Law Commons^™

The Asean Way Or No Way? A Closer Look At The Absence Of A Common Rule On Intellectual Property Exhaustion In Asean And The Impact On The Asean Market, Irene Calboli

Faculty Scholarship

The Symposium in which this essay is published features recent developments in the law of intellectual property (IP) in Asia. In this essay, I focus on the Association of South East-Asian Nations (ASEAN), a region that I have had the opportunity to visit extensively in the past several years. In particular, I analyze the enforcement of IP rights in the context of the application of the principle of IP exhaustion in individual ASEAN Members, and the relationship between this principle and free movement of goods within the ASEAN region. In the past, I have addressed the same topic with respect …

From Nuisance To Environmental Protection In Continental Europe, Vanessa Casado-Pérez, Carlos Gomez Liguerre

Faculty Scholarship

This paper analyzes the evolution and complexity of the legal response to neighboring conflicts in European civil law countries. All of the civil codes analyzed (France, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, and Catalonia) are based on Roman Law rules that are not always clear. The fuzziness of those Roman Law rules explains, in part, why despite this common origin, the Civil Codes did not respond homogeneously to nuisances. The first subsection briefly describes the institution of nuisance in Roman Law. Then, the paper describes the original codification of nuisance and the changes in the treatment of this institution. After assessing the initial …

Regulating Offshore Finance, William J. Moon

Faculty Scholarship

From the Panama Papers to the Paradise Papers, massive document leaks in recent years have exposed trillions of dollars hidden in small offshore jurisdictions. Attracting foreign capital with low tax rates and environments of secrecy, a growing number of offshore jurisdictions have emerged as major financial havens hosting thousands of hedge funds, trusts, banks, and insurance companies.

While the prevailing account has examined offshore financial havens as “tax havens” that facilitate the evasion or avoidance of domestic tax, this Article uncovers how offshore jurisdictions enable corporations to evade domestic regulatory law. Specifically, recent U.S. Supreme Court cases restricting the geographic …

On Constructing A Knowledge Base Of Chinese Criminal Cases, Xiaohan Wu, Benjamin L. Liebman, Rachel E. Stern, Margaret Roberts, Amarnath Gupta

Faculty Scholarship

We are developing a knowledge base over Chinese judicial decision documents to facilitate landscape analyses of Chinese Criminal Cases. We view judicial decision documents as a mixed-granularity semi-structured text where different levels of the text carry different semantic constructs and entailments.We use a combination of context-sensitive grammar, dependency parsing and discourse analysis to extract a formal and interpretable representation of these documents. Our knowledge base is developed by constructing associations between different elements of these documents. The interpretability is contributed in part by our formal representation of the Chinese criminal laws, also as semi-structured documents. The landscape analyses utilizes these …

Embedding Content Or Interring Copyright: Does The Internet Need The "Server Rule"?, Jane C. Ginsburg, Luke Ali Budiardjo

Faculty Scholarship

The “server rule” holds that online displays or performances of copyrighted content accomplished through “in-line” or “framing” hyperlinks do not trigger the exclusive rights of public display or performance unless the linker also possesses a copy of the underlying work. As a result, the rule shields a vast array of online activities from claims of direct copyright infringement, effectively exempting those activities from the reach of the Copyright Act. While the server rule has enjoyed relatively consistent adherence since its adoption in 2007, some courts have recently suggested a departure from that precedent, noting the doctrinal and statutory inconsistencies underlying …

Techniques For Regulating Military Force, Monica Hakimi

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter draws on the five chapters that follow—each of which describes the war powers in a single country — to identify and analyze some of the techniques for regulating this area of foreign affairs and then to reflect on the value of comparative research on it. Three basic techniques are: (1) to establish substantive standards on when the government may or may not use force, (2) to divide among different branches of government the authority to deploy the country’s armed forces, and (3) to subject such decisions to oversight or review. There is considerable variation, both across countries and …

Separation Of Powers In Comparative Perspective: How Much Protection For The Rule Of Law?, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter discusses the separation of powers. The point about traditions, or shared social norms, is a central one for this chapter. At a time of growing pessimism about the fate of democracy worldwide, adherence to norms of political behaviour may have an importance transcending formal provisions for the allocation of governmental power. As such, this chapter first presents a brief account of ‘separation of powers’ under American presidentialism; then the contrasting system of Westminster parliamentarianism; third, the increasingly prevalent mixed regimes, often semi-presidential, that can be described as ‘constrained parliamentarism’; and, finally, international institutions. As the chapter shows, in …

Private Law Statutory Interpretation, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

While scholars routinely question the normative significance of the distinction between public law and private law, few – if any – question its conceptual basis. Put in simple terms, private law refers to bodies of legal doctrine that govern the horizontal interaction between actors, be they individuals, corporate entities, or on occasion the state acting in its private capacity. Public law on the other hand refers to doctrinal areas that deal with vertical interaction between the state and non-state actors, wherein the state exerts a direct and overbearing influence on the shape and course of the law. The latter is …

Considerations Of History And Purpose In Constitutional Borrowing, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This essay is part of a symposium issue dedicated to "Constitutional Rights: Intersections, Synergies, and Conflicts" at William and Mary School of Law. I make four points. First, perfect harmony among rights might not always be normatively desirable. In fact, in some instances, such as when First Amendment and Second Amendment rights clash, we might wish to have expressive rights consistently trump gun rights. Second, we can't resolve clashes between rights in the abstract but instead must consult history in a broadly relevant rather than a narrowly "originalist" fashion. When we do so, we learn that armed expression and white …

Sustainable And Open Access To Valuable Legal Research Information: A New Framework, Alex Zhang, James Hart

Faculty Scholarship

This article evaluates the current status of access to foreign and international legal research information, analyzes the challenges that information providers have experienced in providing valuable and sustainable access, and proposes a model that would help create and facilitate effective and sustainable access to valuable foreign, comparative, and international legal information.

Expropriation In The Name Of Rights: Transferable Development Rights (Tdrs), The Bundle Of Sticks And Chinese Politics, Shitong Qiao

Faculty Scholarship

Through an in-depth empirical investigation, this article discloses for the first time how and why land reform programs in the name of empowering and enriching farmers have been serving the purpose of Chinese local governments to compromise the rights revolution in the Chinese national expropriation regime. The concept of “transferable development rights” (TDRs) is simple: development rights from one parcel of land are lifted up and transferred to another. Upon a detailed examination of land tickets in Chongqing and Chengdu, the southwestern Chinese application of TDRs, this article reveals that local governments in both cities have created schemes of land …

Activist Directors And Agency Costs: What Happens When An Activist Director Goes On The Board?, John C. Coffee Jr., Robert J. Jackson Jr., Joshua Mitts, Robert Bishop

Faculty Scholarship

We develop and apply a new and more rigorous methodology by which to measure and understand both insider trading and the agency costs of hedge fund activism. We use quantitative data to show a systematic relationship between the appointment of a hedge fund nominated director to a corporate board and an increase in informed trading in that corporation’s stock (with the relationship being most pronounced when the fund’s slate of directors includes a hedge fund employee). This finding is important from two different perspectives. First, from a governance perspective, activist hedge funds represent a new and potent force in corporate …

Global Settlements: Promise And Peril, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

In 2010, Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd. destabilized the world of securities litigation by denying those who purchased their securities outside the U.S. the ability to sue in the U.S. (as they had previously often done). Nature, however abhors a vacuum, and practitioners and other jurisdictions began to seek ways to regain access to U.S. courts. Several techniques have emerged: (1) expanding settlement classes so that they are broader than litigation classes and treating the location of the transaction as strictly a merits issue that defendants could waive; (2) adopting U.S. law as applicable to securities issued abroad by …

The Global Dominance Of European Competition Law Over American Antitrust Law, Anu Bradford, Adam S. Chilton, Katerina Linos, Alex Weaver

Faculty Scholarship

The world’s biggest consumer markets – the European Union and the United States – have adopted different approaches to regulating competition. This has not only put the EU and US at odds in high-profile investigations of anticompetitive conduct, but also made them race to spread their regulatory models. Using a novel dataset of competition statutes, we investigate this race to influence the world’s regulatory landscape and find that the EU’s competition laws have been more widely emulated than the US’s competition laws. We then argue that both “push” and “pull” factors explain the appeal of the EU’s competition regime: the …

Divergence And Convergence At The Intersection Of Property And Contract, Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci, Carmine Guerriero

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, we study rules that solve the conflict between the original owner and an innocent buyer of a stolen or embezzled good. These rules balance the protection of the original owner’s property and the buyer’s reliance on contractual exchange, thereby addressing a fundamental legal and economic trade-off. Our analysis is based on a unique, hand-collected dataset on the rules in force in 126 countries. Using this data, we document and explain two conflicting trends. There is a large amount of first-order divergence: both rules that apply to stolen goods and those that apply to embezzled goods vary widely …