The United Postal \u3cem\u3eService\u3c/em\u3e—The One Word that Makes all the Difference

In recent months, the United States Postal Service (USPS) has taken center stage on a number of intersecting issues in our society: the pandemic; the upcoming election (through mail-in voting) and the controversy surrounding the appointment of Louis DeJoy to the position of Postmaster General. President Donald Trump has frequently made derogatory remarks regarding the Postal Service, calling it a “joke,” and has made repeated statements encouraging its privatization. However, President Trump’s rhetoric (as well as the rhetoric of others before him) obfuscates the critical mission of the USPS – to provide service to every American in the country; not simply through its Universal Service Obligation but through other particularly public functions that are largely unique to this agency. This essay unmasks this rhetoric and argues that privatization is not a good fit for USPS. Through an examination of both the debates of privatization and the implications of becoming a profit-making business, we show how these goals are misaligned with the central mission of the Postal Service. Americans rely on USPS for a number of essential functions that it would be impossible to carry out on a for-profit basis. Now, more than ever, we need to focus on the key public mission of USPS to serve all Americans

Retroactivity and the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009

This Article resolves confusion over the scope of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act (FERA), which amends the False Claims Act (FCA), to clarify that it covers fraud against the taxpayers even where committed by and against other government contractors and subcontractors. I focus on a controversial retroactivity clause applying FERA’s expanded liability language to pre-enactment conduct. Ambiguity has led to inconsistent outcomes: some courts have ruled that FERA’s new language applies to pre-enactment conduct while others have reached the opposite result. Much of practical consequence rides on how we resolve this ambiguity—the Department of Justice is currently investigating over a thousand FCA cases, each of which carries the potential for treble damages. I lay out an analytical solution by applying the Supreme Court’s retroactivity doctrine announced in Landgraf v. USI Film Products and conclude that Congress intended the statute to operate retroactively

FOREWORD: CLASSCRITS IX SYMPOSIUM ISSUE

These are dangerous but also hopeful times for the left. The Trump years, and the years of right-wing governance that may lie in store for other countries, are not likely to be good ones for progressive policymaking. Since 2008, a network of scholars, practitioners and activists meet as the ClassCrits group to discuss socioeconomic inequality in the United States and around the world. The Articles in this ClassCrits IX Symposium issue all deal in one way or another with the problems created or exacerbated by neoliberalism or by longstanding defects of the American legal, economic and political systems: access to justice (Victoria Haneman); plutocracy (Timothy Kuhner); liberal theory and corporate ideology (James Wilson); corporate tax fairness (Daron Narotzki); and the use of arbitration to entrench corporate power (Eric George.) Victoria Haneman’s piece, Bridging the Justice Gap with a (Purposeful) Restructuring of Small Claims Court, is perhaps the most reform-oriented of the Articles