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Pretext, Reality, and Verisimilitude: Truth-Seeking in the Supreme Court
Get PDFThe assault on truth in recent public discourse makes it especially important that judicial decisions about Executive actions reflect the world as it is. Judges should not assume some idealized reality where good faith prevails, the motives of public officials are above reproach, and administrative processes are presumptively regular. Unfortunately, however, the Supreme Court has acted on naïve or counterfactual assumptions that limit judicial review of administrative or Presidential action. Such intentional judicial blindness or suspension of justified disbelief—such lack of verisimilitude—can sow doubt regarding the Court’s candor and impartiality.
In analyzing the Court’s fealty to objective reality in its review of Executive actions, this Article focuses primarily on two Supreme Court decisions: the Travel Ban Case and the Census Case. These decisions illustrate how the mode of judicial review can influence verisimilitude. In the Travel Ban Case, the Court refused to look behind an implausible explanation of the government’s actions, a paradigm judicial departure from verisimilitude inimical to the legitimacy of the Court. The Census Case is a less direct assault on objective reality, as the Court ultimately did examine the truthfulness of the government’s justifications. But it did so in a manner that does not manifest a vital commitment to truth.
This Article will also touch upon a third case: U.S. Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the Univ. of Cal. (the DACA Case). The DACA Case did not challenge objective reality but on the contrary insisted that agencies provide the actual reasoning behind their decisions rather than justifications they thought of later, even if those justifications were otherwise valid. The case thus reinforces the importance of candor and accuracy.
A key lesson from these cases is that to preserve its legitimacy, the Court should abandon or modify doctrines that cede judicial review of national security issues, limit consideration of `pretext, decline to assess the intent of government actors, and indulge a presumption of regularity for administrative determinations. These reforms are achievable without a major overhaul of administrative law standards
Alone in the Lone Star State: How a Lack of Centralized Public Defender Offices Fails Rural Indigent Defendants
Get PDFThe criminal justice system is stacked against indigent defendants. The disadvantages indigent defendants face are exacerbated when mixed with the unique qualities of rural America.
For instance, rural court-assigned attorneys are often picked through ad hoc systems by the very judges these attorneys must appear in front of, creating a judicial conflict of interest. The financial realities of rural public defense work often force counsel to manage a private practice while also balancing court-appointed cases. To the extent integral resources like investigators or experts are present in rural spaces, they are seldom used. This Note highlights the way Texas organizes its public defense system as an example of how the unique properties of rural America interact with our criminal justice system to create substandard representation. As a solution, this Note proposes that rural counties should pool together resources to create centralized, regional public defender offices that serve multiple counties. Centralized offices, rather than private attorneys selected by judges to represent indigent defendants on an ad hoc basis, would sever judicial conflicts of interest; they would allow defenders to focus on their indigent clients rather than be forced to manage a separate practice; and they would have the ability to retain in-house services like investigators. Because establishing these centralized offices requires increased state funding and political will, this Note concludes by analyzing impact litigation lawsuits in several states that successfully improved rural public defense
The Business of Securities Class Action Lawyering
Get PDFPlaintiffs’ lawyers in the United States play a key role in combating corporate fraud. Shareholders who lose money as a result of fraud can file securities class actions to recover their losses, but most shareholders do not have enough money at stake to justify overseeing the cases filed on their behalf. As a result, plaintiffs’ lawyers control these cases, deciding which cases to file and how to litigate them. Recognizing the agency costs inherent in this model, the legal system relies on lead plaintiffs and judges to monitor these lawyers and protect the best interests of absent class members. Yet there is remarkably little data on the business of securities class action lawyers, leaving lead plaintiffs and judges to oversee this area without the tools to understand how it works.This Article looks inside the black box of securities class action lawyering to explore the business behind these cases. Our study includes hand-collected data on all securities fraud class actions against public corporations filed between 2005 and 2018, a total of nearly 2500 cases. We find that the business of securities class action lawyering is far more complex than prior scholarship has recognized. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there are not two tiers of plaintiffs’ law firms; instead, there are multiple tiers of firms, each with its own client base, litigation patterns, and revenue model. Our study gives lead plaintiffs and judges the data and tools they need to understand these tiers and to compare the performance of the law firms within them. We also examine how these law firms are compensated, finding that judges’ fee awards fail to account for the difficulty of cases or the risk of non-recovery in any systematic way. These fees are crucial to ensuring that law firms pursue the right cases on behalf of shareholders, so we suggest ways that judges can use data to improve fee awards. As we will see, the path to reforming securities class actions starts with understanding the business behind them
Gotta Get Those Ill-Gotten Gains: Improving the FTC\u27s Authority to Seek Disgorgement in Antitrust Cases
Get PDFDisgorgement is an equitable monetary remedy that requires a defendant to give up all ill-gotten gains from their illegal conduct. Unlike damages, which can be compensatory, deterrent, or even punitive in nature, disgorgement focuses primarily on deterring future illegal conduct. It relies on the simple moral premise that wrongdoers should not be allowed to retain the profits of their wrongdoing. Especially in antitrust litigation involving complex, multilayered supply chains, damages can underestimate the true harm suffered as a result of anticompetitive conduct. Disgorgement, if calculated properly and litigated thoughtfully, has the potential to provide redress for the full amount of harm and therefore act as a more efficient deterrent.
Federal and state antitrust enforcers have sought disgorgement for anticompetitive conduct with limited success, and a recent Supreme Court decision casts doubt on the Federal Trade Commission’s authority to seek disgorgement altogether. Still, there is bipartisan support in Congress and the White House to restore the FTC’s disgorgement authority. This Note proposes enacting legislation to that effect, including a provision that would allow state attorneys general or private plaintiffs to seek disgorgement on the FTC’s behalf (called a “qui tam” provision). Further, this Note outlines how leveraging existing litigation tools can alleviate concerns that disgorgement will lead to duplicative recovery. By restoring the FTC’s authority to seek disgorgement and creating a qui tam mechanism for private enforcement, antitrust plaintiffs will benefit from increased leverage, enabling them to both recover the totality of harm caused by anticompetitive conduct and deter such conduct in the future
Giving the Fourth Amendment Meaning: Creating an Adversarial Warrant Proceeding to Protect From Unreasonable Searches and Seizures
Get PDFFor at least the past 40 years, police and prosecutors have had free reign in conducting illegal searches and seizures nominally barred by the Fourth Amendment. The breadth of exceptions to the warrant requirement, the lax interpretation of probable cause, and especially the “good faith” doctrine announced in U.S. v. Leon have led to severe violations of privacy rights, trauma to those wrongly searched or seized, and a court system overburdened by police misconduct cases. Most scholars analyzing the issue agree that the rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment—to be free from unreasonable search and seizure—have been severely eroded or even eviscerated by the Supreme Court. Some suggest that in order to revitalize the Fourth Amendment, the United States should make it easier to secure civil damages after Fourth Amendment rights have been violated. Others have argued that the United States must guarantee stronger ex ante protections to uphold fundamental privacy rights before they are violated.
This Note argues that, while warrant requirements do need to be more stringent to safeguard Fourth Amendment rights, warrant requirements cannot on their own sufficiently protect such a sacred right. This Note proposes the adoption of adversarial warrant proceedings, designed to ensure police and prosecutors meet their probable cause burden and to ensure that any lies or sloppy investigative work are rooted out from a warrant application before a warrant is granted. False searches and arrests can be deeply traumatizing and have excruciating and long-term impacts. For the Fourth Amendment to have any meaningful affect, the People must have an advocate—a Warrants Counsel— fighting for their right to be free from unreasonable searches before that right is violated.
The Roberts Court’s destruction of the Fourth Amendment leaves little reason to expect protection from unreasonable search and seizure through litigation. Instead, Congress must create the Warrants Counsel program legislatively. Congress should look to the major success of the Federal Defenders program as a blueprint for zealous advocacy and protection of rights. A Warrants Counsel, like a public defender, would be a government paid attorney, present to argue against probable cause before a magistrate whenever police or prosecutors seek a warrant. Like the Sixth Amendment before the public defender system, the Fourth Amendment desperately needs some structure to give its language meaning; the Warrants Counsel system would counterbalance over-powered police and prosecutors in favor of the People
Startups in the Whirlpool of Divorce
Get PDFStartups use stock options to compensate their employees. An employee’s divorce could result in a change in the formal ownership of the startup securities. However, the startup, the employee, and the former spouse of the employee all have considerable and conflicting interests in the outcome of the allocation of the employee’s securities as part of a divorce settlement. I argue that the startup, along with the relevant tax rules, imposes obstacles on the transferability of the securities to the employee’s former spouse that are likely to distort the settlement outcome. An inefficient outcome is likely because the person who may assign a higher value to owning the securities is both barred from owning them and prevented from receiving equivalent value in exchange. While amending the IRC would allow for more outcomes and could enable the parties to reach a more efficient result, corporate law’s attempt to protect the shareholders’ rights and scrutinize contractual arrangements such as voting agreements and appraisal waivers could have an ex-ante unintended consequence. Specifically, since the startup is likely to continue, it may deprive the former spouse of any equity rights following the divorce and attempt to prevent possible complications to future corporate transactions once the tax pretext is lifted
Corporate Income Tax: We Tried the Stick, How About the Carrot?
Get PDFDue to their ongoing focus on tax planning and continuous efforts to find new tax minimization strategies, multinational corporations have not been paying their fair share of taxes for a long time. As a result, the federal government is unable to generate much revenue through taxes levied on corporations. The government’s response to this problem has always been the same: introduce new tax laws and regulations, revise old tax laws to close “loopholes,” and hope that this will solve corporate tax evasion. For decades, this approach has failed.
This Article examines the history of the corporate income tax in the United States and the parallel evolution of an industry dedicated to helping corporations avoid those taxes. This Article finds that the development of this industry has had significant influence on the federal government’s decisions with respect to how it taxes corporations, usually opting to adopt anti-abuse, -avoidance rules in an effort to crack down on perceived bad actors. These policy choices, though, have had little success over the years. Instead, tax revenue generated from large-scale corporate groups has been modest, and there appears to be a consensus that these entities don’t pay their fair share.
We propose a different course. Instead of anti-abuse and -avoidance rules, the tax code should use tax and other economic incentives to encourage entrepreneurs and corporations to invest in the domestic economy. Economic activity creates positive externalities in the domestic economy specifically and United States generally. Congress should amend the tax code to better allocate the proceeds of these positive externalities between the Internal Revenue Service, corporations, and stakeholders.
Since the Internal Revenue Code for corporations was enacted in 1909, Congress has attempted to block abusive tax planning. However, its chosen method–deterrence– has had little positive impact on the U.S. economy. In many instances, deterrence has even had a negative impact, encouraging corporations to shutter their U.S. plants and dismiss hundreds of thousands of American employees in favor of foreign operations. Such legislative measures have “trapped” billions of dollars overseas by making the distribution of these profits to U.S. shareholders too costly. Instead, Congress should adopt tax incentives that balance the positive externalities of economic activity on local communities with the need to protect small- and medium-sized businesses’ ability to compete with the entities that will be most advantaged by these favorable incentives. This approach would reduce the advantages built-in to existing complex corporate structures that enable the largest corporations to easily shift revenue and profits to lower-tax jurisdictions. This approach, however, does not jeopardize recent attempts to set a global minimum tax aimed at reducing the tax incentive driving corporations to move operations overseas in search of a lower tax rate. Instead, this Article’s recommendation focuses on rewarding the positive externalities such operations create for domestic communities
The Death Knell and the Wild West: Two Dangers of Domestic Discovery in Foreign Adjudications
Get PDFUnder 28 U.S.C. § 1782(a), parties to foreign legal proceedings can obtain discovery orders from United States federal courts. In other words, if a foreign party needs physical evidence located in—or testimony from a person residing in—the United States to support their claim or defense, they can ask a district court to order the production of that evidence. For almost two decades, § 1782(a) practice has operated as a procedural Wild West. Judges routinely consider § 1782(a) applications ex parte—that is, without giving the parties subject to the resulting discovery orders a chance to oppose them—and grant those applications at a staggering rate: more than 90% of the time. In its June 2022 decision in ZF Automotive US, Inc. v. Luxshare, Ltd., the Supreme Court transformed § 1782 jurisprudence for the worse. The Court held that private arbitral tribunals do not fall under § 1782(a)’s scope and that, as a result, parties cannot obtain discovery for use in foreign private arbitration under the provision. This Note argues that, after ZF Automotive, § 1782(a) jurisprudence contains two dangers: (1) it subjects some parties to burdensome discovery orders with few procedural safeguards, and (2) it prevents parties who have chosen to arbitrate rather than litigate from obtaining discovery entirely. This Note contributes to existing scholarship by proposing structural changes that would improve § 1782(a) practice. Specifically, it argues that courts cannot root out the procedural flaws that plague § 1782(a), and that, consequently, Congress should enact a new and improved § 1782 to address these manifold problems
How Might We Reimagine Transportation Technology to Combat Forced Labor: Conference Explanations and Recommendations from The Law and Mobility Program’s Annual Conference 2023
Get PDFThe University of Michigan Law School’s Law and Mobility Program (LAMP), a resource for scholarship about the legal implications of emerging transportation technology with a particular focus on connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), hosts an annual conference. The topic of the LAMP Annual Conference 2023 considered how we might reimagine transportation technology in a way that combats the systemic vulnerabilities that leave certain populations more likely to experience forced labor. This topic was selected because there are multiple lenses through which to consider the transportation equity outcomes for users, industry workers, and society at large; forced labor is just one metric. This point is twofold. First, this question matters in particular because transportation touches everything people do from shipping goods to commuting to work to recreational activities to community development. Second, the automobile industry, as was discussed during the conference’s first panel, has an enormous global footprint with many layers within the supply chain, making it a great example for other industries to consider environmental, social, and governance (ESG) challenges in their own contexts. There are many notable historical examples of the impacts of emerging transportation technologies on labor conditions and access to dignified employment, and paying attention to the lessons learned from those outcomes may help policymakers better anticipate the equity outcomes of regulatory decisions.
After articulating why this topic is important in the transportation technology space, LAMP researchers identified four categories through which to understand the research. The categories are organized by population and include, 1) people working in the raw material and mining sectors harvesting the relevant materials to construct the technology such as cobalt and copper; 2) people working in the transportation industry in United States such as transit operators, truck drivers, and mechanics; 3) the user of the emerging transportation technology in their commute to work, and; 4) the nonuser community member whose access to employment or daily commute may be radically altered in an attempt to accommodate new technologies such as changes to bike lane, sidewalks, increased urban sprawl, or public transit routes. The type of analysis for each category varied. At the conference, the first and fourth panels explored many historical examples and existing law and policy tools, while the second and third panels identified questions and theoretical frameworks through which to best understand the needs of the communities.
Part II of this report will explain the methodology of this research and summarize the original literature review that was used to shape the conference format. Parts III through VI will present the findings of each respective panel. Finally, part VII will conclude with recommendations and lessons learned
Carceral Socialization as Voter Suppression
Get PDFIn an era of mass incarceration, many people are socialized through interactions with the carceral state. These interactions are powerful learning experiences, and by design, they are contrary to democratic citizenship. Citizenship is about belonging to a community of equals, being entitled to mutual respect and concern. Criminal punishment deliberately harms, subordinates, and stigmatizes. Encounters with the carceral system are powerful experiences of anti-democratic socialization, and they impact peoples’ sense of citizenship and trust in government. Accordingly, a large body of social science research shows that eligible voters who have carceral contact are significantly less likely to vote or to participate in politics. Hence, the carceral system’s impact on political participation goes well beyond those who are formally disenfranchised due to convictions. It also suppresses participation among the millions of legally eligible voters who have not been formally disenfranchised—people who have had more fleeting encounters with law enforcement or vicarious interactions with the carceral system.
This Article considers the implications of these findings from the perspective of voting rights law and the constitutional values underlying it. In a moment when voting rights are under siege, voting rights advocates are in a heated discussion about how our federal and state constitutions protect ideals of democratic citizenship and political equality. This discussion has largely (and for good reason) focused on how the law should address what I call “de jure” suppression: tangible election laws and policies that impose legal barriers to voting, or dilute voting power. Eliminating these formal barriers to voting is vital. But, I argue, fully realizing the constitutional values underlying voting rights will also require also addressing what I call “de facto” suppression, or suppression through socialization. This occurs not through formal legal restrictions on voting, but when state institutions like the carceral system systematically socialize citizens in a manner that is incompatible with democratic citizenship.
I show how de facto suppression threatens the constitutional interests protected by the right to vote just like de jure suppression does. In short, by systematically socializing people in a manner that is fundamentally incompatible with democratic citizenship, the state can effectively strip a citizen of much of the instrumental and intrinsic value conferred by the right to vote. Those who are concerned about advancing and protecting voting rights should understand the carceral system’s anti-democratic socialization as a form of political suppression—one that should warrant constitutional scrutiny for the same reasons that de jure suppression should warrant scrutiny