How To Do Things With Hohfeld

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld’s 1913 article, Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, is widely viewed as brilliant. A thrilling read, it is not. More like chewing on sawdust. The arguments are dense, the examples unfriendly, and the prose turgid. “How to Do Things With Hohfeld” is an effort to provide an accessible and sawdust-free account of Hohfeld’s article, as well as to show how and why his analysis of “legal relations” (e.g., right/duty, etc.) matters. Perhaps the principal reason is that the analysis furnishes a discriminating platform to discern the economic and political import of legal rules and legal regimes. My project here is to offer a forward-leaning interpretation of Hohfeld — to show how and why his insights remain highly relevant today. The article engages with the jural relations, decomposition and recomposition, the bundle of relations, the critique of reification, and recent discussions in property theory as well as the “New Private Law.” I am keen on protecting Hohfeld’s platform from some (legal realist) over-extensions as well as showing how the views of the “Hohfeld critics” are in many ways consonant with Hohfeld’s own thinking. The article closes with some questions about the limitations of Hohfeld’s approach

The NLRB’s Social Media Guidelines a Lose-Lose: Why the NLRB’s Stance on Social Media Fails to Fully Address Employer’s Concerns and Dilutes Employee Protections

[Excerpt] The expanding use of both personal and professional social media sites has resulted in its growing impact in the workplace. Recently, many examples have emerged where an individual’s use of social media for communicating frustrations or sharing personal information resulted in significant conflict between the individual and their employer. Employment actions arising from an employee’s social media use have become so contentious that a number of employers have been charged with unfair labor practices for overly broad social media policies or implementation of unfair policies. Following several important Board decisions the NLRB issued guidelines, identifying acceptable employer-initiated social media policies. As social media’s popularity will likely only continue to grow, it is important to understand how employer policies impact employees’ social media use and the potential invasion these policies may have on employees’ rights. This article concludes that the NLRB’s issued guidance fails to adequately address social media concerns raised by employers and dilutes employees’ rights to communicate workplace concerns. This is because even though the guidance permits employer developed social media policies, the NLRB’s stance permits employers to monitor and analyze employees’ social media use and does not clarify when an employer can act on social media information

On continuum incidence problems related to harmonic analysis

We consider certain estimates involving averaging operators over curves and hypersurfaces that can be cast into a combinatorial framework. We show that hypersurfaces with nonzero rotational curvature satisfy the usual restricted weak-type bound, but our proof does not involve the Fourier transform. Secondly, we show that a Strichartz-type estimate for the wave equation in 2+1 dimensions can be obtained in a similar fashion, and we give a simplified proof of Wolff's endpoint theorem for maximal averages over circles. Finally, examples are provided that show what the optimal bound can be for the tangency problem of circles in the plane.Comment: 38 pages, no figure