Law Commons^™

Internet Pricing: The Next Policy Frontier, Daniel Lyons

Daniel Lyons

In the past few years, broadband providers have begun shifting toward tiered service plans (sometimes known as usage-based pricing) that offer customers a fixed amount of data each month for a fee. On average, less than 2 percent of users exceed the most commonly-used tier of 300 GB; nearly 80 percent of consumers never exceed even 50 GB per month. Nevertheless, some critics such as Public Knowledge and the New America Foundation are concerned that this trend may bring higher prices and reduced service. Most recently, NAF analyst Benjamin Lennett asked whether tiered service plans are a plot by cable …

Property Law For Dummies, Alan Romero

Alan Romero

No abstract provided.

Podcast, Usage-Based Pricing In Broadband, Daniel Lyons

Daniel Lyons

No abstract provided.

Tout Ensemble: Preserving Seattle's Satterlee House, John F. Nivala

John F. Nivala

No abstract provided.

Properties Of Property, Gregory Alexander, Hanoch Dagan

Gregory S Alexander

Broadly interdisciplinary, Properties of Property provides an overview of cutting-edge work from leading legal scholars as well as important non-legal scholars. The text is designed for an international audience, particularly teachers, scholars, and students throughout Europe, the British Commonwealth, and China. Properties of Property is perfectly suited for courses and seminars in other departments, from history to urban planning, both at the graduate and undergraduate level. It is a must for any law school library, even if no seminar on property theory is offered, because it appeals to law school students as well as scholars and graduate students interested in …

Podcast: Talk America Inc. V. Michigan Bell Telephone Company, Daniel Lyons

Daniel Lyons

No abstract provided.

Podcast: Is Net Neutrality A Virtual Taking?, Daniel Lyons

Daniel Lyons

No abstract provided.

Virtual Takings: The Coming Fifth Amendment Challenge To Net Neutrality Regulation, Daniel Lyons

Daniel Lyons

“Net neutrality” refers to the principle that broadband providers should not limit the content and applications available over the Internet. Long a rallying cry of techies and academics, it has become one of the central pillars of the Obama Administration’s telecommunications policy. The Federal Communications Commission’s efforts to regulate the “onramp to the Internet” have attracted significant attention from the telecommunications industry and the academic community, which have debated whether the proposed restrictions violate broadband providers’ First Amendment rights. But there is an additional constitutional implication of net neutrality that has not yet been sufficiently addressed in the scholarly literature: …

Tethering The Administrative State: The Case Against Chevron Deference For Fcc Jurisdictional Claims, Daniel Lyons

Daniel Lyons

Like many other agencies, the Federal Communications Commission has seen significant regulatory growth under President Obama. But unlike health care, financial reform, and other areas, this growth has come without statutory guidance from Congress. The FCC’s assertion of jurisdiction over broadband service is reminiscent of its earlier attempts to regulate cable and to deregulate telephone service, efforts that courts have viewed skeptically in the absence of specific statutory authorization. But this skepticism is in tension with Chevron, which grants agencies substantial deference to interpret ambiguities in the statutes that they administer. This article argues that Chevron deference should not extend …

Title Insurance Law, Joyce Palomar

Joyce Palomar

No abstract provided.

Editor-In-Chief Of The Journal Of The Copyright Society Of The U.S.A. For 2011-15, Joseph Liu

Joseph P. Liu

Saving Journalism From Itself? Hot News, Copyright Fair Use And News Aggregation, Joseph Liu

Joseph P. Liu

Federal Preemption, Regulatory Failure And The Race To The Bottom In Us Mortgage Lending Standards

Patricia A. McCoy

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Adverse Possession: An Essay On Ownership And Possession, Carole Brown, Serena Williams

Serena M Williams

In the wake of the present real estate crisis, there has been prolonged discussion of the wrongdoing that led to systemic failures in the national real estate market. The mortgage crisis caught the nation’s attention because of its large scale and its rippling effect throughout the economy. Equally nefarious is the impact of adverse possession on the rights of individual property owners. While a single adverse possession does not affect the national market in the same way as the mortgage crisis did, to the individual owner, the wrongdoing, in the form of a trespass, that ripens into title, is just …

Rural Property Law, Alan Romero

Alan Romero

No abstract provided.

Pyrrhic Victory: Daniel Goldman's Defeat Of Zoning In The Maryland Court Of Appeals, Garrett Power

Garrett Power

Nowadays government regulation of the use of urban land is taken for granted. Such was not always the case. Some sixty years ago, the Maryland Court of Appeals held it unconstitutional for Zoning Commissioner J. Frank Crowther to deny a request for a permit to operate a tailor shop in the basement of a Eutaw Place home. This paper examines the case of Goldman v. Crowther. Goldman's story reads like a comic melodrama with a tragic ending. But the saga also illuminates the social condition - it sheds light and casts shadows on the practice of xenophobia, the nature of …

The Mechanical License And The Origins Of Regulatory Copyright, Joseph Liu

Joseph P. Liu

Property, Joyce Palomar, Roger Bernhardt, Patrick Randolph

Joyce Palomar

No abstract provided.

Coping Through California's Budget Crises In Light Of Proposition 13 And California's Fiscal Constitution, David Gamage

David Gamage

This chapter reflects on the ways in which California's fiscal constitution exacerbates the state's budget crises. Without institutional reform, California will likely experience repeated waves of increasingly severe budget crises throughout the coming decades. As such, this chapter presents and analyzes a number of alternatives for reforming California's fiscal constitution so as to ameliorate the dynamics currently leading to repeated harmful budget crises.

Two-Factor Fair Use?, Joseph Liu

Joseph P. Liu

Consumer Protection: Inside Copyright Law Or Outside?, Joseph Liu

Joseph P. Liu

The 2006 Alta Title Insurance Policies: What New Coverage Do They Provide?, Joyce Palomar

Joyce Palomar

No abstract provided.

The Ethical Obligations Of Lawyers, Law Students And Law Professors Telling Stories On Web Logs, Anna Hemingway

Anna P. Hemingway

Copyright And Breathing Space, Joseph Liu

Joseph P. Liu

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, copyright law's fair use and idea/expression doctrines are "built-in free speech safeguards" that establish a "definitional balance" between copyright and the First Amendment. Yet these "built-in free speech safeguards" are among the most uncertain and ill-defined doctrines in all of copyright law. If we accept the Supreme Court's statement that these doctrines play a critical role as First Amendment safety valves, it follows that the chilling effect of uncertainty in these doctrines has a constitutional dimension. Current copyright law doctrine, however, fails to take into account the potential chilling effect of copyright liability. This …

Copyright And Breathing Space, Joseph Liu

Joseph P. Liu

The Legal Framework Surrounding Digital Rights Management Technologies, Joseph Liu

Joseph P. Liu

Simultaneous And Sequential Anticommons, Francesco Parisi, Norbert Schulz, Ben Depoorter

Ben Depoorter

This paper defines a framework for anticommons analysis based on the fragmentation of property rights. In differentiating between sequential and simultaneous cases of property fragmentation, we describe and assess the equilibria obtained under each scenario. Our model reveals how the private incentives of excluders do not capture the external effects of their decisions. Moreover, our model suggests that the result of underutilization of joint property increases monotonically in both (a) the extent of fragmentation; and (b) the foregone synergies and complementarities between the property fragments. Within this context, we can therefore explore important implications for possible institutional responses to a …

Contributions Legal Scholars Can Make To Development Economics: Examples From China, Joyce Palomar

Joyce Palomar

No abstract provided.

Refreshing The Heart Of The City: Vacant Building Receivership As A Tool For Neighborhood Revitalization And Community Empowerment, James Kelly

James J. Kelly Jr.

Vacant Building Receivership is a building code enforcement tool that dispossesses and forecloses on owners of vacant buildings who are unwilling or unable to bring their derelict properties into basic conformity with basic building codes. This article examines vacant building receivership as a tool for ensuring the renovation of vacant buildings and as a means by which communities can develop increased confidence in and control of residential development in their neighborhoods. After discussing the need for a vacant house strategy tailored to support mid-level urban neighborhoods, the article, in its second section, will analyze how Baltimore's vacant building receivership remedy …

The Dmca And The Regulation Of Scientific Research, Joseph Liu

Joseph P. Liu

This Article analyzes the impact of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) on academic encryption research. In this Article, I argue that for both legal and practical reasons academic encryption researchers should be able to conduct and publish certain types of research without significant fear of liability under the DMCA. However, the DMCA will have a non-trivial impact on the conditions under which such research takes place, and this impact can be expected to have several undesirable effects. More broadly, this impact highlights the problematic way in which the DMCA regulates scientific research in furtherance of intellectual property rights. The …