Regulations, like other legal instruments, often arrive in lumps. An agency, for example, can issue a rule addressing many different subjects, each of which could be split off and issued as a separate regulation. Take, for example, a recently finalized proposed rule issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In the agency’s own words, the … Continue reading Agency Lumping and Splitting by Jennifer Nou
Month: March 2020
A popular tweet (popular to a certain segment of folks roughly 250,000 strong, at least) chants, “Who are we? Single young professionals. What do we want? For perishable groceries to be sold in smaller portion sizes.” I cannot count the number of times I have stood in front of a wall of bagged salad greens … Continue reading Lumping, Fairness, and Single People by Michael C. Pollack
Professor Lee Fennell’s groundbreaking Slices and Lumps incisively reconceptualizes how the gig—or “slicing”—economy impacts the structuring of work. But it goes even further to alert us to how “delumping the working experience” (p 6) can transform the infrastructure of work, from an individual’s task design to the agglomeration costs and benefits of untying and retying … Continue reading Ownership Work and Work Ownership by Hiba Hafiz
For close to ten years, the gig economy has dazzled with its seeming powers of disaggregation. Want a picture mounted on your wall but no other decorating, framing, or assembly help? There’s an app for that (TaskRabbit). Want a place to stay during your holiday but without the frills of turn-down service, room service, and … Continue reading Lumpy Work by Deepa Das Acevedo
While reading Lee Fennell’s book Slices and Lumps, I was struck that the book could have been written using only examples from water law. Fennell’s framework describes nearly all challenges and aims inherent in water management, and connects these challenges to broader questions in life and law. Water law is all about slices and lumps. … Continue reading Water Slices and Water Lumps by Rhett B. Larson
This is Briefly, a production of the University of Chicago Law Review. Today we’re discussing Corpus Linguistics, which is a sub-field of linguistics that employs database searches to study language usage. Through this linguistic method, jurists, lawyers, and legal academics can add empirical rigor to textualist assumptions regarding the legal meaning of words, based on … Continue reading Briefly 3.13 – Interpreting the Law through Corpus Linguistics
Professor Richard Re’s Clarity Doctrines sheds light on a neglected and growing legal phenomenon, legal rules that turn on clarity. He is correct to note that these clarity doctrines can serve important aims in law. He is likewise correct to note that clarity doctrines necessarily calibrate conflicting values, as when they promote the finality of … Continue reading The Law of Clarity and the Clarity of Law by Michael A. Francus