Law Commons^™

Re-Reifying Data, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

There's a war on between those who view digital technology as a reason to expand intellectual property law and those who oppose this expansion. One front in the war is technological: the pro-expansionists enclose their products in restrictive code, which the anti-expansionists circumvent and hack. A second is legislative: the pro-expansionists seek extended copyright duration, favorable changes to contract law, and other new legal entitlements, while the anti-expansionists lobby for the opposite. And a third front is a combination of the first two: it is technological. On this battlefield, the pro-expansionists use the law to fortify their technological protections. But …

Easing The Path For Newer Colleagues: Conference For New Law Librarians Helps Beginners Learn Aall's Ropes, Joyce Manna Janto

Law Faculty Publications

The author provides advice for prospective attendees of the Conference of Newer Law Librarians (CONELL).

Mediation And The Transformation Of American Labor Unions, Ann C. Hodges

Law Faculty Publications

First, the Article analyzes in more detail the changes in the workplace that have led to various proposals for reform. Then the Article looks at the potential for mediation of claims that do not arise out of the collective bargaining agreement, analyzing the possible benefits from the point of view of employers, employees and unions. Next, some of the issues and obstacles to mediation are reviewed. Ultimately the Article concludes that the benefits of mediation outweigh the disadvantages and that in most collective bargaining relationships the obstacles should not prevent either negotiation of such provisions or their successful use for …

Single And Paying For It, Shari Motro

Law Faculty Publications

Professor Motro argues that present-day income tax benefits to married couples, such as the privilege to file jointly, are unfair to unmarried taxpayers with or without children, and challenges these policies' societal values of encouraging marriage and subsidizing the support of children born to married couples.

Western Sovereignty For The Twenty-First Century, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

Review of reviewing Daniel Kemmis, This Sovereign Land (2001).

Legal Frameworks For Chronic Disease Prevention, Wendy Collins Perdue

Law Faculty Publications

Law is a tool that can be used to shape both private and government conduct so as to impact public health. There are at least seven different techniques of legal intervention, each of which has advantages and disadvantages. These techniques are: direct regulation through command and coercion; economic incentives to encourage private parties to behave in a particular way; indirect regulation through private enforcement such as tort law; altering the informational environment; directly providing services or infrastructure to the public; government acting as a "model citizen" with respect to its employees and facilities; and, inducing other levels of government to …

Wills, Trusts And Estates (Annual Survey Of Virginia Law, 2003-2004), J. Rodney Johnson

Law Faculty Publications

The General Assembly enacted legislation dealing with wills, trusts, and estates that added or amended a number of sections of the Virginia Code in its 2004 Session. In addition, there were four opinions from the Supreme Court of Virginia that raised issues of interest to the general practitioner as well as the specialist in wills, trusts, and estates during the period covered by this review. This article reports on all of these legislative and judicial developments.

The Lost Original Meaning Of The Ninth Amendment, Kurt T. Lash

Law Faculty Publications

This article presents previously unrecognized evidence regarding the original meaning of the Ninth Amendment. Obscured by the contemporary assumption that the Ninth Amendment is about rights while the Tenth Amendment is about powers, the historical roots of the Ninth Amendment can be found in the state ratification convention demands for a constitutional amendment prohibiting the constructive enlargement of federal power. James Madison's initial draft of the Ninth Amendment expressly adopted the language suggested by the state conventions and he insisted the final draft expressed the same rule of construction desired by the states. In an episode previously unnoticed by scholars, …

The Dilution Effect: Federalization, Fair Cross-Sections, And The Concept Of Community, Laura Gaston Dooley

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Cultural Impatience, Bruce Berner

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Fun With Dick And Jane And Lawrence: A Primer On Education Privacy As Constitutional Liberty, Susan P. Stuart

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Still Part Of The Clan: Representing Elders In The Family Law Practice, Sy Moskowitz

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Models Wanted: The Search For An Effective Response To Human Trafficking, Elizabeth M. Bruch

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

In Search Of Themis: Toward The Meaning Of The Ideal Legislator--Senator Edmund S. Muskie And The Early Development Of Modern American Environmental Law, 1965-1968, Robert F. Blomquist

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Self-Organizing Legal Systems: Precedent And Variation In Bankruptcy, Bernard Trujillo

Law Faculty Publications

Models of legal ordering are frequently hierarchical. These models do not explain two prominent realities: (1) variation in the content of a legal system, and (2) patterns of non-hierarchical ordering that we observe. As a supplement to hierarchical explanations of legal order, this Article, drawing from physical and social science research on complex systems, offers a self-organizing model. The self-organizing model focuses on variation in the content of legal systems and attempts to explain the relationship between that variation and patterns of ordering. The self-organizing model demonstrates that variation and ordering are not opposite categories, but rather constitute one continuous …

The Priority Of Respect: How Our Common Humanity Can Ground Our Individual Dignity, Richard Stith

Law Faculty Publications

In this essay, we notice that the priority of persons, the unbridgeable political gap between persons and mere things, corresponds to a special sort of moral and legal treatment for persons, namely, as irreplaceable individuals. Normative language that conflates the category of person with fungible kinds of being can thus appear to justify destroying and replacing human beings, just as we do with things. Lethal consequences may result, for example, from a common but improper extension of the word “value” to persons. The attitude and act called “respect” brings forth much more adequately than “value” the distinctively individual priority of …

Naming The Dragon: Litigating Race Issues During A Death Penalty Trial, Andrea Lyon

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Topic Both Timely And Timeless, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

Electronic discovery therefore represents one of the most momentous developments in the everyday life of the modern lawyer. Its effect on civil litigators is obvious, but other lawyers need to pay heed to the issue as well. Transactional attorneys, legislative aides, prosecutors, in-house counsel, and anyone else with legal responsibilities must be aware of the consequences of using electronic means of documentation and communication. Even an act as innocuous as sending an e-mail (an act that occurs thirty-one billion times a day7) creates a digital paper trail that is subject to discovery. Delete a client 's e-mails - or close …

Congress, Public Values, And The Financing Of Private Choice, Mary L. Heen

Law Faculty Publications

This Article examines the financing dimension of private choice, with a focus on Congress’s taxing and spending decision-making processes. The Article begins with an overview of the financing and performance dimensions of privatization decisions, followed by an analysis of how taxation relates to both dimensions. Private choice can be financed individually, that is, paid for by an individual’s own resources, facilitated by general tax reduction. Alternatively, private choice can be financed collectively by using tax revenues (or borrowed funds) to pay for privately provided goods and services. The tendency in political debate to conflate those two forms of financing, as …

Brief Of Professors Francesco Berlingieri Et Al. A S Amici Curiae In Norfolk Southern Railway Co. V. James N. Kirby Pty . Ltd., John Paul Jones

Law Faculty Publications

From the Summary of Argument:

In the twelve major commercial maritime nations represented by amici, a transport intermediary acts either as an agent or as a principal--depending on the facts of the case--and no legal rule requires an intermediary to act as an agent when it has not agreed to do so. When an intermediary acts as an "agent" to contract on behalf of its customer, the customer is bound by the contract between the intermediary agent and a third-party carrier, but when the intermediary assumes for itself the carrier's role in a contract with its customer, the customer will …

Judicial Independence In Virginia Dedicated To Chief Justice Harry L. Carrico, William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

The political will of the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia is expressed in the Constitution of Virginia, which created the government of Virginia. Every Constitution of Virginia from 1776 to the present has divided the government among the General Assembly of Virginia, the legislature; the governor, who is the chief executive officer; and the judiciary, a system of courts. Each of these three branches of the government was created as a separate, independent branch of the government. However, they are not totally independent; they must of necessity interact. Furthermore, each Constitution of Virginia has put into place various checks …

Retooling The Intent Requirement Under The Fourteenth Amendment, Henry L. Chambers, Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

Racial classifications carry the largest taint and require the most justification. Strict scrutiny-the level of scrutiny with which the remainder of the article will be concerned-requires that race-based differentiation serve a compelling state interest and be narrowly tailored to serve that interest, guaranteeing that the reason for the differentiation is extremely important and that the link between the means chosen to meet the ends is extremely tight. Though strict scrutiny is difficult to survive, it is triggered only when a state actor engages in intentional or purposeful racial discrimination. Controversy surrounds whether such a trigger is necessary. However, rather than …

The Effect Of Eliminating Distinctions Among Title Vii Disparate Treatment Cases, Henry L. Chambers, Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

St. Mary's Honor Center v. Hicks eliminated the effect of the pretext test and the distinction between standard and pretext cases. Desert Palace interpreted the motivating-factor test in a way that eliminates the distinction between mixed-motives and non-mixed-motives cases. The point is not that the Court has decided the cases incorrectly or with an inappropriate bias. Rather, it is that eliminating the distinctions between the different types of cases suggests that all disparate treatment cases should be treated the same. The result of these decisions will likely be a reversion to an older litigation model in which trial judges are …

Fear, Irrationality, And Risk Perception, Henry L. Chambers, Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

This brief commentary makes two points. The first is that fear can play multiple roles in any decision-making process. The second is that accurately determining whether reactions to fear are irrational is a complex task. Though neither point necessarily requires that symposium participants abandon their positions, together they suggest that extreme care is necessary in developing policy prescriptions based on the claim that fear can trigger irrationality.

Brown's Legacy At Fifty, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

Review of James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (2001)

Brown And The Desegregation Of Virginia Law Schools, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

One-half century ago, the Supreme Court of the United States declared unconstitutional racially segregated public elementary and secondary schools in Brown v. Board of Education. The pathbreaking opinion culminated a three-decade effort that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ("NAACP") and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund ("LDF"), an independent litigating entity, had orchestrated. An important feature of the evolving NAACP and LDF tactical approach was to contest the segregation of government-sponsored professional and graduate education, particularly implicating law schools in jurisdictions bordering the South, namely Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. These pioneering attorneys and the …

Rule 11 And Rule Revision, Carl W. Tobias, Margaret L. Sanner

Law Faculty Publications

Numerous observers of modem civil practice, whose views range across a comparatively broad spectrum, consider the 1983 amendment to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 the most controversial revision since the United States Supreme Court promulgated the original Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938.1 Counsel and litigants overused and abused the 1983 modification to Rule 11 by inappropriately stressing the compensatory goal of the proviso and improperly deemphasizing the stricture's deterrence objective. Many judges vigorously enforced Rule 11, often finding violations and imposing burdensome sanctions which frequently included large attorney's fees. This activity of lawyers and parties, as well …

Some Old Problems In England And Some New Solutions From Virginia, William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

The fundamental ideal to which we aspire in the field of civil procedure is the perfect balance between expeditious results and correct results in the administration of justice. Two famous quotations from two famous English Equity judges come to mind. John Scott, Lord Eldon, the Lord Chancellor of Great Britain from 1801 to 1827 who was often criticized for being excessively dilatory, said, 'sat cito si sat bene'. Sir George Jessel, Master of the Rolls from 1873 to 1883, once said, 'I may be wrong and sometimes am, but I never have any doubts'. Jessel had his docket under firm …

Smart Growth For Community Development, Wendy Collins Perdue

Law Faculty Publications

The built environment has a profound effect on public health. For instance, community transportation policy influences pollution levels, which in turn contribute to levels of illness and death. The panelists for this session elaborate on this concept with perspectives drawn from varied experiences.

The Story Of Shaffer: Allocating Jurisdictional Authority Among The States, Wendy Collins Perdue

Law Faculty Publications

Shaffer v. Heitner is one of a long series of Supreme Court cases addressing the scope of state-court territorial authority. Indeed, Shaffer is the first of a dozen modern cases that delineated the Court's current conception of the constitutional limits on state-court jurisdictional authority.

Determining whether a court has jurisdiction to hear a dispute is an important preliminary step in any litigation. But the constitutional doctrine the Court has developed in this area is also an interesting window on the Court's more general understanding of the allocation of power among the states.