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Full-Text Articles in Law

What Notice Did, Jessica D. Litman Jan 2016

What Notice Did, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

In the twenty-first century, copyright protection is automatic. It vests in eligible works the instant that those works are first embodied in a tangible format. Many Americans are unaware of that, believing instead that registration and copyright notice are required to secure a copyright. That impression is understandable. For its first 199 years, United States copyright law required authors to take affirmative steps to obtain copyright protection. The first U.S. copyright statute, enacted by Congress in 1790, required the eligible author of an eligible work to record the title of the work with the clerk of the court in the …


Sex Offender Law And The Geography Of Victimization, Amanda Y. Agan, J. J. Prescott Dec 2014

Sex Offender Law And The Geography Of Victimization, Amanda Y. Agan, J. J. Prescott

Articles

Sex offender laws that target recidivism (e.g., community notification and residency restriction regimes) are premised—at least in part—on the idea that sex offender proximity and victimization risk are positively correlated. We examine this relationship by combining past and current address information of registered sex offenders (RSOs) with crime data from Baltimore County, Maryland, to study how crime rates vary across neighborhoods with different concentrations of resident RSOs. Contrary to the assumptions of policymakers and the public, we find that, all else equal, reported sex offense victimization risk is generally (although not uniformly) lower in neighborhoods where more RSOs live. To …


Revisiting 'Truth In Securities Revisited': Abolishing Ipos And Harnessing Private Markets In The Public Good, Adam C. Pritchard Jan 2013

Revisiting 'Truth In Securities Revisited': Abolishing Ipos And Harnessing Private Markets In The Public Good, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

My thesis is that the transition between private- and public-company status could be less bumpy if we unify the public-private dividing line under the Securities Act and Exchange Act. The insight builds on Cohen's thought experiment where Congress first enacted the Exchange Act. My proposed public-private standard would take the company-registration model to its logical conclusion. The customary path to public-company status is through an IPO, typically with simultaneous listing of the shares on an exchange. There is nothing about public offerings, however, that makes them inherently antecedent to public-company status. What if companies became public, with required periodic disclosures …


Do Sex Offender Registries Make Us Less Safe?, J. J. Prescott Jan 2012

Do Sex Offender Registries Make Us Less Safe?, J. J. Prescott

Articles

State legislatures enacted sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws with the explicit and exclusive aim of reducing sex offender recidivism. The general idea that we ought to “regulate” released offenders — of any type — to reduce the likelihood of their returning to crime is an attractive one, at least in theory. Criminal recidivism generates significant social harm. Nevertheless, despite their now-widespread use, SORN laws became the norm without any systematic study of their consequences. Admittedly, the logic underlying these laws seems at first difficult to gainsay: if a known sex offender poses even a small risk to a …


Do Sex Offender Registration And Notification Laws Affect Criminal Behavior?, J. J. Prescott, Jonah E. Rockoff Jan 2011

Do Sex Offender Registration And Notification Laws Affect Criminal Behavior?, J. J. Prescott, Jonah E. Rockoff

Articles

Sex offenders have become the targets of some of the most far-reaching and novel crime legislation in the U.S. Two key innovations in recent decades have been registration and notification laws which, respectively, require that convicted sex offenders provide valid contact information to law enforcement authorities, and that information about sex offenders be made public. Using the evolution of state law during the 1990s and 2000s, we study how registration and notification affect the frequency of reported sex offenses and the incidence of such offenses across victims. We find evidence that registration reduces the frequency of sex offenses by providing …


The Registration Of Land Titles, John R. Rood Jan 1914

The Registration Of Land Titles, John R. Rood

Articles

It is proposed in this paper to consider some of the advantages and disadvantages of the older system of no registration, the later system of registering the instruments of conveyance, and the latest system of making the title depend entirely on a recorded adjudication that it is thus and so, which absolutely displaces all former titles, adjudicated or otherwise. It is also proposed to consider some of the reasons why the older systems persist.


The Rights Of Passengers In An Unregistered Automobile, Edson R. Sunderland Jan 1911

The Rights Of Passengers In An Unregistered Automobile, Edson R. Sunderland

Articles

The State of Massachusetts by statute requires automobiles to be registered, and prohibits the operation of unregistered machines upon any public highway. While this law was in force, a party of persons went riding in an automobile whose registration had expired four days before. While they were in the act of crossing a railroad track, the automobile was struck by a locomotive, and several of the party were injured and one killed. Five actions were brought against the railroad company. There was evidence that the whistle of the locomotive had not been blown nor the bell rung as the locomotive …