Digital Commons Network^™

Historical Kinship And Categorical Mischief: The Use And Misuse Of Doctrinal Borrowing In Intellectual Property Law, Mark Bartholomew, John Tehranian

Journal Articles

Analogies are ubiquitous in legal reasoning, and, in copyright jurisprudence, courts frequently turn to patent law for guidance. From introducing doctrines meant to regulate online intermediaries to evaluating the constitutionality of resurrecting copyrights to works from the public domain, judges turn to patent law analogies to lend ballast to their decisions. At other times, however, patent analogies with copyright law are quickly discarded and differences between the two regimes highlighted. Why? In examining the transplantation of doctrinal frameworks from one intellectual property field to another, this Article assesses the circumstances in which courts engage in doctrinal borrowing, discerns their rationale …

Constitutional Patriotism As Europe’S Public Philosophy? On The Responsiveness Of Post-National Law, Paul Linden-Retek

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 13 in Constitutional Patriotism as Europe’s Public Philosophy? On the Responsiveness of Post-National Law, Jan Komárek, ed.

This chapter critiques Jürgen Habermas’s concept of constitutional patriotism—and its basis in his discourse theory of democracy and law—from the analytic perspective of ‘constitutional imaginaries’, and details the consequences of this critique for the constitutional discourse of the contemporary European judiciary. In the first instance, analysis of constitutional imaginaries reveals the extent to which civic attachment to constitutional law is oriented not merely to legal principles simpliciter but also to the historical settlement of political conflict those principles reflect. This …

The Dilemma Of Liberal Pluralism, Abner S. Greene

Buffalo Law Review

Supporters of reproductive rights and of queer rights may sometimes live in harmony with advocates for religious exemptions. But sometimes these goals conflict. This Article explores this tension as a matter of liberal democratic theory and U.S. constitutional law, offering a case for seeing a robust pluralism as contained within a proper understanding of the liberal democratic state. The state’s claimed authority may be the starting point, but just as the modern state was born in decentralized religious toleration, so should the modern state accommodate religious and other views of the good that compete with the state’s own views. The …

The Refugees We Are: Solidarity, Asylum, And Critique In The European Constitutional Imagination, Paul Linden-Retek

Journal Articles

This Article aims to reimagine post-national legal solidarity. It does so by bringing debates over Habermasian constitutional theory to bear on the evolving use of mutual recognition and mutual trust in the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice (AFSJ), particularly in the context of European asylum law and reforms to the Dublin Regulation. Insofar as critiques of Habermasian “constitutional patriotism” apply to the principle of mutual trust, the Article suggests why post-national solidarity requires fallibilism and dynamic responsiveness that exceed formalized rules of forbearance and respect.

On this revised view, legal solidarity guarantees a particular form of adjudication through …

Copyright And The Brain, Mark Bartholomew

Journal Articles

This Article exploresthe intersection of copyright law, aesthetic theory, and neuroscience. The current test for copyright infringement requires a court or jury to assess whether the parties’ works are “substantially similar” from the vantage point of the “ordinary observer. ”Embedded within this test are several assumptions about audiences and art. Brain science calls these assumptions into question. The substantial similarity test posits that aesthetic reactions are unmeasurable and uniform. In actuality, they can be quantified and vary depending on audience and artistic medium. Neuroscience has already reconfigured the law in many areas, from tort damages to the death penalty. Now …

Liberalism's Identity Politics: A Response To Professor Fukuyama, Athena D. Mutua

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Nof Kdumim: Remaking The Ancient Landscape In East Jerusalem’S National Parks, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

This article explores two national parks in East Jerusalem and their legal administration as the focus of contradictory and complementary attempts at preservation, colonization, and normalization. Drawing on in-depth interviews with, and observations of, officials from the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and others, I expose the Judaizing of the landscape in Jerusalem. Nature never stands for itself; it is always an echo of a human presence and, in this case, of a Jewish past and its modern reunion. The project of imagining the natural landscape as one that embodies an ancient past—what Israeli officials have referred to in our …

What Good Is Abstraction? From Liberal Legitimacy To Social Justice, Nimer Sultany

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Legal Pluralist Approach To The Use Of Cultural Perspectives In The Implementation And Adjudication Of Human Rights Norms, Valeska David, Julie Fraser

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.

What Is The Future Of Transitional Justice?, Makau Wa Mutua

Journal Articles

This piece explores and critiques the project of transitional justice. It has been more than a quarter of a century since transitional justice burst onto the global stage. Over the years it has come to be billed as a panacea for addressing deeply embedded social and political dysfunction after periods of mass repression and violence. Many theorists and policy makers have argued that it is a key bridge to sustainable peace, democracy and human rights. But the historical record is not clear about a direct causal relationship between transitional justice mechanisms and specific outcomes in post-conflict societies. In some cases, …

The Spirit And Task Of Democratic Cosmopolitanism: European Political Identity At The Limits Of Transnational Law, Paul Linden-Retek

Journal Articles

The problem motivating this essay is the continuing, yet difficult hope for a Europe of democratic cosmopolitanism, for a Europe in which cosmopolitics works to continually question the terms of lingering exclusion while preserving our ideals of self-legislation and democratic authorship. In what follows, I expand the familiar criticism of Europe’s democratic legitimacy gap, its democratic deficit, as a lens through which to analyse the possibility of a supranational participatory identity within the European political space. First, I describe the contemporary juridification of European politics, specifically concerning the legal formalism of the European Court of Justice, and the dangers such …

Trying A New Way: Barack Obama's Tolerance Of Intolerance, Stephanie L. Phillips

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Law And Literature: Story-Telling And Norms In Rousseau's Emile, Eric Engle

Buffalo Journal of Gender, Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

The Concept Of "Less Eligibility" And The Social Function Of Prison Violence In Class Society, Ahmed A. White

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Forgetting Lochner In The Journey From Plan To Market: The Framing Effect Of The Market Rhetoric In Market-Oriented Reforms, Joel M. Ngugi

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Killing Globally, Punishing Locally?: The Still-Unmapped Ecology Of Atrocity, Timothy William Waters

Buffalo Law Review

Book review of Mark A. Drumbl's Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law

The Place Of Translation In Jerusalem's Criminal Trial Court, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

The court-appointed translator is largely an invisible actor in the legal space. The Israeli context provides an extreme example of this invisibility: apart from a general statutory definition of the court's obligation to translate criminal proceedings, the work of translation in the Israeli courtroom is mostly unregulated by state law, rendering it highly susceptible to informal manifestations. This article offers a critical empirical investigation into the micropractices of translation performed in the Jerusalem criminal trial court in 2002. On the face of things, the court-appointed translator performs a technical task in the everyday working of the court. Expected to mediate …

European Implications Of Bankruptcy Venue Shopping In The U.S., David A. Skeel Jr.

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Courting Failure, Lynn M. Lopucki

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Puzzle Of State Constitutions, Jim Rossi

Buffalo Law Review

Book review of James A. Gardner's Interpreting State Constitutions: A Jurisprudence of Function in a Federal System

Responsibility, Injustice And The American Dilemma, Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.

Leaky Boundaries And The Decline Of The Autonomous Law School Library, James G. Milles

Journal Articles

Academic law librarians have long insisted on the value of autonomy from the university library system, usually basing their arguments on strict adherence to ABA standards. However, law librarians have failed to construct an explicit and consistent definition of autonomy. Lacking such a definition, they have tended to rely on an outmoded Langdellian view of the law as a closed system. This view has long been discredited, as approaches such as law and economics and sociolegal research have become mainstream, and courts increasingly resort to nonlegal sources of information. Blind attachment to autonomy as a goal rather than a means …

Human Rights And Post-Imperialism: Arguing For A Deliberative Legitimation Of Human Rights, Amy Bartholomew

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.

Islamic Feminism: Unveiling The Western Stigma, Shazia N. Nagamia

Buffalo Women's Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Rights Integration In An Institutional Context: The Experience Of The Kenya Human Rights Commission, Willy Mutunga, Alamin Mazrui

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.

Enlightening Identity And Copyright, Shubha Ghosh

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Russian Jewry: The History Of Survival, Polina Tomashevsky

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.

Savages, Victims, And Saviors: The Metaphor Of Human Rights, Makau Wa Mutua

Journal Articles

This article critically looks at the human rights project as a damning three-dimensional metaphor that exposes multiple complexes. It argues that the grand narrative of human rights contains a subtext which depicts an epochal contest pitting savages, on the one hand, against victims and saviors, on the other. The savages-victims-saviors (SVS) construction lays bare some of the hypocrisies of the human rights project and asks human rights thinkers and advocates to become more self-reflective. The piece questions the universality and cultural neutrality of the human rights project. It calls for the construction of a truly universal human rights corpus, one …

Why Retire The Feminization Of Poverty Construct?, Athena D. Mutua

Journal Articles

The "feminization of poverty" concept should be retired, if it has not already been so. It should be retired, even though the concept has been extremely powerful as a discursive construct. In a phrase, the idea captured a seemingly universal phenomenon, inspired theoretical research into the nexus between women and poverty, and summoned coalitions of women by marking an agenda for, and among, women across the boundaries of race, ethnicity, and nationality. In short, it has been a war cry, demanding and framing analyses of women's poverty, and justifying and inspiring women's collective action. Nevertheless, the feminization of poverty construct …

Human Rights And Sustainable Development In Contemporary Africa: A New Dawn, Or Retreating Horizons?, J. Oloka-Onyango

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.