Seeking Due Process Dimensions for Freedom of Contract Michael Pillow
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Building a Better Mousetrap: Patenting Biotechnology in The
DRUZIN-FINAL FINAL (DO NOT DELETE) 10/24/2014 3:19 PM RESTRAINING THE HAND OF LAW: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK TO SHRINK THE SIZE OF LAW Bryan Druzin∗ ABSTRACT ............................................................................................... 59 I. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................ 60 II. THE CASE FOR MINIMALISM ................................................................... 64 A. Assumptions and Starting Points ..................................................... 64 B. The Benefits of Minimalism ............................................................. 66 C. The Minimalist Approach to Economic Regulation ......................... 70 D. The Liability of Ideology—Both Left and Right ............................... 72 III. ARTICULATING A FRAMEWORK FOR LEGISLATIVE MINIMALISM ........... 73 A. Non-Interference .............................................................................. 75 B. Formalizing ...................................................................................... 77 C. Fine-Tuning ..................................................................................... 83 D. Dismantling ...................................................................................... 84 E. Concocting ....................................................................................... 85 IV. CLARIFYING THE FRAMEWORK ............................................................... 86 A. A Tabulated Comparison of the Strategies ..................................... -
Liberty of Contract
YALE LAW JOURNAL LIBERTY OF CONTRACT "The right of a person to sell his labor," says Mr. Justice Harlan, "upon such terms as he deems proper, is in its essence, the same as the right of the purchaser of labor to prescribe the conditions upon which he will accept such labor from the person offering to sell it. So the right of the employee to quit the service of the employer, for whatever reason, is the same as the right of the employer, for whatever reason, to dispense with the ser- vices of such employee ........ In all such particulars the employer and the employee have equality of right, and any legis- lation that disturbs that equality is an arbitrary interference with the liberty of contract, which no government can legally justify in a free land." ' With this positive declaration of a lawyer, the culmination of a line of decisions now nearly twenty- five years old, a statement which a recent writer on the science of jurisprudence has deemed so fundamental as to deserve quotation and exposition at an unusual length, as compared with his treat- ment of other points, 2 let us compare the equally positive state- ment of a sociologist: "Much of the discussion about 'equal rights' is utterly hollow. All the ado made over the system of contract is surcharged with fallacy." ' To everyone acquainted at first hand with actual industrial conditions the latter statement goes without saying. Why, then do courts persist in the fallacy? Why do so many of them force upon legislation an academic theory of equality in the face of practical conditions of inequality? Why do we find a great and learned court in 19o8 taking the long step into the past of deal- ing with the relation between employer and employee in railway transportation, as if the parties were individuals-as if they were farmers haggling over the sale of a horse ? 4 Why is the legal conception of the relation of employer and employee so at variance with the common knowledge of mankind? The late Presi- ' Adair v. -
Reexamining the Seventh Amendment Argument Against Issue Certification
Pace Law Review Volume 34 Issue 3 Summer 2014 Article 2 July 2014 Reexamining the Seventh Amendment Argument Against Issue Certification Douglas McNamara George Washington University Law School Blake Boghosian George Washington University Law School Leila Aminpour Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/plr Part of the Civil Procedure Commons Recommended Citation Douglas McNamara, Blake Boghosian, and Leila Aminpour, Reexamining the Seventh Amendment Argument Against Issue Certification, 34 Pace L. Rev. 1041 (2014) Available at: https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/plr/vol34/iss3/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Law at DigitalCommons@Pace. It has been accepted for inclusion in Pace Law Review by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Pace. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Reexamining the Seventh Amendment Argument Against Issue Certification D. McNamara, * B. Boghosian** & L. Aminpour*** I. Introduction Issue certification is a controversial means of handling aggregate claims in Federal Courts. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure (“FRCP”) 23(c)(4) provides that “[w]hen appropriate, an action may be brought or maintained as a class action with respect to particular issues.”1 Issue certification has returned to the radar screen of academics,2 class action counsel,3 and defendants.4 The Supreme Court’s decision regarding the need for viable damage distribution models in Comcast v. Behrend5 may spur class counsel in complex cases to bifurcate liability and damages. * Douglas McNamara is Of Counsel at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, PLLC, in Washington, D.C. He is an adjunct faculty member of George Washington University Law School and has practiced sixteen years in the area of complex civil litigation and class actions. -
Contracts of Adhesion-Some Thoughts About Freedom of Contract
CONTRACTS OF ADHESION-SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT FREEDOM OF CONTRACT FRIEDRICH KESSLER With the development of a free enterprise system based on an un- heard of division of labor, capitalistic society needed a highly elastic legal institution to safeguard the exchange of goods and services on the market. Common law lawyers, responding to this social need, trans- formed "contract" from the clumsy institution that it was in the six- teenth century into a tool of almost unlimited usefulness and pliability. Contract thus became the indispensable instrument of the enterpriser, enabling him to go about his affairs in a rational way. Rational be- havior within the context of our culture is only possible if agreements will be respected. It requires that reasonable expectations created by promises receive the protection of the law or else we will suffer the fate of Montesquieu's Troglodytes, who perished because they did not ful- fill their promises. This idea permeates our whole law of contracts, the doctrines dealing with their formation, performance, impossibility and damages. Under a free enterprise system rationality of the law of contracts has still another aspect.1 To keep pace with the constant widening of the market the legal system has to place at the disposal of the members of the community an ever increasing number of typical business trans- actions and regulate their consequences. But the law cannot possibly anticipate the content of an infinite number of atypical transactions into which members of the community may need to enter. Society, therefore, has to give the parties freedom of contract; to accommodate the business community the ceremony necessary to vouch for the delib- erate nature of a transaction has to be reduced to the absolute minimum. -
THE CURRENT STATUS of the CONTRACT CLAUSE the Contract
STILL IN EXILE? THE CURRENT STATUS OF THE CONTRACT CLAUSE JAMES W. ELY, JR.* The Contract Clause is no longer the subject of much judicial solici- tude or academic interest.1 Since the 1930s the once potent Contract Clause has been largely relegated to the outer reaches of constitu- tional law.2 This, of course, was not always the case. On the contrary, throughout the nineteenth century the Contract Clause was one of the most litigated provisions of the Constitution. In 1896, Justice George Shiras astutely commented: “No provision of the constitution of the United States has received more frequent consideration by this court than that which provides that no state shall pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts.”3 A brief survey of the evolution of con- tract clause jurisprudence helps to put into perspective the current desuetude of the Clause. I. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The first provision protective of contractual rights was contained in the Northwest Ordinance of July 1787.4 Its adoption anticipated * Milton R. Underwood Professor of Law, Emeritus, and Professor of History, Emeritus, Vanderbilt University. This Article is an expanded version of remarks presented at the Fifteenth Annual Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference at the College of William & Mary on October 5, 2018. I want to thank Katie Hanschke of the Massey Law Library of Vanderbilt University for her valuable research assistance. I also wish to thank David F. Forte for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this Article. 1. Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution provides, in part: “No State . shall pass any . -
Conscience and At-Will Employment
Articles FIRING THOREAU: CONSCIENCE AND AT-WILL EMPLOYMENT James A. Sonne* It is a virtual axiom of the American workplace that, absent a contract or express law to the contrary, "an employer may terminate an employee at any time, for any reason or no reason at all."' Indeed, this presumption of "at-will" employment, which prevails in forty-nine states and the District of Columbia,' has been the law of the land for more than a century. Rooted in freedom of contract and private property principles, the rule is designed to yield efficiencies across a broad range of industries. Despite the prominence of at-will power, however, a growing (and potentially contradictory) trend in employment law, particularly in the health care field, is that employees should be protected in the exercise of their consciences-even if such exercise is contrary to their employers' wishes or the demands of their jobs.' This "conscience clause" movement is * Associate Professor, Ave Maria School of Law. B.A., Duke University; J.D., Harvard Law School. The author thanks George Remy and Jeffrey Melville for their research; Professors Richard Myers, Lynn Wardle, and Robert Vischer for their insights; Mary and Margaret Grace Sonne for their encouragement; and Ave Maria for its support. 1. Cynthia L. Estlund, Labor, Property, and Sovereignty After Lechmere, 46 STAN. L. REV. 305, 312 (1994). 2. See PETER 0. HUGHES, LABOR AND EMPLOYMENT LAW (MB) § 259.02 n.5 (2006) (observing "[e]mployment is presumed to be at will in ...every state" except Montana). For the District of Columbia, see Dantley v. -
Contract Law Through the Lens of Laissez-Faire Richard A
University of Chicago Law School Chicago Unbound Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics Economics 1997 Contracts Small and Contract Large: Contract Law Through the Lens of Laissez-Faire Richard A. Epstein Follow this and additional works at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Richard A. Epstein, "Contracts Small and Contract Large: Contract Law Through the Lens of Laissez-Faire" (Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Working Paper No. 49, 1997). This Working Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics at Chicago Unbound. It has been accepted for inclusion in Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics by an authorized administrator of Chicago Unbound. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Contracts Small and Contract Large: Contract Law Through the Lens of Laissez-Faire by Richard A. Epstein* Introduction: A Fallen Theory? Laissez-faire capitalism, and its associated doctrine of freedom of contract, had many stalwart defenders during the nineteenth century. But it has received a rocky reception from many legal and philosophical commentators in the twentieth century. Freedom of contract often been pronounced "dead on arrival" as an organizing principle for complex contemporary societies. That principle has been said to be insensitive to differences in wealth, status, position and power that make the exercise of contractual choice a myth for the weak and dispossessed. Within the legal literature, it has been attacked as ignoring the large concentrations of wealth that distort market processes and that trample down the rights of consumers and workers. -
An Empirical Appraisal of the Liberty of Contract
An Empirical Appraisal of the Liberty of Contract “I got my first job when I was nine. Worked at a sheet metal factory. In two weeks, I was running the floor. Child labor laws are ruining this country.” -Ron Swanson Aaron Gordon Honors Thesis Department of Political Science Northwestern University Advisor: Prof. Daniel Galvin May 3, 2017 1 Abstract From approximately 1895-1937, the US Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution’s Due Process clauses to implicitly protect a “Liberty of Contract”—the right of individuals to make contracts without arbitrary government interference. The Court relied on this principle to invalidate a variety of regulatory measures, including maximum hours and minimum wage laws. The Court abandoned its enforcement of this doctrine in 1937, and today, the Liberty of Contract is widely condemned by legal thinkers as right-wing judicial activism. Supposedly, the Court’s protection of contractual freedom imposed a strict laissez-faire ideology on the country, interfered with Progressive reform legislation, and harmed public welfare—especially that of workers, consumers, and the poor. But such claims are often made without empirical support. My aim here is to evaluate, based on the surviving data and evidence, the practical impacts of the Liberty of Contract by examining a) the extent to which the doctrine interfered with policymakers’ efforts at economic regulation, and b) the economic and social effects of notable decisions in which the Court invalidated legislation on Liberty-of-Contract grounds. I conclude a) that the Court was quite deferential to legislators in Liberty-of-Contract cases, though its decisions to invoke the doctrine in invalidating laws were often arbitrary; and b) that the societal effects of such invalidations were often either neutral or positive. -
Finding Room in the Criminal Law for the Desuetude Principle
RUTGERS LAW REVIEW COMMENTARIES MARCH 11, 2014 FINDING ROOM IN THE CRIMINAL LAW FOR THE DESUETUDE PRINCIPLE Paul J. Larkin, Jr.* A problem facing the criminal justice system today is the phenomenon known as “overcriminalization,” the neologism given to the overuse and misuse of the criminal law.1 Numerous members of the academy,2 former senior Jus- tice Department officials,3 and the American Bar Association4 have been vocal * Senior Legal Research Fellow, The Heritage Foundation; M.P.P. 2010 The George Washing- ton University; J.D. 1980 Stanford Law School; B.A. 1977 Washington & Lee University. The views also are the author’s own and should not be construed as representing any official position of The Heritage Foundation. 1. “Overcriminalization is the term that captures the normative claim that governments create too many crimes and criminalize things that properly should not be crimes.” Darryl K. Brown, Criminal Law’s Unfortunate Triumph Over Administrative Law, 7 J.L. ECON. & POL’Y 657, 657 (2011). 2. See, e.g., Andrew Ashworth, Conceptions of Overcriminalization, 5 OHIO ST. J. OF CRIM. L. 407 (2008); Sara Sun Beale, The Many Faces of Overcriminalization: From Morals and Mattress Tags to Overfederalization, 54 AM U. L. REV. 747 (2005); Darryl K. Brown, Can Criminal Law be Controlled?, 108 MICH. L. REV. 971 (2010); John C. Coffey, Jr., Does “Unlawful” Mean “Crimi- nal”?: Reflections on the Disappearing Tort/Crime Distinction in American Law, 71 B.U. L. REV. 193 (1991); Stuart P. Green, Why It’s a Crime to Tear the Tag Off a Mattress: Overcriminalization and the Moral Content of Regulatory Offenses, 46 EMORY L.J. -
The Issue Class Revolution – Gilles & Friedman
THE ISSUE CLASS REVOLUTION MYRIAM GILLES* & GARY FRIEDMAN ABSTRACT In 2013, four Supreme Court Justices dissented from the decision in Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, which established heightened requirements for the certification of damages class actions. In a seemingly offhanded footnote, these dissenters observed that district courts could avoid the individualized inquiries that increasingly doom damages classes by certifying a class under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(c)(4) on liability issues only and “leaving individual damages calculations to subsequent proceedings.” The dissenters were onto something big. In fact, the issue class and follow-on damages model has broad potential to restore the efficacy of aggregate litigation across several substantive areas after decades of judicial hostility. This Article offers a bold and original vision for the issue class procedure, one that promises scale efficiency while sidestepping the doctrinal land mines that dot the class action landscape. It is a vision rooted in sober pragmatism and an account of the economic incentives confronting entrepreneurial law firms as they consider investing in aggregate litigation. * Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law and Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. For their generous comments and thoughtful interventions, we are grateful to Lynn Baker, Bob Bone, Beth Burch, Zach Clopton, Scott Dodson, Daniel Klerman, Richard Marcus, Linda Mullenix, Morris Ratner, Charlie Silver, David Spence, and Patrick Woolley. We also thank the organizers and participants of the Fifth Annual Civil Procedure Workshop held at the University of Texas School of Law and the law faculties at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, the University of California Hastings College of the Law, and the University of Texas School of Law for the opportunity to present these ideas. -
Losing at Dodge Ball: Understanding the Supreme Court’S Implied Authorization of Consent in Executive Benefits Insurance Agency V
LOSING AT DODGE BALL: UNDERSTANDING THE SUPREME COURT’S IMPLIED AUTHORIZATION OF CONSENT IN EXECUTIVE BENEFITS INSURANCE AGENCY V. ARKISON AND WHY REVISION OF 28 U.S.C. § 157(B) IS CRITICAL FOR CLARITY Bethany A. Corbin ABSTRACT On June 9, 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the latest installment in the jurisdictional saga of bankruptcy courts. As the highly anticipated sequel to Stern v. Marshall, which deprived bankruptcy judges of authority to hear certain core proceedings, Executive Benefits Insurance Agency v. Arkison was expected to resolve the oft-litigated issue of whether parties could consent to bankruptcy jurisdiction. Practitioners and scholars eagerly awaited the opinion, anxious to determine exactly how far the Court would go in divesting bankruptcy judges of their authority. However, what the nation received instead was a classic attempt by the Court to dodge the ball on the consent issue. In a unanimous decision, the Court resolved the Stern gap by allowing litigants to treat Stern claims as noncore proceedings but refused to address the overarching theme of consent. Tucking their reluctance away in a footnote, the Court expressly reserved the question of consent for another time, another case, and another day. This Article, however, argues that a straightforward reading of the plain language in Arkison impliedly resolves the consent issue. In other words, the Supreme Court has lost at its own game of dodge ball. By broadly applying the entire statutory provision of 28 U.S.C. § 157(c)—which includes subsection (c)(2) on consent—to Stern claims, the Court has plainly stated its approval of consent for certain core proceedings. -
Law and Empire in Late Antiquity
job:LAY00 17-10-1998 page:3 colour:0 Law and Empire in Late Antiquity Jill Harries job:LAY00 17-10-1998 page:4 colour:0 published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge cb2 1rp, United Kingdom cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, USA http://www.cup.org © Jill D. Harries 1999 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1999 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeset in Plantin 10/12pt [vn] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data Harries, Jill. Law and empire in late antiquity / Jill Harries. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 41087 8 (hardback) 1. Justice, Administration of – Rome. 2. Public law (Roman law) i. Title. KJA2700.H37 1998 347.45'632 –dc21 97-47492 CIP ISBN 0 521 41087 8 hardback job:LAY00 17-10-1998 page:5 colour:0 Contents Preface page vii Introduction 1 1 The law of Late Antiquity 6 Confusion and ambiguities? The legal heritage 8 Hadrian and the jurists 14 Constitutions: the emperor and the law 19 Rescripts as law 26 Custom and desuetude 31 2 Making the law 36 In consistory