The Faculty Lounge

AALS Section on Aging and Law Online Book Event - Hot Flash: How the Law Ignores Menopause and What We Can Do About It

Date: Thursday, May 8 from 1 – 2 pm ET/12 – 1 pm CT/11 am – 12 pm MT/10 – 11 am PT

The event is free and open to the all; preregistration is required, here.

The authors of the book Hot Flash: How the Law Ignores Menopause and What We Can Do About It (Stanford University Press, 2024) and commentators will explore the multifaceted challenges and opportunities at the intersections between and among menopause, culture, and law. Like menstruation, menopause is a largely involuntary and age-related phase of life that has long been enveloped in silence and shame. An estimated 46.5 million individuals worldwide experience menopause annually. The authors and commentators will critically examine the current state of research on menopause, unraveling its impact on individuals within the context of legal frameworks and cultural norms around gender, aging, and work.

Details after the fold.

Hello, Introductions, and Where to?

I want to thank you for inviting me here to blog for the next month. I want to introduce you to my co-author, collaborator, and the other half of my brain Lorna Fox O'Mahony. Lorna is at the University of Essex in the UK.  Lorna and started working together in 2017 on a project that would ultimately become our book Squatting and the State: Resilient Property in an Age of Crisis available at Cambridge University Press.  I am going to spend my time (with help from Lorna) blogging about a methodological intervention we have been making on property law and the need to rethink how we think about property problems.  We have 12-13 posts planned out to introduce you to RPT and its approach including a future post about Squatting and the State.  We may also post a dialogue about co-authorship and what makes it work 

Today we want to talk about our changing world.  Liberal property law was developed in a time that is very different from our time today. Advances in technology in the last two centuries have transformed our economies from rural/agriculture production, to industrial production, to knowledge economies. Likewise, advances in travel and the shift to the network society has meant that individuals engage with a broader audience, different cultures and unique perspectives.

In this time, the mechanics for how we engage with property have not stood still, even as the narratives, justifications and ideologies on which property interests are based appear timeless and unassailable. We have seen the transition of property norms from the utility of possession to the legal certainty of recorded title. That transition enabled the increased financialization of property assets with benefits and crises emerging as a result. The 2008 financial crisis was triggered by the over-abstraction of property interests in ways that strained the lived realities of property on the ground.(More on this in future posts).

Since the 1970s, the growth of globalization has increased in both scope and intensity, bringing new paradigms of power, alignments of institutional competencies, and values into view. Both the utility crisis and the currency crisis that erupted in the 1970s placed new strains on a housing infrastructure that was already reeling from disinvestment after federal policy stepped back from investments in public housing infrastructure. And today - those three moments of housing crisis, utility crisis, and financial crisis continue to resonate in a fourth context of environmental stewardship. We face interlocking dilemmas:

• The growth of housing as a financial tool rather than a site for home and family contribute to the erosion of communities, while also making home ownership riskier due to over leveraging;
• Increasing housing demands place pressure to build cheaper housing in environmentally fragile areas, raising the risk of disaster;
• And the demands for more energy consumption in communities have prompted similar questions about the role of private finance and accessibility to new technologies - particularly for poor or disadvantaged communities.

Each of these problems are not ‘private’ but shared, and require, on some level, the participation of the state. Property is implicated in ways that challenge us to think differently about how we understand and work with complexity, and to recognize the effects of our methodological approaches. Most notably, we are interested in how the frames we use to articulate property problems distort our perceptions in ways that undermine our capacity to address these problems in meaningful ways. What we suggest across our research, and through a range of case studies, is a more realistic way of grappling with property as a complex system in which the state’s support for individuals, communities, and institutions (like private property) is not merely an allocation of publicly-backed resilience but embedded in the state’s own resilience needs.

We look forward to hearing from you along the way and hope you engage with comments as we set the development of ‘Resilient Property Theory’ (RPT) through the research agenda we have been on for the last 8 years. In doing so we will highlight works we have written as well as others’ writings that have engaged with RPT to re-imagine a property space for the 21st century.

 

 

 

 

 

The Law School Industry - Law and Technology @ US Law Schools

Digital technologies are an increasingly important phenomena in higher education and professional industries. Law schools have started to participate in rethinking how to train the next generation workforce/citizens at the interface of governance/technology. This post includes links to quantitative data for folks interested to learn more about the current law/tech situation in US legal higher education, and provides a few initial thoughts about the data. 

Here is an excel sheet formatted study with a wide range of data on current US law school efforts around 'Law and Technology': Download US Law and Technology Higher Education Law Schools - Haskell:Fish In addition, for an alternative visualisation for some of the information, see: https://app.flourish.studio/visualisation/2736840 

Note: The study was developed along with a PhD student, Jessica L. Fish, and funded by the University of Manchester Law School and its Law and Technology Initiative. Scholarship based partly on this data will be rolled out in the coming year, but the information provided is meant to be open sources/common for any colleagues however useful. 

A Few Thoughts... (see below)

Bay Area Friends: Third Annual Kagan Lecture

Bay area Loungers may be interested in the upcoming Robert A. Kagan Lecture in Law and Regulation at Berkeley Law’s Center For The Study of Law And Society. The lecture is Thursday, March 16, from 3:30 - 5:15pm (see the flyer for more info) and features Lauren B. Edelman (Agnes Roddy Robb Professor Of Law And Professor Of Sociology, U.C. Berkeley), who will discuss her work on legal endogeneity. Robin Stryker (Professor, School Of Sociology, University Of Arizona) and I will provide commentary.

I’m looking forward to this. Edelman’s work has had a great influence on my own thinking and writing about the regulation of business entities, and I’m looking forward to this chance to reflect on her (and Kagan’s) impact.

Hope to see you there!

The (Video) Gamification of Law

No one’s immune from the (video) gamification of life.  Games populate our Facebook pages, home screens, and even (still) once per week family gatherings.  You can be a marine, a real estate tycoon, an environmentalist, a football coach, or even a fruit ninja.  Recently, I downloaded a game to my iPhone called Landlord 2.  It’s a basic buy property and get rich game.  In this game there are several “skills” the player may purchase to improve their money-making: Tycoon (increase property slots), Lawyer (increase properties waiting for paperwork), Innovator (reduce property cost), Landlord (increase property rent), Accountant (reduce taxes), and Speculator (increase property valuations). 

All of these skills are interesting in their own right; they all simplify the complexities of property acquisition.  But, what might be of most interest to readers of this blog is the Lawyer skill.  There are two problems with this skill attribute: 1) the lawyer only functions transactionally, increasing the amount of space available for the processing of land deals, and, relatedly, 2) that the lawyer’s primary function is “paperwork.”  Both of those points cut deeply into the importance of lawyers, law, and legal knowledge. 

Practitioners and scholars alike will note that while lawyers function in transactional roles they also do much more on a variety of issues.  Lawyers are often involved in the beginning, middle, and end of legal agreements, provide counsel and engage in negotiations, and represent clients of all types in court and other proceedings.  Simply put, there’s a lot more to law than moving things through a nebulous system from one’s desk chair.  Even if transactional lawyering is understood as synonymous with corporate or business lawyering, that still denies the complexities of that wide-ranging practice area.  The only business of business law isn't sitting at one's desk.  

Secondly, the abstract notion of paperwork seems to demean just how important legal documentation is.  Paperwork would seem to include contracts, memos, briefs, and maybe emails, professional publications, etc.  Rather than discuss contracts or filing motions, Landlord 2 gives the Lawyer the job of paperwork.  This risks positioning lawyers as paperwork pushers rather than advocates, allies, and important participants in legal actions. 

Of course, television, movies, and music have all had their problems in reasonably representing law and lawyering, but now that our students, friends, family, and colleagues are on their iPads, iPhones, and other devices, we should turn our attention to the video gamification of law.  I’d be interested in readers adding their experience with lawyers and law firms in video games or apps.  What role do these organizations and characters serve?  Do they represent law firms, prosecutors, defense attorneys, etc. fairly or as best they can given the constraints of the game or app?  What games or apps seem particularly successful or particularly disastrous?  Have representations in video games changed over time? 

Other folks have written about gamification, but not video gamification.  Gamification describes a broader concept of incentivizing action through rewards.  Imagine leveling up for turning in a report to your dean or memo to a senior partner.  Of course, leveling up might involve more free time, better case assignments, an extra day off, or increased research budgets, and not a Super Mario Bros. 3 Raccoon tail. 

Readers might find these stories interesting on the debate about gamification, generally: “Improve your legal practice through gamification,” “What can ‘gamification’ do for lawyers?,” “Gamification of law: Good idea or game over?,” and for a scholarly take from Austria, “Gamification and law: On the legal implications of using gamified elements.”

When we start to address these issues, we’ll be in a better place to assess what I’ve called “coming to the law,” or how people because of their social experiences construct the legal world and their interactions with it.  If our clients and students are learning from video games and apps, then we’ll need to work with them to not only understand them and their ideas, but also to better understand law and lawyering ourselves.