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Consumerist Waste: Looking Beyond Repair
Get PDFA review of The Right to Repair: Reclaiming the Things We Own. By Aaron Perzanowski
In Pursuit of Collective Liberation in Feminist Constitutionalism
Get PDFA review of After Misogyny: How The Law Fails Women and What to Do About It. By Julie C. Suk
Radical Commons
No full textIssue #2 Fall 2023. Radical Commons is a student-published zine that seeks to create a platform for left-leaning art and writing about law school and the legal field. RadCo is non-academic by design, promoting creative expression, rejecting professionalism, and celebrating the beauty of honest imperfection.
Above all, RadCo gives students the opportunity to publicly voice dissent against the hyper-conservative principles that make up the heart of the U.S. legal system
Bankruptcy in Black and White: The Effect of Race and Bankruptcy Code Exemptions on Wealth
Get PDFBankruptcy law in the United States is race-neutral on its face but, in practice, race matters in bankruptcy outcomes. Our original research provides an empirical look at how the facially neutral laws that allow debtors to retain assets in bankruptcy cases result in disparate outcomes for Black and white debtors. Racial differences in asset retention in bankruptcy cases play a role in perpetuating wealth inequality between Black and white debtors.
Existing bankruptcy data lacks individual-level characteristics such as race, which inhibits researchers’ ability to adequately assess biases or unintended consequences of laws and policies on subsets of the population. Thus, we construct a novel data set using bankruptcy data from Washington D.C. in 2011 and imputing race. The data demonstrates that facially race-neutral bankruptcy laws contribute to racially disparate outcomes by allowing white debtors to keep larger amounts of both personal and real property.
First, exemption laws allow every bankruptcy filer to retain some personal property even if they do not repay their creditors in full. At the median, white filers in the District of Columbia claimed 8,359 for Black filers. In other words, the median white filer kept roughly 585,000 compared with $251,600 at the median). Unsurprisingly, then, white debtors also leave bankruptcy with more home equity (e.g., the median Black filer retains roughly 80% less in home equity than white filers).
Although bankruptcy laws do not inflate the value of white filers’ personal or real property values relative to Black debtors, our exemption rules contribute to white debtors leaving bankruptcy with greater wealth than Black debtors. By protecting certain assets like home equity, which are unevenly distributed in our sample across Black and white debtors, bankruptcy law appears to play a role in perpetuating wealth inequality. Even where assets are more evenly distributed, as personal property was in our sample, bankruptcy law leaves Black debtors with a less robust “fresh start” than white debtors
2023 Spring/Summer Class Schedule
Get PDFClass schedule for the 2023 Spring/Summer semester at the University of Michigan Law Schoo
A Revisionist History of Products Liability
Get PDFIncreasingly courts, including the Supreme Court, rely on ossified versions of the common law to decide cases. This Article demonstrates the risks of this use of the common law. The main contribution of the Article is to demonstrate that the traditional narrative about early products law—that manufacturers were not liable for injuries caused by their products because the doctrine of privity granted producers immunity from suit by the ultimate consumers of their goods—is incorrect. Instead, the doctrinal rule was negligence liability for producers of injurious goods across the United States in the nineteenth century. Courts routinely ignored or rejected privity arguments, and contract was not their paradigm for understanding a producer’s relationship with users of its products. This analysis has implications for how we view the development of the common law today. And it serves as a warning not to rely on potted histories from casebooks in determining what the common law was in the past
Why Stop Grazing the Climate Commons?
Get PDFMany have argued that climate change is the textbook example of a tragedy of the commons. Assuming that is correct, to make headway on climate change, we would expect an enforceable agreement that provides for global collective action. The tragedy of the commons assumes that those who cut back when others do not are—to use the formal language of game theorists—suckers. So, the last thing we would expect is a surge of unilateral action. Contrary to theory, for the past decade, unilateral climate action has flourished among governments, businesses, other organizations, and individuals.
Is the number of climate suckers growing exponentially, or is there more going on? This Article proposes an alternative explanation. A growing and substantial part of the climate crisis is not subject to the tragedy of the commons, allowing rational actors to take climate action because of their self-interests, not despite them.
While the ability to rely on unilateral action to make some climate progress unlocks exciting possibilities, effectively confronting climate change requires a better understanding of why unilateral actors act. This Article exposes the economic and political incentives that frequently drive unilateral action. Understanding the incentives of unilateral actors opens two promising inroads for climate action: strengthening unilateral action by playing to these incentives and building on unilateral action to make collective action more obtainable
Former Whistleblowers: Why the False Claims Act\u27s Anti-Retaliation Provision Should Protect Former Employees
Get PDFSince the Civil War, the False Claims Act has served as a tool to combat fraud perpetrated against the government. Early fraud by government contractors during the Civil War was quaint: contractors selling the same horse twice or filling a Union Army contract for sugar with sand. Today, the government recovers billions of dollars annually through actions under the FCA.
Essential to the FCA’s functioning are “relators,” private citizens who serve as whistleblowers incentivized to report fraud by receipt of a percentage of whatever amount the government recovers in damages. The government relies on relators to blow the whistle on fraud—over two-thirds of FCA recoveries since 1986 come from cases brought by relators as whistleblowers. So important are these relators that in 1986 Congress amended the FCA and included an anti-retaliation provision to provide relief for employees who experience retaliation from their employers for reporting fraud.
This Note discusses a recent circuit split over whether the anti-retaliation provision of the FCA protects former employees against post-termination retaliation by their employers, arguing that the anti-retaliation provision extends to retaliation against former employees. In arguing in favor of a more inclusive definition of “employee” in the FCA’s anti-retaliation provision, this Note explores the history and purpose of the FCA, the legislative history of the FCA’s anti-retaliation provision, and the arguments for and against the inclusion of former employees under the provision’s protections. Finally, this Note calls for Supreme Court intervention or congressional action to clarify that the FCA’s anti-retaliation provision protects former employees from post-termination retaliation
Mothers in Law
Get PDFA Review of Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality. By Tomiko Brown-Nagin