Digital Commons Network^™

Three Milestones In The History Of Privacy In The United States, Vernon Valentine Palmer

Vernon Palmer

Over the course of more than 120 years the right of privacy has somehow acquired, absorbed and incorporated various tangential interests such as the right to control use of one’s name, one’s image, one’s writings, one’s life story, and even the right to exploit one’s own publicity value. Obviously those who seek to capitalize upon the publicity value of their name or talent are not in fact seeking privacy in the usual sense of the word, and yet American tort law protects the publicity right either in the name of privacy or describes it as a related offshoot. Somewhat more …

Cleaning Up The Refuse From A Financial Crisis: The Case For A Resolution Management Corporation, James Thomson

James B Thomson

Systemic banking and financial crises invariably result in the transfer of a large volume of distressed financial assets into the hands of the government, which must later dispose of them. The fiscal and economic costs of the crisis and the speed of recovery depend on how effectively the government’s salvage operations can re-privatize these assets. To maximize the operations’ effectiveness, I propose that the government create a temporary resolution management corporation. Drawing on Kane’s (1990) asset-salvage principles, as well as the U.S. experience with special-purpose entities for managing and disposing of assets stripped from distressed financial firms’ balance sheets, I …

Fees On Plastic Bags: Altering Consumer Behavior By Taxing Environmentally Damaging Choices, Alice R. Baker

Alice R Baker

Reduce, reuse, recycle, the environmental adage of the 1980s has proved unsuccessful in solving many of our solid waste problems. Far too often emphasis was placed only on recycling as the solution to our troubles, while the concepts of reducing our consumption or reusing products fell by the wayside. Thirty years later, it is clear that simply recycling is not enough.

Plastic bags have emerged as an icon of society’s eagerness to acquire goods and its single-use consumerism. Every year approximately 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. Our uncontrolled consumption and quick disposal of plastic bags …

Grutter's Regrets: An Empirical Investigation Of How Affirmative Action Is(N'T) Working, Deirdre Bowen

Deirdre M Bowen

This exploratory empirical work examines whether students of color enjoy the benefits articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Grutter decision that rationalized the continuation of affirmative action based on diversity interests. Specifically, the Court stated that affirmative action was permissible because students of all backgrounds would increase their racial understanding and decrease their racial stereotyping of minorities. Supporters and opponents were skeptical that such benefits would really materialize for students of color. Supporters argued that minority students would merely be tokens in which only white students would benefit from a diverse classroom. Opponents argued that this diversity rationale …

A High Devolution Region (Hdr): A Community Based Political Solution For Darfur, Ibrahim A. Ibrahim Mr

Ibrahim A Ibrahim Mr

A High Devolution Region (HDR): A Community Based Political Solution for Darfur By/ Ibrahim Ali Ibrahim LLM Sudanese Lawyer & Congressional Researcher Abstract: The main causes of the war in Darfur as the paper highlights lie in both communal conflicts and the imbalance of power between the centre and marginalized regions. Therefore, the power sharing is a valid mechanism for redressing communal conflicts and the years of political marginalization of Darfur. The Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) demonstrated that there were no powers to share in Darfur and that why it failed. The parties have not been able to achieve peace …

A Social Movement History Of Title Vii Disparate Impact Analysis, Susan D. Carle

Susan D. Carle

This Article examines the social movement history of Title VII disparate impact law in light of the policy and potential constitutional questions the Court=s recent decision in Ricci v. DeStefano raises. My analysis shows that, contrary to popular assumptions, disparate impact doctrine was not a last-minute, ill-conceived invention of the EEOC following Title VII=s passage, but instead arose out of a moderate, experimentalist regulatory tradition that sought to use law to create incentives to motivate employers to scrutinize and reform employment practices that posed structural bars to employment opportunities for racial minorities, regardless of invidious intent. Non-lawyer activists within the …

A Post-Racial Voting Rights Act, Jason Rathod (R-Z)

Jason Rathod (R-Z)

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) was enacted “to foster our transformation to a society that is no longer fixated on race.” Georgia v. Ashcroft, 539 U.S. 461, 490 (2003). This article critiques the prevailing election law scholarship and jurisprudence as out of step with VRA’s post-racial aspirations and offers proposals for Congress to correct course. The United States has long been torn between civic nationalism and racial nationalism. By the mid-20th Century, the uneasy interplay of these visions had produced a remarkable expansion of citizenship to all migrants from Europe alongside appalling discrimination against, or outright exclusion of, …

Who Wants To Be A Muggle? The Diminished Legitimacy Of Law As Magic, Mark E. Burge

Mark Edwin Burge

In the Harry Potter world, the magical population lives among the non-magical Muggle population, but we Muggles are largely unaware of them. This secrecy is by elaborate design and is necessitated by centuries-old hostility to wizards by the non-magical majority. The reasons behind this hostility, when combined with the similarities between Harry Potter-stylemagic and American law, make Rowling’s novels into a cautionary tale for the legal profession that it not treat law as a magic unknowable to non-lawyers. Comprehensibility — as a self-contained, normative value in the enactment interpretation, and practice of law — is given short-shrift by the legal …

Technological Fair Use, Edward Lee

Edward Lee

The Article proposes a framework tailoring fair use specifically for technology cases. At the inception of the twenty-first century, information technologies have become increasingly central to the U.S. economy. Not surprisingly, complex copyright cases involving speech technologies, such as DVRs, mp3 devices, Google Book Search, and YouTube, have increased as well. Yet existing copyright law, developed long before digital technologies, is ill-prepared to handle the complexities these technology cases pose. The key question often turns, not on prima facie infringement, but on the defense of fair use, which courts have too often relegated to extremely fact-specific decisions. The downside to …