Articles

The analysis herein arises from the collision course between the sweeping reforms mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 and a single sentence of the U.S. Code, adopted nearly fifteen years earlier and largely forgotten ever since. Few were likely thinking of Section 106 of the National Securities Market Improvement Act when the Dodd-Frank Act was enacted on July 21, 2010. As applied by the D.C. Circuit less than a year later in Business Roundtable v. SEC, however, that provision’s peculiar requirement of cost-benefit analysis could prove the new legislation’s undoing.

To help navigate this potential impasse, the Article that follows suggests the need to more carefully analyze the function and form of the cost-benefit analysis mandate in Section 106 and develops a generally applicable framework for doing so. Discussions of cost-benefit analysis have traditionally approached it as a fairly singular phenomenon—with broad aspirations of “efficiency” as its purpose and with its application in environmental and risk regulation understood to capture its form. In reality, cost-benefit analysis is both more ad hoc—and more systematically varied—than this account suggests.

The framework proposed herein thus makes an important contribution to our understanding of the complexities and varieties of cost-benefit analysis generally. In the particular case of Section 106, meanwhile, it counsels a distinct function and particular characteristics of form that will better direct its application—both to the myriad regulations mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act and beyond. Properly understood, Section 106 is designed to encourage SEC attention to substantive considerations that might otherwise be neglected, given the Commission’s traditional focus on investor protection. As to form, Section 106 constitutes a true mandate and one properly subject to judicial review. Contrary to the analysis in Business Roundtable, however, that mandate is procedural rather than substantive in nature. By comparison with formal cost-benefit analysis, it is less rigidly quantitative. It does, however, demand careful attention to the distributional impacts of relevant rulemaking. To such particularized ends and in such tailored form, ultimately, cost-benefit analysis has the potential to generate significant insight—both under Section 106 and for financial regulation as a whole.

Who should own a federal judge’s papers? This question has rarely been asked. Instead, it has generally been accepted that the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal judges own their working papers, which include papers created by judges relating to their official duties, such as internal draft opinions, confidential vote sheets, and case-related correspondence. This longstanding tradition of private ownership has led to tremendous inconsistency. For example, Justice Thurgood Marshall’s papers were released just two years after he left the bench, revealing behind-the-scenes details about major cases involving issues such as abortion and flag burning. In contrast, Justice David Souter’s papers will remain closed until the fiftieth anniversary of his retirement, and substantial portions of Justice Byron White’s papers, including files relating to the landmark case of Miranda v. Arizona, were shredded. In addition, many collections of lower federal court judges’ papers have been scattered in the hands of judges’ families. Notably, this private ownership model has persisted despite the fact that our country’s treatment of presidential records shifted from private to public ownership through the Presidential Records Act of 1978. Furthermore, private ownership of judicial papers has endured even though it has proven ill-equipped to balance the many competing interests at stake, ranging from calls for governmental accountability and transparency on the one hand, to the judiciary’s independence, collegiality, confidentiality, and integrity on the other.

This Article is the first to give significant attention to the question of who should own federal judges’ working papers and what should happen to the papers once a judge leaves the bench. Upon the thirty-fifth anniversary of the enactment of the Presidential Records Act, this Article argues that judges’ working papers should be treated as governmental property—just as presidential papers are. Although there are important differences between the roles of president and judge, none of the differences suggest that judicial papers should be treated as a species of private property. Rather than counseling in favor of private ownership, the unique position of federal judges, including the judiciary’s independence in our constitutional design, suggests the advisability of crafting rules that speak to reasonable access to and disposition of judicial papers. Ultimately, this Article—giving renewed attention to a long-forgotten 1977 governmental study commissioned by Congress—argues that Congress should declare judicial papers public property and should empower the judiciary to promulgate rules implementing the shift to public ownership. These would include, for example, rules governing the timing of public release of judicial papers. By involving the judiciary in implementing the shift to public ownership, Congress would enhance the likelihood of judicial cooperation, mitigate separation of powers concerns, and enable the judiciary to safeguard judicial independence, collegiality, confidentiality, and integrity.

In April 2012, facing a court order to disclose internal Justice Department e-mails, the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) wrote to the United States Supreme Court to admit that it had made a factual statement to the Court three years earlier in Nken v. Holder about agency policy and practice that was not accurate. The statement had been based on e-mail communications between Justice Department and agency lawyers. In fact, the statement neither reflected the content of the e-mails nor the actual policy and practice of the relevant government agencies. The letter promised remedial measures and concluded by assuring the Court that the OSG took its responsibility of candor seriously. The underlying factual representation by the OSG in the Nken case was unusual because it attracted attention and lengthy Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation that led to the disclosure of the communications that served as the basis of the statement. But it is not at all unusual as an example of unsupported factual statements by government lawyers that are used to support legal arguments. Indeed, unsupported statements appear in OSG briefs on a wide range of issues. These statements benefit from the unusual position of the government: It has access to information not available to other litigants, and it benefits from a presumption of candor that endows its statements with a claim of self-evident authority that no private litigant could match.

The Nken case provides a unique opportunity to explore the consequences of judicial acceptance of fact statements provided by the OSG. Because of FOIA litigation, we have an opportunity to examine how the OSG gathered information as well as the role played by government counsel at the Justice Department and the interested agencies. This examination shows multiple dangers with unsupported statements about internal government facts. It also demonstrates the difficulty of relying on lawyers representing the government to seek out and offer information that will undermine the government’s litigation position. Finally, it shows that it is dangerous to rely on the party that has misled the Court to develop an appropriate remedy.

Prevention of misleading statements could be pursued through greater self-regulation, prohibition of extra-record factual statements, or through a model of disclosure and rebuttal. This Article argues that the experience in Nken reflects the grave danger in presuming that self-regulation is an adequate safeguard against erroneous statements. It further argues that despite the appeal of a rigid rule that prohibits such statements, such an approach ignores the Court’s interest in information about real world facts that are relevant to its decisions. The Article concludes by arguing that the best proactive approach is to adopt a formal system of advance notice combined with access to the basis of government representations of fact. It further argues that courts should refuse to honor statements in court decisions that are based on untested and erroneous statements of fact by the government.

Legitimacy of the use of military force is undergoing a fundamental but insufficiently appreciated moral and legal transformation. Whereas the traditional practices and laws of war defined enemy forces in terms of categorical, group-based judgments that turned on status—a person was an enemy not because of any specific actions he himself engaged in but because he was a member of an opposing military force—we are now moving to a world that, implicitly or explicitly, requires the individuation of enemy responsibility of enemy persons in order to justify the use of military force. Increasingly, the legitimate use of military force is tied to quasi-adjudicative judgments about the individual acts and roles of specific enemy figures; this is the case whether the use of force involved is military detention or targeted killing. This transformation transcends conventional debates about whether terrorist actions should be treated as acts of war or crime and is more profound in its implications.

This readjustment in the basic premises underlying the justified use of military force will have, and is already having, implications for all the institutions involved in the use of military force and in the processes by which decisions are made to use force. For the military, this change will generate pressures to create internal, quasi-adjudicative processes to ensure accurate, credible judgments about the individual responsibility of particular enemy fighters. For the executive, these changes will propel greater engagement in decisions that had previously been exclusively within the province of the military. For the courts, this transformation toward individuated judgments of responsibility will inevitably bring about a greater judicial role in assessing wartime judgments than in the past; this expansion has begun to occur already. These changes are not yet directly reflected (or at least fully reflected) in the formal laws of war, but we anticipate that as these changes embed themselves in the practices of states, especially dominant states, these changes in practice will also eventually be embodied in the legal frameworks that regulate the use of force. This Article will identify this fundamental transformation as the central factor driving struggles over the proper boundaries of military force and then explore the ramifications of this change for issues like military detention and targeted killings.

Every year, medical error kills and injures hundreds of thousands of people and costs billions of dollars in lost income, lost household production, disability, and healthcare expenses. In recent years, hospitals have implemented multiple systems to gather information about medical errors, understand the causes of these errors, and change policies and practices to improve patient safety. The effect of malpractice lawsuits on these patient safety efforts is hotly contested. Some believe that the fear of malpractice liability inhibits the kind of openness and transparency needed to identify and address the root causes of medical error. Others believe that malpractice litigation brings crucial information about medical error to the surface and creates financial, political, and institutional pressures to improve. Yet neither side in this debate offers much evidence to support its claims.

Drawing on a national survey of healthcare professionals and thirty-five in-depth interviews of those responsible for managing risk and improving patient safety in hospitals across the country, I find reason to believe that malpractice litigation is not significantly compromising the patient safety movement’s call for transparency. In fact, the opposite appears to be occurring: The openness and transparency promoted by patient safety advocates appear to be influencing hospitals’ responses to litigation risk. Hospitals, once afraid of disclosing and discussing error for fear of liability, increasingly encourage transparency with patients and medical staff. Moreover, lawsuits play a productive role in hospital patient safety efforts by revealing valuable information about weaknesses in hospital policies, practices, providers, and administration. These findings should inform open and pressing questions about medical malpractice reform and the best ways to continue improving patient safety.

The growing centrality of “criminal aliens” to American immigration enforcement is one of the most significant historical shifts in the federal immigration system. However, little is known about how this dramatic restructuring of federal immigration priorities affects local criminal justice systems. Do noncitizens experience the same type of criminal justice as citizens? This Article seeks to answer this question by offering the first empirical study of how local criminal process is organized around immigration enforcement and citizenship status. It accomplishes this task by analyzing the criminal justice systems of the three urban counties that prosecute the highest number of noncitizens: Los Angeles County, California; Harris County, Texas; and Maricopa County, Arizona.

Comparative review of law, procedure, and practice in these three counties reveals that immigration’s interaction with criminal law has a far more powerful impact on local criminal practice than previously understood. Across all three counties, the practical effects of the federal government’s reliance on arrests and convictions in making enforcement decisions are felt at every stage of the criminal process: Immigration status is part of routine booking at local jails, “immigration detainers” impede release on criminal bail, immigration officials encourage criminal prosecutors to secure plea agreements that guarantee removal, and noncitizens are sometimes deported before their criminal cases are completed. Yet, there is surprising variation in how these three counties have structured their criminal practices in light of the consistently deep connections between criminal process and immigration enforcement. As this Article develops, the three jurisdictions have adopted distinct models of noncitizen criminal justice—what I term alienage neutral, illegal-alien punishment, and immigration enforcement. Each model reflects significant agreement across county agencies about the appropriate role of noncitizen status in criminal case adjudication and of local involvement in deportation outcomes. These findings have important implications for the institutional design of both local criminal systems and federal immigration enforcement.

Enforcement of law is at the core of the President’s constitutional duty to “take Care” that the laws are faithfully executed, and it is a primary mechanism for effecting national regulatory policy. Yet questions about how presidents oversee agency enforcement activity have received surprisingly little scholarly attention. This Article provides a positive account of the President’s role in administrative enforcement, explores why presidential enforcement has taken the shape it has, and examines the bounds of the President’s enforcement power. It demonstrates that presidential involvement in agency enforcement, though extensive, has been ad hoc, crisis-driven, and frequently opaque. The Article thus reveals the need for institutional design reforms—namely more coordination across agencies and greater disclosure of enforcement policy. The seeds for such reforms can be found in several recent efforts that have yet to be made systematic. Concerns about politicization of law enforcement should not override the considerable benefits that would derive. Rather, by acknowledging the President’s role in, and responsibility for, enforcement, we can better ensure the structure and transparency that promote appropriate presidential influence.

The determinacy revolution in federal sentencing, which culminated in the passage of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, has since been upended by a little-noticed phenomenon: the evolution of federal supervised release. A “determinate” sentencing regime requires that prison terms be of fixed and absolute duration at the time of sentencing. Because of the manner in which supervised release now operates, however, contemporary federal prison terms are neither fixed nor absolute. Instead, the court has discretion to adjust the length of a prison term after sentencing based on its evaluation of the post-judgment progress of the offender. This power to amend the duration of the penalty is the classic marker of the “indeterminate” sentence.

In this Article, I show how federal supervised release has dismantled the ambitions of the determinacy movement and made federal prison terms structurally indeterminate in length. I conclude that the widespread use of supervised release has created a muddled and unprincipled form of indeterminate sentencing: one that flouts the insights and vision of the nineteenth-century indeterminacy movement as well as the twentieth-century determinacy movement. Having dislocated once-celebrated theories of sentencing, federal supervised release now controls the lives of more than 100,000 people without offering any alternative theoretical basis for doing so. This Article draws on the lessons of a 200 year history to expose the current nature of supervised release and to envision a more coherent role for its future.

This Article examines the difficult question of the deference congressional fact-findings merit when they support legislation expanding or limiting individual rights. The deference question is crucial to judicial review of such legislation, yet the Supreme Court has offered little by way of a principled answer: platitudes about Congress’s expertise and co-equal status when it wishes to defer to such findings, and bromides about the Court’s superiority in constitutional interpretation when it does not. Scholars have described this important question as “radically under-theorized.” Any stable and useful theory addressing Congress’s ability to participate in the process of constitutional construction requires a better answer to the deference question than those which have been thus far offered. This Article proposes the outlines of such an answer.

This Article begins in Part I by identifying the three axes that should govern the deference question. Based on the insights gleaned from this analysis, Part II identifies six principles guiding the deference inquiry and applies them to congressional deference claims in several contexts: legislation enforcing the Equal Protection Clause, the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, a “human life” statute of the sort that has been proposed in the past, and the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirements. This Article concludes with a call for further research on this troublesome yet crucial question, which has so far generated only incomplete, unsatisfying answers.

For many critical aspects of family life, all the world truly is a stage. When a parent scolds a child on the playground, all eyes turn to watch and judge. When an executive’s wife hosts a work party, the guests are witness to traditional gender roles. And when two fathers attend a back-to-school night for their child, other parents take note of this relatively new family configuration. Family is popularly considered intimate and personal, but in reality much of family life is lived in the public eye.

These performances of family and familial roles do not simply communicate messages to others. They are also central to the deep structure of family law. Drawing on sociological and feminist theory, this Article argues that iterated, everyday performances are performative—that is, they create and then maintain collective understandings of mother, father, child, and family itself. The law plays an integral role in this by imbuing the performances with legal salience to define the categories at the heart of family law. This Article terms this dynamic process “performative family law.”

Aspects of this mutually constitutive relationship between performance and family law are deeply troubling, raising significant concerns for core areas of doctrine, policy, and theory. First, family law’s prevailing approach to defining familial categories is normatively narrowing because legal actors tend to give effect only to traditional, dominant images of the family despite seismic demographic changes in family form. Second, the obscuring effects of the public face of the family often warp the policies designed to address family violence, most notably child sexual abuse. Finally, by ignoring the pressure of performance, scholarly debates over the public-private divide are incomplete and have failed to explain why the concept of family privacy retains such enormous appeal.

In response, this Article proposes a new framework for family law that decenters dominant performances and provides an alternative means to define familial categories and counter family violence. It is not possible or even desirable to eliminate performativity entirely, but it is important to resist its more troubling aspects. A denaturalizing framework promises a more pluralistic approach to the emerging demographic transformation of the family and deeper engagement with the variety of family life today.