Salt Blog

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt I've been thinking a lot (and writing some, too) about the links between poverty and place for several years, spurred by my interest in rural populations and critical geography.  I have become increasingly convinced that place plays a profound role in who is impoverished and who isn't.  Think about how unevenly our own nation is developed and the spatial inequalities that result in terms of access to education, jobs, and both public and private services.  (Some recent articles are here and here). So it's not surprising that this item recently in the New York Times caught my eye:  "Was Today's Poverty Determined in 1000 BC?"  The story by Catherine Rampell reports on a recent study by Diego Comin, William Easterly and Erick Gong.  They gathered "gathered crude information on the state of technological development in various parts of the world in 1000 B.C.; around the birth of Jesus; and in A.D. 1500" and then compared this to current per capita income in today's nation states.   Rampell's report is accompanied by a scatterplot that depicts the relationship between a country's present wealth and the state of its technological development in A.D. 1500.  It turns out that the latter is "an extraordinarily reliable predictor" of the former.

Written by Adrien Wing I have been involved in teaching abroad since 1996. This time period included 6 summers in South Africa, 11 summers in France, and now one semester in London. The pictures below show Iowa students from my Arcachon, France 2010 summer program, who studied Law in the Muslim World with me there, then visiting the Pyramids and also the North Cairo, Egypt chief judge and his colleagues. I am firmly convinced that all students should have foreign opportunities whether in high school, university, or law school. Many universities have increased or are actively trying to augment their students going abroad. On the law school level, this could be done by encouraging folks to go after their first year summer, or during intercessions, spring break, entire semesters or a full year. The goal could be that everyone would have the opportunity to undergo some experience with a foreign culture and a foreign legal system. I separate the two because the legal system cannot be understood outside its broader cultural context, so it is important to experience both. Right now, there are no shortage of programs. Currently, more than 100 law schools offer programs, and most are open to all 2L and 3L students at ABA schools.

Immigrants partial judicial victory in Arizona against SB 1070 a day before the law was to go into effect did not stop protesters from marching.

On Yom Kippur, Jews are required to seek and give forgiveness. It is not about redemption, but rather about the power of forgiveness in our lives, the lives of others and the life of the community. Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower is a moving exploration and account of forgiveness during an historical moment marked by unspeakable terror. Wiesenthal brings the reader into his inner circle by sharing a painful story about oppressor and oppressed. He takes us on a journey where we are privy to the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp where Wiesenthal was an inmate in WWII Poland. We read words that can never fully capture the pain, degradation, fear, and loathing that framed the lives of the interned at the hands of sadistic guards consumed by hate and an utter contempt for human life and suffering.

Watch some of the back episodes of Jon Stewart interviewing Elizabeth Warren on The Daily Show and you, too, will understand why there is so much resistance to Warren’s nomination. She is smart and very funny. She is clear, and she is undaunted. She knows who is doing what and she doesn’t pretend that she doesn’t. She knows how government is supposed to act and explains how it isn’t doing its job.

Written by Adrien Wing In preparation to be a guest blogger, I read all the previous posts as I felt out of the loop. I am now living half of the year outside the United States. In the spring, I am director of the London Law Consortium, a group of seven law schools holding classes and activities in the heart of the city. In May and June, I am director of the University of Iowa College of Law’s summer program in Arcachon, France, and then I take the students to the Middle East. I always feel culture shock upon returning to the US, even though I have been an international and comparative law person for 28 years, 23 as a professor teaching international human rights and Law in the Muslim world.  I also teach US subjects like Critical Race Theory and US Constitutional Law.  I basically consider almost everything I do human rights, just some is in the US and some abroad. What is most interesting to me in the blogging so far and in the progressive justice community generally, is the lack of global contextualization for most of what happens in the US in many instances. I know it’s hard enough to become expert and stay up to date on even minor aspects of our fields in the US. Yet, I have found that getting comparative angles actually enhances my understanding of the possibilities to consider here, whether currently or in the future. Even if we ultimately reject these options, it teaches us something more about ourselves and our society.  

Written by Adrien Wing If you were a legal advisor to Shirley Sherrod, would you advise her to  accept a new job at the Department of Agriculture? Would you advise her to just accept the apology and promotion, and  get back to the work to…

Bloggers are not journalists, and what bloggers write (including what I am writing in this post) should not be mischaracterized as principled, researched reporting.

Crowley is duty-bound to keep the peace and trained to deal with conflict; Gates is a professor, he is neither obligated nor trained to keep his cool.

When trying to figure out what the Federal government is all about, what powers it really has and, even more importantly, what types of problems the Founders invented it to deal with, it is a really good idea to take a hard look at the very first words of the Constitution. Those are found in the Preamble. Generally ignored, it just happens to be the Statement of Purpose of the Constitution and indeed for our nation itself. This column proposes the establishment of a new "-ers" organization (you know, "Birthers," "Tenthers). Focused on Constitutional government and what it is all about, according to the plain language of the Constitution, it would be called "The Preamblers."

Written by Tucker Culbertson Professor Noah Feldman recently published a valuable op/ed in the The New York Times arguing that liberals are facing a constitutional crisis, one they cannot confront with conventional civil rights talk about liberty and equality: “[N]ew and pressing constitutional issues and problems loom on the horizon — and they cannot be easily solved or resolved using the now-familiar frameworks of liberty and equality… The great economic and political challenges of our present decade — salvaging and fixing financial institutions, delivering health care, protecting the environment — have major constitutional dimensions. They require us to determine the limits of government power and the extent to which the state can impinge on collective and individual freedoms. Progressive constitutional thinkers, so skilled in arguing about social and civil rights, are out of practice in addressing such structural economic questions.” I am truly grateful for Feldman’s piece.  In this reply, I want to do two things: 1) trouble his use of the terms liberal, progressive, and conservative; and 2) suggest that the current crisis he describes is only one reflection of issues which are endemic to, and which constitute the genuine tragedy of, political liberalism.

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt The closing line of my recent blog post asked:  "Is even democracy a luxury for the poor?" Shortly after writing it, I came across this quote by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, featured in the obituary of Senator Robert C. Byrd who died last week.  Regarding the vast federal aid that Byrd garnered for West Virginia over the years, Rockefeller said Byrd knew that “before you can make life better, you have to have a road to get in there, and you have to have a sewerage system.” This comment resonated with me, struck me as accurate.  Yet it ran counter to my thinking about Robert C. Byrd for the past few decades.  While I have always considered Byrd a fine man (well, aside from his Klan membership as a younger man) and appreciated his dedication to the Senate, I saw him primarily as a poster child for the excesses of pork barrel politics.  Rarely was he in the news, it seems, without some mention of the federal aid he was able to channel to West Virginia.  Indeed, his obituary in the New York Times states that he built, "always with canny political skills, a modern West Virginia with vast amounts of federal money."  Elsewhere, it includes this quote from Senator Byrd himself, “I lost no opportunity to promote funding for programs and projects of benefit to the people back home.”  He referred to West Virginia as "one of the rock bottomest of states."

Written by Katie Porter I teach business law. Or at least **I** think I teach business law. But to my surprise, some people do not think my courses and scholarship fit into “business law.” What are the boundaries of business law, and what is at stake in…

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt I've thought about vote buying a lot over the course of my life.   I'm not talking about how corporations and other affluent actors donate money to campaigns in hopes of swaying legislators' votes, or even lower-scale political patronage type activity.  I'm talking about the phenomenon at the individual level in what is arguably its most base and disturbing form:  The payment and acceptance of cold hard cash for one's vote in a particular political race or slate of races. I've been thinking about vote buying again lately because I discussed it a bit in this recent essay and because a friend from Kentucky mentioned that, in the wake of the state's May 18 primary, federal investigations into vote buying are underway in several counties in the Eastern part of the state.  (Read some  news coverage of those investigations here and here.  Also, here's another interesting Kentucky story from earlier this decade.) My interest in vote buying goes back to my childhood.  My father was involved in vote buying in the rural Arkansas county where I grew up, and he was quite open it.  I recall rather vividly one election night when he and other local men gathered at our kitchen table with the paper ballots cast that day.   If memory serves me well, they were checking to see if various people had, in fact, voted as they had been paid to do.   This was in the 1970s and 1980s in rural Arkansas, where people still cast paper ballots; in fact, I think they still do in Newton County.  My father was a life-long Democrat who bought votes on behalf of the party's local candidates, but the local Republicans engaged in the practice, too.  Indeed, the Newton County Judge (in Arkansas, the county judge is the chief elected administrative officer) was convicted of vote buying in the late 1980s and spent some time in federal prison.  U.S. v. Campbell, 845 F.2d 782 (8th Cir. 1988).

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt I started writing about rural people and places in relation to the law a few years ago, motivated in part by their near total absence from legal scholarship.  I grew up in a very rural corner of Arkansas, where most of my family of origin still lives, and it struck me that lives like theirs (and formerly mine) were largely unseen and unacknowledged by legal actors at scales other than the most local (and sometimes even by those, e.g, the Sheriff). Rural residents comprise nearly 20% of our nation's population,but they are a forgotten fifth whose lives are in many ways different to what has become a presumptive but rarely expressed urban norm in legal scholarship. (Fellow blogger Katie Porter's work on bankruptcy in rural contexts is an important exception). Parthenon General Store in Parthenon, Arkansas, which is not a census designated place; a town with a post office but with no wikipedia entry. I started studying the legal relevance of rurality about a decade ago, and I have found so much to say that I have published only within the sub-discipline I call "law and rural livelihoods" since 2006.   I expect to spend the rest of my career exploring rural people as legal subjects and rural places as context, even if it means writing my way into the very obscurity associated with rurality itself. It is not surprising, then, that as a consumer of legal scholarship I find myself looking for rural people, for acknowledgment of rural difference, rural context, rural society.  Of course, rural-urban difference is not relevant to every legal issue or every piece of legal scholarship, but from time to time I come across a law review article that seems to cry out for some acknowledgment of rurality.   That happened last week when I saw on ssrn.com an essay by Jonas Lerman titled "Food Fights and Food Rights:  Legislating the 'Delicious Revolution.'"  Lerman's abstract states in part:

Written by Katie Porter At a recent FDIC Conference exploring the idea of “Safe Financial Products,” I was struck by the hostility of the representatives of the banking industry to “more law.” I don’t expect businesses to volunteer to take on additional regulatory burden, but it didn’t seem…

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt Anyone who is following the debate about immigration and its reform in the United States is familiar with rhetoric disputing what America's core values are as a means of supporting the competing visions for who gets to be an American--or, at least, who gets to be in America legally.   Those opposing immigration talk about how the newcomers are changing America too much.  Those in favor of more lax immigration laws remind us that the United States has always been a nation of immigrants. Nowhere is this debate being waged more vigorously than in what might be thought of as America's heartland.  I was reminded of that fact this morning when I read that 57% of voters in Fremont, Nebraska, population 25,576, voted in favor of an ordinance that will "banish illegal immigrants from jobs and rental homes."  One of the things that makes the Fremont ordinance unusual among anti-immigrant activity by smallish local governments is that residents demanded this referendum--taking the matter all the way to the Nebraska Supreme Court--after city officials voted against such an ordinance.  Interestingly, the primary reason that the city's political leaders opposed the ordinance appears to be the litigation it is likely to prompt--litigation the municipality can hardly afford.  Read more here and here.

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt In addition to being acronyms most of us had never heard before two different disasters brought them to our attention in April, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) are both examples of apparent regulatory failure. The MSHA and its failings attracted public scrutiny in the wake of the Upper Big Branch mine explosion on April 5, an accident that took the lives of 29 miners.  Turns out, the Upper Big Branch Mine (UBB) had long been on MSHA's radar screen as a bad actor.  In December 2007, the MSHA, a division of the Dept. of Labor, noted that the mine had been cited for 204 serious and significant violations in the past two years, a rate about twice the national average.  MSHA warned the mine's owner, Massey Energy, that  it had a potential "pattern of violations," a designation that would have permitted MSHA to close the mine each time it found a significant violation.  While Massey cleaned up its act enough in the months following that warning letter to avoid the "pattern of violations" scrutiny and consequences, it nevertheless continued to accumulate violations.  After the rate of violations decreased in 2008, they again accelerated.  One news report indicates that, in March 2010 alone, the MSHA cited the UBB mine 53 times.  Another indicates 515 citations at UBB in 2009.  Analysis by New York Times reporters indicates that one of the problems with the MSHA was not its failure to watch Massey, but rather a huge backlog of appeals by mining companies challenging citations.  According to the NYT, one in four MSHA citations are now appealed, which has resulted in a 18,000 pending appeals and $210 million in contested penalties.  Massey alone appealed 37 of the 50 citations it received for serious violations in 2009.  Read more here, here and here.

Written by Katie Porter Legal scholars have queued up several lists of good questions for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. Most have focused on her views on  “hot” topics, such as national security, racial diversity, how she might be…

Written by Katie Porter Elizabeth Loftus (UC-Irvine Law) has co-authored a new paper on lawyers' abiliy to predict outcomes in litigation. She and her colleagues surveyed about 500 lawyers with pending litigation, asking them to specify a minimum goal for their case and providing a confidence estimate for the chances of meeting that goal. The key finding: "Overall, lawyers were overconfident in their predictions." The article lays out all the ways that this can be harmful to clients, and to our legal system in general. I've been thinking about the role of law schools, and legal educators, in cultivating this optimism bias. The researchers find that lawyers don't get better at estimating outcomes with more years of experience; recent grads and old hands are equally likely to overestimate their odds of success. How can law schools counter this overconfidence? What are the risks of doing so?