Law Commons^™

The Gains From Faith In An Unfaithful Agent: Settlement Conflicts Between Defendants And Liability Insurers, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

A pervasive problem in the settlement of liability litigation arises because liability insurers bundle their promise to indemnify the insured with a promise to represent the insured in settlement and litigation [see, e.g., Beckwith Machinery Co. v. Travelers Indemnity Co., 638 F.Supp. 1179 (W.D. Pa. 1986)]. Standard policies not only require the insurer to pay for legal representation but, more importantly, give the insurer the privilege of controlling the litigation and settlement process. The problem is how to resolve the conflict of interest between the insurer and the insured that may arise during settlement negotiations. This conflict is manifest when …

Efficiency And Individualism, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Law and economics-the systematic application of neoclassical price theory to legal problems 1 -has dominated the legal academy in recent years. One recent study found that law and economics "for several decades appears to have pervaded about one quarter of scholarship in elite law reviews,"2 and that figure may seriously understate the theory's influence.3 A number of justifiably wellregarded scholarly journals devote themselves almost exclusively to economic analysis of law, and the subject is now a regular part of law school curricula.' Perhaps most importantly, law and economics is a pervasive and influential presence in informal academic discussions. Even legal …

Personal Narratives And Racial Distinctiveness In The Legal Academy, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

A small group of legal academicians is embroiled in yet another debate that, to the uninitiated at least, appears to have little or nothing to do with "the law." ¹ This time the issue is the ideology of legal writing style-that is, does a growing, unique body of legal scholarship that draws on the personal experiences of minority faculty and, arguably, reflects the racial oppression these scholars have suffered, produce "distinct normative insights?" ² Professor Patricia Williams of the University of Wisconsin clearly believes that it does.

In her new book, The Alchemy of Race and Rights,³ which is …

Whose Law Is It Anyway?, Susan P. Koniak

Faculty Scholarship

What can and should be the role of private groups in creating and maintaining law? What can and should be the relationship between law-giver and law-receiver? These fundamental questions haunt each of the essays that make up Corporate Lawbreaking and Interactive Compliance (hereinafter Corporate Lawbreaking).' These questions, though not the explicit focus of the book, are questions to which the essayists and editors of this book are speaking whether they realize it or not. Seen as a series of discussions on the role of non-state groups in creating and maintaining law, this book is provocative and worth reading. Some of …

The Law Between The Bar And The State, Susan P. Koniak

Faculty Scholarship

The traditional understanding of the relation between law and professional legal ethics is that legal ethics covers matters not covered by law; that ethics sits passively above law, starting where law leaves off. In this Article, Professor Susan Koniak argues that this understanding is wrong. She asserts that professional ethics are in competition and conflict with law as it is embodied in the pronouncements of courts and legislatures. Although "law" is usually considered to be the near exclusive preserve of the state, the Article contends that private groups also have "law," but it is usually called "ethics." The legal profession's …

The Eichmann Trial, The Jewish Question, And The American-Jewish Intelligentsia, Pnina Lahav

Faculty Scholarship

The abduction, trial, and execution of Adolf Karl Eichmann by the state of Israel, fifteen years after the shutdown of the crematoria at Auschwitz, challenged the American Jewish intelligentsia to confront the Jewish question.4 What does it mean to be a Jew in America and who is an American Jew? Is the Jewish history of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust also a part of American-Jewish history? Is there a lesson in the destruction of European Jewry-the triumph of anti-Semitism, the failure of assimilation-relevant to American Jews? Is there a national component to being Jewish? Are Jews a people? If so, is …

Reality As Artifact: From Feist To Fair Use, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Lawyers more than most people should be aware that what language calls "facts" are not necessarily equivalent to things that exist in the world. After all, when in ordinary conversation someone says "it's a fact that X happened," the speaker usually means, "I believe the thing I describe has happened in the world." But when a litigator presents something as a "fact," she often means only that a good faith argument can be made on behalf of its existence. Two sets of factfinders can look at the same event and come to diametrically opposed conclusions-each of which is binding, but …

Asymmetric Market Failure And Prisoner's Dilemma In Intellectual Property, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

When competitors engage in unrestrained copying of each others' intangible products, the structure can resemble a prisoner's dilemma in which free choice leads to unnecessarily low individual payoffs and low social welfare. There are many ways to avoid these low payoffs, such as contract enforcement, direct regulation of copying behavior through IP, and direct government subsidies. All of these modes alter the payoff pattern away from prisoner's dilemma.

When should lawmakers place copyright law or other IP law among the prime options to consider?

Because copyright, patent, misappropriation and the like all work through private-property markets, one key is to …

'Atomistic Man' Revisited: Liberalism, Connection, And Feminist Jurisprudence, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

One of the major strains of feminist jurisprudence has criticized American law, and the liberal jurisprudence and political philosophy on which it is said to be grounded, as male or masculine.' A central theme of the critique has been that the law embodies a masculine perspective in emphasizing autonomy and the individual over interdependency and the community. Liberalism has been viewed as inextricably masculine in its model of separate, atomistic, competing individuals establishing a legal system to pursue their own interests and to protect them from others' interference with their rights to do so. Hence, it is said that liberal, …

On Owning Information: Intellectual Property And The Restitutionary Impulse, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Every day someone invests time, labor, or money in creating a valuable intangible. Someone collects information, creates an idea, designs a boat hull, writes a book, or comes up with a new way to market a product that someone else developed. Judicial treatment of these and other cognate occurrences has shifted dramatically in recent years.

The Economics And Politics Of Emergency Health Care For The Poor: The Patient Dumping Dilemma, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

As the numbers of uninsured mount⁴ because of job dislocations, exhaustion of benefits, and unaffordably high premiums, the incidence of "dumping" by private hospitals is, predictably, on the rise. Dumping occurs when a hospital, in violation of federal or state law, transfers an emergency patient to another (usually public) hospital or simply refuses any treatment based on the patient's inability to pay.5 In addition to the completely uninsured, favorite dumping targets include Medicare and Medicaid patients, AIDS patients, and cancer patients whose therapy may cost more than the maximum reimbursement under private insurance.

Dumping is merely a part of …

The Poverty Of Privacy?, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This Article has two aims. First, it defends a continuing role for the right of privacy in arguments -for women's reproductive freedom against charges that privacy is an impoverished concept. Second, it raises cautions about certain feminist critiques of privacy that would ground this freedom in notions of reproductive responsibilities. As this Article was first presented at a conference, "Reproductive Issues in a Post-Roe' World," held in the wake of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services,2 the first question is: Are we now, given the Supreme Court's recent decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey,' in a "post-Roe world"? Furthermore, what remains …

The Internalization Paradox And Workers' Compensation, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

By providing a scientific link between the compensatory and deterrence goals of tort law, the Pigovian theory of externalities has had an enormous influence on modem torts scholarship and tort doctrine.

Proving The Law, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Interpretative theory has become a major growth industry over the past two decades. Legal academics in particular have invested heavily in the enterprise, producing a burgeoning literature that addresses many of the most important problems of legal interpretation.1 The discussion to date, however, has largely neglected one critical aspect of interpretative theory: the selection of appropriate standards of proof for legal propositions. That neglect will not bother or surprise interpretative skeptics who doubt the utility of searching for "true" or "better" meanings of texts, but it ought to prove troubling to any theorist who wants to make absolute or comparative …

An Interpretivist Agenda, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

As I write these words, bevies of law clerks assigned to cases involving the Bill of Rights are dutifully editing their bench memos for publication in the national reporter system. Once printed, these bench memos will be solemnly treated by lawyers, scholars, other law clerks, and the occasional judge who runs across them as legally significant, or even binding, interpretations of the Constitution. Two features of this burgeoning mass of otherwise unpublishable law review comments bear mention. First, most of them are tedious, tendentious, pretentious, and badly reasoned when reasoned at all, just as one would expect from authors who …

Foreword: The Constitution Of Responsibility, Steven G. Calabresi, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

The American legal academy is decidedly nationalistic. Comparative law tends to be a minor part of the law school curriculum, and discussion of alternative legal systems almost never finds its way into mainstream courses like constitutional law. As a result, much that is distinctive about American constitutionalism, and the American legal system in general, is often taken for granted. The federal Constitution, for example, says much about governmental structure, power, and limitations, but virtually nothing about the obligations of citizens to one another or to the government.' This feature of the American Constitution starkly sets it apart from many of …

Efficiency And Individualism, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Law and economics-the systematic application of neoclassical price theory to legal problems has dominated the legal academy in recent years. One recent study found that law and economics "for several decades appears to have pervaded about one quarter of scholarship in elite law reviews," and that figure may seriously

understate the theory's influence. A number of justifiably well regarded scholarly journals devote themselves almost exclusively to economic analysis of law, and the subject is now a regular part of law school curricula.' Perhaps most importantly, law and economics is a pervasive and influential presence in informal academic discussions. Even legal …

Intra-Professional Warfare Between Prosecutors And Defense Attorneys, Nancy J. Moore

Faculty Scholarship

Until recently, I was only vaguely aware of the ongoing "war" be- tween the United States Department of Justice and the American Bar Association over the ethical conduct of prosecutors in their relation- ships with criminal defense attorneys.' Indeed, while I had always covered some aspects of prosecutorial misconduct in my professional responsibility course, I had never included either of the two ethics rules debated in this symposium-Model Rules 4.2 [hereinafter "the anti- contact rule"]2 and 3.8(f) [hereinafter "the subpoena rule"].3

Sticks And Stones Can Break My Name: Nondefamatory Negligent Injury To Reputation, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

If a reputation is injured, does it matter whether defamation is the cause? Injury to reputation differs from other items of damage a plaintiff enumerates. Tradition links it to particular tortious conduct-defamation-on the part of a defendant. This Comment examines ordinary negligent conduct as an alternative ground for recovery for injury to reputation.

The Supreme Court, Liberty, And Abortion, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Abortion has aroused intense personal and political passions for almost two decades in the United States, and demeaning sloganeering has long substituted for reasoned discourse. Just as few people have actually read the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, few people who have expressed their opinion on the Supreme Court's ruling in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, which has been condemned by activists on both sides of the debate about abortion rights, have read it. In one poll, however, more than 70 percent of Americans agreed with the restrictions upheld by the Court as they understood …

Equity And Hierarchy: Reflections On The Harris Execution, Steven Calabresi, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

The legal controversy surrounding the execution of Robert Alton Harris is only one in a series of cases over the past few months testing the proper relationship between the Supreme Court and the inferior federal courts. Controversy over inferior federal court grants or denials of injunctions concerning Haitian refugees1 and the French abortion pill2 have starkly raised, as does the Harris case3, profound questions concerning Supreme Court review of inferior court rulings on issues involving equitable relief. The Harris case did not display the American legal system at its finest. None of the participants in the process distinguished themselves-not the …

The Changing Landscape Of Human Experimentation: Nuremberg, Helsinki, And Beyond, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Since World War II there have been persistent efforts at both the national and international level to develop rules to protect the rights and welfare of subjects of human experimentation.' These efforts have focused primarily on codifying the rights of subjects, and protecting their welfare by prior peer review of research protocols. In recent years research regulations have been under attack by politicians, drug companies, researchers, and advocacy groups. In less than half a century, human experimentation has been transformed from a suspect activity into a presumptively beneficial activity. With this transformation, traditional distinctions between experimentation and therapy, subject and …

Setting Standards For The Use Of Dna-Typing Results In The Courtroom - The State Of The Art, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

DNA typing, sometimes called DNA fingerprinting or profiling, has been the focus of heated exchanges in courtrooms, the popular press, and scientific journals. It is a powerful law-enforcement weapon, especially in cases of rape, because it has the potential to exonerate a suspect or to place him at the scene of a crime. On the other hand, it is of no use in rape cases like those in which William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson were accused, in which coitus is conceded to have occurred and the only real issue is consent. When should judges permit evidence from DNA typing …

Changing The Consent Rules For Desert Storm, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Shortly before the beginning of Operation Desert Storm, during Desert Shield, the U.S. military sought a waiver of requirements for informed consent for the use of investigational drugs and vaccines on our troops in the Persian Gulf. The danger of chemical and biologic warfare was seen as demanding this waiver, although the Nuremberg Code, other codes of medical ethics, and respect for the human rights of American soldiers seemed to caution against it. One year later it seems reasonable to review this decision. The legal maneuvering to revise consent regulations for wartime conditions provides a case study that highlights three …

Using Genes To Define Motherhood - The California Solution, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Sometimes (although not often) new forms of medical technology raise unique legal and social-policy issues that require new laws. In vitro fertilization, followed by the transfer of the embryo to a woman who did not contribute the ovum, is such a technique, because when the child's gestational mother is not the child's genetic mother, society must decide which is the child's legal mother. A California Court of Appeal, the first appellate court anywhere in the world to rule on this issue, decided in late 1991 that genes determine motherhood.

Adding Injustice To Injury - Compulsory Payment For Unwanted Treatment, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

A New York court this year issued one of the most disturbing and aberrant appellate opinions of the past two decades concerning the right to refuse treatment.1 In my view, the judges ruling in Grace Plaza v. Elbaum made a series of errors: they assumed that institutions can have ethics apart from those of their physicians; they believed that both institutions and physicians are primarily motivated by money; and they approved the use of legal threats by institutions and physicians against patients and their families. In this court's idiosyncratic view, dying and medical care seem to be not about …

Health Warnings, Smoking, And Cancer - The Cipollone Case, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The figures have become familiar. Tobacco use has been declared "the single most important preventable cause of [premature] death in the United States, accounting for one of every six deaths, or some 390,000 deaths annually. "The health goals of the nation for the year 2000 call for reducing the prevalence of cigarette smoking to 15 percent among adults (a 48 percent decrease from the current 29 percent) and reducing the rate of beginning smoking among teenagers to 15 percent (a 50 percent decrease from the current rate of 30 percent). The goal of reducing smoking in the United States is …

Risky Business: Setting Public Health Policy For Hiv-Infected Health Care Professionals, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In JULY 1991, THE UNITED STATES SENATE VOTED 81 to 18 to impose a $10,000 fine and a ten-year jail sentence on any HTV-infected physicians who treated patients without disclosing their HIV status. Senator Jesse Helms, the sponsor of the measure, explained his rationale: “Let the punishment fit the crime. . . . I believe in horsewhipping. I feel that strongly about it” (Tolchin 1991). Later, Senator Helms wrote that HIV-infected physicians who practice medicine “should be treated no better than the criminal who guns down a helpless victim on the street” (Helms 1991). In his article he explained that …

Socially Responsible Investing In An Inefficient Market: Doing Good Versus Doing Well, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

The debate about the desirability and efficacy of socially responsible investing (SRI) is about as old as the practice of investing itself. Indeed, in spite of a persistent inability on the part of all participants in the debate to develop a simple, coherent definition of what is meant by socially responsible investing, the debate continues. Many funds that purport to engage in SRI have surprisingly little in common. However, if a single political issue could be said to have attracted the attention of virtually every socially responsible fund currently in existence, it would have to be South Africa's abhorrent practice …

An Interpretivist Agenda, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

As I write these words, bevies of law clerks assigned to cases involving the Bill of Rights are dutifully editing their bench memos for publication in the national reporter system. Once printed, these bench memos will be solemnly treated by lawyers, scholars, other law clerks, and the occasional judge who runs across them as legally significant, or even binding, interpretations of the Constitution. Two features of this burgeoning mass of otherwise unpublishable law review comments bear mention. First, most of them are tedious, tendentious, pretentious, and badly reasoned when reasoned at all, just as one would expect from authors who …