Law Commons^™

Copyright Preemption And The Right Of Publicity, Jennifer E. Rothman

All Faculty Scholarship

This article addresses the conflict between an ever-expanding right of publicity and the federally guaranteed rights provided by copyright law. This conflict is highlighted in the Wendt v. Host International case in which the actors George Wendt and John Ratzenberger from Cheers used the right of publicity to prevent the show's creators from licensing the use of the Norm and Cliff characters in the decor of a chain of airport bars. Even though the licensing of the characters was explicitly allowed under copyright law, the Ninth Circuit held that the right of publicity prevented the creators from doing so. Similarly, …

The Challenge Of Creating 'A World Fit For Children', Jonathan Todres

Faculty Publications By Year

No abstract provided.

Program: Florida Historic Site Marker Unveiling, August 27, 2002

Textual material from the Rodney Lawrence Hurst, Sr. Papers

Program for Florida historic site marker unveiling commemorating the August 27, 1960 Civil Rights Demonstration in downtown Jacksonville. Tuesday, August 27, 2002 at Hemming Plaza

The Rhetoric Of Legal Backfire, Robert A. Hillman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Article focuses on legal backfire claims. A claim of legal backfire constitutes the position that a law produces or will produce results directly contrary to one or more of those intended. Legal backfire claims are pervasive, yet potentially misleading and harmful argumentation used primarily to undermine existing law (or policy) or to forestall the enactment of new law. This Article analyzes many examples of legal backfire to suggest that the concept is often a rhetorical strategy for opposing the promulgation of new law or policy or for attempting to have existing law rolled back, and that actual legal backfires …

Traffic Stop Practices Of The Louisville Police Department: January 15 - December 31, 2001, Terry D. Edwards, Elizabeth L. Grossi, Gennaro F. Vito, Angela D. Crews

Criminal Justice Faculty Research

This report summarizes the findings of a study conducted using data collected by the Louisville Division of Police between January 15, 2001 and December 31, 2001. These data resulted from 48,586 interactions between law enforcement officers and citizens during traffic-related contacts.

Information was collected about the driver, the officer, and the stop event. Driver demographics included race, sex, age, residency, license number, and vehicle registration. The only information collected about the officer was officer badge number. Finally, data collected about the stop event include the date, time of day, reason for stop, activities during the stop, number of passengers, and …

Trial Outcomes And Demographics: Is There A Bronx Effect?, Theodore Eisenberg, Martin T. Wells

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Minorities favor injured plaintiffs and give them inflated awards. This folk wisdom in the legal community influences choice of trial locale and the screening of jurors. A Los Angeles court is said to be known by local lawyers as "the bank" because of the frequency and size of its anti-corporate awards. A newspaper article summarizing court results suggests, somewhat jokingly, that the "Bronx County Courthouse should post a warning: People who get sued here run an increased risk of suffering staggering losses." Beliefs about the influence of factors other than race, such as income and urbanization, also are common.

This …

Reconciling Experimental Incoherence With Real-World Coherence In Punitive Damages, Theodore Eisenberg, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Martin T. Wells

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Experimental evidence generated in controlled laboratory studies suggests that the legal system in general, and punitive damages awards in particular, should display an incoherent pattern. According to the prediction, inexperienced decisionmakers, such as juries, should fail to convert their qualitative judgments of defendants' conduct into consistent, meaningful dollar amounts. This Article tests this prediction and finds modest support for the thesis that experience across different types of cases will lead to greater consistency in awards. Despite this support, numerous studies of damage awards in real cases detect a generally sensible pattern of damage awards. This Article tries to reconcile the …

Casting New Light On An Old Subject: Death Penalty Abolitionism For A New Millennium (Reviewing Austin Sarat, When The State Kills: Capital Punishment And The American Condition (2001))., Wayne A. Logan

Scholarly Publications

This paper examines recent U.S. efforts to abolish capital punishment, using Austin Sarat's 2001 book "When the State Kills" as the centerpiece of its exploration. The book, rather than mounting a principled "frontal assault" on the death penalty, instead surveys the numerous ways in which capital punishment negatively affects American law, politics, and culture. The paper considers the broader historic significance of this tactical shift and reflects upon the consequences and prospects for its ultimate success.

Spring 2002

Bill of Particulars

No abstract provided.

Federalism And The Idea Of Law Practice, Patrick Baude

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

"How To Think About Equality." Review Of Sovereign Virtue: The Theory And Practice Of Equality, By R. Dworkin, Don Herzog

Reviews

Ronald Dworkin's' latest might well seem sharply discontinuous with his other work. The formal theoretical apparatus that kicks off the book is a forbiddingly abstract - some will say arcane - hypothetical auction, coupled with a hypothetical insurance market. There is simply nothing like it in Taking Rights Seriously, or A Matter of Principle, or Law's Empire, or Life's Dominion, or Freedom's Law. Then again, Dworkin first published the key papers on the auction some twenty years. ago and has never flagged, as far as I know, in his commitment to the basic project.2 Theorists have been waiting for the …

James Heckman As A Law And Society Scholar: An Outsider's Appreciation, Peter Siegelman

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Clarence Thomas After Ten Years: Some Reflections, Stephen Wermiel

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

A Qualified Defense Of Military Commissions And United States Policy On Detainees At Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Kenneth Anderson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article, published in a special post 9-11 issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, offers a defense of the view that terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden should be tried, if captured, outside of regular US civilian courts and in some form of military commission. The article argues that terrorists should be seen as criminals as well as enemies of the United States. Criminals who are simply deviants from the domestic social order are properly dealt with within the constitutionally constituted civilian court structure. Enemies who are not also criminals - legal combatants - are properly …

Empathy, Spring, And Fervorino, Susan Bennett

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Gender Hate Propaganda And Sexual Violence In The Rwandan Genocide: An Argument For Intersectionality In International Law, Llezlie Green

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article explores the gendered dimensions of genocidal hate propaganda before and during the Rwandan genocide and proposes that the international tribunal consider these cases with an intersectional approach that attempts to fully appreciate the harm inflicted upon Tutsi women.

Twenty-Five Years Of Death: A Report Of The Cornell Death Penalty Project On The "Modern" Era Of Capital Punishment In South Carolina, John H. Blume

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In 1972, the United States Supreme Court determined that the death penalty, as then administered in this country, violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Many states, including South Carolina, scurried to enact new, "improved" capital punishment statutes which would satisfy the Supreme Court's rather vague mandate. In 1976, the High Court approved some of the new laws, and the American death penalty was back in business. After a wrong turn or two, including a statutory scheme which did not pass constitutional muster, the South Carolina General Assembly passed the current death penalty statute in 1977. The …

Transformative Justice: Anti-Subordination Processes In Cases Of Domestic Violence, Donna K. Coker

Books and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

The Baby Richard Amendments And The Law Of Unintended Consequences, 22 Child. Legal Rts. J. 2 (2002), Diane S. Kaplan

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Review: The Mormon Question: Polygamy And Constitutional Conflict In Nineteenth-Century America, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

Polygamy makes for fascinating social history and for best-selling potboilers as well. This study by Sarah Barringer Gordon, who teaches both law and history at the University of Pennsylvania, is the first attempt to write a full-length legal history of “the Principle.” It turns out that even in this dry-as-dust genre, polygamy fuels a very dynamic story indeed, one that reveals the rich malleability of the Constitution, the endless resourcefulness of determined guardians of public morality, and the resilience of a peculiar people committed to the practice of plural marriage.

The Social Welfare Of Advertising To Children, Dennis D. Crouch

Faculty Publications

The aim of this Comment is to approach the issue of advertising to children through an examination of economic incentives and efficiency. The Comment ultimately makes the claim that televised advertisement of products, such as junk food, directed toward children may be inefficient and tend to decrease social welfare. Although they may be compelling, this paper does not rely on the secondary negative externalities often associated with television, such as the cost of treating diabetes and heart disease. Rather, the inefficiency discussed in the Comment involves the informational qualities of advertising. Advertising directed towards young children can be thought of …

Where Do We Go From Here? New And Emerging Issues In The Prosecution Of War Crimes And Acts Of Terrorism: A Panel Discussion, Kenneth Anderson

Presentations

Panel discussion.

Little Engines That Could: Community Clients, Their Lawyers, And Training In The Arts Of Democracy, Susan Bennett

Presentations

We assume a lot about the virtues of governance "from the bottom up." We trust in it as an antidote: to oppression from the other direction; to the kind of "top-down" planning that we blame for the tragedies of urban renewal; and to the hubris of any "helping professionals" who think they have good ideas about the way in which communities ought to be helped.' In short, we place a great deal of faith in the authenticity of the neighborhood-based organization as an engine of democracy. Less emphatically, we also (sometimes) assume that programs run by neighborhood-based organizations carry with …

Access To Financial Services In The 21st Century: Five Opportunities For The Bush Administration And The 107th Congress (Symposium On Poverty And The Law)., Michael S. Barr

Articles

Noticeably absent from debate over President Bush's agenda is any discussion of a central question for equality of opportunity in the 21st century. Access to financial services is the "passport" to our modem economy, as former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers oft said, but despite the enormous progress that has been made over the last decade, too many families in the United States still are left out of the financial services mainstream. There are five key opportunities that the Bush Administration, working with Congress and the private sector, can seize in order to continue to democratize access to financial services: …

Should Government Be Allowed To Recover The Costs Of Public Services From Tortfeasors?: Tort Subsidies, The Limits Of Loss Spreading, And The Free Public Services Doctrine, Timothy D. Lytton

Faculty Publications By Year

The free public services doctrine (also known as the municipal cost recovery rule) states that a government entity may not recover from a tortfeasor the costs of public services occasioned by the tortfeasor's wrongdoing. This article traces the history of the doctrine and argues for its elimination. The article criticizes case law supporting the doctrine and raises objections based on fairness, efficiency, and institutional concerns about the proper limits of judicial policy making. The article discusses the implications of eliminating the doctrine for tobacco litigation, gun litigation, and tort reform.

Getting To Survivance: An Essay About The Role Of Mythologies In Law, Jo Carrillo

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sight, Sound, And Stereotype: The War On Terrorism And Its Consequences For Latinas/Os, Steven W. Bender

Faculty Articles

In the days and weeks following the September 11 terrorist attacks, reports emerged of hate crimes, discrimination, and profiling directed at Arab Americans, Arabs, and Muslims in the United States. Although aware that the primary targets of the public and private response against terrorism were those of Arab or Muslim appearance, I realized that the backlash within the United States also affected Latinas/os and certain other subordinated groups. This Article grew out of my concern that while Latinas/os at first might be deemed "safe" by the American public, their negative societal construction made their targeting inevitable as the fervent, amorphous …

When Interests Diverge, Robert S. Chang, Peter Kwan

Faculty Articles

In this review of Mary Dudziak's important book, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton Univ. Press 2000), Professors Chang and Kwan find the book to provide compelling historical narratives about the intersection of the Cold War and civil rights struggles. Dudziak demonstrates through an amazing array of historical evidence a story that runs counter to the standard narrative of racial sin followed by racial redemption, which helps us to reassess who we are and to be cognizant of the work that remains.

The First Decade: Critical Reflections, Or "A Foot In The Closing Door", Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

In the introduction to Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, Gary Peller, Neil Gotanda, Kendall Thomas, and I framed the development of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a dialectical engagement with liberal race discourse and with Critical Legal Studies (CLS). We described this engagement as constituting a distinctively progressive intervention within liberal race theory and a race intervention within CLS. As neat as this sounds, it took almost a decade for these interventions to be fleshed out fully. Reflecting on the past ten years of CRT, this Article explores the course of these interventions from the …

Linking Progressive Corporate Law With Progressive Social Movements, Kellye Y. Testy

Articles

Professor Testy critically assesses what has been termed a "new" corporate social responsibility project After noting the hegemony of shareholder primacy in corporate law, she critiques four major counter-hegemonic discourses: team production theory, corporate social accountabiity, stakeholder theory, and corporate social responsibility (or progressive corporate law). Finding the first three ineffective foils for the problems of corporate power that have spurred calls for reform, she turns to an examination of the progressive corporate law project. That project, presently poised at a defining juncture as it attempts to use the "master's tools" to "dismantle the master's house," nonetheless holds promise for …