN), https://lex.jotwell.com/the-internet-of-beliefs-and-strategies-how-ngos-fight-energy-projects-in-a-digitally-connected-world/.

Resistance is Not As Useless As We Believed

Daniel Farbman, Resistance Lawyering, 107 Cal. L. Rev. 6 (2019), available at SSRN.

“Resistance is useless,” said the Vogon guard to Ford and Arthur, the intergalactic protagonists of Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That statement turned out to be pretty accurate. Despite Ford’s attempt at resistance through searing critique of the bureaucratic system that the Vogon guard serves, he and Arthur are summarily pushed through the airlock into the starry void.1

Perhaps what Ford needed was the lesson in Daniel Farbman’s Resistance Lawyering:  that resistance staged from within an unjust and illegitimate system, rather than from the outside, can be dramatically effective. Farbman illustrates this through examining resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the sharp edge of a system that shaped both the racial trajectory of this nation and our national yardstick of the meaning of injustice.

Resistance Lawyering introduces to the historical stage a troupe of unknowns: abolitionist lawyers who used the stingy, slanted procedural rules of the Fugitive Slave Act, in combination with political savvy, to “wage a proxy war against the institution of slavery.” Walking the halls of Congress or bringing impact litigation to defeat slavery, approaches that attack the institution from the outside, was not their methodology. Instead, they were direct service lawyers, employing the summary processes of the Act in service of their clients’ freedom and also their abolitionist commitment. These lawyers’ movement politics manifested in a commitment to ensuring that their clients remained free by engaging with and using the system the lawyers opposed.

Celebrating success in these cases would have been in tension with the idea that had significant traction for abolitionists: that the Fugitive Slave Act imposed relentless unremitting injustice on people who had succeeded in fleeing slavery. The historical consensus has embraced that narrative, concluding that the overwhelming majority of people were returned to slavery.  Farbman’s groundbreaking archival research, however, reveals that this direct service, linked with an unwavering commitment to opposing enslavement, was far more effective than previously realized. The article reports that “of 210 cases invoking some form of process under the Law, eighty-one (38.5 percent) of the fugitives ended their cases as free people,” either exonerated, escaped, or having had their freedom purchased.

I like this article (lots) because, in addition to the revelations that archival research brings, and to the light the article sheds on one of the most harrowing decades in this nation’s history, it’s a good read. Farbman introduces us to characters who once drew breath here, at the most important crossroads of their lives–people like Lewis, captured by a slavecatcher, who obtained representation by two abolitionist lawyers: John Joliffe and future president Rutherford B. Hayes. While his lawyers engaged with the Fugitive Slave Act commissioner, Lewis seized an opportunity not contemplated by the Act:

“While the room (including the lawyers on both sides) was thus distracted, Lewis slipped his chair back a little bit to make space for himself. Noticing that nobody took note of him moving his chair, he did it again until he was behind the marshal and almost in among the crowd. Still no one noticed his movements, so he quietly stood up and stepped backwards. An ally in the crowd gave him a nudge of encouragement and someone put a hat on his head. Then, while [Commissioner] Carpenter droned on, Lewis quietly walked right out of the courtroom and mingled among the crowd of free black activists who had gathered to observe the hearing.”

Lewis made it to a safe house and ultimately to Canada and freedom.

The article dubs this approach of working within the system in furtherance of its destruction “resistance lawyering.” Abolitionist lawyers were able to both protect their individual clients and use those cases to further political opposition to slavery. Resistance lawyering worked when the lawyers won, either by overcoming the procedurally-skewed odds and convincing an often-sympathetic judge on the merits, or by delaying the process sufficiently so that the client took the opportunity to escape or abolitionist groups staged a rescue. Even when lawyer lost though, the legalized violence of the return of a client to enslavement, and the inflicted horrors of legalized retaliation, laid before the public, furthered the abolitionist crusade against the law. This tactic of delay and transparency frustrated the summary process in the Fugitive Slave Act that was intended to facilitate rapid return of people who had made it to the North, with as little publicity as possible.

So what does this have to do with immigration? (After all, I’m an immigration editor for JOTWELL.) The article singles out immigration law as one area in which resistance lawyering has taken root. The United States has over the past few decades constructed a grand apparatus of immigration enforcement that many advocates believe encroaches on once sacrosanct principles of immigration law, like asylum law and family unity. The development of these institutions—what Eisha Jain has called the enforcement pyramid—results in mass deportation and detention but also play out among legal, social, and racial lines when enforcement manifests as surveillance and social control of communities of color. Arrest, deportation and detention rates have soared as have rates of conviction for immigration crimes. Procedural shortcuts to expelling noncitizens using administrative forms of deportation now leapfrog court proceedings as easily as turnstile jumping.

The lesson that Resistance Lawyering brings to the present is that daily direct advocacy linked to movement ideology has been effective in resisting institutionalized injustice. The article points to immigration law as one of several areas where resistance lawyering has either taken root or could. Stephen Manning and I have written before about massive collaborative resistance to family detention. That resistance effort relies on the accumulation of daily direct service actions yoked to the larger goal of frustrating, opposing, and ending family detention itself. Ingrid Eagly, Steven Shafer, and Janna Whalley have documented the role that immigration courts (and advocates) have played in reducing deportation and detention by reversing half of the negative credible fear decisions of asylum officers and systematically lowering the bond amount set by detention officers.

For observers of legal transformation, Resistance Lawyering holds another lesson. As commentators, scholars, and analysts, we often train our binoculars on impact litigation making waves in the Supreme Court, track the freefall of comprehensive immigration reform, or obsess over high-level agency policy and pronouncements. Resistance Lawyering teaches us that when we overlook the integration of direct service with political goalposts, we may be missing the game.

  1. Spoiler alert: contrary to the laws of physics, the book does not end there.
Cite as: Juliet Stumpf, Resistance is Not As Useless As We Believed, JOTWELL (June 12, 2020) (reviewing Daniel Farbman, Resistance Lawyering, 107 Cal. L. Rev. 6 (2019), available at SSRN), https://lex.jotwell.com/resistance-is-not-as-useless-as-we-believed/.

Long-Term Residence as Evidence of De Facto Membership

Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Americans In Waiting: Finding Solutions for Long Term Residents, 46 Notre Dame J. Leg. 29 (2019).

In 2018 the Pew Research Center reported that approximately two-thirds of all unauthorized migrant adults in the United States have lived here for more than ten years. The average length of residence is fifteen years. The unauthorized migrant population has become a more settled population rather than a temporary population and mass deportation is politically impossible. In light of these realities it is critically important to seriously explore a pathway to lawful immigration status and/or citizenship for this population. Wadhia’s recent article in the Notre Dame Journal of Legislation argues that long-term residence should be a basis for access to regularizing immigration status in the United States. This argument is rooted in the historical use of long-term residence as the basis for a variety of forms of relief in immigration law.

Americans in Waiting: Finding Solutions for Long Term Residents offers a detailed overview of the role that long-term residence has played in the past, the role that it currently plays, and the role that it could play to address the immigration status of the almost 11 million unauthorized migrants in the United States. Long-term residence in the United States has been recognized as a mitigating factor in deportation cases since 1891 when Congress authorized the deportation of individuals who became a public charge within one year of arrival. The one-year statute of limitations was later extended to five years and this approach to deportation grounds was continued in 1917 when crime-based deportation grounds were adopted.

As historian Mae Ngai notes in the classic text Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and The Making of Modern America “it seemed unconscionable to expel immigrants after they had settled in the country and had begun to assimilate.” 1

As Wadhia explains with the words of Ngai, “they settle, raise families and acquire property–in other words, they become part of the nation’s economic and social fabric.” (P. 30.) Thus, deportation was not appropriate for long-term residents regardless of their immigration status or their actions within the country.

Wadhia’s article provides an incredibly useful overview of the various legal tools that have been used historically, and today, to provide relief to long-term resident non-citizens. The article begins with registry and ends with an order of supervision. Each tool offers a different type of relief, but each is available based on the non-citizens’ long-term residence in the United States. The additional tools addressed are the pathway to citizenship created in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, suspension of deportation, cancellation of removal, the 1997 Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act, temporary protected status, general deferred action, and the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. These tools vary in whether or not the recipients obtain lawful permanent residence status, permission to reside in the United States temporarily, or a promise not to deport for a specified period of time along with work authorization.

The political challenges which the United States of America is currently facing regarding the fate of approximately 11 million unauthorized migrants are not new. Long-term residence has historically been a basis for viewing individuals as members of our national community and providing a pathway to lawful immigration status. The American polity recognized presence and the resulting connections as paths to membership. Even though this approach to membership has not been applied equally to all immigrant groups, it is a principle that has been operationalized in our legal system. The political reality is that almost 11 million individuals are not going to be deported from the United States en masse. Therefore, it is important to discuss options for recognizing the de facto membership of this established population rather than allowing them to languish with uncertainty, limited employment options, and limited opportunities for social and political engagement. This article and Wadhia’s important book, Banned: Immigration Enforcement in the Time of Trump (2019), provide important insights on the role and use of discretion in responding to this challenge. Ultimately a legislative response is necessary to provide unauthorized migrants with durable solutions, but Wadhia outlines a wide range of statutory options that demonstrate that long-term residence is a compelling basis for providing a durable solution.

  1. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens And The Making Of Modern America 59 (2004).
Cite as: Angela Banks, Long-Term Residence as Evidence of De Facto Membership, JOTWELL (May 21, 2020) (reviewing Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Americans In Waiting: Finding Solutions for Long Term Residents, 46 Notre Dame J. Leg. 29 (2019)), https://lex.jotwell.com/long-term-residence-as-evidence-of-de-facto-membership/.