Digital Commons Network^™

Book Review, Peter H. Huang

Publications

This review of Leo Katz's book, Why the Law is So Perverse, addresses three questions. First, does Katz draw the appropriate normative conclusions about legal perversities based on their connections to social choice theory? In other words, what are the legal ethics and professionalism implications of his book? Second, how does each of the legal perversities in the book follow from a particular social choice theory result? In other words, what is the precise theoretical connection between each of the legal perversities discussed and an impossibility theorem in social choice theory? Third, can we reinterpret our understanding of the …

Imputation, The Adverse Interest Exception, And The Curious Case Of The Restatement (Third) Of Agency, Mark J. Loewenstein

Publications

The imputation doctrine in the common law of agency provides that knowledge of an agent acquired in the course of the agency relationship is imputed to the principal. An important exception to the imputation doctrine, known as the adverse interest exception, provides that knowledge is not imputed if it is acquired by the agent in a course of conduct that is entirely adverse to the principal. These doctrines play an important role in sorting out liability when senior management of a corporation engages in a financial fraud that harms the company. Typically, new management is brought in and it sues …

The Corporate Preference For Trade Secret, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

Many inventions can be legally protected either by patent or by trade secrecy, and a conventional wisdom exists on how to select between them. This Article adds to that literature by showing that corporations should have an inherent preference for trade secret over patent for reasons relating to their legal form. Among them is the idea that corporations are perpetual entities and therefore perfectly suited to reap the perpetual returns that only a trade secret can offer. The Article also addresses the potential for a conflict between the inherent corporate preference for trade secret and the preferences of corporate managers, …

Crowdfunding Securities, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

A new federal statute authorizes the online "crowdfunding" of securities, a new idea based on the concept of "reward" crowdfunding practiced on Kickstarter and other websites. This method of selling securities had previously been banned by federal securities law but the new CROWDFUND Act overturns that prohibition.

This Article introduces the CROWDFUND Act and explains that it can be expected to have two primary effects on securities law and capital markets. First, it will liberate startup companies to use peer networks and the Internet to obtain modest amounts of capital at low cost. Second, it will help democratize the market …

Water Transfers For A Changing Climate, Mark Squillace

Publications

The prior appropriation doctrine that dominates the water laws of the Western United States was perhaps the inevitable consequence of the need to manage water resources in a region where the demand for water often exceeds the supply. This doctrine has proved surprisingly clumsy at accommodating changing water needs during times of shortage. Economists have long viewed water markets as an attractive solution for reallocating water to meet the demands of an evolving community of water users. But most western states have been skeptical--sometimes even hostile--to proposed changes in historic water use patterns. This reluctance to encourage the transfer of …

The U.N. Security Council's Duty To Decide, Anna Spain

Publications

When faced with a global crisis within the scope of its mandate, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC or Council) has no obligation to decide whether or not to take action. This Article argues that it should. The UNSC is the only governing body with the legal authority to authorize binding measures necessary to restore peace and security, yet neither the United Nations Charter nor the UNSC's own rules clarify the extent of its obligations. Unlike courts, the UNSC lacks a procedural rule establishing that it has a duty to decide. Unlike the United States Congress, which accepts its practical …

(In)Competence In Appellate And District Court Brief Writing On Rule 12 And 56 Motions, Scott A. Moss

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No abstract provided.

Remarks Of David H. Getches: Federal Bar Association Indian Law Conference (April 7, 2011), David H. Getches

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No abstract provided.

American Gangsters: Rico, Criminal Syndicates, And Conspiracy Law As Market Control, Benjamin Levin

Publications

In an effort to reexamine legal and political decisions about criminalization and the role of the criminal law in shaping American markets and social institutions, this Article explores the ways in which criminal conspiracy laws in the United States have historically been used to subdue nonstate actors and informal markets that threatened the hegemony of the state and formal market. To this end, the Article focuses primarily on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) as illustrative of broader trends in twentieth-century criminal policy. Enacted in 1970, RICO provides criminal sanctions for individuals engaged in unacceptable organized activities and …

De-Naturalizing Criminal Law: Of Public Perceptions And Procedural Protections, Benjamin Levin

Publications

Innocence, it turns out, is a complex concept. Yet the Innocence Movement has drawn power from the simplicity of the wrong-person story of innocence, as told most effectively by the DNA cases. The purity of that story continues to have power, but that story alone cannot sustain the Innocence Movement. It is too narrow. It fails to accommodate the vast majority of innocent people in our justice system. It fails to embrace innocence in its full complexity. . . . [I]n the end, for virtually all purposes, innocence must be understood under the objective rules that have long governed the …

The Case For Curation: The Relevance Of Digest And Citator Results In Westlaw And Lexis, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

Humans and machines are both involved in the creation of legal research resources. For legal information retrieval systems, the human-curated finding aid is being overtaken by the computer algorithm. But human-curated finding aids still exist. One of them is the West Key Number system. The Key Number system’s headnote classification of case law, started back in the nineteenth century, was and is the creation of humans. The retrospective headnote classification of the cases in Lexis’s case databases, started in 1999, was created primarily - although not exclusively - with computer algorithms. So how do these two very different systems deal …

Rural Crowdfunding, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

One reason that economic development in rural America lags behind its urban counterpart is the persistent lack of venture capital for rural entrepreneurs. Geography deserves much of the blame, as angel investors and venture capitalists tend to live and work in metropolitan areas on the coasts, in places like Silicon Valley and Boston. Many rural areas are literally thousands of miles away, with the result that venture capital has rarely found its way to rural regions.

Recent federal legislation, however, has the potential to change this dynamic. The JOBS Act authorizes the sale of securities over the Internet to large …

Real Masks And Real Name Policies: Applying Anti-Mask Case Law To Anonymous Online Speech, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

The First Amendment protects anonymous speech, but the scope of that protection has been the subject of much debate. This Article adds to the discussion of anonymous speech by examining anti-mask statutes and cases as an analogue for the regulation of anonymous speech online. Anti-mask case law answers a number of questions left open by the Supreme Court. It shows that courts have used the First Amendment to protect anonymity beyond core political speech, when mask-wearing is expressive conduct or shows a nexus with free expression. This Article explores what the anti-mask cases teach us about anonymity online, including proposed …

Settler Colonialism And Reclamation: Where American Indian Law And Natural Resources Law Meet, Sarah Krakoff

Publications

Three hours west of Phoenix, Arizona, the Colorado River Indian Tribes (“CRIT”), a federally recognized tribe that includes over 3,700 enrolled members of Mohave, Chemehuevi, Navajo, and Hopi descent, occupies a reservation nearly 300,000 acres in size. The CRIT was one of five tribes to have its water rights confirmed in the landmark case of Arizona v. California, and therefore has senior rights to 719,248 acre-feet of Colorado River water, nearly one-third of Arizona’s allocation. How the CRIT came to be a single federally recognized tribe composed of members from four indigenous peoples located on lands that were a fraction …

Private Copyright Reform, Kristelia A. García

Publications

The government is not the only player in copyright reform, and perhaps not even the most important. Left to free market negotiation, risk averse licensors and licensees are contracting around the statutory license for certain types of copyright-protected content, and achieving greater efficiency via private ordering. This emerging phenomenon, herein termed "private copyright reform," presents both adverse selection and distributive justice concerns: first, circumvention of the statutory license goes against legislative intent by allowing for the reduction, and even elimination, of statutorily mandated royalties owed to non-parties. In addition, when presented without full term disclosure, privately determined royalty rates can …

Never Construed To Their Prejudice: In Honor Of David Getches, Richard B. Collins

Publications

This article reviews and analyzes the judicial canons of construction for Native American treaties and statutes. It discusses their theoretical justifications and practical applications. It concludes that the treaty canon has ready support in contract law and the law of treaty interpretation. Justification of the statutory canon is more challenging and could be strengthened by attention to the democratic deficit when Congress imposes laws on Indian country. Applications of the canons have mattered in disputes between Indian nations and private or state interests. They have made much less difference, and have suffered major failings, in disputes with the federal government. …

Reimagining Democratic Inclusion: Asian Americans And The Voting Rights Act, Ming Hsu Chen, Taeku Lee

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The current legal framework for protecting voting rights in the United States has been dramatically destabilized by Supreme Court decisions re-interpreting the protections against minority vote dilution and requires rethinking to survive modern challenges. At the same time, the nation has itself undergone dramatic changes in the racial composition of its polity and in the complexity and salience of race as a factor in political life. In this paper, we focus on a relatively unexamined constituent of this complex reality of modern racial diversity that illustrates some of the core features that all minority groups face in continuing VRA challenges: …

Prostitution 3.0?, Scott R. Peppet

Publications

This Article presents an entirely novel approach to prostitution reform focused on incremental market improvement facilitated by information law and policy. Empirical evidence from the economics and sociology of sex work shows that new, Internet-enabled, indoor forms of prostitution may be healthier, less violent, and more rewarding than traditional street prostitution. This Article argues that these existing "Prostitution 2.0" innovations have not yet improved sex markets sufficiently to warrant legalization. It suggests that creating a new "Prostitution 3.0" that solves the remaining problems of disease, violence, and coercion in prostitution markets is possible, but would require removing legal barriers to …

Coase Minus The Coase Theorem--Some Problems With Chicago Transaction Cost Analysis, Pierre Schlag

Publications

In law as well as economics, the most well-known aspect of Coase's "The Problem of Social Cost," is the Coase Theorem. Over the decades, that particular notion has morphed into a crucial component of Chicago law and economics--namely, transaction cost analysis.

In this Article, I deliberately bracket the Coase Theorem to show that "The Problem of Social Cost" contains far more interesting and unsettling lessons--both for law as well as for economics. Indeed, while Coase's arguments clearly target the Pigouvian attempts to "improve on the market" through government correctives, there is, lurking in those arguments, a much more profound critique …

Neofeminism, Aya Gruber

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Today it is prosaic to say that "feminism is dead." Far from being moribund, feminist legal theory is breaking from its somewhat dogmatic past and forging ahead with new vigor. Many modern feminist legal scholars seek innovative ways to better the legal, social, and economic status of women while simultaneously questioning some of the more troubling moves of second-wave feminism, such as the tendency to essentialize the woman's experience, the turn to authoritarian state policies, and the characterization of women as pure objects or agents. These "neofeminists" prioritize women's issues but maintain a strong commitment to distributive justice and recognize …

Rationalizing Entity Law: Corporate Law And Alternative Entities (Part I), Mark J. Loewenstein

Publications

In this article, I consider how corporate law and limited liability company law treat five different areas: agency authority, derivative actions, formation issues, veil piercing, and oppression of minority owners. For each such area, I consider whether the law varies depending on the kind of entity involved, why that might be the case, and whether the law should be rationalized; that is, whether legislatures or the courts should seek to harmonize the law across entities. While this short article focuses primarily on corporations and limited liability companies, the issues considered here apply as well to partnerships and, where appropriate, reference …

Keep It Light, Chairman White: Sec Rulemaking Under The Crowdfund Act, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

Title III of the JOBS Act, known as the CROWDFUND Act, authorizes the “crowdfunding” of securities, defined as raising capital online from many investors, each of whom contributes only a small amount. The Act was signed into law in April 2012, and will go into effect once the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) promulgates rules and regulations to govern the new marketplace for crowdfunded securities. This Essay offers friendly advice to the SEC as to how to exercise its rulemaking authority in a manner that will enable the Act to achieve its goals of creating an ultralow-cost method for raising …

The Power And Promise Of Procedure: Examining The Class Action Landscape After Wal-Mart V. Dukes, Suzette M. Malveaux

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No abstract provided.

The Jury (Or More Accurately The Judge) Is Still Out For Civil Rights And Employment Cases Post-Iqbal, Suzette M. Malveaux

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No abstract provided.

Re-Problematizing Anger In Domestic Violence Advocacy, Deborah Cantrell

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Feminist advocacy commits wholeheartedly to a woman’s autonomous choices about how to respond to domestic violence, prioritizing a woman’s own lived experiences and her own assessments of her needs and goals over other supposedly “objective” assessments. Feminists robustly privilege individual choices of women in part as a way of revealing anti-woman bias in the dominant, patriarchal legal system as well to reject male constructions of feminine behavior. In feminist domestic violence advocacy, scholars and advocates have argued that a woman’s autonomous choices include capacious choices about the kinds of emotions that a woman might express about being subjected to abuse. …

Undue Burdens In Texas, Jennifer S. Hendricks

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No abstract provided.

Panel Discussion Iii: Recognizing And Addressing Immigration Concerns In The Criminal Process, Violeta Chapin, Dan Kesselbrenner, Christina Kleiser

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No abstract provided.

Lawyering For Groups: The Case Of American Indian Tribal Attorneys, Kristen A. Carpenter, Eli Wald

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Lawyering for groups, broadly defined as the legal representation of a client who is not an individual, is a significant and booming phenomenon. Encompassing the representation of governments, corporations, institutions, peoples, classes, communities, and causes, lawyering for groups is what many, if not most, lawyers do. And yet, the dominant theory of law practice--the Standard Conception, with its principles of zealous advocacy, nonaccountability, and professional role-based morality--and the rules of professional conduct that codify it, continue to be premised on the basic antiquated assumption that the paradigmatic client-attorney relationship is between an individual client and an individual attorney. The result …

Technological Cost As Law In Intellectual Property, Harry Surden

Publications

Changes in the scope of IP legal rights are generally thought to be linked to changes in positive law. This Article argues that shifts in the scope of IP laws are often driven by changes in technological feasibility and not by changes in positive law. Diminishing technological constraint is an under-acknowledged factor driving changes in substantive IP law.

More specifically, there are certain activities that are core to IP law. Such activities include, for example, the copying of creative works in copyright (e.g. duplicating books or music), or the manufacturing of products in patent law. Traditionally, IP legal theory has …

Foreword: Public Constitutional Literacy; A Conversation, Melissa Hart

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No abstract provided.