Professor Richard Epstein on the 4th Amendment Third Party Doctrine
Criminals
who can't keep secrets have short careers. A big reason for this is
the “third-party doctrine” which, as most readers of this blog
are probably aware, holds that information shared with others is not
generally protected by 4th Amendment restrictions on
search and seizure. Put differently, the law does not recognize any
reasonable expectation of privacy in information shared with others.
This doctrine has been widely criticized and, most recently and
notably in an article by 4th Amendment scholar Orin Kerr,
defended (The Case for the Third-Party Doctrine, 109 Mich. L. Rev.
561, 563 (2009)). Chicago's own Richard Epstein has recently taken
interest in this debate, and presented his preliminary thoughts at
this week's Works in Progress (WiP) talk. Essentially, Prof. Epstein
thinks current constitutional doctrine is generally correct on this
point. He agrees with Prof. Kerr and other defenders of the
third-party doctrine that it is worth keeping, though his defense is
on somewhat different grounds than those of Prof. Kerr. Since Prof.
Epstein comes to this issue as an outsider, he also returns to first
principles in his work and asks whether we are analyzing these cases
consistently and coherently. His conclusion is to suggest a general
method for considering 4th Amendment issues that optimizes
the public benefits and private costs of permitting government action
in various classes of cases.
Continue reading "Student Blogger - A Second Look at the Third Party Doctrine" »
In September, Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law Omri Ben-Shahar and Fischel-Neil Visiting Professor of Law Ariel Porat organized a conference intended to reevaluate the role of fault in contract law. Speakers included Chicago faculty Saul Levmore, Eric Posner, Richard Epstein and Judge Richard Posner, along with experts in contract law from around the world. Subscribers to our Faculty Podcast may have already heard Judge Posner's "Let Us Never Blame a Contract Breaker," and audio and video of the entire conference is now available on the conference website. You may also watch Professor Ben-Shahar's introduction to the conference in the video embedded after the jump.
Continue reading "Audio/Video: Fault in Contract Law" »
Update: You can download audio of this talk here, and video of the talk is embedded after the jump.
As you may already know, Professor Richard Epstein is not President Obama's biggest fan. Obama favors some economic regulations that Epstein does not. In his Chicago's Best Ideas talk on Tuesday, January 27, Professor Epstein spoke about three proposed laws in the area of labor relations: the Employee Free Choice Act, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act. Epstein spent most of his time on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), so my attention will focus on that law. (Epstein has a column about the Lilly Ledbetter Act on Forbes.com.) The EFCA is an amendment to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).
Epstein started with the word "free" in the EFCA's name. Back in the nineteenth century before the New Deal, "free" meant free for both sides of the labor relationship: employer and employee. An employer could not force the employee to accept a particular wage, and the employee could not, even if represented by a union, force the employer to hire him at a given wage. The NLRA was passed at the height of the New Deal in 1935. (Epstein is, not surprisingly, no fan of the New Deal.) The Act provides that unions can prompt a unionization vote by getting at least 30 percent of employees to show support by signing cards, called the card check. The vote is a simple majority vote by secret ballot. If the union is approved, the employer must negotiate with the union. Freedom under the NLRA is one-sided because employers must negotiate with a valid union.
Continue reading "Student Blogger - Chicago’s Best Ideas: Richard Epstein, “The Coming Meltdown in Labor Relations”" »
Recent Comments