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Property, Duress, And Consensual Relationships, David Blankfein-Tabachnick
Property, Duress, And Consensual Relationships, David Blankfein-Tabachnick
Michigan Law Review
Professor Seana Valentine Shiffrin has produced an exciting new book, Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and the Law. Shiffrin’s previous rigorous, careful, and morally sensitive work spans contract law, intellectual property, and the freedoms of association and expression. Speech Matters is in line with Shiffrin’s signature move: we ought to reform our social practices and legal and political institutions to, in various ways, address or accommodate moral values—here, a stringent moral prohibition against lying, a strident principle of promissory fidelity, that is, the principle that one ought to keep one’s promises, and the general value of veracity. The book …
Commerce, Jack M. Balkin
Commerce, Jack M. Balkin
Michigan Law Review
This Article applies the method of text and principle to an important problem in constitutional interpretation: the constitutional legitimacy of the modem regulatory state and its expansive definition of federal commerce power Some originalists argue that the modem state cannot be justified, while others accept existing precedents as a "pragmatic exception" to originalism. Nonoriginalists, in turn, point to these difficulties as a refutation of originalist premises. Contemporary originalist readings have tended to view the commerce power through modem eyes. Originalists defending narrow readings offederal power have identified "commerce" with the trade of commodities; originalists defending broad readings of federal power …
On Communication, John Greenman
On Communication, John Greenman
Michigan Law Review
Everybody knows that communication is important, but nobody knows how to define it. The best scholars refer to it. Free-speech law protects it. But no one-no scholar or judge-has successfully captured it. Few have even tried. This is the first article to define communication under the law. In it, I explain why some activities-music, abstract painting, and parading-are considered communicative under the First Amendment, while others-sex, drugs, and subliminal advertising-are not. I argue that the existing theories of communication, which hold that communicative behaviors are expressive or convey ideas, fail to explain what is going on in free-speech cases. Instead, …
Modularity In Contracts: Boilerplate And Information Flow, Henry E. Smith
Modularity In Contracts: Boilerplate And Information Flow, Henry E. Smith
Michigan Law Review
Contractual boilerplate is a little like property. Such a statement might seem like a category mistake. After all, contractual boilerplate language is part of contracts, which, unlike property, are freely customizable by the parties. Contracts create rights between those parties, not against the world at large. Nor do people who devise new boilerplate terms usually have intellectual property in the provisions themselves. I will argue that, in an interesting and overlooked way, boilerplate is the first way station on the road from contract to property. In particular, boilerplate, like all legal communication, is the result of striking a trade-off between …
The Strategy Of Boilerplate, Robert B. Ahdieh
The Strategy Of Boilerplate, Robert B. Ahdieh
Michigan Law Review
That boilerplate is pervasive is hardly surprising. In a variety of ways, standardized terms in day-to-day contracts serve an essential cost-saving function. By this measure, one might expect less frequent reliance on boilerplate in high-value contracts among sophisticated parties. Yet standard terms would appear to be no less widespread in contracts among the sophisticated. Notwithstanding their representation by able counsel, charged to craft comprehensive and detailed, but also particularized, contracts, such parties will commonly conclude agreements comprised heavily of traditional terms--contracting norms of a sort-rather than terms tailored to the distinct features of their particular bargain. Examples of seemingly suboptimal …
Making Sense Of Billboard Law: Justifying Prohibitions And Exemptions, R. Douglass Bond
Making Sense Of Billboard Law: Justifying Prohibitions And Exemptions, R. Douglass Bond
Michigan Law Review
Part I of this Note surveys the trends in the aesthetic regulation of billboards, culminating in the Supreme Court of California's decision in Metromedia, Inc. v. City of San Diego, and the Supreme Court's review of that decision. Part II analyzes the five Metromedia opinions in order to present properly the contemporary debate over billboard law. It inquires whether a sign prohibition should hinge on the commercial or noncommercial status of the targeted signs. Part III indicates how ambiguities in the Metromedia plurality opinion have produced the conflict in lower courts between the commercial/noncommercial distinction and the onsite/ off …
Off-The-Record Consultations And The Revised Model State Administrative Procedure Act, John H. Martin
Off-The-Record Consultations And The Revised Model State Administrative Procedure Act, John H. Martin
Michigan Law Review
The drafters of the Revised Act have sought to resolve the confrontation of policy objectives in part by insisting that the decision maker refrain from off-the-record communications with any of the parties to the proceeding. However, there are a number of ambiguities in the act which indicate that it may be possible for state agencies to avoid this objective. Furthermore, implementation of the policy decisions of the drafters may prove to be undesirable for the overall operation of state administrative agencies. This comment will consider these two possible criticisms of the Revised Model Act and will suggest that changes be …
Mr. Justice William Johnson And The Common Incidents Of Life: Ii, A. J. Levin
Mr. Justice William Johnson And The Common Incidents Of Life: Ii, A. J. Levin
Michigan Law Review
Here must be the key to Johnson's constitutional jurisprudence, which time, and the effect of the repression of Marshall's domination has obscured. The dynamic pattern of his thought is, however, unmistakable when analyzed without the burden of prepossession. There can be little meaning to what Johnson said in Ogden v. Saunders unless conceived in relation to Johnson's whole approach to man and society and his repeated insistence upon "that communication of thought and experiment without which nothing human can advance in improvement." Otherwise, we are unable to reconcile his repeated dwelling upon the literal meaning of words and their "technical …
The Proposed Four-Year Law Curriculum: A Dissenting Opinion, Philip Mechem
The Proposed Four-Year Law Curriculum: A Dissenting Opinion, Philip Mechem
Michigan Law Review
A conspicuous and very wholesome manifestation today in legal education is dissatisfaction with legal education. With education in general for that matter. Doubtless the dissatisfaction begins with the general and extends to the particular. The law teacher, that is, observes that the college graduate who comes to him can barely read and write the English language, is scarcely aware that there are any other languages, is wholly devoid of intellectual curiosity, wholly untrained in hard thinking, wholly uninformed about and uninterested in the ideas which make for or against civilization. It makes the law teacher think there must be something …