Law Commons^™

Preparing For Service: A Template For 21st Century Legal Education, Michael J. Madison

Articles

Legal educators today grapple with the changing dynamics of legal employment markets; the evolution of technologies and business models driving changes to the legal profession; and the economics of operating – and attending – a law school. Accrediting organizations and practitioners pressure law schools to prepare new lawyers both to be ready to practice and to be ready for an ever-fluid career path. From the standpoint of law schools in general and any one law school in particular, constraints and limitations surround us. Adaptation through innovation is the order of the day.

How, when, and in what direction should innovation …

At The Tipping Point: Race And Gender Discrimination In A Common Economic Transaction, Lu-In Wang

Articles

This Article examines the ubiquitous, multibillion dollar practice of tipping as a vehicle for race and gender discrimination by both customers and servers and as a case study of the role that organizations play in producing and promoting unequal treatment. The unique structure of tipped service encounters provides plenty of opportunities and incentives for the two parties to discriminate against one another. Neither customers nor servers are likely to find legal redress for the kinds of discrimination that are most likely to occur in tipped service transactions, however, because many of the same features of the transaction that promote discrimination …

The Impossible, Highly Desired Islamic Bank, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

The purpose of this Article is to explore, and explain the stubborn persistence of, a central paradox that is endemic to the retail Islamic bank as it operates in the United States. The paradox is that retail Islamic banking in the United States is impossible, and yet it remains highly desired. It is impossible because the principles that are supposed to underlie the practice of Islamic finance deal with the trading of assets and the equitable sharing of risks, profits and losses among bank, depositor and portfolio investment. It is true that much of this can be, and is, circumvented …

Remittances From Puerto Rico: Unsuspected Transnational Locality In Times Of Crisis, Sheila I. Velez Martinez

Articles

This paper looks at immigrant remittances from Puerto Rico as a tool to understand how immigrant communities have faced and engaged the economic crisis. For example, from the data reviewed, it stems that immigrant remittances sent from Puerto Rico do not follow the same patterns as remittances sent from the United States and Europe inasmuch as they seem less affected by the global financial crisis and local unemployment rates. The research conducted also tends to indicate that money transfers from Puerto Rico might allow us to grasp the growing economic transnational relationships that are being maintained by varied immigrant communities …

Retaliation In An Eeo World,, Deborah L. Brake

Articles

This Article examines how the prevalence of internal policies and complaint procedures for addressing discrimination in the workplace are affecting legal protections from retaliation. Retaliation has been an unusually active field of law lately. The Supreme Court’s heightened interest in taking retaliation cases in recent years has highlighted the central importance of retaliation protections to the integrity of discrimination law. The Court’s string of plaintiff victories in retaliation cases has earned it the reputation as a pragmatic, pro-employee Court when it comes to retaliation law. However, this view does not account for the proliferation and influence of employer EEO policies …

Tortifying Retaliation: Protected Activity At The Intersection Of Fault, Duty, And Causation, Deborah L. Brake

Articles

In University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, the Supreme Court broke its string of plaintiff victories in the eight retaliation cases it has decided since 2005. In its 2013 decision in that case, the Court rejected a mixed motive framework for Title VII’s retaliation provision, a part of the statute that Congress did not amend in 1991 when it adopted the motivating factor standard for proving discrimination under Title VII. For help construing what “because of” means in the retaliation claim, the Court looked to tort law, which it read as requiring plaintiffs to prove but-for causation …

Mass Torts And Universal Jurisdiction, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

The technologies of the present era mean that injuries have become more massive in dimension. Mass torts affect greater numbers of people and larger geographical areas. Consequently, they can cross borders, affecting the populations of multiple countries. One of the two mechanisms in tort law for remedying mass catastrophes. restricted to cases involving jus cogens violations (namely, violations of human rights so grave as to be against international customary law, or the "law of nations"), is universal jurisdiction pursuant to the Alien Tort Statute (ATS).

Despite the distinctive official restriction of universal jurisdiction to the criminal law domain in civilian …

What We Talk About When We Talk About Tax Exemption, Philip Hackney

Articles

Under the Internal Revenue Code, certain nonprofit organizations are granted exemption from federal income tax (“tax-exemption”). Most tax-exemption rationales assume tax-exemption is a subsidy for organizations such as charities that provide some underprovided good or service. These theories assume there should be a tax on the income of nonprofit organizations but provide no justification for this assumption. This article contributes to the literature by examining the corporate income tax rationales as a proxy for why we might tax nonprofit organizations. The primary two theories hold that the corporate tax is imposed to: (1) tax shareholders (“shareholder theory”), and (2) regulate …

Veil-Piercing Unbound, Peter B. Oh

Articles

Veil-piercing is an equitable remedy. This simple insight has been lost over time. What started as a means for corporate creditors to reach into the personal assets of a shareholder has devolved into a doctrinal black hole. Courts apply an expansive list of amorphous factors, attenuated from the underlying harm, that engenders under-inclusive, unprincipled, and unpredictable results for entrepreneurs, litigants, and scholars alike.

Veil-piercing is misapplied because it is misconceived. The orthodox approach is to view veil-piercing as an exception to limited liability that is justified potentially only when the latter is not, a path that invariably leads to examining …

A Changing Mosaic In Sec Regulation And Enforcement: Broker-Dealers And Investment Advisers, Douglas M. Branson

Articles

The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act directed the SEC to study the issue of whether the Commission should, by regulation, decree broker-dealers (“registered representatives”) subject to the same fiduciary standards applicable to investment advisers, applicable at least since SEC v. Capital Gains Research Bureau, 385 U.S. 180 (1963). The SEC completed such a study in 2011, predictably recommending that the Commission exercise the authority Dodd-Frank had given it, namely, waving its wand, declaring brokers fiduciaries. Many able academics and regulators have adumbrated the pros and the cons of such a regulatory step. To date, however, the SEC has done nothing, undoubtedly …

Proposals For Corporate Governance Reform: Six Decades Of Ineptitude And Counting, Douglas M. Branson

Articles

This article is a retrospective of corporate governance reforms various academics have authored over the last 60 years or so, by the author of the first U.S. legal treatise on the subject of corporate governance (Douglas M. Branson, Corporate Governance (1993)). The first finding is as to periodicity: even casual inspection reveals that the reformer group which controls the "reform" agenda has authored a new and different reform proposal every five years, with clock-like regularity. The second finding flows from the first, namely, that not one of these proposals has made so much as a dent in the problems that …

Stasis And Change In Environmental Law: The Past, Present And Future Of The Fordham Environmental Law Review, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

The past twenty years of environmental law are marked as much by legislative stasis as by profound change in the way that lawyers, policymakers, and scholars interact with the field. Although no new federal legislation was passed over the past two decades, much has changed about the field of environmental law. This change is the result of a set of conceptual and legal challenges to the field posed by intellectual and policy movements that took root in the early 1990s. The intellectual and policy movements that have most profoundly shaped the field of environmental law in the past twenty years …

Pathways For Women To Senior Management Positions And Board Seats: An A-Z List, Douglas M. Branson

Articles

In April, Michigan State University School of Law held a symposium entitled “Pathways to Power.” For the most part, symposium speakers confined themselves to speaking about women’s progress along partner tracks in law firms, into positions as prosecutors and judges, and elections to political office. The author of this article has published two books (No Seat at the Table - How Governance and Law Keep Women Out of the Boardroom and The Last Male Bastion - Gender and the CEO Suite) and several articles on pathways for women to corporate management positions and to board seats. This article …

Remarks On The Gjil Symposium On Corporate Responsibility And The Alien Tort Statute, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

The following essay is a summary of remarks I delivered at the symposium on corporate responsibility and the Alien Tort Statute held at Georgetown Law School after the first Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. Supreme Court oral argument. My remarks addressed the importance of considering foreign national law when judging the meaning of universal civil jurisdiction, and, implicitly, the inextricability of domestic from international law matters.

Veil-Piercing, Peter B. Oh

Articles

From its inception veil-piercing has been a scourge on corporate law. Exactly when the veil of limited liability can and will be circumvented to reach into a shareholder’s own assets has befuddled courts, litigants, and scholars alike. And the doctrine has been bedeviled by empirical evidence of a chasm between the theory and practice of veil-piercing; notably, veil-piercing claims inexplicably seem to prevail more often in Contract than Tort, a finding that flouts the engrained distinction between voluntary and involuntary creditors.

With a dataset of 2908 cases from 1658 to 2006 this study presents the most comprehensive portrait of veil-piercing …

Copyright’S Twilight Zone: Digital Copyright Lessons From The Vampire Blogosphere, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

Web 2.0 technologies, characterized by user-generated content, raise new challenges for copyright law. Online interactions involving reproductions of copyrighted works in blogs, online fan fiction, and online social networks do not comfortably fit existing copyright paradigms. It is unclear whether participants in Web 2.0 forums are creating derivative works, making legitimate fair uses of copyright works, or engaging in acts of digital copyright piracy and plagiarism. As online conduct becomes more interactive, copyright laws are less effective in creating clear signals about proscribed conduct. This article examines the application of copyright law to Web 2.0 technologies. It suggests that social …

What Blogging Might Teach About Cybernorms, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

Since the dawn of the information age, scholars have debated the viability of regulating cyberspace. Early on, Professor Lawrence Lessig suggested that “code is law” online. Lessig and others also examined the respective regulatory functions of laws, code, market forces, and social norms. In recent years, with the rise of Web 2.0 interactive technologies, norms have taken center-stage as a regulatory modality online. The advantages of norms are that they can develop quickly by the communities that seek to enforce them, and they are not bound by geography. However, to date there has been scant literature dealing in any detail …

Wikipedia And The European Union Database Directive, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

“Web 2.0" and "User Generated Content (UGC)" are the new buzzwords in cyberspace. In recent years, law and policy makers have struggled to keep pace with the needs of digital natives in terms of online content control in the new participatory web culture. Much of the discourse about intellectual property rights in this context revolves around copyright law: for example, who owns copyright in works generated by multiple people, and what happens when these joint authored works borrow from existing copyright works in terms of derivative works rights and the fair use defense. Many works compiled by groups are subject …

Digital Multi-Media And The Limits Of Privacy Law, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

While digital video and multi-media technologies are becoming increasingly prevalent, existing privacy laws tend to focus on text-based personal records. Individuals have little recourse when concerned about infringements of their privacy interests in audio, video, and multi-media files. Often people are simply unaware that video or audio records have been made. Even if they are aware of the existence of the records, they may be unaware of potential legal remedies, or unable to afford legal recourse. This paper concentrates on the ability of individuals to obtain legal redress for unauthorized use of audio, video and multi-media content that infringes their …

Some Optimism About Fair Use And Copyright Law, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This short paper reflects on the emergence of codes of best practices in fair use, highlighting both the relationship between the best practices approach and an institutional perspective on copyright and the relationship between the best practices approach and social processes of innovation and creativity.

Secondary Liability And The Fragmentation Of Digital Copyright Law, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

The digital age brought many challenges for copyright law. While offering enticing new formats for the production and dissemination of copyright content, it also raised the specter of large scale digital piracy. Since the end of the 20th century, content industries have reeled to keep up with technological developments that offer significant promise as well as threats of large scale piracy. There has always been some tension between promoting innovation in content creation and promoting innovation in technologies that enable the enjoyment of copyright works, such as photocopiers, audio tape recorders, video tape recorders, and peer-to-peer file sharing systems. The …

You Say You Want A Revolution: Interpretive Communities And The Origins Of Islamic Finance, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

Despite its currently conservative character, the modern practice of Islamic finance lies on a bedrock of social, cultural and economic revolution. Examination of these revolutionary origins and their attendant jurisprudential implications reveal much about the schizophrenia plaguing Islamic finance today, of a largely formalist practice repeating the functional aims of the early revolutionaries and falsely understood by substantial portions of the wider Muslim community to be achieving such aims. Though the revolution has not come to pass, some of the comparatively radical functional approaches conceived in the context of the anticipated upheaval, and in particular those of the Iraqi Shi'i …

A View Of The Dutch Ipo Cathedral, Peter B. Oh

Articles

This is the Keynote Address for "IPOs and the Internet Age: The Case for Updated Regulations," a symposium held at The Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law. Initial public offerings ("IPOs") are an exercise in asymmetrical valuation. One mechanism for bridging these asymmetries is a private financial intermediary to conduct price discovery by meeting with preferred investors. An alternate mechanism is an auction, such as a descending-bid or Dutch procedure, to conduct price discovery by soliciting bids from all prospective investors. Recent disenchantment with the relationship between issuers and intermediaries has prompted some to hail (online) auction-based …

Celebrity In Cyberspace: A Personality Rights Paradigm For Personal Domain Name Disputes, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

When the Oscar-winning actress, Julia Roberts, fought for control of the domain name, what was her aim? Did she want to reap economic benefits from the name? Probably not, as she has not used the name since it was transferred to her. Or did she want to prevent others from using it on either an unjust enrichment or a privacy basis? Was she, in fact, protecting a trademark interest in her name? Personal domain name disputes, particularly those in the space, implicate unique aspects of an individual's persona in cyberspace. Nevertheless, most of the legal rules developed for these disputes …

A Winning Solution For Youtube And Utube? Corresponding Trademarks And Domain Name Sharing, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

In June of 2007, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio ruled on a motion to dismiss various claims against the Youtube video-sharing service. The claimant was Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment Corp ("Universal"), a manufacturer of pipes and tubing products. Since 1996, Universal has used the domain name utube.com - phonetically the same as Youtube's domain name, youtube.com. Youtube.com was registered in 2005 and gained almost-immediate popularity as a video-sharing website. As a result, Universal experienced excessive web traffic by Internet users looking for youtube.com and mistakenly typing utube.com into their web browsers. Universal's servers …

Intellectual Property And Americana, Or Why Ip Gets The Blues, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This essay, prepared as part of a Symposium on intellectual property law and business models, suggests the re-examination of the role of intellectual property law in the persistence of cultural forms of all sorts, including (but not limited to) business models. Some argue that the absence of intellectual property law inhibits the emergence of durable or persistent cultural forms; copyright and patent regimes are justified precisely because they supply foundations for durability. The essay tests that proposition via brief reviews of three persistent but very different cultural models, each of which represents a distinct form of American culture: The Rocky …

Muhammad's Social Justice Or Muslim Cant?: Langdellianism And The Failures Of Islamic Finance, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

Though it is advertised and promoted as the bulwark of an alternative economic system based on populist Muslim notions of social justice and fairness, Islamic finance as a practice has failed to meet these objectives. The causes of that failure and the question of whether alternative approaches are possible are the subject of this Article.

The failure of Islamic finance to provide that which it promotes is the direct consequence of the application of an Islamic logic driven interpretive system through which rules are derived, which its adherents claim was formalized and systematized by the early jurist Muhammad Ibn Idris …

Jurisprudential Schizophrenia: On Form And Function In Islamic Finance, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

Despite its explosive growth over the past several decades, Islamic finance continues to have trouble attracting large numbers of otherwise pious Muslims as potential investors. The underlying reason for this is that the means that the practice employs to circumvent some of the central Muslim bans relating to finance (most notably, the ban on interest) are entirely formal in their structure and are equivalent to conventional structures both legally and economically. However, the practice purports to serve functional ends; namely, through offering Muslims alternative means of finance that are intended to further Islamic ideals of fairness and social justice. This …

The Dutch Auction Myth, Peter B. Oh

Articles

The bursting of the internet bubble continues to have ripple effects on the initial public offering (IPO) process. Critics of this process have fashioned a complex set of interconnected objections to the orthodox bookbuilding method for conducting IPOs, pricing shares, and allocating them to preferred investors. Critics instead hail online reverse-bid, or Dutch, auctions (Dutch IPOs) as an alternative method promising more equitable access, efficient prices, and egalitarian allocations.

This article comprehensively assesses the case for Dutch IPOs. Part I dissects critiques of bookbuilding, which rely on anomalous data, derogate established financial literature, and largely evaporate in the face of …

Tracing, Peter B. Oh

Articles

Tracing is a method that appears within multiple fields of law. Distinct conceptions of tracing, however, have arisen independently within securities and remedial law. In the securities context plaintiffs must trace their securities to a specific offering to pursue certain relief under the Securities Act of 1933. In the remedial context victims who trace their misappropriated value into a wrongdoer's hands can claim any derivative value, even if it has appreciated.

This article is the first to compare and then cross-apply tracing within these two contexts. Specifically, this article argues that securities law should adopt a version of the rules-based …