Law Commons^™

Mapping A Cultural Studies Of Law, Naomi Mezey

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this chapter I briefly map the terrain of a set of scholarly approaches that could be called a cultural analysis of law. A cultural analysis or a cultural studies of law generally starts with the dual premise that law is a set of meaning-making practices that exists within and is the product of a particular culture and that the culture is a set of meaning-making practices that exists within and is the product of a particular set of laws.

In this chapter I unpack and elaborate this foundational idea by exploring three routes along which a cultural analysis of …

An Empirical Analysis Of Noncompetition Clauses And Other Restrictive Postemployment Covenants, Randall Thomas

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Employment contracts for most employees are not publicly available, leaving researchers to speculate about whether they contain postemployment restrictions on employee mobility, and if so, what those provisions look like. Using a large sample of publicly available CEO employment contracts, we are able to examine these noncompetition covenants, including postemployment covenants not to compete ("CNCs" or "noncompetes'), nonsolicitation agreements ("NSAs"), and nondisclosure agreements ("NDAs'). What we found confirms some long-held assumptions about restrictive covenants but also uncovers some surprises.

We begin by discussing why employers use restrictive covenants and examining how the courts have treated them. We then analyze an …

The Roberts Court And Penumbral Federalism, Edward Cantu

Faculty Works

For several decades the Court has invoked “state dignity” to animate federalism reasoning in isolated doctrinal contexts. Recent Roberts Court decisions suggest that a focus on state dignity, prestige, status, and similar ethereal concepts — which derive from a “penumbral” reading of the Tenth Amendment — represent the budding of a different doctrinal approach to federalism generally. This article terms this new approach “penumbral federalism,” an approach less concerned with delineating state from federal regulatory turf, and more concerned with maintaining the states as viable competitors for the respect and loyalty of the citizenry.

After fleshing out what “penumbral federalism” …

Disappearing Claims And The Erosion Of Substantive Law, J. Maria Glover

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court’s arbitration jurisprudence from the last five years represents the culmination of a three-decade-long expansion of the use of private arbitration as an alternative to court adjudication in the resolution of disputes of virtually every type of justiciable claim. Because privatizing disputes that would otherwise be public may well erode public confidence in public institutions and the judicial process, many observers have linked this decades-long privatization of dispute resolution to an erosion of the public realm. Here, I argue that the Court’s recent arbitration jurisprudence undermines the substantive law itself.

While this shift from dispute resolution in courts—the …

Ambiguous-Purpose Statements Of Children And Other Victims Of Abuse Under The Confrontation Clause, Paul F. Rothstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author examines in this paper two kinds of ambiguous-purpose out-of-court statements that are especially problematic under current Confrontation law--problematic in ways that we hope will be solved directly or indirectly by the Supreme Court when it renders its decision in Ohio v. Clark. The statements he examines are:

(1) Statements made by abused children concerning their abuse, for example to police, physicians, teachers, welfare workers, baby sitters, or family members, some of whom may be under a legal duty to report suspected abuse to legal authorities. At least some of these statements will be directly addressed by the …

The Romantic Author And The Romance Writer: Resisting Gendered Concepts Of Creativity, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Dominant narratives of creativity regularly expect female-associated forms of creativity to be provisioned naturally without need for the economic incentives provided by exclusive rights, just like housework and childcare. Even as the concept of Romantic authorship has come under sustained analytic assault, its challengers often look elsewhere–to the kinds of creativity in which men are more likely to participate–to find models of situated, always-influenced authorship. In this chapter, I examine one variant of the problem, in which certain arguments about copyright discount the value of forms that are predominantly produced and enjoyed by women. But creative works in these oft-denigrated …

Modifying Unjust Sentences, E. Lea Johnston

UF Law Faculty Publications

The United States is in the midst of an incarceration crisis. Over-incarceration is depleting state budgets and decimating communities. It has also led to the overfilling of prisons, which has degraded conditions of confinement, increased violence, and reduced access to needed medical and mental health care. Judicial sentence modification offers a means to address both the phenomenon of over-incarceration and harsh prison conditions that threaten unjust punishment. Indeed, some legislatures have framed states’ early release provisions as fulfilling goals of proportionality and just punishment. Proportionality is also an express purpose of the proposed Model Penal Code provisions on judicial sentence …

Cherokee Freedmen And The Color Of Belonging, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

This article addresses the Cherokee tribe and their historic conflict with the descendants of their former black slaves, designated Cherokee Freedmen. This article specifically addresses how historic discussions of black, red and white skin colors, designating the African-ancestored, aboriginal (Native American) and European-ancestored people of the United States, have helped to shape the contours of color-based national belonging among the Cherokee. This article also suggests that Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of postcolonial mimicry offers a potent source for analyzing the Cherokee’s historic use of skin color as a marker of Cherokee membership. The Cherokee past practice of black slavery and …

A Few Thoughts On Free Speech Constitutionalism, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

Cyberharassment And Workplace Law, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

China's Ip Protection Minefield: Separating Fact From Fiction, David Llewelyn, Peter J. Williamson

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

China is the key emerging market for international technology companies. Smart, well-informed IP and business strategies are required if companies are to make the most of what the country has to offer.

Equality And Singapore’S First Constitutional Challenges To The Criminalization Of Male Homosexual Conduct, Jack Tsen-Ta Lee

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In 2013, i Lim Meng Suang and Kenneth Chee Mun-Leon v Attorney-General and Tan Eng Hong v Attorney-General, the High Court of Singapore delivered the first judgments in the jurisdiction considering the constitutionality of section 377A of the Penal Code, which criminalizes acts of gross indecency between two men, whether they occur in public or private. The Court ruled that the provision was not inconsistent with the guarantees of equality before the law and equal protection of the law stated in Article 12(1) of the Constitution of the Republic of Singapore. The result was upheld in 2014 by the Court …