Law Commons^™

Foreword To An Interview With Fred Korematsu, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

One afternoon in the spring of 1942, Fred Korematsu was arrested for doing what would have been perfectly innocent and natural for millions of other American citizens, but was for him a criminal offense. He went for a stroll with his fianc6e along a public street in San Leandro, California.' By order of General John L. DeWitt, Americans of Japanese ancestry had been directed to remain in their homes during daylight hours and to ready themselves for transport to "assembly centers," where they would wait out the war.' Korematsu's family had already reported to such a center near San Francisco, …

Foreword: Two Visions Of The Nature Of Man, Steven G. Calabresi, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

This year, for the first time in its ten-year history, The Federalist Society convened in a world no longer haunted by the specter of a global communist empire. Seventy-four years after its creation, Lenin's Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had shattered into many fragments; more importantly, his political philosophy had taken its well-deserved place on the "ash heap of history."

The Reception Of Canon Law And Civil Law In The Common Law Courts Before 1600, David J. Seipp

Faculty Scholarship

English common law practitioners and judges borrowed much of the conc structure for their body of legal knowledge from the legal culture of continen Europe over the centuries. Their surviving writings show a marked increa the use of Roman legal classifications in the century before 1600: public private, criminal and civil, real and personal, property and possession, con and delict, among other examples. Those who perpetuated the learning of English royal courts in the sixteenth century had begun fitting it in framework borrowed from the two great bodies of 'learned law' taught in universities of Europe: civil (Roman) law and …

Physician-Assisted Suicide -- Michigan's Temporary Solution, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Lewis Thomas has noted that doctors “are as frightened and bewildered by the act of death as everyone else”. “Death is shocking, dismaying, even terrifying,” Thomas has written. “A dying patient is a kind of freak . . . an offense against nature itself”. It is thus not surprising that many physicians have difficulty talking candidly with dying patients and caring for them, a reaction that often results in undermedication for pain and expensive and ineffective overtreatment.

American patients know this, and although death is a culture-wide enemy, many Americans fear the process of dying in an impersonal modern hospital …

Control Of Tuberculosis -- The Law And The Public's Health, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In their history of tuberculosis, The White Plague, Rene and Jean Dubos note that the first national movement to control tuberculosis in the United States came from the Medico-Legal Society of the City of New York, a group of lawyers, scientists, and physicians devoted to solving social problems. At a meeting in 1900 to organize an American Congress on Tuberculosis, the group drafted legislation designed to prevent the spread of the disease. Even though almost every state eventually passed tuberculosis-control laws, it was not the passage of legislation, or even the development of effective treatment, that led to the decline …

The Habeas Hagioscope, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

If you would understand American law, American politics, and the elusive difference between the two, look no further. Federal habeas corpus for state prisoners opens a window on the workings of our national government, overt and covert. I mean in this Article to describe the scene that is revealed. A rich account of experience in recent years can contribute to a deeper understanding of our government by arranging the players and the set in context and sequence. The record will show a number of things to be true.

A Property Right In Self-Expression: Equality And Individualism In The Natural Law Of Intellectual Property, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

This Article argues that a properly conceived natural-rights theory of intellectual property would provide significant protection for free speech interests. This is more than just an academic exercise. Judges have failed to use the First Amendment to provide extensive protection for free expression in intellectual property cases, in part because they mistakenly find a warrant for strong "authors' rights" in a philosophy of natural law. Natural rights theory, however, is necessarily concerned with the rights of the public as well as with those whose labors create intellectual products. When the limitations in natural law's premises are taken seriously, natural rights …

Efficiency And Labor Law, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, I examine the economic efficiency of labor law. My claim is that much of labor law seems to be efficient-in a sense that will be made precise below.⁹ I approach this issue by examining the process by which labor law develops and some important areas of labor law doctrine. The central question addressed is whether the process by which labor law develops differs substantially from the common law process. I demonstrate that there are differences that have implications for the efficiency of labor law. But the differences do not seem to be so great as to …

Throwing Stones At The Mudbank: The Impact Of Scholarship On Administrative Law, Ronald A. Cass, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

The impact of administrative law scholarship on administrative law seems at first blush both a relatively straightforward issue and one that academicians should be especially eager to engage. But there is reason to doubt both propositions. First, any effort to grapple with this topic compels the conclusion that the issue is by no means straightforward. As Peter Strauss recently observed, the question of the influence of administrative law scholarship necessarily becomes as well the influence of active engagement in the practice of administrative law on scholarship.' Moreover, the questions implicated in this assessment cannot be narrowly compassed. The topic requires …