Law Commons^™

Public Finance In The American Federal System: Basic Patterns And Current Issues, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Public finance issues with significant consequences for American federalism have been at the top of the political agenda for the last several years. Indeed, much of the current debate about American federalism has been explicitly about questions of public finance: Which level of government should pay for which programs? What is to be the relationship between financial responsibility and policy-making authority? Should there be some overall limitation on government outlays and receipts?

Thus, one of the first actions of the 104th Congress was passage of a measure, swiftly signed into law by the President, to curb the ability of the …

Acknowledgments, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

On April 11-12, 1996, members of the law faculties at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität and Columbia University met in New York for the Second Frankfurt-Columbia Symposium on Comparative Law, once again dealing with issues of regulatory federalism and harmonization of laws in comparative perspective. The first symposium took place in Frankfurt a year earlier, and it was our great pleasure to host our German colleagues and return in some small measure the hospitality that they had shown us the previous year. I would particularly like to thank my good friend and colleague Prof. Dr. Ingolf Pernice (now of the law faculty …

U. S. Federalism And Intellectual Property, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

The federal structure of the U.S. government presents interesting questions for intellectual property. Which government, national or state, exercises regulatory authority? Or do both governments play a significant role? Questions of this order cannot be addressed unless one first analyzes what the term "intellectual property" comprehends. Intellectual property includes well-recognized regimes of exclusive rights in inventions (patents), literary, artistic and musical creations (copyrights), and trademarks. But it also covers more elusive, and evolving, interests, such as exploitation of one's personal name and image (right of publicity), trade secrets, and a generalized concern with prevention of acts amounting to unlicensed appropriation …

Regulatory Federalism: A Reprise And Introduction, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

This colloquium, like its predecessor, proceeds on the basis of a series of assumptions. First, it assumes that the federalism dimension of the regulatory state is an important one Gust as is the regulatory dimension of the federal state). In introducing our first colloquium, I suggested that, although determining the content of public policy is critical in a democratic society, also critical is determining the level of government at which the choice of policy is made. Ingolf Pernice remarked then that a federal system is "any legal entity [which is] comprised of states for the purpose of pursuing certain common …