Law Commons^™

Lowering The Filed Tariff Shield: Judicial Enforcement For A Deregulatory Era, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law Review

The filed tariff doctrine, fashioned by courts to protect consumers from rate discrimination, has strayed from its origins. Instead of protecting consumers, the doctrine has evolved into a shield for regulated firms against common law and antitrust claims that reinforce market norms. In the ideal world, Congress would expand the jurisdiction of regulatory agencies to allow them to penalize private misconduct. However, since that has not always happened, the filed tariff doctrine has encouraged private firms to expend resources in using the regulator as a strategy to immunize conduct from antitrust and common law antitrust claims.

This Article assesses how …

Taking The Protection-Access Tradeoff Seriously, Harvey S. Perlman

Vanderbilt Law Review

Law and economics scholarship has contributed much to our understanding of both the nature of intellectual property rights generally and the features of individual intellectual property regimes. Indeed it is hard to imagine a field other than antitrust law that is so explicitly governed by economic thinking. In authorizing the copyright and patent systems, Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution expressly incorporates a social welfare imperative as the basis for its grant of power.' Certainly economists and economically oriented legal academics have given the field the attention it is due.

I am far from being a sophisticated …

Intellectual Property Rights And The New Institutional Economics, Robert P. Merges

Vanderbilt Law Review

When someone speaks of "the law and economics of intellectual property rights" (IPRs), an image along the lines of the following diagram is apt to come to mind: Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati Professor of Intellectual Property Law, U.C. Berkeley (Boalt Hall) School of Law. For helpful comments, the author wishes to thank members of the Vanderbilt Law School Conference, "Taking Stock: The Law and Economics of Intellectual Property Rights," April, 2000. The usual disclaimer applies.

This is the basic illustration of monopoly price and output, familiar from introductory microeconomic texts. It is often used to explain the effects of …

Copyright And The Perfect Curve, Julie E. Cohen

Vanderbilt Law Review

Everyone agrees that the purpose of the copyright system is to promote progress.' At the same time, though, skepticism about the law's ability to define the substance of progress runs deep within copyright case law and theory. Legal decisionmakers and scholars have quite properly doubted their own ability to evaluate artistic or literary merit, and have worried that efforts to do so would result in an inappropriately elitist and conservative standard. In addition, there is room for substantial debate about whether the metaphor of forward motion leaves out other important measures of what "progress" is or might be. This agnosticism …

The Place Of Law And Literature, William H. Page

Vanderbilt Law Review

The modern field of law and literature began in 1907 with the publication of Wigmore's list of novels related to law.' The form of that work is significant because for decades, the field remained largely one of reading lists assembled to broaden the perspectives of practicing lawyers. In literary scholarship, law and literature scarcely could have been called a field; critics discussed the effects of law on the work of various writers, often perceptively but their studies were independent of each other and of legal scholarship. In the past decade, however, law and literature has shed its nonprofessional heritage and …

Ambivalent Legacy: A Legal History Of The South, Herbert A. Johnson

Vanderbilt Law Review

This volume of essays generated by a February 1983 conference at the University of Southern Mississippi represents a major step in the advancement of the legal history of the South.' Not only does the collection raise challenging questions concerning the history of law in the South, but it also presents outstanding examples of what can be accomplished when legal historians turn their attention to this region and the states that comprise it. Covering abroad geographical and topical range in individualistic fashion, the essays are, for the most part, well researched and written with clarity and style. This Review will address …

Book Reviews, George A. Hay, H. Michael Mann, Teresa Amott

Vanderbilt Law Review

Book Reviews:

The Antitrust Penalties: A Study in Law and Economics By Kenneth G. Elzinga and William Breit

Reviewed by George A. Hay

The Antitrust Penalties was published in 1976. Its main mes-sage is that the only efficient antitrust penalty is a heavy fine and that incarceration comes out poorly by any benefit-cost standard.Later that year, in a celebrated and possibly unprecedented appearance, newly appointed Assistant Attorney General Donald I. Baker argued before a federal district judge that jail sentences were the appropriate penalty for a group of defendants who had just been convicted in one of the major price-fixing …

Law And Social Order In The United States, James W. Ely, Jr.

Vanderbilt Law Review

No student of American legal history can overlook the significant work of J. Willard Hurst, who has been described as "the foremost historian of American law."' A prolific author, Hurst has been concerned primarily with the relationship between law and the economic system. His most recent volume, Law and Social Order in the United States, is an important contribution to the rapidly growing literature in the legal history field. Based upon the Carl L.Becker Lectures that Hurst delivered at Cornell University in 1976, the book ranges broadly over America's nineteenth- and twentieth-century legal past, with emphasis upon law and social …