Law Commons^™

The Past, Present, And Future Of The Restatement Of Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

It is now six years since the American Law Institute (ALI) began work on its first ever Restatement of an area dominated by a federal statute: copyright law. To say that the Restatement of the Law, Copyright (hereinafter “Restatement”) has been controversial would be a gross understatement. Even in its inception, the ALI identified the project as an outlier, noting that it was likely to be seen as an “odd project” since copyright “is governed by a detailed federal statute.”1 Neither the oddity nor the novelty of the project, however, caused the ALI to slow its efforts to push the …

Liberalism And Tort Law: On The Content And Economic Efficiency Of A Liberal Common Law Of Torts, Richard S. Markovits

Faculty Scholarship

This Article has three parts. Part I begins by delineating the protocol one should use to determine whether a society is an immoral society, an amoral society, a goal-based society of moral integrity, or a rights-based society of moral integrity (i.e., a society that engages in a bifurcated prescriptive-moral practice that strongly distinguishes moral-rights claims (about the just) from moral-ought claims (about the good), that is committed to the lexical priority of the just over the good, and that fulfills its commitments to some hard-to-specify, requisite extent). Part I then proceeds to outline the protocol one should use to determine …

A Reexamination Of Glanzer V. Shepard: Surveyors On The Tort- Contract Boundary, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

In international commodity transactions, intermediary certifiers of quantity and quality play a crucial role. Sometimes they err, and when they do, the aggrieved party can pursue remedies against the counterparty or against the intermediary, either in contract or tort. The remedy against the intermediary has depended, at least in part, on whether the plaintiff was in privity. Even absent privity, the aggrieved party could possibly recover in tort (or perhaps as a third-party beneficiary). So held Cardozo in the leading New York case Glanzer v. Shepard. Section I of this paper reviews the Glanzer litigation, with special emphasis on how …

Recovery For Economic Loss Following The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

The physical cleanup following one of the worst oil spills in history, that of the Exxon Valdez, is done. The legal cleanup, however, has barely begun. Over 100 law firms participating in over 200 suits in federal and state courts involving more than 30,000 claims are presently engaged in litigation. Fishermen, cannery workers, fishing lodges, tour boat operators, oil companies whose shipments were delayed, and even California motorists facing higher gasoline prices have filed claims against Exxon and its fellow defendants.

Most claimants face a formidable roadblock, the so-called Robins doctrine. Under Robins Dry Dock & Repair Co. v. Flint …