Big News Everybody

Five years after the last one is the perfect time for a new blog post.

Effective July 1, I’ll be joining my alma mater, the criminally underappreciated University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law, as an assistant professor teaching Torts and Lawyering Skills. After five years in the trenches as an undergrad professor teaching legal studies majors to be irreplaceable paralegals or standout law students, I now get to teach the same stuff (and a few of the same students) but at the law school level. What fun!

Of course, that means I’ll be leaving my post as the Managing Attorney for the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights. It is a bittersweet departure. Over the past year and a half I greatly enjoyed my return to practice from academia. Under my watch, the agency’s legal unit filed its first amicus briefs (in any court) in a decade, made its first regulatory updates in thirty years, and closed cases that had inexplicably been left dormant for a long time. Though the agency still suffers from regular budget cuts and staffing shortages (legislative austerity, once reserved for emergencies, is now permanent), it is still doing good work and I’ll be leaving it in a very good place.

As for teaching, I had not truly given it up. Last semester I taught two courses at UofL Law, including Con Law II, easily my favorite class to teach. The semester before I got to teach Employment Law, which was a great refresher on all the aspects of workplace law that I do not normally deal with in my day-to-day work enforcing the Kentucky Civil Rights Act (which deals only with class-based discrimination). But as much as I enjoy teaching as a second job, I’m very happy to be doing it again full time.

UofL Law has done a very bold thing—it has dared to hire one of its own alums to teach doctrinal courses as a tenure-track faculty member. For so many years, law schools have restricted hiring to a very specific kind of candidate and often overlooked their own graduates (even those with exemplary practice experience or academic achievement). No longer, it seems. Earlier this month I attended the AALS conference for new law professors in DC and found myself surrounded by many just like me. And at UofL I’ll be in a class of entering faculty that includes several other alums, including my esteemed former law partner Dan Canon, who I am very excited to be working with again after years apart.

The students will benefit from having increased faculty diversity. There is a place in legal academia not only for graduates of the Top 14 and former federal clerks but also for local lawyers who took a different path to teaching. I once sat in the same seat they sat in, in the same room, at the same school. I practice law in the same city and state they will most likely practice law. I am long-time friends or classmates with many of the people who will interview them for jobs. I wish I had had more professors like those now being hired.

Now back in academia, will I regularly update this site again? Who knows. But if you need me, you know where to find me. See you in the Fall!

Bag of Torts

Tort law is a never-ending highlight reel of human drama and catastrophe. That’s why I love teaching it.

A very noteworthy tort claim was filed early this month in Hardin County, Kentucky. The allegation, in a nutshell, is this: a disgruntled customer of an auto dealership posted a bunch of crappy reviews and mailed a bunch of questionable items to a staff member.

The allegations, in their specificity, are much more colorful. A fellow named Troy Mann is being accused of sending through the mail, among other things, “glitter bombs” and several “bags of dicks,” which then resulted in much harm and offense by the recipient.

I present to you, key screenshots from the complaint.

First, a visual depiction of the various “glitter bombs” allegedly mailed by the defendant to the plaintiff:

Glitter bombs were not the only items mailed to the plaintiff, however:

Well, that’s…something. But what’s the big deal? So what if this company makes tacky stuff people can mail to each other? Where’s the harm in that?

Tort law provides plaintiffs with a cause of action called “battery,” an intentional tort that involves harmful or offensive bodily contact intentionally caused by someone else. As it turns out:

Note that no actual physical injury is alleged. That’s not necessary to prove the tort of battery. Merely “offensive” contact can be enough, hence why the complaint alleges that the plaintiff was “shocked, scared, and offended” when the Bag of Dicks made contact with her.

The complaint goes on to describe additional similar mailings received by the plaintiff, all of which made offensive contact with her or put her in apprehension of such contact (all that is required for the tort of “assault,” which is also alleged in the complaint).

The complaint also includes claims for defamation and business interference, based on purposely negative reviews allegedly posted online about the plaintiff car dealership.

No doubt the plaintiffs in this case sincerely believe in the merits of their claims. It could very well be considered offensive to take a surprise Jizz Bomb directly to the face.

But as a teacher of legal writing I really appreciate this complaint because it shows that even the most clinical legal writing can also be deadpan hilarious.

Undue Burdens

This week, Kentucky will defend state regulations designed to make it more difficult to open and operate abortion clinics. Known as "TRAP laws," these regulations target abortion providers with medically unnecessary hurdles to operation. Two Louisville abortion providers, Planned Parenthood and the private EMW Women's Surgical Center, are suing, arguing that the state is using unconstitutional regulations to either keep them out of business (PP) or shut them down (EMW).

The key regulation at issue in Kentucky is one that requires abortion clinics to acquire "written agreements" with a "licensed acute-care hospital" and a "local ambulance service" to care for clinic patients who may need emergency treatment beyond what the clinic itself can provide. The regulation does not specify what content is required in these written agreements, nor does it specify how close a hospital must be to the clinic for an agreement to be valid.

There are several problems with this regulation. First, hospitals and ambulance services are required by law to treat and transport emergency patients no matter where they come from. If a patient at the downtown Louisville location of EMW were to face a serious emergency, the clinic need only call 911 and a Louisville Metro EMS ambulance would arrive to take her to the nearest hospital, which is just a few blocks away. This would happen automatically, no "written agreements" necessary. So the written agreement regulation is medically unnecessary.

Second, if a hospital and ambulance service would be available anyway, what's the problem with getting a written agreement that confirms this? It should be simple, right? Well, Governor Matt Bevin has allegedly used his power to pressure Louisville hospitals not to enter into written agreements with abortion providers. For example, Planned Parenthood and the University of Louisville Hospital claim that that hospital rescinded a written agreement with the PP clinic after Bevin and his underlings directly threatened the hospital's various funding sources. PP then reached out to hospitals in southern Indiana (less than a mile away, just across the Ohio River) and in Lexington (50 minutes away) but the state has rejected those as too remote (even though the regulation specifies no geographical limits).

So PP is left without the paperwork necessary to get a license. And now EMW is trying to renew its license and is facing the same problems.

Regulations like these are specifically designed to interfere with a woman's right and access to abortion. Similar regs have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court because they create an "undue burden" on the autonomy of women without providing any legitimate medical benefit. Just last year, the Court struck down Texas regulations (and similar ones in other states) that required abortion providers to have hospital admitting privileges and required the clinics to be equipped as if they are "ambulatory surgical centers," even though they are not.

All of these schemes are part of a desperate flanking effort by conservative politicians to ban abortion without actually banning it, which they cannot do outright under current Supreme Court case law dating all the way back to 1974's Roe v. Wade decision.

Speaking of Roe, immediately after that decision, Kentucky passed new laws allowing and regulating abortion, but very begrudgingly. It set strict rules on who could perform abortions, where they could perform them, and what hoops women had to jump through to get them.

These laws are of varying coherence. One of the more head-scratching examples comes from KRS 311.710, the "Legislative Findings" section, first passed just after Roe. Subsection 1 reads:

How, exactly, the Commonwealth can ensure that an unborn child continues its "life after its abortion" is not explained in the law. Nor is it explained in Nebraska law, which passed a nearly identical statute around the same time. The Nebraska legislature uses stronger language to denounce abortion than Kentucky does, and it identifies Roe v. Wade by the date it was decided. Kentucky is more subtle, but does conclude the statute with a promise - if the Supreme Court changes its mind about this silly "woman's right to privacy" thing, you can bet the Commonwealth will ban abortion again.

It is the present intention of the General Assembly to protect the valid and compelling interests of the Commonwealth and its inhabitants without unduly burdening a woman's constitutional privacy rights as delineated by the courts. If, however, the United States Constitution is amended or relevant judicial decisions are reversed or modified, the declared policy of this Commonwealth to recognize and to protect the lives of all human beings regardless of their degree of biological development shall be fully restored.

So far that hasn't happened (if not without trying), and, presuming that the federal courts maintain their current position on TRAP schemes, Kentucky's attempted end run around Roe and its progeny via unnecessary and burdensome regulations will soon be eliminated, frustrating once again the "declared policy" of the Commonwealth.

Old Books and Old Justices

In my frequent antique store book-hunting excursions, I often seek out old history and law books. The older the better. An old history or law book is like a time machine, zooming a current day reader off to a different world with different social norms, historical assumptions, and methods of thought.

To my delight, I was recently able to find a 1938 copy of professor Jerome Hall's Readings in Jurisprudence law school textbook for just two dollars. In it, along with dozens of well-known essays and articles about legal theory and judicial decision-making, is an excerpt from a 1921 essay by Benjamin Cardozo, at the time a state court judge in New York. Just over ten years later he would become a justice of the United States Supreme Court.

The excerpted article, "The Nature of the Judicial Process," describes Cardozo's multi-faceted approach to judging, an approach that would probably seem far too nuanced and malleable to the far more rigid contemporary schools of statutory and constitutional interpretation. 

Below is the excerpt as it appears in Professor Hall's book:

My analysis of the judicial process comes then to this, and little more: logic, and history, and custom, and utility, and the accepted standards of right conduct, are the forces which singly or in combination shape the progress of the law. Which of these forces shall dominate in any case, must depend largely upon the comparative importance or value of the social interests that will be thereby promoted or impaired. One of the most fundamental social interests is that law shall be uniform and impartial. There must be nothing in its action that savors of prejudice or favor or even arbitrary whim or fitfulness. Therefore in the main there shall be adherence to precedent. There shall be symmetrical development, consistently with history or custom when history or custom has been the motive force, or the chief one, in giving shape to existing rules, and with logic or philosophy when the motive power has been theirs. But symmetrical development may be bought at too high a price. Uniformity ceases to be a good when it becomes uniformity of oppression. The social interest served by symmetry or certainty must then be balanced against the social interest served by equity and fairness or other elements of social welfare. These may enjoin upon the judge the duty of drawing the line at another angle, of staking a path along new courses, of marking a new point of departure from which others who come after him will set out upon their journey.

If you ask how he is to know when one interest outweighs another, I can only answer that he must get his knowledge just as the legislator gets it, from experience and study and reflection; in brief, from life itself. Here, indeed is the point of contact between the legislator's work and his. The choice of methods, the appraisement of values, must in the end be guided by like considerations for the one as for the other. Each indeed is legislating within the limits of his competence. No doubt the limits for the judge are narrower. He legislates only between gaps. He fills the open spaces in the law. How far he may go without traveling beyond the walls of the interstices cannot be staked out for him upon a chart. He must learn it for himself as he gains the sense of fitness and proportion that comes with years of habitude in the practice of an art.

And, as a bonus relic from the past, I found a brief (and positive) review of Professor Hall's book, published in the 1939 volume of the fledgling Louisiana Law Review. The reviewer concludes:

Obergefell Grows Equal Protection Teeth on its Second Birthday

In Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Anthony Kennedy focused primarily upon marriage as a "fundamental right" protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As such, the states were required to come up with a strong argument why they could deny it to anyone, let alone gay couples. They couldn't, at least not in the eyes of five of the justices, and the gay marriage bans were struck down.

Justice Kennedy didn't totally limit his reasoning to the due process question of rights, however. He did specifically reference the doctrine of equal protection - also required by the Fourteenth Amendment - and said that it and due process are tied together, based on similar principles of liberty and freedom and both protective of dignity and autonomy.

But many observers have criticized Obergefell for focusing too heavily on fundamental rights and not enough on equal protection. 

That's where Arkansas comes in. There, as in most states that I'm aware of, it is customary for the male spouse of a mother to appear on her child's birth certificate. It happens automatically, regardless of whether the husband is really the biological father of the child. There is no distinction for cases of adultery or artificial insemination. If you're a husband and your wife has a child, your name goes on the birth certificate. End of story.

But that wasn't the case for same-sex spouses in Arkansas. If a woman gives birth there and is married to a woman, her spouse's name didn't go on the birth certificate. Her spouse was not automatically considered the parent of the child - at least when it comes to documenting the birth.

Two couples challenged this rule. They won at the trial court level, but the Arkansas Supreme Court, considering the scope of Obergefell, found that the birth certificate rule "pass[es] constitutional muster" and upheld it.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court summarily reversed that conclusion in Pavan v. Smith, an anonymous "per curiam" opinion. Why? Because Obergefell held that same-sex couples are entitled to "the constellation of benefits that the State has linked to marriage" on "the same terms and conditions" as different-sex couples. In other words, those couples are entitled to equal protection.

"Disparate treatment" is an equal protection term for discrimination. It doesn't get any clearer than that: Obergefell prohibits treating same-sex couples differently than different-sex couples when the state is doling out various "rights, benefits, and responsibilities" of marriage, including the presumption of parentage to the spouse of the birth mother. If husbands who are not biological fathers are entitled to be listed, then wives who are non-biological mothers must be listed. Simple enough.

But it apparently isn't that simple to Justices Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito. Gorsuch, writing for them all, argued in dissent that summary reversals such as Pavan are only allowed when "the law is settled and stable...and the decision below is clearly in error," and this is not such a case.

Why? Well, first because there is no "constitutional problem with a biology based birth registration regime" standing alone (an overly simplistic conclusion based primarily on the sharply divided plurality decision of Michael H. v. Gerald D.). Second, the plaintiffs didn't directly challenge the artificial insemination provision of the law, just the general rule about "husbands" that excluded same-sex wives, so there was no reason for the Court to cite it as a reason for reversal. And third, the wife who is left off the birth certificate initially can simply adopt the child later and get added that way. 

Finally, Gorsuch says that Arkansas conceded before them that the artificial insemination rule, 9-10-201, would apply equally to same-sex spouses and thus there was not really a controversy for the court to resolve:

Thus, Gorsuch says, "it is not even clear what the Court expects to happen on remand that hasn't happened already." After all, Arkansas was going to list the mothers on the birth certificates anyway. This is much ado about nothing, or at least much ado about the wrong statute.*

But to me, the majority's view is more compelling. The rule that the plaintiffs challenged - the general requirement that a male spouse's name should appear on the birth certificate regardless of actual paternity, but not a female spouse's name, is discriminatory on its face. It treats same-sex and different-sex married couples differently. Under Obergefell, that's not allowed.

I am glad that six members of the Court took the opportunity to give Obergefell some equal protection teeth, especially as states and cities continue to try creative (and hateful) end runs around it. For example, the Texas Supreme Court is still considering whether Houston can deny marital benefits to municipal employees based on the sex of their spouse. Hopefully they will seriously consider Pavan and rule consistently with it.

*Update: As Mark Stern at Slate documents, Justice Gorsuch's recitation of the facts in the case is totally incorrect. Arkansas never conceded that it would list the birth mother's female spouse on the birth certificates. And it made no sense for the plaintiffs to challenge the artificial insemination rule because they didn't want to overturn it, they referenced it in support of their argument that the rule they did challenge - the rule limiting the naming of spouses to "husband" - was pointlessly discriminatory in violation of Obergefell. All of this suggests Gorsuch's opinion is fraught with errors that should be corrected.