Source: https://lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/2014/11/index.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 15:13:26+00:00

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Today, most Americans lack constitutional rights on the job. Instead of enjoying free speech or privacy, they can be fired for almost any reason or no reason at all. This book uses history to explain why. It takes readers back to the 1930s and 1940s when advocates across the political spectrum - labor leaders, civil rights advocates, and conservatives opposed to government regulation - set out to enshrine constitutional rights in the workplace. The book tells their interlocking stories of fighting for constitutional protections for American workers, recovers their surprising successes, explains their ultimate failure, and helps readers assess this outcome.
"The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right is both ambitious and important - it moves across time and among a variety of individuals, organizations, and government entities, and it utilizes a wide range of archival material - all of keen interest to historians, legal scholars, and political scientists alike. Lee's formidable intelligence gives us new insights, as well as historical and historiographical surprises."
"Sophia Lee brilliantly pairs her analysis of the civil rights movement with the rise of the right-to-work movement and the 'union-avoidance' industry. She also matches her fine history of the state action theory with an equally persuasive argument that administrative agencies have been a fruitful source of constitutional visions and versions. This beautifully written book represents deep and broad research and entirely original analysis. I know of nothing like it."
"Sophia Lee's The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right is one of the most insightful and provocative studies of the bifurcated matrix of laws and court rulings that govern the American work regime. Deploying a marvellous talent as narrative historian, Lee demonstrates that the attempt to construct a labor relations regime that simultaneously protects the rights of racial minorities proved an enormously vexing and contentious project, one standing close to the heart of American politics for more than half a century."
Every kitchen has two kinds of tools. Some of these tools do many things well, like a chef’s knife. Other tools do only one thing, but they are meant to do that one thing exceedingly well, like a garlic press. This distinction also appears in legal doctrines. Some do one thing and are meant to do it very well. Other doctrines do many different things. They serve multiple functions, though perhaps all imperfectly. Indeed, this is often a basis for criticism. Scholars have criticized many legal doctrines -- from the constructive trust to the Erie doctrine, from the irreparable injury rule to the standing requirement, from the collateral source doctrine to strict scrutiny -- on the grounds that they serve multiple purposes and are therefore incoherent. By contrast, judges seem to prefer these multi-function doctrines. They resist the scholarly projects of deconstruction and specialization. This Essay considers that contrast in perspective, and it explores the differences between single-function and multi-function doctrines. These differences include the type of decisions that must be made, the possibility of expertise, adaptability over time, and the relative burdens on the designer and the user.
Notwithstanding deep points of disagreement, there is a general — albeit largely implicit — consensus among theorists of the rule of law around what we call the public law presumption: the view that the rule of law is essentially a public law doctrine. We see this view expressed in influential accounts of the rule of law including the work of Dicey, Hayek, Fuller, and Raz. The goal of this book is to challenge the public law presumption. The chapters in this collection all consider the idea that the rule of law concerns the nature of law generally and the conditions under which any relationship — between citizens as well as between citizens and the state — becomes subject to law. They address two major questions. The first question is whether our understanding of the rule of law is enriched by considering how and to what degree it is expressed or realized in private law. For example, many of the chapters address the ways in which the private law secures rule of law values such as non-arbitrariness and guidance. The second question is whether our understanding of the private law is enriched by adding the principles of the rule of law to the traditional list of core private law concepts. For example, many of the chapters show how private law concerns are usefully illuminated through rule of law themes, including strict liability, limitation periods, equity, and ‘boilerplate’. This introduction introduces these themes and the chapters of this volume.
Victoria has seen a major increase in prisoner numbers in the last couple of years, and existing prisons have been unable to accommodate this increased population satisfactorily. This Working Paper critiques claims that increased prisoner numbers are inevitable, and identifies rights-based challenges to prison overcrowding. It emphasises the importance of strong monitoring regimes and argues for Australia's ratification and implementation of OPCAT, the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture.
Globalization has led legal systems to influence each other throughout history and legal transplants have not been immune to that process either. Nowadays we do not just see examples of legal transplants but come across cases of 'cross-fertilization' of case law. An emergence of unstudied trends that have spread around the world in a voluntary and involuntary way across legal cultures can also be witnessed. However it seems that legal transplants have been largely misunderstood and have been condemned as mere copy-paste exercises due to their history. This paper studies the different theories of legal transplants in comparative law and also analyses some particular cases that have eventually ‘worked’ efficiently both in the country of origin and in the country where those laws were adopted. We can no longer say that legal transplants are impossible; they are a reality we cannot run away from. Amongst the many challenges faced by this phenomenon, the primary one is to overcome all the obstacles imposed by a ‘legal globalization’ that is threatening developing countries by focusing more on the liberalization of markets, rather than on policies supporting social welfare. Despite this fact, there is still hope for a new concept of ‘legal globalization’, one that includes executing a serious study of the trends that not only developing countries are in need of, but also is a need of the developed countries, which is the adoption of policies towards social welfare, one of the biggest challenges that face modern legal comparatists today.
This essay offers an empirical approach to assessing whether compelled disclosures are “factual” for the purposes of the First Amendment — the central issue at stake in the D.C. Circuit’s upcoming rehearing of National Association of Manufacturers v. SEC (“NAM”).
Under the Supreme Court’s holding in Zauderer v. Office of Disciplinary Council, “purely factual and uncontroversial” compelled disclosures receive only minimal constitutional scrutiny. Other forms of commercial speech regulation face more demanding requirements. Whether mandated commercial speech consists of “facts” or “opinions” is therefore an important question — both for NAM and for other related cases.
This essay offers a new perspective on the problem by conducting original survey research that assesses whether ordinary consumers understand the compelled disclosures at issue in several recent cases to express facts or opinions. It finds that respondents’ characterizations accord with those of courts in many cases — such as American Meat Institute v. U.S. Department of Agriculture, United States v. United Foods, and United States v. Arnold — but deviate sharply from the D.C. Circuit over the disclosures from NAM and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. v. FDA, which survey participants tended to classify as “purely factual.” The essay argues that while these results do not “prove” or “disprove” any court’s analysis, they could play a valuable role in helping judges understand the disclosures that come before them as NAM, and other similar cases, continue to be litigated.
Why do people comply with traffic laws and regulations? Road traffic policing tends to be premised on the idea that people comply when they are presented with a credible risk of sanction in the event of non-compliance. Such an instrumental model of compliance contrasts with the normative account offered by procedural justice theory, in which compliance is encouraged by legitimate legal authorities. Comparing these two accounts, we find evidence that both instrumental and normative factors explain variance in motorists’ self-reported propensity to offend. Extending the standard procedural justice account, we also find that it is social identity – not legitimacy – that forms the ‘bridge’ linking procedural fairness and compliance, at least according to a definition of legitimacy that combines felt obligation and moral endorsement. Fair treatment at the hands of police officers seems to enhance identification with the social group the police represent, and in turn, identification seems to motivate adherence to rules (laws) governing social behavior. These findings have implications not only for understandings of legal compliance, but also our understanding of why procedural justice motivates compliance, and the role of procedural justice in promoting social cohesion.
State sovereignty is often thought to be and seen as absolute, unlimited. We have seen that there is no such a thing as absolute State sovereignty. Indeed, I maintained in the first article of this series that absolute or unlimited sovereignty is impossible because all sovereignty is necessarily underpinned by its conditions of possibility. The present paper focuses on the Modern Era. What happens after the mediaeval period is crucial, because that is when the kings try to obtain all the power, and theories of total sovereignty are presented, like those of Bodin and Hobbes. In both cases, they fail to demonstrate their thesis of absoluteness in regard to sovereignty and their theories actually introduce limits. Moreover, sovereignty is in practice curtailed by many elements that are particular to this period in history and that are still existent: a) by the increasing power of the people — this could in principle result in a new kind of unchecked sovereignty, but is itself (as the theories from Locke and Rousseau will show) checked by; b) increased emphasis on individual rights; c) the use of separation of legislative and executive powers; and d) international agreements, some voluntary, some required.
Trade-restrictiveness is a familiar concept across various provisions and agreements of the World Trade Organization (WTO), but its precise meaning remains vague. In many WTO disputes, the existence or degree of trade-restrictiveness of a challenged measure is simply assumed or addressed in a few brief sentences. Yet whether a measure is more trade-restrictive than necessary, or more trade-restrictive than a proposed alternative measure, is crucial to the legality of a range of measures currently in place around the world, some under challenge in the WTO. A careful analysis of the existing caselaw and treaty text — focusing on Article 2.2 of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade and the general exceptions in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994 and the General Agreement on Trade in Services — demonstrates that while the existence of discrimination is likely to restrict trade, discrimination is not necessary to establish trade-restrictiveness, which also necessarily arises from direct barriers to market access such as import bans. In the absence of an explicit barrier to imports, a WTO panel is likely to focus on the extent to which a challenged measure negatively affects the competitive opportunities of imported products vis à vis domestic products.

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