[Cross-posted from Commonwealth Club Podcast]

UC Davis Professor of Law Mary Ziegler is one of the world’s leading authorities on the U.S. abortion wars and the history of reproductive rights in this country. Since the leak of a draft of a Supreme Court majority opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade and the guaranteed right to an abortion, Ziegler has been one of the most sought-after experts on this issue.

Ziegler's timely new book Dollars for Life: the Antiabortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment, explores how the antiabortion movement remade the Republican Party and led to this current historic moment. She traces how the anti-abortion movement helped to revolutionize the rules of money in U.S. politics and persuaded conservative voters to focus on the federal courts. Ziegler offers a surprising new view of the slow drift to extremes in American politics and says it had everything to do with the strange intersection of right-to-life politics and campaign spending. Her previous books have explored the legal history of Roe v. Wade and the role of privacy rights in the abortion debate.

At a historic time that might mark a turnaround in abortion rights, The Commonwealth Club is pleased to host a true expert on the topic and this historic moment. You won't want to miss this important conversation. LISTEN to the episode.

SPEAKERS

Mary Ziegler

Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law; Author, Dollars for Life: the Antiabortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment

Vikrum Aiyer

Member, Inforum Advisory Board—Moderator

Ep. 26 of "What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law" looks as Roe v. Wade as it relates to President Trump, his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and the Constitution. This episode also examines the unusual trajectory of Roe plaintiff Norma McCorvey's life in the decades following the 1973 Supreme Court decision.

I've been keeping an eye on elite bashing of working class and rural whites for years now, and I published my first article about it as long ago as 2011.  But the election of 2016 brought the disdainful badmouthing by the chattering classes to a fever pitch, and I've occasionally blogged about the phenomenon, including here and here.  

One "series" I see on Twitter begins:  "And in today's episode of:  I Bet I Know Who You Voted For..." That is the common  preface to re-Tweets of headlines that could previously have appeared in the "Darwin Awards" or perhaps the petty crime pages of a local paper.  I'm pasting one below.  It re-Tweets a Fox News Tweet that reads "Substitute allegedly brought boxed wine to school, vomited in class."

Another re-Tweets this Fox News Tweet:  "Woman charged with choking teen for blocking view at Disney fireworks show."

On a related note, here's an item from Instagram just a few days ago, from the account called guerrillafeminism that reads "happy international women's day except the 53% of white women who voted for trump."

Pat Bagley, the cartoonist for the Salt Lake City Tribune (whose work I greatly admire, by the way--both cartoonist and paper), has referred to Trump's "idiot followers."  I could provide many more illustrations of this phenomenon.  

With that background, you can imagine my surprise--but also delight--when I saw this Tweet from Neera Tanden, President of the Center for American Progress, which bills itself as an

independent nonpartisan policy institute that is dedicated to improving the lives of all Americans, through bold, progressive ideas, as well as strong leadership and concerted action. Our aim is not just to change the conversation, but to change the country.

Despite the "nonpartisan" billing, I see Center for American Progress as clearly left leaning (a good thing in my book!).  Tanden's Tweet reads:

The teachers of West Virginia are heroes.  They deserve good pay and a real raise.  I stand with them. 

Now, I don't recall any past Tweets by Tanden blasting Trump supporters, though I do recall some highly critical of Trump.  That's fine by me.  It's a line I've drawn myself--at least in the last year or so (I was a bit less discriminating--a bit more knee jerk--as I reeled in the wake of election of 2016, and I sent off some angry, pejorative Tweets about Trump supporters as a monolithic group).  I now readily take aim at Trump but try to be more thoughtful and circumspect re: Trump supporters.  I'm looking to understand them, trying to listen empathically. (I've got a whole law review article forthcoming about female Trump supporters, delivered as the key note address at the Toledo Law Review symposium in October, 2017,  The Women Feminism Forgot:  Rural and Working Class White Women in the Era of Trump.  I hope to have the text posted soon on my ssrn.com page).

But the bottom line is that some things I saw on Twitter about the West Virginia teachers--many sympathetic comments of the sort Tanden shared--had me wondering if the lefties doing this Tweeting realized that many of the folks they were lauding and advocating for had no doubt voted for Trump.  That is, these newfound labor heroes with their wild-cat strike were one and the same with (many) reviled Trump voters.  Some 68% of West Virginians voted for Trump!  Could I possibly be seeing praise for these women--praise from the left?   These are the same women that many lefties on Twitter have said "get what they deserve" if they lose their healthcare (thanks to Trump's effort to dismantle Obamacare) or face further economic decline (thanks, for example, to the long-term consequences of Trump's tax reform law).

(Btw, I was at an Appalachian Justice symposium at West Virginia University College of Law in Morgantown from Thursday Feb. 22 'til Saturday Feb. 24th, and I got to see the teachers picketing--and hear the honking in support--first-hand, which was pretty cool.  One of my favorite signs, this published in the Washington Post, is here) 

Michelle Goldberg, a relatively new columnist at the New York Times who is writing a lot about gender issues, offered up this column under the headline, "The Teachers Revolt in West Virginia."  She called the strike "thrilling," noting that strikes by teachers are unlawful in West Virginia, which became a right-to-work state a few years ago, and where unions do not have collective bargaining rights. Yet, Goldberg writes,

teachers and some other school employees in all of the state’s 55 counties are refusing to return to work until lawmakers give them a 5 percent raise, and commit to addressing their rapidly rising health insurance premiums.

Goldberg further explains that the "obvious impetus" for action is West Virginia's awful pay of teachers, which ranks 48th in the nation (read more analysis here).  She also discusses the critical role that health care/health insurance plays in the labor dispute:

 In the past, solid health care benefits helped make up for low wages, but because West Virginia hasn’t been putting enough money into the state agency that insures public employees, premiums and co-payments have been increasing significantly.  

Ah, there's that health care problem again, by which I mean you should read this and this, among other sources cited and discussed in that forthcoming Toledo Law Review article. 

Having pored over many, many mainstream media reports of white working class Trump supporters in places like Appalachia (you guessed it, all discussed in that Toledo Law Review article!), I was struck that the women Goldberg identified and interviewed did not appear to be Trump supporters.  Quite to the contrary, these women are held out as having responded to Trump's election by becoming part of what is popularly known as "the resistance." I was delighted to learn about and hear from these women, but was Goldberg unable to find any Trump supporters among the striking teachers?  I would very much have liked to have heard their attitudes about the strike, also in relation to their support for Trump.  Did they reconcile the two?

Here are excerpts/quotes about the two women Goldberg did feature, Jenny Craig, a special education teacher from Triadelphia (population 811, northern panhandle) and Amanda Howard Garvin, an elementary art teacher in Morgantown (third largest city in the state, home of WVU):

Craig described the anti-Trump Women’s March, as well as the explosion of local political organizing that followed it, as a “catalyst” for at least some striking teachers.

Goldberg quotes Craig:  

You have women now taking leadership roles in unionizing, in standing up, in leading initiatives for fairness and equality and justice for everyone.

Goldberg also quotes Garvin:

As a profession, we’re largely made up of women. ... There are a bunch of men sitting in an office right now telling us that we don’t deserve anything better. 

No. We’re equal here.

I've been guest blogging for the past few weeks over at Concurring Opinions and invite you over to that blog, on "the law, the universe, and everything" to see what I've been writing.  I've done a four-installment review/commentary on J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy:  A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.  Spoiler Alert:  I'm not a big fan but, in the end, suggest that the book can help law profs better understand the low-income white students who (thankfully, yes, thankfully!) show up in our classrooms from time to time.  My posts are:

On Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and the White Working Class

Hillbilly Elegy as Rorschach Test

The "Shock and Awe" Response to Hillbilly Elegy:  Pondering the Role of Race

On Ree Dolly, J.D. Vance and Empathy for Low-Income Whites (or, What Hillbilly Elegy is Good for)

I've also done a bit of writing about rurality, with these posts:

Rurality and Government Retreat

Local Journalism as Antidote to Echo Chambers and Fake News

Also related to rurality are these posts about spatiality and abortion access. 

Did You Hear the One About the Alaska Legislator Who Said ... 

Sanger's Tour de Force on Abortion (with a Blind Spot for Geography)

Carol Sanger of Columbia Law responded to my post about her new book, About Abortion:  Terminating Pregnancy in the 21st Century, here.  I love the fact she says I get the "last word" in our exchange over the significance of geography.

I expect to post another item or two before my term as a guest blogger expires in about a week. 

Cross-posted from JURIST.

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Zubik v. Burwell on March 23, 2016, six years to the day the Affordable Care Act (ACA) became law. The petitioners, a group of religious organizations, have challenged the ACA's contraceptive coverage requirement. The challenge is a free exercise claim under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) [PDF], a federal statute. The court has now heard four challenges to the ACA.

The contraceptive coverage requirement is part of a broader provision that requires coverage for preventive health care without cost-sharing. This provision serves the ACA goals of improving health care access and reducing health care disparities among populations. Even small co-pays create barriers to health care. The ACA emphasizes the importance of preventive health care by removing that barrier.

Cost-sharing mechanisms like co-pays reflect the fact that health care services are delivered in a commercial market. The ACA coverage requirement applies to FDA-approved contraceptives. Prices for drugs and devices in the US are among the highest in the world. Contraceptives are distributed within that market. Recent stories about the role of profit-motive in pharmaceutical pricing highlight new cancer drugs and Hepatitis C drugs that cost several hundred thousand dollars a year. Plain old oral contraception, the most widely used contraceptive, can cost close to $1,000 per year for those without insurance coverage. Intrauterine devices, a type of long-acting reversible contraception, typically cost $500 to $1,000. Those amounts are less than 1 percent of the highlighted examples, but they are a great deal more than many can afford. Because most FDA-approved methods are available on a prescription-only basis, obtaining contraception also requires the time and cost of visiting a doctor. Oregon and California have enacted law making some contraceptives (the pill, the ring and the patch) available over-the-counter, with a pharmacist prescription. Those laws make the doctor's visit, and the accompanying costs, unnecessary for most. People without coverage, however, will still face out-of-pocket costs for the contraceptives.

The contraceptive coverage requirement applies to employers who provide health insurance as a benefit. The Zubik petitioners are religious organizations who hire employees and run colleges. Their employees and students rely on petitioners for health insurance access, but do not all share the petitioners' religious objections to contraceptive use. The ACA provides accommodation for religious employers, which removes petitioners from the responsibility of paying for coverage and yet makes coverage available to employees and students. Petitioners, however, claim that submitting the one-page form to obtain the accommodation makes them complicit in providing contraceptives.

The arguments were fascinating. You can listen to or read [PDF] them. RFRA requires that petitioners show the contraceptive coverage requirement imposes a substantial burden on free exercise of religion. If petitioners can do that, the government must justify the burden by showing that the contraceptive coverage requirement is based on a compelling state interest and that there is no less restrictive means of achieving that interest. The justices and lawyers spent much of oral argument addressing the substantial burden requirement. In an exchange with Justice Kagan, Paul Clement, representing petitioners, distinguished between an authorization form and an opt-out form. Clement seemed to suggest that an opt-out form would not make petitioners complicit, while an authorization form would, and thus, substantially burden free exercise. Much of the substantial burden argument turned into a battle of analogies. Noel Francisco, also representing petitioners, characterized the coverage requirement as "seizing control." The most bandied-about analogy was "hijacking"-as in, by requiring contraceptive coverage, the government is hijacking the religious employers' benefit plans. Chief Justice Roberts fully embraced the hijacking analogy. In the meantime, Justices Sotomayor and Kagan challenged Clement on petitioners' analogy to military objectors during war. Clement agreed that laws penalizing conscientious objectors substantially burdened objectors' free exercise, but asserted the objectors had to affirmatively object, while petitioners should not have to in order to obtain accommodation.

Donald Verrilli represented the US government in arguments. (Because he is the US Solicitor General, the justices call him "General Verrilli.") He argued that the procedure for obtaining an accommodation would not substantially burden petitioners' free exercise of religion. He and Justice Alito spent some time in the weeds about the fact that employers with self-insured plans must submit not one, but two pieces of paper. The existing accommodation exempts religious employers from paying for contraceptives regardless of whether the plan is fully insured or self-insured. So the only difference is, in fact, the extra piece of paper.

Verrilli marshaled his time to address petitioners' proposed alternatives to the existing accommodation. Petitioners' briefs proposed that rather than obtaining contraceptive coverage through employer-sponsored or student insurance, employees and students could use Medicare, Medicaid, Title X, contraception-only insurance policies or individual policies purchased in the insurance marketplaces. Some of these proposals do not exist. For example, insurers do not offer contraception-only policies. Even if available, a separate policy might very well offer a different provider network than a petitioner's plan. All of the proposals, including individual policies, would raise barriers to access and undermine the purpose of requiring preventive care coverage without cost-sharing. None, as Verrilli pointed out, are available under existing law. Access to Medicare, Medicaid, Title X and the marketplaces would require significant amendment of eligibility laws.

Near the end of Verrilli's allotted time for argument, Sotomayor returned to the conscientious objector analogy. She distinguished conscientious objectors in wartime from the Zubik petitioners' challenge to the accommodation. In Sotomayor's view, conscientious objectors do not trigger regulatory power over third parties, but the effects of Zubik petitioners' request would rebound on petitioners' employees and students. Sotomayor's distinction points to the origins of the RFRA. Congress enacted RFRA in response to a 1989 Supreme Court decision called Employment Division v. Smith. The late Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion, in which the court stated that the Constitution's Free Exercise Clause did not excuse an individual from complying with a generally applicable law. In other words, the Constitution does not require accommodation for those whose religious beliefs place them in conflict with the law. Scalia's opinion listed examples-laws requiring military service, payment of taxes and vaccination. RFRA passed with bi-partisan support. Many supporters worried that the Supreme Court had peeled back protection for members of minority religions whose beliefs are more likely to differ from majoritarian norms underlying law. In Smith, for example, the court rejected free exercise claims by two Native Americans who were fired and denied unemployment benefits after using peyote in a religious ceremony. Before Smith, the court had recognized free exercise claims by a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church who was fired for refusing to work on Saturday, the Adventist Sabbath. In those two cases, exempting the religious claimants from state unemployment compensation laws did not interfere with others' rights. Exemption may have inconvenienced the state unemployment office, but it did not produce interference with third party rights.

With Scalia's death, it seems very likely the eight justices may split. Questions and statements in oral argument, as well as prior votes, indicate that Roberts, Alito, Thomas and perhaps Kennedy will hold that the existing accommodation violates petitioners' statutory rights under RFRA. Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan and Sotomayor, on the other hand, seem likely to find no violation.

In the meantime, the court has taken an unusual step. On March 29, the court issued an order [PDF] directing the parties to file additional briefs. The briefs are to address "whether and how contraceptive coverage may be obtained by petitioners' employees through petitioners' insurance companies, but in a way that does not require any involvement of petitioners beyond their own decision to provide health insurance without contraceptive coverage to their employees." The Order includes an example for the parties to consider. What if petitioners contracted with an insurer and informed the insurer that they did not want to include contraceptive coverage and the insurer notified employees that it would "provide cost-free contraceptive coverage and that such coverage is not paid for by petitioners and is not provided through petitioners' health plan." The example echoes a hypothetical that Clement and Francisco used in arguments. They posited an "uber-insurance policy" that provides contraceptive coverage to all women in the US, as a counterpoint to the alleged hijacked plans offered by petitioners to employees and students. In essence, they described a private single-payer plan for contraception. Both the court's example and the uber-policy scenario rely on the fictional existence of contraceptive-only plans. Even if petitioners and five justices will this type of plan into existence, it would require significant government intervention in the market, as well as two forms of insurance and the possibility of two different provider networks for petitioners' employees and students.

The order and the question it poses signals what the vote will hinge on. More specifically, it indicates Kennedy's attentiveness to the complicity concerns and the fact that RFRA does not permit religious claimants to hijack the government's administrative and regulatory systems to implement an accommodation. The court may split along other lines, as well. Ginsburg asked whether religious organizations should necessarily receive the same protection under RFRA as a church. Kennedy asked whether a church organization should be treated the same as a university. As noted, petitioners consist of both church-affiliated organizations and religious universities. The questions suggest that universities may be less likely to receive accommodations that impose burdens on third parties. On the other hand, Ginsburg and Kennedy's questions may just have been aimed at Francisco's sweeping assertions about the RFRA's scope of protection for free exercise.

What should be notable is that because the parties to the case are religious employers and the federal government, people who use contraceptives-mostly women, are positioned as third parties. Yet, the so-called third parties have a significant stake in this case: health, autonomy and equality. When you set aside the analogies and hypotheticals, the case positions women between the privatization of health care and the religious beliefs of others.

Faculty members at UC Davis School of Law publish truly unique scholarship that advances the legal profession. You can view their scholarly works via the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) Legal Scholarship Network. An archive can be found on this web page.

What follows here is the most recent collection of papers:

"The One Woman Director Mandate: History and Trajectory" 
CORPORATE GOVERNANCE IN INDIA: CHANGE AND CONTINUITY (ed. Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs) (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming)
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 472

AFRA AFSHARIPOUR, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: aafsharipour@ucdavis.edu

In 2013, India passed historic legislation mandating that boards of publicly listed and certain other large companies must include one woman director. The mandate, which came into effect on April 1, 2015, has the potential to vastly change the profile of Indian boards and board members. This chapter examines the history and trajectory of India's board diversity requirement. It seeks to understand the genesis and goals of this requirement, and explores some of the challenges that India has already faced and may continue to face with respect to the possible effectiveness of this requirement. The chapter then considers for the Indian context the implications of business and social science literature on gender diversity on corporate boards.

"In Defense of Content Regulation" 
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 483

ASHUTOSH AVINASH BHAGWAT, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: aabhagwat@ucdavis.edu

Since at least 1972, the central tenet of free speech doctrine has been that if a law regulates speech based on its content, and the speech is not unprotected or "low value," then the law is subject to strict scrutiny and presumptively unconstitutional. Few commentators have seriously questioned this rule, on the assumption that any deviation from it threatens to unleash censorship, and is in any event unnecessary. This article questions that consensus, and identifies specific circumstances in which, it argues, the government should be permitted to discriminate based on content.

The article begins by identifying a variety of situations in which courts have regularly evaded the general presumption against content regulation, even though the speech at issue was in principle fully protected. The core insight of this article is that these evasions make sense. The corollary of the rule against content discrimination is a presumption that all (fully protected) speech should be treated as equally valuable. But this presumption itself conflicts with the Supreme Court's repeated assertions that the First Amendment values certain speech - speech relevant to democratic self-governance - above all other forms of speech. So, all speech is not equal. Moreover, there are specific circumstances in which it is profoundly irrational to treat all speech as equally valuable. The core example is physical scarcity of speech opportunities. Here, some speech must be allowed, at the expense of other speech. Why not, then, favor more over less valuable speech? Yet current doctrine forbids this choice. The article goes on to identify other specific, objectively definable situations where the presumption against content regulation should be reconsidered. It concludes by exploring, and rejecting counterarguments.

"Information Goes Global: Protecting Privacy, Security, and the New Economy in a World of Cross-Border Data Flows" 
E15Initiative. Geneva: International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) and World Economic Forum, 2015.
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 480

USMAN AHMED, eBay Inc.
Email: uahmed2@gmail.com
ANUPAM CHANDER, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: achander@ucdavis.edu

This paper addresses the question of whether it is possible to balance the need for a free flow of information across borders with legitimate government concerns related to public order, consumer privacy, and security. The paper begins by highlighting the risks associated with limitations on free information flows and the policy concerns that lead to these limitations. The paper then provides an analysis of the current international regime on cross-border information flows. The authors argue that specific binding trade language promoting cross-border flows - combined with continued international cooperation - will enhance, rather than undermine, public order, national security, and privacy.

"Should Rape Shield Laws Bar Proof that the Alleged Victim Has Made Similar, Untruthful Rape Accusations in the Past?: Fair Symmetry with the Rape Sword Laws" 
Pacific Law Journal, Forthcoming
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 478

EDWARD J. IMWINKELRIED, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: EJIMWINKELRIED@ucdavis.edu

Traditionally, the common law enforced a general ban on character evidence. More specifically, the common law prohibited a proponent from introducing evidence of a person's other conduct as proof of the person's character trait and then using the trait as proof that on a particular relevant occasion, the person acted consistently with the trait. The prohibition applied to both sides in criminal as well as civil cases. Federal Rules 404-05 extend the prohibition to evidence on the historical merits, and to an extent Rules 608-09 apply the ban to evidence offered on a credibility theory. Rule 608(b) deviates from the ban by permitting cross-examination about a witness's other untruthful acts but bars extrinsic evidence of the acts.

In 1995 Congress enacted the "rape sword" statutes, Rules 413-14. The statutes carve out an exception to the traditional prohibition and allow the prosecution to introduce evidence of an accused's other sexual assaults or child molestations on a character theory to prove the accused's commission of the charged offense. The available psychological research does not warrant drawing a character inference when there is only one or a few other instances of similar conduct. However, the proponents of the statutes contend that the statutes are defensible because these prosecutions often devolve into swearing contests and the prosecution has a legitimate need for evidence to break the credibility tie by corroborating the victim's testimony that the offense occurred.

Especially since 1995, in these prosecutions the defense has attempted to introduce evidence, including extrinsic testimony, of similar, untruthful accusations by the complainant. However, the prosecution has objected that such evidence runs afoul of the prohibitions in Rules 404-05, 608, and 412, the rape shield statute. A few jurisdictions have construed these statutes as banning the defense evidence. However, many jurisdictions allow defense cross-examination about similar, untruthful accusations. Even in these jurisdictions, though, the courts ordinarily exclude extrinsic proof.

The first thesis of this article is that the courts should permit cross-examination when the defense has sufficient proof that the prior accusation was untruthful. Like prosecution evidence proffered under Rules 413-14, this evidence is logically relevant on a character reasoning theory.

Moreover, if the proponents of the rape sword statutes are correct, like the government the defense has an acute need for evidence to prevail in the swearing contest. Just as evidence of other offenses by the accused corroborates the complainant's testimony that the accused attacked him or her, evidence of the complainant's prior, untruthful accusations corroborates the accused's testimony that the complainant has fabricated the charge against the accused.

The second thesis of this article is that as a matter of policy, extrinsic evidence of the prior similar accusations should be admissible. Admittedly, Rule 608(b) purports to enunciate an absolute ban on extrinsic evidence of prior untruthful acts. However, Rule 608(b) is the only impeachment technique subject to a rigid, absolute prohibition of extrinsic evidence; and the wisdom of singling out 608(b) impeachment is questionable. Furthermore, the accused has an extraordinary need for extrinsic evidence in 413-14 cases. Women and children who are the alleged victims of these offenses are exceptionally sympathetic figures on the witness stand; and if the defense cannot disprove the alleged victim's denial on cross-examination, the cross-examination is likely to be counterproductive - the jurors may conclude that the cross-examination was a second, cruel victimization of the complainant. At least in this context, if the law is going to permit inquiry about prior, untruthful accusations, the defense ought to have the right to resort to extrinsic evidence.

The rape sword statutes impact the balance of the criminal justice system in Rule 413-14 prosecutions. To maintain the essential balance of the adversary system in these cases, Evidence law should permit the defense to introduce extrinsic evidence of the complainant's prior, similar, untruthful accusations.

"Back to the Future? Returning Discretion to Crime-Based Removal Decisions" 
New York University Law Review Online, Vol. 90, 2016, Forthcoming
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 479

KEVIN R. JOHNSON, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: krjohnson@ucdavis.edu

Jason A. Cade has powerfully advocated for returning greater discretion to the courts and agencies in making and reviewing Executive Branch decisions to remove noncitizens from the United States. His latest article, Return of the JRAD, 90 NYU L. REV. ONLINE 36 (2015), calls for a revival of a now-discarded procedural device of allowing courts sentencing noncitizen criminal defendants to make a "Judicial Recommendation Against Deportation" (JRAD) that would bar the Executive Branch from removing a noncitizen from the United States.

Congress eliminated the JRAD from the immigration laws in 1990. In calling for its comeback, Cade points to a ruling by respected federal district court judge Jack Weinstein. In United States v. Aguilar, the judge issued a sentencing order that, despite the fact that Congress abolished the JRAD a quarter century ago, resembled the old recommendations against deportation. The court thus went beyond the law on the books to advocate against the removal from the United States of a one-time, non-violent criminal offender with U.S. citizen children.

One might dismiss Judge Weinstein's recommendation as mere dicta. However, Jason Cade views the order as a much-needed sign of judicial resistance to the harsh criminal removal provisions of the immigration laws. He seeks to return discretionary authority to the courts to ensure greater proportionality and reasonableness to contemporary removal decisions.

Part I expresses full agreement with Jason Cade's conclusion in Return of the JRAD that the modern criminal removal system fails to protect against unfair removals of immigrants.

Part II adds a powerful justification to the call for the reform of the modern criminal removal system - namely, the serious concerns with the overwhelming modern racial disparities in removals, which directly flow directly from racial disparities in the operation of the modern criminal justice system in the United States. The contemporary criminal removal regime has disparate impacts on Latina/o immigrants, who today comprise the overwhelming majority of the persons deported from the United States. In fact, the modern removal system might accurately be characterized as a Latina/o removal system. The racial impacts of contemporary criminal removals alone warrant a wholesale reconsideration of criminal removals under current American immigration law.

Part III considers separation of powers concerns in the administration of the immigration laws. Jason Cade indirectly raises a critically important question concerning the branch of the federal government that is best equipped - constitutionally and politically - to curb the excesses of the modern criminal removal system. Fundamental separation of powers principles suggest that Congress should be the focus of reforms.

The challenging political question posed to reformers is how to convince Congress to dismantle the mandatory criminal removal regime that it built. As politicians frequently employ anti-immigrant themes for political gain, noncitizens with criminal convictions continue to be among the most reviled of all immigrants in American politics. Only through a political change of heart can Congress begin to restore discretion to removal decisions and better ensure that respect is afforded to the weighty human interests of immigrants, their families, and communities.

"The Law of Look and Feel" 
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 482

PETER LEE, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: ptrlee@ucdavis.edu
MADHAVI SUNDER, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: msunder@ucdavis.edu

Design is the currency of corporations, and increasingly, under the Demsetzian logic, the subject of property claims by them. The world's biggest company owes its value largely to design. Where once Apple's claim to own its popular graphical user interface was rebuffed readily by courts, today, design-related claims lead to billion dollar judgments in Apple's favor. Today design - which includes everything from shape, color, and packaging to user interface, consumer experience, and organizational structure - plays a central role in the modern economy and is increasingly the subject of intellectual property law's attention.

But the law of design is confused and confusing. It is splintered among various doctrines in copyright, trademark and trade dress, and patent law. Indeed, while nearly every area of modern IP law has been marshalled in the service of design protection, the law has taken a siloed approach, with separate disciplines developing ad hoc rules and exceptions to design protection. To make matters worse, different disciplines within IP use similar terms and concepts - functionality, consumer confusion - but apply them in wholly different, even contradictory ways.

This Article provides the first comprehensive assessment of the regulation of consumers' aesthetic experiences in copyright, trade dress, and patent law - what we call "the law of look and feel." We canvas the diverse ways that parties have utilized (and stretched) intellectual property law to protect design in a broad range of products and services, from Pac-Man to Louboutin shoes to the iPhone, from the "feel of the '70s" captured in Marvin Gaye's music, the scantily clad employees of Abercrombie & Fitch, and the décor of Mexican restaurants, to Apple's technologies of "pinch to zoom," "bounce-back" and "rubberbanding." In so doing, we identify an emergent "law of look and feel" that finds unity among the diversity of IP laws protecting aesthetic experience. Going further, we argue that the new enclosure movement of design, if not comprehensively reformed and grounded in theory, can in fact erode innovation, competition, and cultural cohesion itself.

"Justice in the Hinterlands: Arkansas as a Case Study of the Rural Lawyer Shortage and Evidence-Based Solutions to Alleviate It" 
University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review, Vol. 37, 2015
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 481

LISA R. PRUITT, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: lrpruitt@ucdavis.edu
J. CLIFF MCKINNEY, Quattlebaum, Grooms & Tull PLLC
Email: cmckinney@QGTlaw.com
BART CALHOUN, McDaniel, Richardson & Calhoun
Email: Calhoun.bart@gmail.com

In recent years, state high courts, legislatures, bar associations, and other justice system stakeholders have become aware that a shortage of lawyers afflicts many rural communities across the nation and that this dearth of lawyers has implications for access to justice. A lack of systematically collected data about precisely where lawyers are - and are not - in any given state is an obstacle to solving the problem. Another impediment is a lack of information about why lawyers are choosing not to practice in rural locales and about the sorts of incentives that might entice them to do so.

A principal aim of this article and the empirical work that informs it is to begin to develop evidence that will inform solutions to the rural lawyer shortage. In that regard, the article, written for the UALR Bowen "Access to Justice" symposium, makes two significant contributions. The first is to literally map where Arkansas lawyers are and then to look for trends and patterns regarding the least-served communities. The second is to survey law students and attorneys to determine their attitudes toward rural practice and rural living more generally, while also assessing openness to specific opportunities and incentives aimed at attracting lawyers to underserved communities.

We focused our analysis on Arkansas's 25 least populous counties, which we refer to as the "Rural Counties." All except one of these counties has a population of less than 15,000. Collectively, the Rural Counties are home to some 255,000 residents but fewer than 200 total lawyers, less than half of whom accept clients for representation, as signified by having an IOLTA Account. Representing a third of the state's 75 counties, the Rural Counties lie in clusters in each of the state's four quadrants, and most are relatively distant from state and regional population centers. Among these counties, we found no clear correlation between high poverty and low ratios of attorneys to population. As a general rule, the Rural Counties that are farthest from a metropolitan area have the most acute attorney shortages, although several counties in the Mississippi Delta stood out as exceptions. Not surprisingly, the attorney population in Arkansas's Rural Counties is an aging one. We also found that many other nonmetropolitan counties - those with populations somewhat larger than the Rural Counties - have poor attorney-to-population ratios, suggesting that attorney shortages are on the horizon there, too.

Meanwhile, Arkansas's attorneys tend to be highly concentrated in the state's population centers, with particular overrepresentation in Pulaski County (the state's most populous county and home to state capital Little Rock) and two contiguous central Arkansas counties: 48% of the state's attorneys are a mismatch for just 21% of the state's population in those three counties. The state's second and third most populous counties, Benton and Washington, in the state's booming northwest corridor, have attorney populations more commensurate with their populations.

Our survey of students at the state's two law schools revealed few student respondents who grew up in or had spent much time in Arkansas's Rural Counties or in similarly low-population counties in other states. Further, only a handful of students indicate that they plan to practice in the state's nonmetropolitan areas, let alone the Rural Counties specifically. Nevertheless, many students - particularly among those who grew up in the Rural Counties - expressed openness to working in these counties if given specific opportunities and incentives to do so. When asked about what deterred them from pursuing rural practice, the most dominant theme was concern about economic viability; a lack of cultural and other amenities associated with urban living was a close second. Some students also expressed concern about the greater challenge of finding a life partner in rural places. A number of students expressed very negative attitudes toward rural people, places and practice. Recurring themes included an expectation of rural bias toward racial and sexual minorities and women; concerns about lack of anonymity in the community and lack of professionalism in the justice system; and a shortage of clients able to afford an attorney's services. Still, a critical mass - certainly enough to meet the need in Arkansas's rural communities - indicated willingness to practice in a rural locale if provided fiscal and professional supports, e.g., student loan repayment assistance, mentoring, training in law practice management. When the few students who indicated their intent to practice in a rural area were asked about what they found appealing about such a prospect, the most common theme was autonomy - the ability to have one's own practice and to develop and maintain local clientele.

Respondents to the lawyer survey were generally less negative about rural practice than their law student counterparts. On the whole, most attorneys expressed contentment with their practice location, whether rural or urban. One surprise among the lawyer survey results was that employment opportunities for spouses were less important than we anticipated, perhaps because urban lawyers - the vast majority of survey respondents - take these for granted.

We close with suggested reforms for Arkansas's institutional stakeholders. Among other actions, we suggest that Arkansas follow the lead of South Dakota and offer loan repayment assistance to attorneys who are willing to make a multi-year commitment to practice in an underserved rural area. This incentive has proved popular in South Dakota, which has doubled the size of its program in just two years in response to a high degree of attorney interest. Our survey results give us every reason to believe that such a program, as well as other interventions to bolster the rural lawyer population in Arkansas, could be just as successful. In any event, we anticipate that our efforts to document in detail the rural attorney shortage in Arkansas will provide an incentive - and, we hope, a model - for other states wishing to better understand and alleviate their rural access-to-justice deficits.

"How Litigants Evaluate the Characteristics of Legal Procedures: A Multi-Court Empirical Study" 
UC Davis Law Review, Vol. 49, 2016
UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 477

DONNA SHESTOWSKY, University of California, Davis - School of Law
Email: dshest@ucdavis.edu

This Article presents findings from the first multi-court field study examining how civil litigants evaluate the characteristics of legal procedures shortly after their cases are filed in state court. Analyses revealed that litigants evaluated the characteristics in terms of control - i.e., whether the characteristics granted relative control to the litigants themselves or to third parties (e.g., mediators, judges). Although the litigants indicated a desire to be present for the resolution process, they preferred third-party control to litigant control. They also wanted third parties to control the process more than the outcome. Gender, age group, and case-type significantly predicted attraction to third-party control, whereas attraction to litigant control was predicted by whether litigants had a pre-existing relationship with each other, how much they valued a future relationship with the opposing party, party type, the type of opposing party, and court location. Implications for legal policy and lawyering are discussed.

"The Uncondemned," a feature documentary about the first conviction of rape as a war crime, is showing at the Napa Valley Film Festival, which starts tomorrow, Thursday Nov. 12.  

That first conviction came in 1998 in a decision by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in the case against Jean-Paul Akayesu, the mayor of Taba Commune.  I worked at ICTR as a gender consultant in 1996, analyzing the evidence of sexual assault in the Akayesu matter, and I am therefore one of the "baby lawyers" who worked on the case and who is featured in the film. (Photo below from 1996, as we flew between Kigali where the Office of the Prosecutor was located and Arusha, Tanzania, where the tribunal judges sat.) 

The film already won two awards at the Hamptons International Film Festival, including the Brizzolara Family Foundation Award for the best film about conflict and resolution. The Guardian.com filed this story about the film and that award.

I have seen the film once before, this summer in Rwanda when the Rwandan witnesses (one of whom is pictured in the flyer) saw it for the first time.  Read more in this previous blog entry.  I'm looking forward to seeing it again tomorrow night, this time with two UC Davis colleagues, Keith Watenpaugh (Religious Studies, History, Human Rights) and Michael Lazzara (Spanish, Cinema and Digital Media). Both are involved with UC Davis's Human Rights Initiative, a project of the Davis Humanities Institute.  Hope to see some of you in Napa this weekend, where the film will be shown at a different venue each day.  Here is the schedule.

This week, I am in Rwanda for the premiere of the documentary film The Uncondemned.

The Uncondemned documents the legal and political path to the 1998 conviction of Jean-Paul Akayesu, the mayor of Taba Commune, Rwanda, in the first-ever conviction of rape as an act of genocide and as a crime against humanity.  The prosecution and conviction were at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). a forerunner to the International Criminal Court.  The Rwandan Genocide occurred over about 3 months, beginning in April 1994, after the plane carrying the president of Rwanda, a moderate Hutu, was shot down. 

I was a gender consultant to ICTR in 1996 where I did the initial legal analysis of the sexual assault case against Akayesu, arguing that the indictment (for killings as acts of genocide and as crimes against humanity) against him should be amended to include charges of rape and other sexual assaults that occurred at the Taba Bureau Communale, which was under his control.  I appear in the film, along with the two American lawyers who tried the case, Pierre-Richard Prosper and Sara Darehshori. Also featured are other officials of ICTR, journalists who covered the genocide, and human rights advocates. 

Most exciting is that the three women who were the key witnesses against Akayesu are in the film, along with the Taba commune social worker who encouraged them to testify and helped to facilitate their doing so.  Those four women attended the premiere.  Their statements were the ones I was analyzing back in 1996. 

The President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, hosted the screening of The Uncondemned in the capital city, Kigali. Also among those in attendance were the Minister of Justice, the Foreign Minister and a number of women parliamentarians. Official photos from the event are posted to the President's  Flickr album.  I am in a couple of the photos there, and my son William is one, too, near the bottom of the page.  

Photo: Professor Lisa Pruitt with two of the rape survivors, Serrafina and Victoire, who testified against Akayesu.

The Uncondemned is expected to be in distribution across the U.S. and worldwide in 2016.

Cross-posted from Justia's Verdict.

In my last column, Part I of this Two-Part series, I argued that lower courts are justified in paying (indeed perhaps required to pay) close attention to Justice Kennedy's concurring opinion in this summer's blockbuster Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ruling, even though the "Opinion of the Court" in that case had the support of five Justices. Because Justice Kennedy was one of the five in the majority in this 5-4 case, his understanding of the majority opinion-on which he based his decision to join and which is explained in his concurring opinion-essentially represents the narrowest common grounds on which a majority of Justices agreed.

In the space below, I suggest a number of significant ways in which Justice Kennedy's take on the majority opinion, which he says are among the "reasons . . . [he] join[ed] it[,]" counsels in favor of a narrow reading of what the Court decided. To see why this is so we must directly compare Justice Alito's majority opinion (and the language and tone it used) with Justice Kennedy's writing.

The Basic Structure of Justice Alito's Opinion of the Court

Justice Alito's opinion can be broken down into two big questions: (1) Does the Hobby Lobby corporation partake of protection under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA)?; and (2) Is the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) regulations the "least restrictive means" to accomplish the "compelling" government interest-that female employees receive contraceptive service insurance at no cost-as required under RFRA?

On the first question, Justice Alito reasons quite broadly, and rests statutory protection for Hobby Lobby on the ground that a for-profit closely held corporation is itself a "person" capable of the "exercise of religion" under RFRA (rather than resting protection on the idea that the persons whom RFRA protects are the owners of a corporation, and the fact that Hobby Lobby's owners are operating through the corporate form should not strip them of the statutory protection they have as individual human beings to practice religion). Because of this broad reasoning, and because Justice Kennedy did not say anything in his concurrence on this question, the Court (and lower courts) may find it difficult to deny RFRA coverage to publicly traded corporations whose managements try to assert claims for religious exemptions in the future.

But on the second question-concerning what RFRA protection means once RFRA applies-the breadth of the Court's ruling is more open to debate, because Justice Kennedy did say things that might diverge from what Justice Alito said. I mention four such possible divergences here.

Some Ways in Which Justice Kennedy's Understanding of the What the Majority Held Might Be a Narrow One

First, and perhaps least significant doctrinally but potentially important optically, while Justice Alito characterizes the test the government must meet to justify denying an exemption under RFRA as "exceptionally demanding," Justice Kennedy is content to call it "stringent" (citing his own opinion in a prior case). This subtle language difference may send slightly different messages to lower courts about how tough to be in evaluating arguments put forth by the federal government in future cases.

Second, on the question whether the government has a "compelling" interest (the kind of interest it needs under RFRA) "in ensuring that all women have access to all FDA-approved contraceptives without cost sharing," Justice Alito spends a great deal of space explaining why it is "arguable" that the government should lose on this question. In particular, he discusses how the exceptions the Affordable Care Act creates for existing health plans to be "grandfathered"-and thus not required to provide contraceptive coverage-undermine the notion that the government's interest is compelling. Justice Alito ultimately finds it "unnecessary to adjudicate this issue [because] [w]e will assume that the interest in guaranteeing cost-free access . . . is compelling."

Justice Kennedy on this question writes in a way that suggests a much stronger likelihood that he would, if push came to shove, find (as the four dissenters did) the government's interest to be compelling, notwithstanding the grandfather exceptions. He says that is "it is important to confirm that a premise of the Court's opinion is its assumption that the . . . regulation here furthers a legitimate and compelling interest in the health of the female employees." It is true that he uses the word "assumption"-which reminds us that the Court assumed but did not decide the government's interest was compelling. But one wonders why it is important to "confirm" an "assumption" unless the assumption is likely to be correct. Also, Justice Kennedy starts this part of his discussion by saying that the federal government "makes the case that the mandate serves . . . [a] compelling interest" (emphasis added). "Makes the case" is a term that can be read to mean simply "argues" or "contends," but more often it is used to mean "provides good reasons to think."

If Justice Kennedy is, in fact, sending a signal here that government-granted grandfather exceptions based on convenience and ease of transition do not undermine the compelling nature of a government interest, and if that is how lower courts read his tone here, then such a signal could have important consequences for the range of other government interests that are asserted in subsequent RFRA cases, and other cases in which the government needs to establish a compelling interest. Government often needs to grant exceptions to facilitate enactment of big new regulatory schemes, and if the inclusion of such exceptions jeopardizes the idea that the government has compelling interests on which it is acting, a great deal more government regulation would be vulnerable.

The Key Questions of What the Less Restrictive Alternative in Hobby Lobby Was and How Competing Interests Should Be Weighed

 Third, on the important question whether the Government should lose because it could pay for the contraceptive coverage itself (rather than requiring employers to provide it), and government payment is a "less restrictive means" to accomplish the government's (compelling) objective, Justice Alito seems to try to have his cake and eat it too. He says ultimately that "we need not rely" on this possible accommodation as a basis for Hobby Lobby's victory because the federal government could also simply tell insurance companies (rather than employers) to provide the coverage (as the government does for non-profit corporations), but this language comes only after Justice Alito had already spent a lot of ink explaining why the government-payment option seems to be required under RFRA. Indeed, Justice Alito observes that it is "hard to understand" the Government's argument to the contrary. Moreover, even though Justice Alito writes that the Court "need not rely" on this accommodation, he doesn't say whether he means simply that there are two possible accommodations that explain Hobby Lobby's victory (in which case neither of them is one that must be relied on), or instead that the second accommodation (having the insurance companies provide the coverage) is the statutorily required accommodation in this case, such that the Court doesn't decide whether, in the absence of such an option, the government would have to pay itself. Note that, unlike the language concerning whether there is a compelling interest, Justice Alito does not say the Court declines "to adjudicate" this issue.

Justice Kennedy, by contrast, does not equivocate here, and makes clear that, as he reads the majority opinion he is joining, the Court is not deciding the question whether the Government would have to pay itself if the insurance-company-accommodation were not available: "In discussing th[e] [government-payment] alternative, the Court does not address whether the proper response to a legitimate claim for freedom in the health care arena is for the Government to create an additional program [, because] [i]n these cases, it is the Court's understanding that an accommodation may be made to the employers without imposition of a whole new program or burden on the Government." For this reason, he says, the "Court does not resolve" the question whether creating a new government spending program could be required.

Fourth, and more generally, on the question of how much cost the government must be willing to bear to accommodate religious exercise, Justice Kennedy notes: "[T]his existing model [i.e., having the insurance company bear whatever cost may be involved], designed precisely for this problem, might well suffice to distinguish the instant cases from many others in which it is more difficult and expensive to accommodate a governmental program to countless religious claims based on an alleged statutory right of free exercise" (emphasis added).

And, importantly, he also says, apparently in response to concerns that federal sex discrimination workplace protection will go by the boards-a prospect that Justice Alito's opinion pointedly did not deny-that religious exercise, while important, cannot "unduly restrict other persons, such as employees, in protecting their own interests, interests the law deems compelling." Justice Alito does acknowledge that courts must take "adequate account of the burden a requested accommodation imposes on non-beneficiaries," but he makes this concession in a footnote that literally marginalizes the concerns of third parties.

Justice Kennedy's language makes clear that he will, in deciding when an exemption under RFRA is warranted, surely consider costs, both to the government and to third persons, as a counterbalance to any assertion of religious liberty. Indeed, in some ways, Justice Kennedy's opinion is eerily similar in substance to Justice Blackmun's writing in National League of Cities that I discussed in Part I of this series; Justice Kennedy recognized the right to an exemption in the case before him, but he indicated more directly than did Justice Alito that in future RFRA cases some kind of balance-rather than an absolute or near-absolute entitlement to exemption-is called for.

If this is so, and if (as I think they can and should) lower courts take their cue from the writing of this fifth Justice in the majority in Hobby Lobby, then Justice Kennedy's writing may go a fair ways in determining exactly how many companies can successfully use Hobby Lobby to obtain exemptions by suing under RFRA.

The Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice has published a special symposium issue devoted to Presumed Incompetent: The Intersection of Race and Class for Women in Academia, the recent book edited by Professor Angela Harris with Professor Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs of Seattle University, Professor Yolanda Flores Niemann of the University of North Texas, and Professor Carmen G. González of Seattle University School of Law.

The book, published in 2012 by Utah University Press, features personal narratives and qualitative empirical studies that expose the daunting challenges faced by academic women of color as they navigate the often hostile terrain of higher education. The special issue of the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice is based upon a March 8, 2013 symposium that featured more than 40 speakers who were invited to celebrate and respond to the book. Among the contributing scholars is Dean Kevin R. Johnson, whose article "Important Lessons for University Leaders" (co-authored with Maria P. Lopez) appears in the issue.  

Angela Harris is one of the nation's foremost scholars in the fields of critical race theory, feminist legal theory, and civil rights. She joined the UC Davis faculty from UC Berkeley School of Law in 2011.