September 2014

Crowdfunding site GoFundMe recently removed the funding page for a person looking to crowdfund her abortion.  Past crowdfunding campaigns have funded fertility treatments, gender confirmation surgeries, organ transplants, and other medical procedures and treatments.  Watsi is an entire crowdfnding platform dedicated to financing medical care for patients through donations.  While I usually research and write about crowdfunding business entities and projects, the crowdfunding of medical procedures and treatments has gotten more and more traction with those needing or wanting financial assistance for expensive medical care.  It seemed like a good time to say something about it . . . .  But what to say?

I was recently asked to serve on an ABA site team to reaccredit a law school. I have done this before; it’s hard work, but it’s fun. You get to see how another law school operates and meet many legal educators you might not otherwise meet.  But I turned this one down and I told the ABA to take me off their list of potential accreditors.

I have decided that I will no longer serve as an ABA accreditor. I see no evidence that ABA review is doing much to increase the quality of legal education. The accreditation rules stifle creativity, protect traditional law schools from competition, and increase the cost of legal education.

The newly revised ABA standards are better in some ways than the current standards. They accommodate some technological changes, although at least ten years too late. And I was happy to see that the restrictions on distance education were loosened a little. But the changes are too little, too late.

Ironically, the new ABA standards require law schools to justify their programs based on student outcomes, something the accreditation rules themselves have never done.

I’m not willing to play the game anymore. I’ll leave enforcement of…

This coming Tuesday, I am scheduled to provide a brief overview of the corporate law/theory aspects of Hobby Lobby as part of the University of Akron’s Supreme Court Roundup.  What follows are the seven key quotes from the opinion that I plan to focus on (time permitting) in order to highlight what I see as the key relevant issues raised by the opinion. Comments are appreciated.

Issue 1: Did corporate theory play a role in Hobby Lobby?

While I believe the majority made a pitch for applying a pragmatic, anti-theoretical approach (“When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of … people.” Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 134 S. Ct. 2751, 2768 (2014)), the following quote strikes me as conveying an underlying aggregate view of corporations:

In holding that Conestoga, as a “secular, for-profit corporation,” lacks RFRA protection, the Third Circuit wrote as follows: “General business corporations do not, separate and apart from the actions or belief systems of their individual owners or employees, exercise religion. They do not pray, worship, observe sacraments or take other religiously-motivated actions separate and apart from the intention and direction of their individual actors.” 724 F.3d, at 385 (emphasis added). All of this is true—but quite beside the point. Corporations, “separate and apart from” the human beings who own, run, and are employed by them, cannot do anything at all.

134 S. Ct. at 2768.

NDSU

First Joshua Fershee visits North Dakota, now ESPN’s College GameDay. 

North Dakota State University, which is being featured on GameDay this morning, is also one of the schools looking for a business law professor (albeit a “lecturer”) on my updated list here.

While most of my co-bloggers teach at much bigger sports schools than I, as I mentioned previously, it is a lot of fun teaching at a school that gets at least occasional national attention for its sports teams.  

The Solicitor General recently filed a brief with the Supreme Court recommending that the Court grant certiorari in the Ninth Circuit case of Moores v. Hildes, No. 13-791.  If the Court takes this recommendation (which I’m guessing it will), it will be the third Section 11 case scheduled to be heard this Term.  (I’ve blogged about the prior two here and here.)

[More under the cut]

In 2007, J. W. Verret (George Mason) and then Chief Justice Myron Steele authored an article entitled Delaware’s Guidance: Ensuring Equity for the Modern Witenagemot, which discussed “some of the extrajudicial activities in which members of the Delaware judiciary engage to minimize the systemic indeterminacy resulting from the resolution of economic disputes by a court of equity.”

One of these extrajudicial activities is authoring or co-authoring law review articles.  In this post, I am not going to weigh in on whether Delaware judges should be authoring law review articles, but rather, I simply note that there are two recent law review articles and one recent book chapter by Delaware judges that warrant our attention. 

Vice Chancellor Travis Laster – Evidence-Based Corporate Law.

John Maynard Keynes is said to have observed, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” In Delaware’s Choice, Professor Subramanian argues that the facts underlying the constitutionality of Section 203 have changed. Assuming his facts are correct, and the Professor says that no one has challenged his account to date, then they have implications for more than Section 203. They potentially extend to Delaware’s jurisprudence regarding a board’s ability to

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Today started in Williston, ND, and we then went to Mountrail County.  We vistied Tioga and Stanley, then headed south through New Town and Killdeer on the way back to Dickinson, where we stay tonight before flying out tomorrow morning (ridiculously early, I might add). 

We started the day at Williston State College, where we learned about the TrainND program and other degree programs.  TrainND works with companies to do OSHA and other safety training, and trained more than 16,000 people last, the vast majority of whom were employed.  The College also offers degree programs for those seeking to be Lease Operators and PLC-trained operators. Interesting for academics, the college had 38% turnover last summer.  The college has invested in campus housing for faculty, which can be part of the incentive package to bring people.  Apartments run from $2600/mo for 1 and 2 BR options, with home rentals over $3K.  Seventy percent of new faculty hires are moving into the new campus housing apartments (which looked nice from the outside). Just like the industry, the college is “catching up” with the whole thing. 

We saw more densely packed well sites, such at this 9-pack (nine wells on one…

As I predicted in 2011 here and here, in 2012 here, in 2013 in amicus brief, and countless times on this blog, the SEC Dodd-Frank conflicts minerals law has had significant unintended consequences on the Congolese people and has been difficult to comply with. Apparently the Commerce Department, which has a role to play in determining which mines are controlled by rebels so that US issuers can stay away from them, can’t actually figure it out either. In the past few days, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and other experts including seventy individuals and NGOS (some Congolese) who signed a memo, have called this misguided law into question.  In my view, without the “name and shame” aspect of the law, it is basically an extremely expensive, onerous due diligence requirement that only a few large companies can or have the incentive to do well or thoroughly. More important, and I as I expected, it has had little impact on the violence on the ground and has hurt the people it purported to help.

I had hoped to be wrong. The foundation that I work with helps medical practitioners, midwives, and traditional birth attendants in…

Campbell2                                                      Wyoming

Two recent professor postings that may be of interest to our readers:

Campbell University School of Law (Raleigh, NC) has posted a law professor opening (commercial law).

University of Wyoming College of Law (Laramie, WY) has posted a law professor opening (business law).

We covered a lot of ground today, driving up from Medora, ND, to Williston, ND, through Watford City.  The traffic was not terrible for us, though the truck traffic and the road construction was slow going for a while.  We’re told we missed the worst of the traffic because our timing was good. It still felt like big city traffic in what is not a big city.  Traffic

Watford City has been a prime example of a place where the oil boom has caused significant growing pains. A recent article in The Atlantic asked, What If Your Small Town Suddenly Got Huge?, and explained: 

The Bakken oil boom has brought rapid growth to many towns and cities in western North Dakota, including Williston, north of the Missouri River, and Dickinson, alongside Interstate 94. But Watford City, where the population has jumped from just 1,400 people six years ago to more than 10,000 today, has experienced a particularly dramatic shift in character. 

There is dirt being moved everywhere: for roads, for housing, and, of course, for oil.  Driving this region you see very few homes, rolling hills, a few small buttes, and some abandoned farm homes. Oil wells blend in surprisingly well…