Law Commons^™

The Game, The Players, And The Board, Bruce E. Boyden

Faculty Publications

Christopher Seaman and Thuan Tran’s fascinating article, Intellectual Property and Tabletop Games, raises important questions about the role of intellectual property in developing and distributing innovative products. The market for tabletop games, Seaman and Tran argue, is able to sustain a high level of creativity at a high up-front cost, all while protected by some but not all of the IP rights that other industries’ outputs receive. Is that evidence of IP’s necessity or its superfluousness? In this Response, I argue that the answer is a little bit of both. Whereas prior scholarship has shown the lack of an …

The International Commitments Of The Fifty States, Ryan M. Scoville

Faculty Publications

U.S. law allocates power to conduct foreign relations primarily to the federal government, but it is well known that states routinely maintain foreign relations of their own. Much of this activity appears to result in legal and political commitments, whether in the form of “sister state” agreements or binding pledges to cooperate on discrete issues such as investment, environmental protection, and transportation. These commitments are at least loosely comparable to international treaties and may either advance or disserve state and national interests.

Yet very little is known about the commitments that are in force. For the most part, neither federal …

The Problems, And Positives, Of Passives: Exploring Why Controlling Passive Voice And Nominalizations Is About More Than Preference And Style, Jacob M. Carpenter

Faculty Publications

As professional writers, attorneys should understand and have command of two of “the worst writing weaknesses”—passive voice and nominalizations. Studies show that compared to active voice, passive voice and nominalizations can make writing slower to read, harder to read, harder to comprehend, harder to remember, less concise, less familiar feeling, and less engaging. However, passive voice isn’t always bad. Expert writers can use passive voice to create cohesion, shift emphasis, imply objectivity, and make readers feel more distant and less emotional about an event. The problem is that attorneys commonly use passive voice indiscriminately, unknowingly, and excessively, amplifying its negative …

U.S. Foreign Relations Law From The Outside In, Ryan M. Scoville

Faculty Publications

Arguments in the field of U.S. foreign relations law typically proceed from the inside out: legal actors focus on internal (domestic) sources of authority to reach conclusions with significant external (international) implications. The text and structure of the Constitution, case law, legislative intent, assessments of institutional competency, and historical practice thus dominate debates about treaty-making, war powers, diplomatic authorities, and related matters. This tendency reflects generic assumptions about the proper modalities of legal analysis and helps to ensure that the law reflects national values.

Yet inside-out arguments overlook a critical fact: the practical merits of U.S. foreign relations law often …

The Impact Of The Singapore Convention On The Development Of Non-Adjudicative Forms Of International Dispute Resolution, Andrea Kupfer Schneider

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Walk The Line: Aristotle And The Ethics Of Narrative, Melissa Love Koenig, Lori D. Johnson

Faculty Publications

Lawyers are storytellers who face tremendous pressure to persuade judges and juries of the rightness of their stories. Zealous advocacy has long been a touchstone in lawyering, but lawyers need to balance zealousness with candor to the tribunal. As narrative and storytelling have evolved in scholarship and practice as powerful tools for persuasion, lawyers can find themselves walking a delicate ethical line. The applicable Model Rules of Professional Conduct do not provide a sufficient framework for ensuring sufficient candor in the use of narrative, particularly when considering the cultural and psychological power inherent in stories. Thus, lawyers can find themselves …

Early Release For Prisoners Convicted Of Violent Crimes: Can Anyone Escape The Incapacitation-Retribution Catch-22?, Michael M. O'Hear

Faculty Publications

Two decades of criminal-justice reform in the United States have achieved only a modest reduction in the nation’s historically high imprisonment rate. Returning to the much lower imprisonment rate of a generation ago will almost certainly require shorter prison terms for individuals who have been convicted of violent crimes. Such a change, however, would draw at least two important objections: (1) people who have been convicted of violent crimes are an especially dangerous offender group who ought to be incapacitated behind bars for as long as possible, and (2) violent crimes are so serious that long prison terms are required …

Gain The Upper Hand With Good Typography, Melissa Love Koenig, Joseph S. Diedrich

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Managing The Risk Of Violent Recidivism: Lessons From Legal Responses To Sexual Offenses, Michael M. O'Hear

Faculty Publications

Over the course of a generation, American legislatures have quietly adopted an intricate web of measures intended to reduce the risk that individuals who have been convicted of violent crimes will commit new violent crimes. These measures include, for instance, sentencing and corrections laws that categorically target “violent offenses” and “violent offenders” for harsher treatment, prohibitions on pretrial diversion opportunities, employment restrictions, and long-term offender registration requirements. Such measures parallel a generally similar, but more closely studied, set of laws that aim to reduce sexual recidivism.

This article provides an overview of the literature on sexual-recidivism measures, especially sexual offender …

Ad Hoc Diplomats, Ryan M. Scoville

Faculty Publications

Article II of the Constitution grants the president power to appoint “Ambassadors” and “other public Ministers” with the advice and consent of the Senate. By all accounts, this language requires Senate confirmation for the appointment of resident ambassadors and other diplomats of similar rank and tenure. Yet these are hardly the only agents of U.S. foreign relations. Ad hoc diplomats—individuals chosen exclusively by the president to complete limited and temporary assignments—play a comparably significant role in addressing international crises, negotiating treaties, and otherwise executing foreign policy.

This Article critically examines the appointments process for such irregular agents. An orthodox view …

Third-Class Citizenship: The Escalating Legal Consequences Of Committing A “Violent” Crime, Michael M. O'Hear

Faculty Publications

For many years, American legislatures have been steadily attaching a wide range of legal consequences to convictions — and sometimes even just charges — for crimes that are classified as “violent.” These consequences affect many key aspects of the criminal process, including pretrial detention, eligibility for pretrial diversion, sentencing, eligibility for parole and other opportunities for release from incarceration, and the length and intensity of supervision in the community. The consequences can also affect a person’s legal status and rights long after the sentence for the underlying offense has been served. A conviction for a violent crime can result in …

Who Studies International Law? Explaining Cross-National Variation In Compulsory International Legal Education, Ryan M. Scoville, Mark Berlin

Faculty Publications

The compulsory study of international law is a universal component of legal education in some states but extremely uncommon or non-existent in others. This article uses global data and statistical methods to test a number of conceivable explanations for this puzzling feature of international society. In contrast to much of the empirical literature on state behaviour in relation to international law, we find that functionalist and socio-political variables carry little explanatory power and that historical variables – specifically, legal tradition and regional geography – instead account for the overwhelming majority of the global pattern. We explore potential explanations for these …

Assumption Of Flood Risk, Alexander Lemann

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Autonomous Vehicles, Technological Progress, And The Scope Problem In Products Liability, Alexander Lemann

Faculty Publications

Autonomous vehicles are widely expected to save tens of thousands of lives each year by making car crashes attributable to human error – currently the overwhelming majority of fatal crashes – a thing of the past. How the legal system should attribute responsibility for the (hopefully few) crashes autonomous vehicles cause is an open and hotly debated question.

Most tort scholars approach this question by asking what liability rule is most likely to achieve the desired policy outcome: promoting the adoption of this lifesaving technology without destroying manufacturers’ incentives to optimize it. This approach has led to a wide range …

Unqualified Ambassadors, Ryan M. Scoville

Faculty Publications

In making appointments to the office of ambassador, U.S. presidents often select political supporters from outside the ranks of the State Department’s professional diplomatic corps. This practice is aberrational among advanced democracies and a source of recurrent controversy in the United States, and yet its merits and significance are substantially opaque: How do political appointees compare with career diplomats in terms of credentials? Are they less effective in office? Do they serve in some countries more than others? Have any patterns evolved over time? Commentators might assume answers to these questions, but actual evidence has been in short supply. In …

Stronger Than The Storm: Disaster Law In A Defiant Age, Alexander Lemann

Faculty Publications

This paper seeks to offer a new way of understanding the impulse to rebuild in the wake of disasters. This is a major problem. One recent study estimated that three feet of sea level rise—expected in consensus estimates by 2100—would displace about 4.2 million Americans, and yet our current legal mechanisms for encouraging retreat from flood-prone areas have not been particularly successful. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a panel of urban planning experts notoriously called for the abandonment of several particularly hard-hit neighborhoods, sparking a political firestorm that put all talk of retreat off the table almost immediately. The …

Invisible Stripes: The Problem Of Youth Criminal Records, Judith G. Mcmullen

Faculty Publications

It is common knowledge in American society that persons who have criminal records will have a more difficult path to obtaining legitimate employment. Similarly, conventional wisdom acknowledges the unfortunate fact that young people, on average, are more prone to engage in risky, impulsive, and other ill-advised behavior that might result in brushes with law enforcement authorities. This article addresses the difficult situation faced by people whose now disabling criminal records were attained while they were under the age of 21. Not only do such individuals face stigma and possible discrimination from potential employers, the efforts of today’s young people to …

Identifying Inefficiencies: Exploring Ways To Write Briefs More Quickly Within The Time Demands Of Legal Practice, Jacob M. Carpenter

Faculty Publications

Time is precious for attorneys. For many, there is never enough time. A typical day is filled with so many tasks to complete that it can overwhelm. In fact, the most common complaint many attorneys have is the number of hours they spend at work. A common time-consuming task causing attorneys stress is writing briefs: the stakes are high and filing deadlines loom, despite that the attorney often does not have the time needed to write the brief well. Even when attorneys have sufficient time, attorneys charging hourly rates have to be concerned with the bills they send clients. Not …

Why And How The Supreme Court Should Have Decided O’Bannon V Ncaa, Matthew J. Mitten

Faculty Publications

Despite requests by both parties, the United States Supreme Court refused to grant a writ of certiorari in O’Bannon v. NCAA, the first federal appellate court decision holding that an NCAA student-athlete eligibility rule violates section 1 of the Sherman Act. The Ninth Circuit ruled that NCAA rules prohibiting intercollegiate athletes from receiving any revenue from videogames and telecasts incorporating their names, images, or likenesses unreasonably restrain economic competition among its member universities in the college education market in which these athletes purchase higher education services and sell their athletic services, which violates federal antitrust law. Circuit court rulings …

Coercive Insurance And The Soul Of Tort Law, Alexander Lemann

Faculty Publications

Scholars have long accepted the idea that there are alternatives to the tort system, particularly insurance, that are better at compensating victims than tort law. Tort law remains necessary, it has been assumed, because insurance lacks the ability to deter conduct that causes harm, and indeed it sometimes creates a moral hazard that increases incentives to engage in risky conduct. Scholars of insurance law, however, have observed that insurance has at its disposal a variety of tools that can help deter risky conduct. Recent technological developments lend dramatic support to this account. New telematics devices being used in automobiles can …

Imprisonment Inertia And Public Attitudes Toward "Truth In Sentencing", Michael M. O'Hear, Darren Wheelock

Faculty Publications

In the space of a few short years in the 1990s, forty-two states adopted truth in sentencing (“TIS”) laws, which eliminated or greatly curtailed opportunities for criminal defendants to obtain parole release from prison. In the following decade, the pendulum seemingly swung in the opposite direction, with thirty-six states adopting new early release opportunities for prisoners. However, few of these initiatives had much impact, and prison populations continued to rise. The TIS ideal remained strong. In the hope of developing a better understanding of these trends and of the prospects for more robust early release reforms in the future, the …

Prior Inconsistent Statements: The Simple Virtues Of The Original Federal Rule, Daniel D. Blinka

Faculty Publications

How well do hearsay rules function under the current Federal Rules of Evidence? One issue, dormant yet pulsating beneath the surface for decades, involves the admissibility of prior inconsistent statements by witnesses. The long-standing “orthodox” rule admitted the prior statement only to impeach the witness’s trial testimony; it could not be used as substantive evidence of the facts asserted. In 1972, the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Evidence (“the Advisory Committee” or “the Committee”) proposed an innovative rule permitting all prior inconsistent statements to be used both for impeachment and as substantive evidence—a sea change in practice. Congress, …

Public Attitudes Toward Punishment, Rehabilitation, And Reform: Lessons From The Marquette Law School Poll, Michael M. O'Hear, Darren Wheelock

Faculty Publications

Since the late 1990s, many opinion surveys have suggested that the American public may be growing somewhat less punitive and more open to reforms that emphasize rehabilitation over incarceration. In order to assess current attitudes toward punishment, rehabilitation, and the criminal justice system, we collected survey data of 804 registered voters in Wisconsin. Among other notable results, we found strong support for rehabilitation and for the early release of prisoners who no longer pose a threat to public safety. However, we also found significant divisions in public opinion. For instance, while black and white respondents largely shared the same priorities …

Finding Customary International Law, Ryan M. Scoville

Faculty Publications

Established doctrine holds that customary international law (“CIL”) arises from general and consistent state practice that is backed by a sense of legal obligation. Contemporary litigation requires federal courts to apply this doctrine to identify the contours of CIL in a diverse collection of cases ranging from civil actions under the Alien Tort Statute to criminal prosecutions under the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act. This Article provides an in-depth look at how federal judges carry out this task. Conducting a citation analysis of opinions published since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, this Article analyzes …

Justice Reinvestment And The State Of State Sentencing Reform, Michael M. O'Hear

Faculty Publications

The national Justice Reinvestment Initiative has arguably been the most important development in American sentencing policy in the past decade. This essay introduces an issue of the Federal Sentencing Reporter that focuses on the JRI. The essay highlights both strengths and weaknesses of the JRI, particularly from the standpoint of reducing mass incarceration in the United States.

The Communistic Inclinations Of Sir Thomas More, David Ray Papke

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Persuading With Precedent: Understanding And Improving Analogies In Legal Argument, Jacob M. Carpenter

Faculty Publications

When writing persuasive briefs, attorneys use comparisons — metaphors or case-based analogies — to help explain their analyses and support their positions. But attorneys use the two types of comparisons for very different purposes. Several legal scholars have explored how attorneys use metaphors in their legal writing. While the existing scholarship on legal metaphors is excellent, it is not sufficient to properly understand how to best draft case-based analogies. Unfortunately, case-based analogies have been surprisingly understudied despite their critical role in persuasive legal briefs. Not surprisingly, many attorneys are unaware of how far short their analogies fall from reaching their …

How Cosmopolitan Are International Law Professors?, Ryan M. Scoville, Milan Markovic

Faculty Publications

This Article offers an empirical answer to a question of interest among scholars of comparative international law: why do American views about international law appear at times to differ from those of other countries? The authors contend that part of the answer lies in legal education. Conducting a survey of the educational and professional backgrounds of nearly 150 legal academics, the authors reveal evidence that professors of international law in the United States often lack significant foreign legal experience, particularly outside of the West. Sociological research suggests that this tendency leads professors to teach international law from predominantly nationalistic and …

Emergent Works, Bruce E. Boyden

Faculty Publications

We are on the cusp of a significant transformation in how creative works are produced. Automated programs can now generate music, write poetry, pen news reports, create videos, and more. These computer-generated works pose a problem for copyright law, which has only rarely had to address a situation in which creative elements are produced without conscious decisions. The question of who authors such works, and thus has the initial rights to them, will become more pressing as computer programs not only improve their artistic mimicry, but become commercially successful at doing so.

In this Essay I draw three conclusions. First, …

Let The Good Time Roll: Early Release For Good Behavior In Prison, Michael M. O'Hear

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.