Law Commons^™

Authors' Rights In France: The Moral Right Of The Creator Of A Commissioned Work To Compel The Commissioning Party To Complete The Work, André Françon, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

The French law protecting authors' rights incorporates two distinct regimes of rights, "pecuniary" rights, and "moral" rights. As the denomination indicates, pecuniary rights pertain to the author's economic interests, and provide the author a monopoly in the reproduction and public performance of his work. Moral rights safeguard the author's "personality" interest in his work. Despite the appellation "moral" rights, the author's claims under French law to the security of his personality as expressed in his work are not precatory: moral rights entail several distinct and enforceable interests. These are: the right to make the work known to the public "droit …

Efficient Markets, Costly Information, And Securities Research, Jeffrey N. Gordon, Lewis A. Kornhauser

Faculty Scholarship

Courts, administrative policy makers and legal scholars have widely embraced the theory that well-developed markets are efficient. In this Article, Professors Gordon and Kornhauser cast doubt on the wisdom of reliance on the efficient market hypothesis as applied to various areas of corporate law. Their charge is that legal decision makers and scholars have misunderstood the assumptions and limitations of the theory and have neglected recent critical economics scholarship. Professors Gordon and Kornhauser begin by detailing the assertions of the hypothesis in relation to the workings of securities markets, focusing on various asset pricing models used to test the hypothesis …

The Invention And Reinvention Of Welfare Rights, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

This essay contrasts the jurisprudence of welfare entitlement developed by social workers during and after the New Deal with the lawyers' welfare jurisprudence of the past two decades.

I find this contrast interesting for two reasons. First, it brings to light an episode in the intellectual history of the American welfare state that lawyers have ignored – the development of an understanding of welfare as a legal right by another profession long before Charles Reich's The New Property and the literature that followed it made such a notion current among lawyers. Second, the contrast between the social workers' and the …

Babbitt V. Brandeis: The Decline Of The Professional Ideal, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

The vision of professionalism that entranced the liberal legal elite for a century now strikes most lawyers and law students as implausible or uninteresting or both. The papers in this symposium by Robert Nelson and by Ronald Gilson and Robert Mnookin are outstanding examples of two of the current modes of repudiation of this vision: the mode of skepticism and the mode of indifference. Nelson takes the claims of the professional vision seriously, and, using a methodology responsive to them, sets out to refute them. Gilson and Mnookin ignore the vision, and, using a methodology that assumes the vision's invalidity, …

A Transaction Theory Of Crime?, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The most difficult questions are foundational. It is no surprise then that one of the most puzzling questions in criminal law frames the whole inquiry: what is the nature of crime? Positivists dispose of the question easily. If the law is whatever the legislature and courts say it is, then crime is whatever these authoritative agencies designate as crime. The question becomes more interesting, however, if we regard crime as a prepositive concept, a concept that exists logically prior to the positive law. It is not that conduct is criminal because the legislature speaks; rather the legislature speaks because conduct …

Paradoxes In Legal Thought, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Traditional legal thought has generated few anomalies, antinomies, and paradoxes. These factual and logical tensions arise only when theorists press for a complete and comprehensive body of thought. Discrete, unconnected solutions to problems and particularized precedents spare us the logical tensions that have troubled scientific inquiry.

Anomalies arise from data that do not fit the prevailing scientific theory. Paradoxes and antinomies, on the other hand, reflect problems of logical rather than factual consistency. To follow Quine's definitions, paradoxes are contradictions that result from overlooking an accepted canon of consistent thought. They are resolved by pointing to the fallacy that generates …

Sharing Among The Human Capitalists: An Economic Inquiry Into The Corporate Law Firm And How Partners Split Profits, Ronald J. Gilson, Robert H. Mnookin

Faculty Scholarship

Large corporate law firms seem to be in a state of extraordinary flux. Success and failure are both on the rise. Large firms appear to supply a substantial and growing proportion of the legal services consumed by American business enterprises and to hire a significant fraction of the graduating classes of elite American law schools. Moreover, the last twenty years have witnessed a remarkable expansion in both the number of large firms and the absolute size of the biggest. But accompanying this striking success, there are also signs of serious institutional instability. During the last few years, several previously successful …

Distrust Of Democracy, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The current rediscovery of state constitutions has had a singular and curious feature: it has been focused largely on state constitutional provisions that are analogous, if not identical, to provisions of the United States Constitution. Scholars and jurists have devoted their attention to state protections of speech, state equal protection clauses, state privileges against self-incrimination, and state proscriptions of cruel and unusual punishments, and have developed interpretations of these texts that diverge from those adopted by the United States Supreme Court in construing comparable federal constitutional provisions. These attempts to play state variations on federal constitutional themes have not been …

Reforms And Innovations Regarding Authors' And Performers' Rights In France: Commentary On The Law Of July 3, 1985, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

Following thirteen months of parliamentary deliberations, on July 3, 1985, France enacted a law which brings major reforms and additions to its copyright act of March 11, 1957. The new law becomes effective on January 1, 1986. Among the French modernizations and innovations discussed in this Article are the new law's provisions regarding: computer software protection and ownership; royalties for home taping of audio and audiovisual works; and the recognition and regulation of "neighboring rights." These provisions extend statutory protection for the contributions of performing artists, and also accord reproduction and performance rights to the producers of phono- and videograms. …

The Right And The Reasonable, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

As the common law relies on the concept of "reasonableness," the civil law relies on the concept of "Right." Professor Fletcher argues that reliance on reasonableness enables the common law to develop rules that can be voiced in a single standard. Such rules permit what Professor Fletcher terms 'flat" legal thinking. In contrast, the civil law's reliance on the concept of Right leads it to develop rules that proceed in two stages: the first rule asserts an absolute right; the second, a limitation based upon criteria other than Right. The application of such rules proceeds by what Professor Fletcher terms …

Retroactivity Revisited, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

In three prior articles, I considered transitional problems of changes the tax law. My general analysis and its specific application to the adoption of a consumption tax were criticized last year in this journal by Avishai Shachar. By taking liabilities explicitly into account in considering tax transition rules, Shachar extended the fundamental principles generated by my theory of legal transitions. Shachar, however, misunderstood or mischaracterized much of my earlier work.

In this comment, I respond briefly to Shachar's criticisms. In Part I, I set out the context and conclusions of my general theory and suggest that Shachar agrees with its …

The Limits Of Expanded Choice: An Analysis Of The Interactions Between Express And Implied Contract Terms, Charles J. Goetz, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Although trade and its defining terms lie at the very core of contract law, perceptions of the state's involvement in the exchange process remain peculiarly incomplete. Everyone understands that the state supplies the fundamental property-defining rules for pre-trade endowments. For instance, governmentally provided rules of tort, nuisance, and civil rights establish basic boundaries of what initially belongs to an individual and, hence, what he has to offer in exchange. When an exchange subsequently takes place, however, the parties themselves assume an important part of the burden of communicating what rights are being given and received. Although the state's general rules …

The Metamorphosis Of Legal Education Symposium On Legal Education, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Brook's remarks this morning provide a context for my own. I mean to say a word or two for the classical era. One of the characteristics of legal education over the past half century or so, one that we ought not give up, has been its passion for order in a chaotic world. Striking as it is to say that "a passion for order ill suits a chaotic world," the world has ever been chaotic – and that passion, our principal defense. The question is, with what principles of order do we exercise that passion, to subdue unruly fact. …

The Unfaithful Champion: The Plaintiff As Monitor In Shareholder Litigation, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

When the legal history of the 1970's is written, it will note a significant shift in the way courts perceived shareholder litigation. Only a generation ago, the Supreme Court described the derivative action as "the chief regulator of corporate management." Even into the 1960's, those issues involving shareholder litigation that percolated up to the Supreme Court were typically resolved so as to extend the availability of a litigation remedy by removing arbitrary or overbroad barriers to the plaintiff.

The Development Of The Law Of Seditious Libel And The Control Of The Press, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

This article presents a new account of the development of the law of seditious libel from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth. It also outlines a new version of the relationship between the government and the press during that period. The article argues that it was the gradual erosion, during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of the legal foundations of the government's policies toward the press that eventually made necessary a new policy based on the law of libel. In the midsixteenth century, the Crown possessed a wide variety of means for dealing with the printed press, …

Price Adjustment In Long-Term Contracts, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

After parties enter into a contract, changed circumstance might result in one of them being dissatisfied with the price. Anticipating this, the parties could include a price adjustment mechanism in the agreement. If the mechanism is imperfect, some dissatisfaction will remain. This dissatisfaction may result in litigation with the dissatisfied party asking the court either to excuse performance or revise the contract price. For example, large changes in fuel prices since 1973 generated considerable litigation.

In this paper, I suggest a framework for analyzing price adjustment in private contracts. Contrary to most economists and lawyers, I argue that price adjustment …

Television And The Quest For Gold: The Unofficial Paper Of The 1984 Olympics, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

While sitting in front of the tube watching Olympic canoeing (or Greco-Roman water polo, it's all a blur), I began to wonder about why ABC had been granted exclusive rights to televise the Olympics. The owners of the "Olympics" brand name could have sold the television rights in numerous ways. Why did they choose to have a single network provide all the coverage? Further, I mused, how did they get away with it? If the NCAA's football package violates the antitrust laws, how does the Olympic package remain within the law? It struck me that a paper speculating on the …

Property Rules, Liability Rules, And Adverse Possession, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The law of adverse possession tends to be regarded as a quiet backwater. Both judicial opinions and leading treatises treat the legal doctrine as settled. The theory underlying the doctrine, although routinely discussed in the opening weeks of first-year property courses, is only rarely aired in the law reviews any more. Indeed, the most frequently cited articles on adverse possession date from the 1930s and earlier. Perhaps most tellingly, adverse possession seems to have completely escaped the attention of the modem law and economics movement – almost a sure sign of obscurity in today's legal-academic world.

Nevertheless, two recent events …

Constitutional Fact Review, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Bose Corp. v. Consumers Union of United States held that the clearly erroneous standard of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 52(a) does not prescribe the scope of appellate review of a finding of actual malice in defamation cases governed by New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. Rather, as a matter of "federal constitutional law," appellate courts "must exercise independent judgment and determine whether the record establishes actual malice with convincing clarity." Thus, in addition to the familiar judicial duty to "say what the law is," the first amendment imposes a special duty with respect to law application: both …

From Sovereignty To Process: The Jurisprudence Of Federalism After Garcia, Andrzej Rapaczynski

Faculty Scholarship

On February 19, 1985, the Supreme Court, in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, overruled its 1976 decision in National League of Cities v. Usery. Although the continued vitality of National League of Cities had been in question in recent years, the Court's abrupt repudiation of the very principle announced in that case is an event of considerable significance, beyond showing, one more time, that the rule of stare decisis has a limited application in the Court's modern constitutional adjudication. Garcia's importance lies, above all, in revealing the absence of anything approaching a well elaborated theory of federalism that …

Trespass, Nuisance, And The Costs Of Determining Property Rights, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The right to exclude intrusions by others, we have it on high authority, is "one of the most essential sticks in the bundle of rights that are commonly characterized as property." Yet the right to exclude is not one right; it is itself a collection or "bundle" of rights. With respect to property in land, for example, the right to exclude depends to a large extent on whether the intrusion in question is subject to the common law of trespass or of nuisance. Generally speaking, when the intrusion is governed by trespass, then there is no exception for de minimis …

Equalities Real And Ideal: Affirmative Action In Indian Law Review, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

American legal scholars have devoted surprisingly little effort to studying India. In India, as in America, judges, lawyers, and legislators have had to shape a transplanted legal system with English roots. Both countries have adapted English legal institutions to conditions far more heterogeneous – ethnically, racially, linguistically,and geographically – than those of the mother country. It thus seems no accident that India's constitutional structure parallels that of the United States in so many ways. For example, India has a written constitution that embodies principles of federalism and separation of powers, and that provides for judicially enforced guarantees of individual rights. …

The Natural Duty To Obey The Law, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, Professor Greenawalt examines the strengths and weaknesses of arguments asserting the existence of a natural duty to obey the law. He begins by defining "natural duty," and then investigates this concept in the theories of John Finnis, John Rawls, Tony Honore, Philip Soper, and John Mackie. Drawing upon the similarities of these theories, Professor Greenawalt questions the nature, reach, and force of the natural duty to obey, considering, among other things, whether the duty extends to laws that are unjust or to laws with which few others comply, and examining more generally when duties should be understood …

Religious Convictions And Lawmaking, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, presented as the 1985-86 Thomas M. Cooley Lectures at the University of Michigan School of Law on March 10-12, 1986, Professor Greenawalt addresses the role that religious conviction properly plays in the liberal citizen's political decisionmaking in a liberal democratic society. Rejecting the notion that all political questions can be decided on rational secular grounds, Professor Greenawalt argues that the liberal democratic citizen may rely on his religious convictions when secular morality is unable to resolve issues critical to a political decision. The examples of animal rights and environmental protection, abortion, and welfare assistance illustrate situations where …

Federal Tort Claims At The Agency Level: The Ftca Administrative Process, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

Tort actions against the federal government and its agencies are currently governed by the FTCA and various other statutes, agency rules and procedures. Claims against the government are increasing rapidly, and the agencies enjoy broad settlement authority, often at the expense of coordination among the appropriate statutes. This Article examines the various procedures allowed and those that are actually practiced by the agencies. The author points out that, though claims officers are supposed to be fair-minded, the process can take on an adversarial nature, often a prelude to litigation rather than settlement. He proposes that the current processes be made …

The Pathological Perspective And The First Amendment, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Constitutions are designed to control, or at least influence, future events – political events, adjudicative events, to some extent even interactions between private parties. Yet the future is unknowable, largely unpredictable, and inevitably variable. At any moment there exists a short-run future, a long-run future, and a future in between. The future is virtually certain to contain some progress, some regression, some stability, some volatility. How is a constitution supposed to operate upon this vast panoply?

That is a question that ought to loom large in the deliberations of persons who propose and ratify new constitutions and new constitutional amendments. …

The Common Law Powers Of Federal Courts, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Lawmaking by federal courts has been a matter of controversy since the early days of the Republic. In the last forty years, the debate has fallen into roughly two periods, with Roe v. Wade marking the dividing line. During what might be called the "legal process" era of the 1950's and 1960's, scholarly energy was focused on Erie Railroad v. Tompkins and what was then called the "new federal common law." To be sure, important work on judicial review was also done in those years, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court's dramatic decision in Brown v. Board of …

Legal Informality And Redistributive Politics, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Until recently, one of the most consistent themes in both right and left critiques of the legal system has been the repudiation of procedural formality, that is, of specialized, rule-bound procedures. The left critique portrayed formality as facilitating the manipulation of the legal system by the privileged to the disadvantage of others. Both right and left critiques portrayed formality as expressing and fostering alienation and antagonism.

In recent years, however, attitudes toward formality on the left have become increasingly complex and ambivalent. This development may be partly a reaction to the rising prominence of a conservative rhetoric that links proposals …

Taking Bureaucracy Seriously, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

The Federal Courts: Crisis and Reform can be viewed as not one but two "books." "Book I" (pp. 1-192), which reflects Judge Posner's well-known commitment to the interplay of law and economics, adds to the literature on the explosive and unremitting growth of litigation in the inferior federal courts during the last quarter-century. Noting this situation with alarm, Judge Posner seeks to identify the dimensions of the "crisis," to evaluate some current proposals for reform, and to advance some of his own. “Book II” (pp. 192-340) is quite different. Considerably less reliant upon law and economics, it addresses the substance …