Law Commons^™

Federal Constraints: Possible Constitutional Hurdles To Cross-Border Cap-And-Trade,, Shelley Welton

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Technology Drives The Law: A Foreword To Trends And Issues In Techology & The Law, Ralph D. Clifford

Faculty Publications

Technology has always been a motivating force of change in the law. The creation of new machines and development of novel methods of achieving goals force the law to adapt with new and responsive rules. This is particularly true whenever a new technology transforms society. Whether it is increasing industrialization or computerization, pre-existing legal concepts rarely survive the transition unaltered - new prescriptions are announced while old ones disappear.

Collaboration And Coercion: Domestic Violence Meets Collaborative Law, Margaret B. Drew

Faculty Publications

‘Collaboration and Coercion’ addresses the systemic and individual concerns that arise when family members that have experienced abuse enter into the collaborative law process. A form of alternative dispute resolution, collaborative law is a method of resolving disputes without engagement of the legal system. The author addresses the structural and cultural difficulties that survivors of abuse encounter throughout the process as well as the ethical concerns that are raised when collaborative practitioners accept cases where the parties have a history of coercion within the intimate relationship.

Speaking Of Moral Rights: A Conversation Between Eva E. Subotnik And Jane C. Ginsburg, Eva E. Subotnik, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Publications

This piece is the transcription of a conversation between two law faculty members speaking about moral rights in the digital age. Prof. Subotnik questions Prof. Ginsburg about some of the legal and technological developments that have occurred since Prof. Ginsburg’s 2001 essay, Have Moral Rights Come of (Digital) Age in the United States?. "If moral rights have come of digital age, should their realization be achieved by conveying more information about the copy, or by controlling the copy itself?" This question is now asked from the vantage point of 2012, ten years since Prof. Ginsburg first posed it.

Interpretive Divergence All The Way Down: A Response To Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl And Ethan J. Leib, Elected Judges And Statutory Interpretation, 79 U Chi L Rev 1215 (2012), Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

This article is a response to the law review article cited in its title. It focuses on a corollary question raised by the article's analysis: if one takes seriously the proposition that it may make sense for elected judges to interpret statutes differently than do appointed judges, should judicial opinions written by elected judges look substantially different from those written by appointed judges? Part I examines the relative roles of judicial opinions written by elected versus appointed judges in a world in which divergence is practiced. Part II explores specific ways in which we might want or expect an elected …

Accentuate The Normative: A Response To Professor Mckenna, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

In his article, “A Consumer Decision-Making Theory of Trade-mark Law,” 98 Va. L. Rev. 67 (2012), Professor Mark McKenna makes two significant claims. The first is that the dominant Law and Economics theory of trademark law—the search-costs theory of the Chicago School—is in some way connected to recent undesirable expansions of trademark rights. The second is that a preferable theory of trademark law—one that would result in more tightly circumscribed and socially beneficial notions of trademark rights—would take consumer decision making, rather than search costs, as its guiding principle. I find myself sympathetic to these arguments, and yet I believe …

Rehnquist's Missing Letter: A Former Law Clerk's 1955 Thoughts On Justice Jackson And Brown, John Q. Barrett, Brad Snyder

Faculty Publications

"I think that Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed." That's what Supreme Court law clerk William H. Rehnquist wrote privately in December 1952 to his boss, Justice Robert H. Jackson. When the memorandum was made public in 1971 and Rehnquist's Supreme Court confirmation hung in the balance, he claimed that the memorandum reflected Jackson's views, not Rehnquist's. Rehnquist was confirmed, but his explanation triggered charges that he had lied and smeared the memory of one of the Court's most revered justices. This Essay analyzes a newly discovered document—a letter Rehnquist wrote to Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1955, …

Fear And Loathing In Trademark Enforcement, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

Much academic commentary these days concludes that trademark enforcement has become overly aggressive. Commentators argue that the increasingly expansive claims of rights by well-funded trademark owners are unreasonable, and thus that lawsuits asserting those rights amount to trademark bullying. But I think many, if not most, trademark practitioners would take the contrary view that enforcement can only barely keep up with the constantly evolving and worsening threats to their clients' brands, particularly internationally and online. The purpose of this Essay is to try and bridge these two positions by critiquing each one from the perspective of the other. The first …

Overcoming Our Global Disability In The Workforce: Mediating The Dream, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

The unparalleled global support for the 2008 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities ("CRPD") highlights the global schism between the public extolling of human rights for individuals with disabilities and the private castigating of such individuals in their daily lives and in the workforce. The CRPD explicitly mandates that work is a right accorded to individuals with disabilities, and global employers are now being challenged to implement that right. Yet, in order to ensure meaningful, universal compliance with its directives, the CRPD imposes affirmative duties on Supporting States to develop a customized, workable plan that effectively …

The Anti-Messiness Principle In Statutory Interpretation, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

Many of the Supreme Court's statutory interpretation opinions reflect a juisprudential aversion to interpreting statutes in a manner that will prove "messy" for implementing courts to administer. Yet the practice of construing statutes to avoid "messiness" has gone largely unnoticed in the statutory interpretation literature. This Article seeks to illuminate the Court's use of "anti-messiness" arguments to interpret statutes and to bring theoretical attention to the principle of "messiness" avoidance. The Article begins by defining the concept of anti-messiness and providing a typology of common anti-messiness arguments used by the Supreme Court. It then considers some dangers inherent in the …

Against Theories Of Punishment: The Thought Of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

This paper reflects critically on what is the near-universal contemporary method of conceptualizing the tasks of the scholar of criminal punishment. It does so by the unusual route of considering the thought of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a towering figure in English law and political theory, one of its foremost historians of criminal law, and a prominent public intellectual of the late Victorian period. Notwithstanding Stephen's stature, there has as yet been no sustained effort to understand his views of criminal punishment. This article attempts to remedy this deficit. But its aims are not exclusively historical. Indeed, understanding Stephen's ideas …

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission And The Politics Of Governmental Investigations, Michael A. Perino

Faculty Publications

In May 2009, Congress passed the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act which created the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, an independent, bipartisan panel tasked to examine the causes of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States.

Franklin Roosevelt never created an independent commission to investigate Wall Street, but the Pecora hearings, the eponymous investigation of Wall Street wrongdoing run by a former New York prosecutor, captivated the country. For sixteen months in the worst depths of the Great Depression, Ferdinand Pecora paraded a series of elite financiers before the Senate Banking and Currency Committee. In one hearing after …