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“Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”

The Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey

On his way out of office, President Biden proposed Supreme Court reform that, among other things, would place 18-year term limits on Supreme Court Justices. Justices currently serve a lifetime appointment, a peculiarity that is supposed to “insulate them from the temporary passions of the public,  and allow them to apply the law with only justice in mind, and not electoral or political concerns.”

It’s arguable that life-long Supreme Court term limits have never worked. To the extent that it has, the reason is that over the past several centuries, the Court has widely viewed the U.S. Constitution as a living document – a document that, while rarely amended, must be dynamic enough to evolve in interpretation with the social evolution of the electorate. As I discuss in more detail below, this has been the way the Court has worked for a large proportion of the country’s history, but this historical approach to the interpretation of the Constitution and the function of the Supreme Court in contemporary society has shifted dramatically in the past eight years.

Through nothing more than sheer dumb luck, convicted felon Donald Trump had the opportunity to appoint three ultra-conservative judges to the bench. Kavanaugh,  Coney-Barret, and Gorsuch are originalists. In Neil Gorsuch’s words, “[o]riginalism teaches only that the Constitution’s original meaning is fixed; meanwhile … new applications of that meaning will arise with new developments and new technologies.”

Fifty-eight percent of Americans currently disagree with this new, Trump-shaped Supreme Court. Like Trump, these justices represent a very loud minority of the electorate who long for days gone by of openly and proudly oppressing minorities, controlling women’s bodies, and dictating this country’s laws based on Judaeo-Christian ideas of morality. This is not (only) a matter of personal disgust: as the Supreme Court drifts further away from evolving ideas of national and international justice, imposing a minority’s views of right and wrong on a majority, the Court loses something important – legitimacy. At this point in our democracy, Supreme Court reform would help the Court maintain its position as a respected source of legal authority in American society.

A living constitution.

The Supreme Court is supposed to change with the times. It’s supposed to follow the flow of expanding principles of morality. It’s supposed to evolve and progress, not devolve and regress. During this country’s relatively short history, the Supreme Court could be relied upon to add legal justification to the evolving attitude of our citizenry. Examples abound.

In 1896 the Supreme Court heard Plessy v. Ferguson, a case in which a man with one-eighth African ancestry challenged a Louisiana statute requiring passengers with “discernible” negro heritage to use train coaches separate from (and inferior to) white passengers. Plessy argues that the Louisiana statute violated the 14^th Amendment’s equal protection clause. Few people don’t know how this controversy ended, with the Supreme Court smacking down Plessy’s argument like Dikembe Mutombo. Holding that Louisiana was well within its rights to enforce a law requiring separate but “equal” train coaches for the different “races.” The Court repeatedly denied Plessy’s argument that this difference denoted the distinction of inferiority to the less-dominate negro race. The Court held that the separate but equal distinctions had nothing to do with stamping one race as superior and the other inferior and that, if that construction did exist, it was only because the colored race chose to adopt it. The Court argued that “[i]f the civil and political rights of both races be equal one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.”

Context is critical. Plessy was decided in 1896 – thirty-two years after the abolition of slavery and twenty-eight years after the 14^th Amendment was ratified. The very idea of Black people being politically equal, not to mention socially equal, was all relatively new. The majority of the country – white people – were not on board. Reconstruction had failed, and backlash against Black progress was nearing a fever pitch. In the context of civil rights, the country had given as much as it wanted and aimed to give no more. The Court’s decision in Plessy reflected this dominant social attitude.

Around fifty years later, however, the context had changed dramatically. Black people had gained more economic power pre-and post-World War II, and the NAACP was forty years into strategically litigating Jim Crow laws, largely on the basis of unconstitutionality. Despite himself, President Truman established a Committee on Civil Rights in 1948. Segregation, while still the law in a lot of the land, was falling increasingly out of favor. On the wings of that forward-moving momentum, the NAACP challenged state laws denying Black children admission to White schools. In a legal about-face, the Supreme Court held that separate but equal laws were in fact violative of the 14^th Amendment. In Brown v. Board, the Supreme Court acknowledged the role the passage of time and the evolution of minds played in its ruling. When addressing the Plessy court’s rejection of the argument that separate but equal laws stamped Black Americans as an inferior race, the Brown court accepted that “the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting inferiority of the negro group” and held that “any language in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary to that finding” was rejected.

This is an excellent example of a living constitution. There were no textual changes to the 14^th Amendment between Plessy and Brown.  The only change was time.

Bowers v. Hardwick and Lawrence v. Texas are other examples that implicate the 14^th Amendment, but this time, the implied substantive rights in the Due Process Clause. In Bowers, decided in 1986, the Court adamantly refused to recognize a fundamental right for homosexual men to participate in private, sexual behavior in their own homes. To defend its point, the Court recited what it considered to be a comprehensive review of laws dating back to pre-colonial times condemning homosexuality. The Court went on to decide that the law’s justification, i.e., the presumption that a majority of Georgians believed homosexuality to be immoral, was sufficient to preserve the law’s application.

Not even twenty years later, the Supreme Court overruled their Bowers holding. In Lawrence v. Texas, a case involving an almost identical law to the Georgia law in Bowers, the Court recognized that the liberty protected in the 14^th Amendment protected homosexuals’ rights to make choices to participate in homosexual activity in the privacy of their own homes. The Court specifically stated that “liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct.”

Again, the substantive due process clause of the 14^th Amendment did not change between 1986 and 2003. The wording remains identical. But the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the rights implied in that wording changed, based on what it called “an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons deciding how to conduct their private tlives in matters pertaining to sex.” Again, the “emerging awareness” was a cultural and societal shift away from homophobia towards inclusivity.

Now, we see the opposite. In 1973, amid the second-wave feminist movement, the Court decided Roe v. Wade, another case implicating the concept of personal liberty embodied in the 14^th Amendment’s Due Process Clause. In Roe, the Court held that a woman’s right to privacy is “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” Nearly fifty years later, after the end of second-wave feminism and third-wave feminism, in a world where every economic indicator illustrates the connection between poverty and motherhood, in the only developed country that doesn’t offer affordable (or free) childcare, guarantees no maternity leave, and has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, we get Dobbs.

Judicial Context.

Let’s put this in perspective. Coney-Barrett, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh would have upheld Plessy v. Ferguson. The Constitution classifies Americans of African descent as three-fifths of a person – that unequivocal classification would not allow for the forced integration of segregated schools as there is no evidence at all in the Constitution that Black people should have the right to enjoy the same social or educational spaces as white Americans. These justices would have agreed with the Plessy court which proclaimed “if one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.” As Neal Gorsuch wrote in his defense of originalism, “a good originalist judge will not hesitate to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution’s original meaning, regardless of contemporary political consequences.”

This means that they would have also upheld Bowers v. Hardwick. Certainly, in determining the “original meaning” of the document, the judges would have ascertained and adhered to the ideals of morality largely held at the time of the Constitution’s writing—ideals that forbade homosexual acts and regarded them with disgust.  

And, as we already know, they would have never given a woman dominion over her own ability to choose when to become a mother.

While they may not be able to revisit the separate but equal statutes, or criminalize private, consensual policy, they’ve already done everything in their power to roll back the clock on any progress Americans have made over the past century. They’ve ended affirmative action in college admissions, created law that allows businesses to discriminate against gay people, and declared illegal Biden’s attempt to relieve America’s young people of life-crippling debt.

Supreme Court Reform is essential.

These justices do not represent the majority of American people. They don’t represent the seventy (and growing) percent of Americans who don’t give a shit if gay people get married. They don’t represent the seventy percent of Americans who believe that racism is a serious problem in the U.S. They don’t represent the significant majority of Americans who believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And they most certainly don’t represent the nearly eighty percent of people ages 18-29 that support a woman’s right to choose.

As liberal as millennials have proven themselves to be, generation Z goes even further. Not only does this conservative Supreme Court not represent the nation as it is today, it does not represent the nation as it will be in ten, twenty, or thirty years. It doesn’t even represent how the nation will be in eighteen years. Judicial turnover is essential. In a country with a living constitution, we cannot place our futures in the hands of a bunch of fucking zombies. We need Supreme Court Reform. Yesterday.

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U.S. Courts have a problem determining the reasonability of healthcare charges. This issue comes up repeatedly in personal injury suits where a plaintiff seeks to recover medical costs for injuries sustained due to the defendant’s negligence. To support their argument that the plaintiff’s medical charges are too high, the defendants bring in an expert to testify on the reasonable and customary costs of medical services. Almost all of these billing experts rely on the same database – FAIR Health. This database compiles the information of insurance company charge rates and is most typically used to set insurance reimbursement rates. Using this data, these experts have consistently argued against the reasonableness of charge data presented by plaintiffs.

What’s the problem with FAIR Health data?

The difference between the charge of medical care for an insured patient and an uninsured patient is vast enough to span an ocean. In the U.S., patients are separated into three categories: privately insured, publicly insured, and uninsured. Patients that fall under the first two categories benefit from the bargaining power of their benefactors. In the case of patients who seek medical treatment under Medicare and Medicaid, the U.S. government sets the rates that providers who accept these public insurance programs must accept for certain services.[i] Healthcare providers also accept much lower prices for services from private health insurance companies, which wield significant bargaining power in the market because of their access to potential patients. Uninsured patients – vulnerable, sick, uneducated, lone consumers in a capitalistic marketplace of secret prices and predatory practices – are incapable of negotiating favorable prices. Because “uninsured patients are protected in this Darwinian marketplace by neither insurers nor regulators, hospitals are loosed to charge what they will.”[ii] And they do. In an effort to recoup some of the costs of the “discounted” services provided to the publicly and privately insured, medical providers routinely charge the uninsured more than twice what they charge the insured.

The problem for uninsured patients in the U.S. medical marketplace is obvious, but this double standard becomes even more glaring in the context of a personal injury lawsuit. After a plaintiff is injured, defendants (almost always insurance companies), always argue that the charges that the plaintiff submits as evidence of their medical charges – almost always the prices for uninsured care – are unreasonable. To support this argument, these defendant insurance companies present an expert to testify on their findings of customary and reasonable medical charges taken directly from the FAIR Health database – a database that only includes charge data for the publicly and privately insured.

Obviously, this information doesn’t represent the reasonable and customary charge of medical care because it is not representative of the entire market. Specifically, it does not consider – at all – the rates that medical care providers charge their uninsured patients. Of course, this is precisely what large defendant companies want to benefit from – the bargaining power of powerful entities like the U.S. government and private insurance companies in the context of individual consumers. Basically, these defendants only want to reimburse plaintiffs – insured or uninsured – for what an insurance company or the government would pay for a medical service. So, not only will these uninsured patients, utterly devoid of any kind of bargaining power, be charged astronomical rates by the hospitals where they seek care, the defendants at fault for their injury will try to reimburse them as though they belonged to the class of people protected from these predatory prices.

Keep FAIR Health data out with the collateral source rule.

The collateral source rule is a good way to keep this information out of evidence. “The collateral source rule, stated simply, is that the receipt of benefits or mitigation of loss from sources other than the defendant will not operate to diminish the plaintiff’s recovery of damages.”[iii] Generally, this rule works to keep out information that an insurance company has paid part of the bill that the plaintiff presents as evidence of his accrued medical expenses – the defendant can’t benefit from the insurance companies’ contribution to the plaintiff’s medical costs. The collateral source rule works differently in the current context:

presenting FAIR Health data is a way to benefit from the assumption of an insurance contribution without presenting the actual insurance-modified medical charges. The route is different, but the destination is the same.

Two courts have excluded FAIR Health Data as violative of the collateral source rule. In Verci v. High, the Illinois appellate court addressed a case in which the defendant presented expert testimony to support their position that the plaintiff’s charged medical costs were unreasonable and uncustomary. The expert’s opinions were based entirely on information from the FAIR Health database and other databases that also rely on FAIR Health information. The Verci court held that the expert’s testimony violated the collateral source rule because FAIR Health data is most commonly used by private insurance companies to set reimbursement rates, and testimony about reimbursement rates is irrelevant and violative of the collateral source rule.

In Belcher v. Kelly (2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 2419), the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado came to a similar conclusion. Relying on precedent from the Colorado Supreme Court, the Belcher court adopted the rule that the introduction of insurance rates for the purposes of determining the reasonable value of medical services violates the collateral source rule because it “carries with it the unjustifiable risk that the jury will infer the existence of a collateral source –most commonly an insurer – from the evidence, and thereby improperly diminish the plaintiff’s award.”[iv] The court held that introducing FAIR Health data is akin to introducing the lower insured rates because it would work to reduce the plaintiff’s recovery based on the inference of collateral contributions and is therefore violative of the collateral source rule. “Thus, any fee schedule derived from Fair Health’s data represents a healthcare provider’s estimate of what an insurance company is likely to reimburse, which is not necessarily coextensive with the reasonable value of those services. Viewed in that light, the introduction of this evidence would indeed appear to violate the collateral source rule.” [v]

Keep FAIR Health data out with a Daubert challenge.

Because FAIR Health-based opinion must be presented through an expert, a Daubert challenge based on the sufficiency of the FAIR Health Data is also a great way to keep these opinions out. The same cases cited above, Verci and Belcher, are instructive in this regard as well.

In Verci v. High, the court held that the FAIR Health data was not sufficient to determine the reasonableness and the plaintiff’s medical charges because the information comes from insurance companies, not healthcare providers. Because the FAIR Health data only comes from insurance companies, the information lacks the rates that medical providers charge to uninsured patients. Id. The court stressed that the exclusion of the rates that providers charge to uninsured patients has unfairly skewed the information, resulting in unrealistically low charge data because “[p]hysicians charge uninsured patients, on average, more than twice what they charge insurers.” Id. The court held that, in order to determine the reasonableness of medical charges, the rates charged to uninsured patients would also have to be considered, because all patients are not insured and the defendant cannot benefit from the inference that a plaintiff is insured. The court held that “[b]ecause the FAIR Health database does not include amounts charged to uninsured patients, it is not a true representation of what medical providers charge.” The court held that the data was insufficient because uninsured rates were not charged.

The Belcher court also emphasized that “FAIR Health’s data represents only the limited universe of what healthcare providers have billed to insurance companies.” Id. at 7-8. The Belcher court held that the expert’s FAIR Health-based opinions were irrelevant for determining the reasonable value of medical costs because they were not sufficiently tied to the facts of the case. “The question the jury here must answer is not what it might be reasonable to bill some hypothetical (insured) patient before he is seen by a physician, but rather whether the expenses [the plaintiff] actually incurred were reasonable and necessary in the circumstances which confronted his doctors at the time he sought their care.” [vi]

[i] Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Crossgrove, 276 P.3d 562, 566-67, 2012 CO 31 (Colo. 2012) (internal citation and punctuation omitted).

[ii] See Mark A. Hall & Carl E. Schneider, Patients as Consumers: Courts, Contracts, and the New Medical Marketplace, 106 Mich. L.Rev. 643, 663 (2008).

[iii] Stephens v. Castano-Castano, 346 Ga. App. 284, 290, 814 S.E.2d 434, 439 (2018) (internal citation and punctuation omitted).

[iv] Belcher v. Kelly, Civil Action No. 19-cv-03367-REB-NYW, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 2419, at *7 (D. Colo. Jan. 6, 2021) (quoting Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Crossgrove, 276 P.3d 562, 566-67, 2012 CO 31 (Colo. 2012))

[v] Belcher v. Kelly, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 2419, at *7 (D. Colo. Jan. 6, 2021).

[vi] Belcher v. Kelly, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 2419, at *10-11 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted) (emphasis added).

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Lo que aprendí en la facultad de derecho es que la ley cambia para adaptarse a la dirección en la que evoluciona la gente. Y, por lo tanto, la función más importante del tribunal supremo es codificar todos estos cambios y declararlos ley. Normalmente, las decisiones del tribunal supremo reflejan los tiempos, el latido de la población, y la “interpretación” de la Constitución de EE. UU. se adaptará, de alguna manera, para correlacionarse con los tiempos.

Un buen ejemplo es Plessy v. Fergueson. En el caso Plessy, el tribunal supremo examinó una situación en la que un hombre “negro” -un hombre con siete octavos de ascendencia blanca y un octavo de ascendencia negra- intentó coger un tren destinado únicamente a los blancos.  Esta acción contravenía la ley “Separados pero iguales”, que entró en vigor tras el fin de la esclavitud para mantener la idea de la supremacía blanca. En pocas palabras, esta ley decía que, era legal -incluso preferible- separar a los “negros” y a los “blancos” siempre que los diferentes espacios fueran “iguales”. Todo el mundo ya sabe lo que significa “igual” en este punto. Plessy fue expulsado del tren y arrestado por violar la ley de 1890 La. Acts No. 111 que establecía la separación entre vagones de ferrocarril para “negros” y “blancos”.

Lo que ocurrió en este caso, y después, tiene muchas similitudes con el caso Roe v. Wade y la reciente decisión del Tribunal Supremo. Plessy dijo que el estatuto 1890 La. Acts No. 111 contravenía la Decimocuarta Enmienda, que básicamente dice que todos los ciudadanos de Estados Unidos merecen el mismo trato ante la ley. El Tribunal Supremo no estuvo de acuerdo. Dijo que la ley en cuestión no contravenía la Decimocuarta Enmienda porque la ley establecía la igualdad política, no la igualdad social. Y, el tribunal opinó que correspondía a los estados -no al gobierno federal- establecer estas leyes de acuerdo con sus poderes policiales.

Como sabemos, cincuenta y ocho años más tarde, el Tribunal Supremo, interpretando la misma Constitución, decidió que, de hecho, estas leyes separadas pero iguales sí contravenían la Decimocuarta Enmienda. La misma Decimocuarta Enmienda de Plessy. Entonces, ¿qué cambió durante estos cincuenta y ocho años? ¿La Constitución? No. Por razones irracionales, Estados Unidos insiste en no reescribir y actualizar la Constitución, un documento anacrónico escrito en tiempos que nada tienen que ver con los que vivimos y por hombres racistas, misóginos y clasistas. Entonces, ¿qué ha cambiado? Los tiempos.

En los cincuenta y ocho años transcurridos entre Plessy y Brown v. Board, Estados Unidos avanzó hacia una dirección un poco más justa para los “negros”.  El catalizador de este cambio fue el movimiento por los derechos civiles de 1896 a 1954. Este movimiento no sólo cambió las actitudes de los “negros” en relación con la “raza” sino, lo que es más importante, las actitudes de muchos “blancos” también. Este entorno político y social es muy importante, porque este entorno, mucho más que esta corta y débil constitución, influyó en la nueva “interpretación” que, de alguna manera, consiguió un derecho donde antes no había nada.

Ahora llegamos al momento actual. Hace cincuenta años, el Tribunal Supremo afirmó -en una sentencia mal escrita y razonada- el derecho de las mujeres a elegir. Interpretando la misma Decimocuarta Enmienda en el caso Plessy, el tribunal decidió que el gobierno no podía imponer restricciones irrazonables al derecho al aborto, que estaba garantizado a todos los ciudadanos estadounidenses por el derecho a la intimidad. Por supuesto, este derecho no aparece en la Decimocuarta Enmienda ni en la Constitución -como tampoco lo hacen los derechos al matrimonio homosexual, a la igualdad de todas las razas y al sexo gay- pero eso nunca ha impedido que el Tribunal Supremo cambie una ley que ha perdido el favor social, con el argumento de que, tras hablar con los espíritus de esta banda de hombres muertos, ha extraído una interpretación más pertinente y correcta del mismo documento.

Pero, ahora, los jueces están diciendo lo contrario. Ahora, cincuenta años después de Roe, el tribunal está diciendo que, a pesar de que la población de EE.UU. se está moviendo en la dirección de dar a las mujeres más libertad, más igualdad, y, al menos, más autoridad sobre sus propios cuerpos, es el momento de negar este impulso hacia adelante. Ahora, los jueces dicen que la Decimocuarta Enmienda no da a las mujeres el derecho a manejar sus propios cuerpos, porque esta pandilla de hombres blancos, racistas, misóginos y clasistas nunca quiso dárselo (pero esta pandilla sí quiso dar a los negros -los tres quintos de una persona- la igualdad, y a los homosexuales el derecho a casarse).

¿Qué significa todo esto en el gran esquema de las cosas? ¿Que es culpa de los republicanos y de Mitch McConnell por negar a Barack Obama su oportunidad de nombrar a Merrick Garland para el tribunal supremo? Sí. ¿Que este documento que todavía estamos tratando de usar para hacer la voluntad de un grupo de hombres horribles y muertos tiene su lugar apropiado dentro de un museo y lejos de nuestras leyes? Sí. ¿Que el tribunal supremo no volverá a disfrutar de su reputación de ser neutral y apolítico? Sí.Sí. ¿Que el gobierno, a partir de ahora, hará lo que quiera, sin respetar al pueblo? Sí.

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Según el Georgia Bureau of Investigation (la oficina de investigación de Georgia), Georgia tiene una crisis de pandillas. Los fiscales dicen que los miembros de las pandillas cometen la mayoría de los crimines dentro del área metropolitana de Atlanta. En el año 2018, había más de 70,000 miembros de pandillas documentados en Georgia. Para luchar contra la violencia que cometen las pandillas, el órgano legislativo de Georgia promulgó O.C.G.A. § 16-15-7 – una ley que permite que las víctimas de la violencia de las pandillas reciban el triple de los daños si el delito ocurrió en un área donde la violencia de las pandillas era prominente. 

La ley

O.C.G.A. § 16-15-7 reconoce lo que mucha gente que vive en barrios peligrosos siempre ha sabido– que los propietarios de los pisos son conscientes de que los residentes que los alquilan se encuentran en una zona de guerra, pero no les importa. Ahora los dueños de estas propiedades tienen que preocuparse. La ley dice que, si una propiedad se usa para actividades de pandillas, será considerada como una amenaza pública. Según la ley, una persona víctima de la violencia perpetrada por una pandilla en un área infestada de pandillas puede recibir una indemnización de cuantía equivalente al triple de los daños reales y también daños punitivos. La ley también concede a las víctimas un importe equivalente a los honorarios del abogado y los costes de la investigación. Y, según el tribunal de apelaciones de Georgia, los dueños de estas propiedades peligrosas pueden ser considerados responsables de los daños que sufrieron los residentes.

En Star Residential, LLC v. Hernandez (Ga. App. 2020), el tribunal de apelaciones emitió una resolución judicial sobre uno de estos casos. Habían disparado por la espalda a un residente en frente de la puerta de su piso. El residente entabló una acción contra los dueños del apartamento y, entre otras cosas, dijo que el apartamento era una amenaza pública según las leyes locales y O.C.G.A. § 16-15-7. Los demandados argumentaron que O.C.G.A. § 16-15-7 no era aplicable a ellos porque no participaron en ese acto de violencia. Sin embargo, el tribunal decidió que no solo la ley es aplicable a las personas que participan en la violencia, sino que el juez puede decidir, en cada caso, si el tipo de delito que se produce está relacionado al tipo de violencia que los legisladores intentaban erradicar. De acuerdo con Hernandez, si un apartamento se usa habitualmente para actividades de pandillas, los propietarios pueden ser responsables. El tribunal señaló que la ley no dice nada sobre la naturaleza del caso y el demandado especifico.

La redacción de la ley deja mucho espacio para la interpretación. Como la asamblea legislativa no identificó a un demandado específico, el juez o el jurado – como señala fervientemente el disentimiento en Hernández – tiene un control total para declarar si un caso se encuentra amparado por la ley o no. Esta autoridad total elimina la facultad de revisión del tribunal de apelaciones y no dará lugar a una aplicación uniforme de la ley. Sin embargo, como la disentimiento en Hernández también señala, este es un problema para los legisladores, no para los tribunales.

Responsabilidad civil de las instalaciones, específicamente

La responsabilidad civil de las instalaciones es un área de ley que no ha cambiado mucho en los últimos 100 años. La causa de pedir (cause of action) tiene cuatro elementos: una obligación a conformar un estándar de conducta, una infracción de la obligación, un daño causado por la infracción, y una pérdida provocada por el daño. La clase de personas que pueden cobrar una indemnización para una infracción son invitees y licensees. Un invitee es alguien que paga para un servicio dentro del edificio o área – como clientes en una tienda o residentes de un complejo de apartamentos. Un licensee es alguien que está dentro de la propiedad, pero no para el beneficio del dueño. Los duenos tienen la obligación para con los invitees de ejercer atención ordinaria (ordinary care) para asegurar que la propiedad y las áreas que rodean la propiedad sean seguras. Cuando la violencia se ejerce contra alguien dentro de una propiedad, la pregunta siempre es, ¿la violencia que ocurrió era previsible, o no? Si la respuesta es sí, los dueños son responsables si no tomaron precauciones razonables para prevenir la violencia.

En este contexto, la decisión de Hernández tiene sentido. Si un propietario ya sabía que su complejo de apartamentos estaba infestado de violencia y no hizo nada para evitarlo, es responsable de los daños sufridos por la víctima de esta violencia previsible. Pero, los propietarios no habían calculado los daños triples cuando hicieron las cuentas para decidir si era más barato poner guardias dentro de sus complejos de apartamentos o pagar los daños triples, los gastos legales y de investigación.

Lo que O.C.G.A. § 16-15-7 hace muy evidente es que los legisladores no permitirán que nadie que no tome medidas frente a la violencia desenfrenada de las pandillas eluda su responsabilidad. Seguramente, la ambigüedad que el Tribunal de Apelaciones reconoció en Hernández animará a los propietarios a tomar precauciones para limitar o eliminar la violencia de las bandas en sus propiedades. Los propietarios ya no pueden dejar a sus inquilinos viviendo desprotegidos en una zona de guerra.

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The plan documents rule does away with intention determination. The rule says that no matter what extraneous documents exist and no matter what deathbed promises were made, a plan’s funds will only be distributed to those beneficiaries that were designated in accordance with the plan rules. These plan rules typically require the plan holder to designate beneficiaries by documenting their designation on a form or, increasingly, on some sort of online platform. Designating beneficiaries in these ways allows plan administrators to create easily accessible paper trails that they can rely on to the exclusion of literally all other information. The plan documents also give the plan holder the only information they need to change their beneficiary so that they know their own obligations and responsibilities under the plan.  The Kennedy court put it perfectly when they said that ‘[b]y giving a plan participant a clear set of instructions for making his own instructions clear, ERISA forecloses any justification for inquiries into expressions of intent, in favor of the virtues of adhering to an uncomplicated rule.”

Kennedy was decided in 2009 and since then federal courts have been struggling to reconcile it with the previously applied substantial compliance rule. Under the substantial compliance rule, a plan holder’s attempt to change a beneficiary can be upheld, even if it doesn’t meet the rules under the plan documents, if the court finds that the plan holder has evidenced his intent to make a beneficiary change and “[attempted] to effectuate the change by undertaking positive action which is for all practical purposes similar to the action required by the change of beneficiaries provisions of the policy.” This rule is hard to pin down. It basically gives the court an incredible amount of discretion to decide which actions have gone far enough to qualify as “substantial compliance” and which haven’t.

I think that the Plan Documents Rule overrules the substantial compliance rule. And I also think that the Supreme Court intended for it to do so – substantial compliance is too subjective, demands a potentially endless amount of evidence, and makes the settlement of end-of-life issues harder than they need to be. Some courts share my opinion, but others are still attempting to reconcile the two doctrines, often choosing the doctrine that gives them more ability to make the decision that they feel is right or using the plan documents rule to “interpret” the wording of the plan to reach nonsensical outcomes.

The plan documents rule is heartless in its decisiveness. In Kennedy, the decedent’s ex-wife was awarded his plan’s proceeds even though she had disclaimed her interest in his life insurance policy in their divorce decree because the decedent failed to complete a paper beneficiary designation form. The decedent surely turned in his grave. Commonsense-wise, the fact that the decedent had divorced his wife is enough to tell a layman that he did not want her to get hundreds of thousands of dollars upon his death. But the Supreme Court – decidedly not laymen—held that the only thing that mattered was the beneficiary form — not his divorce from his wife, or her signature on a divorce decree in which she unequivocally disclaims any interest in the policy proceeds. The Court awarded the ex-wife the insurance proceeds, ignoring the competing claim of the decedent’s own daughter. Cold-blooded. But refreshingly reliable.

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person [pur-suh n] noun. a human being, whether an adult or child.

Language evolves. New words that describe change or innovation are often born from necessity. All of those self-portraits taken with your front facing cameras? “Selfies.” A pithy take on a current event sent to the world via your mobile phone? A “tweet.” But sometimes language is perverted – diverted from its source to alternate and unnatural destinations like a dammed river – and used to entrench bias instead of communicate objective fact. In articles and books, language manipulation is a relatively contained disease – only infecting those who have been directly exposed – but in the law, it can breed an epidemic.

The best example of a vocabulary that has been manipulated to the point of nonsensicality is the language surrounding reproductive rights. Riddled with linguistic oddities and oxymorons, the language that we use to talk about what happens in a woman’s body when she’s pregnant has little to do with the observable world – little to do with the rules of science, physics and biology – and more to do with pushing a political agenda or fortifying a religious belief. Alabama’s recently passed Human Life Protection Act is far from the only offender in this context, but it is the most egregious.

The moral failings of this legislation (outlawing abortion for the victims of rape and the child victims of incest) threaten both patience and inner peace, so let’s stick to the language. I take particular umbrage with two terms in this legislation.  

First, the legislation uses the term “unborn life” to describe a fetus at any stage of liability. This isn’t the first time this term has been tossed around, but this is one of the most important times. Let’s take a closer look at the term “unborn life” and why, both on their own and together, these words are emblematic of the limitations of the vocabulary we currently use to talk about reproductive rights.  

Most dictionaries contain multiple entries for the word “life”, ranging from the biological to the celestial. Life is both “the animate existence” and a “principle of existence conceived of as belonging to the soul.” So, life is both something that we can see, and something that we can believe in. These definitions make sense, of course: our language evolved not only to describe a world that made sense, but to describe a world as we sensed it, thus definitions that pit fact against faith must often reach some sort of compromise. The six to eight definitions that pop up to define the word “life” are the perfect example of such a compromise and why dictionaries – the place we go to figure stuff out, not make stuff more confusing – are not reliable sources in the instant context.

“Unborn” is similarly confusing. Most dictionaries use the following definitions: (1) Not yet born; yet to come; future (2) Not yet delivered; still existing in the mother’s womb; (3) Existing without birth or beginning. I find the last definition to be the most confusing and/or fascinating. Without birth or beginning? Surely everything must begin somewhere? Are my ova “unborn”? What about my partner’s spermatozoon? How much “unborn” blood is on our hands?

The second bone I’ll pick will take much less time. The statute does allow abortion when medical professionals agree that the child will be born with a “lethal anomaly.” The statute’s definition of this term as “a condition from which an unborn child would die after birth” begs the question of which of us has been spared this particular anomaly?

The reason debates deadlock in the context of reproductive rights is because the language that we currently use to talk about pregnancy is unusable. We need words rooted in fact, not faith. Words that fortify a woman’s right to autonomy, and her freedom to make decision about a part of her body, housed in her body and reliant on its holistic function to provide calories, oxygen and water, just like a kidney, a stomach, or a heart. A sugar addicted woman with poorly managed type two diabetes would not be charged with the murder of her kidneys. A man stuck for hours between rocks can’t be charged with the death of the arm he was forced to amputate and leave in the crevasse in order to survive (even though he’s the one who decided to go on the hike in the first place).

There are multiple sides to this debate, and I understand where everyone is coming from. But, regardless of what side we’re on, we can’t use language that doesn’t appropriately label what it is we’re debating in the first place. To say a fetus is an “unborn life” is the same as saying that I am a “born life” – we would all agree that the latter is a linguistic anomaly, but some of us would say that the former is an accurate description. Sometimes language ties our tongues and our hands.

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In creative writing, rules often give way to style. E.E. Cummings had little patience for punctuation; Twain and Orwell created their own words when imagining and defining new worlds, and one of the most acclaimed books of this year is a single sentence that runs the length of one thousand pages. Creative writing excites the mind by challenging the reader with innovative ideas, language, and form. Unfortunately, lawyers and legislators – some of the world’s most prolific writers – do not enjoy the same freedom as their creative counterparts. To be effective, legal writing must be technical and precise, often to the point of banality; only the best lawyers manage to wrestle a touch of imagery or flourish into jargon-heavy motions and briefs. While every lawyer must adhere to grammatical technicalities, strict adherence to linguistic precision is arguably most important in the context of reading and interpreting law from the judge’s bench – while one attorney’s sloppy work can throw a single person’s life into disarray, a misinterpreted statute can implicate the rights of millions.

This post was inspired by a recent project in which I dealt with a maddening misinterpretation of a piece of Georgia legislation. Specifically, O.C.G.A. § 53-2-27 which authorizes Georgia courts to compel parties to submit to DNA testing to prove a biological relationship with a decedent in the context of probate proceedings. Section A of the statute reads:

When the kinship of any party in interest to a decedent is in controversy in any proceeding under this article, a superior court may order the removal and testing of [DNA] samples from the remains of the decedent and from any party in interest whose kinship to the decedent is in controversy for purposes of comparison and determination of the statistical likelihood of such kinship.

Relying on its interpretation of the statute, the court at issue ordered a decedent’s undisputed biological and legal child (who was also serving as the administrator of the estate) to submit to DNA testing to prove shared paternity with a child who claimed to be the decedent’s previously unacknowledged biological child (and was obviously demanding some share of the decedent’s intestate estate). The problem with the court’s order is that the statute clearly does not allow it.

Let’s get technical. The phrase “whose relationship to the decedent is in controversy” is a restrictive clause that limits the meaning of the phrase “a party in interest.” Introduced by the pronouns, who, that, which, and whose, a restrictive clause defines the meaning of the noun or noun phrase and is essential to the meaning of the sentence because it limits the thing it refers to. The phrasing at issue is a restrictive clause. “Whose relationship to the decedent is in controversy” is not preceded by a comma and is introduced by the pronoun “whose.” “Whose relationship to the decedent is in controversy” is used to limit the meaning of the noun phrase “any party in interest” to mean a party whose relationship to the decedent has not yet been proven, or is “in controversy.” Universally agreed upon English grammatical rules make this interpretation unequivocal.

If this statute is interpreted based on the grammatical rules set out above, then the court has legislative authority to order DNA testing from two parties: (1) the decedent and (2) the interested party with an unproven biological relationship with the decedent. The court does not have authority to order a party with a proven, uncontroversial, relationship to the decedent to submit to a DNA test.

This statute isn’t vague – the wording is concise, and the meaning is clear. But any attorney who’s spent significant time in courtrooms knows that judges aren’t law professors, and nuanced, technical (correct) arguments often lose to a judge’s idea of what is “right” or “wrong” in a specific context. It’s a frustrating result that, due to the delay, cost and uncertainty of the appellate process, often goes unchecked. This isn’t to say that judges aren’t often right – courts of review have long recognized a trial court’s right to recognize a statute’s implied authority, and statutes are often rewritten to make previously implied authority explicit. But this is simply not one of those occasions.

While most legislators aren’t lawyers, they are still legal writers and beholden to the same level of technical specificity that governs the rest of us. When interpreting the statutes that legislators write, judges must apply universally accepted English grammatical rules. Judges must assume that the legislature expects for laws to be interpreted according to a clear reading of the language based on grammatical rules that govern punctuation and composition. Holding otherwise doesn’t just lead to a lot of frustrated lawyers – it makes following the law confusing, which will make life harder, in general, for everyone.

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