Law Commons^™

Once And Future Copyright, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

Copyright is like a well-meaning but ultimately bothersome friend, eager to help but nearly impossible to get rid of. It attaches indiscriminately to the simplest acts of expression, without regard for whether the author needs or wants its protection. This automatic propertization made sense in the print era, when mass distribution of information was an expensive process rarely undertaken by those with no plans to profit from their creativity. It makes little sense today. The following article shows that copyright's overly solicitous nature is the source of several seemingly unrelated and intractable problems - e.g., closed code, copyright as censorship, …

Unpublished Opinions And No Citation Rules In The Trial Courts, J. Thomas Sullivan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Fourth Circuit Publication Practices, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

Certain publication practices, especially dependence on issuing unpublished opinions, are one major response of federal courts to the increasing number of appeals. Few observers have assessed how specific tribunals employ these practices, although a recent study elucidates them. The Commission on Structural Alternatives for the Federal Courts of Appeals (Commission) gathered much useful data, which have remained strikingly constant, on each court. Because Fourth Circuit's publication practices and reliance on unpublished decisions allow the court to manage a large docket and suggest that it may not enunciate the common law, this Article scrutinizes those practices.

The Article first describes the …

Private Standards In Public Law: Copyright, Lawmaking And The Case Of Accounting, Lawrence A. Cunningham

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Government increasingly leverages its regulatory function by embodying in law standards that are promulgated and copyrighted by non-governmental organizations. Departures from such standards expose citizens to criminal, civil and administrative sanctions, yet private actors generate, control and limit access to them. Despite governmental ambitions, no one is responsible for evaluating the legitimacy of this approach and no framework exists to facilitate analysis. This Article contributes an analytical framework and, for the federal government, nominates the Director of the Federal Register to implement it.

Analysis is animated using among the oldest and broadest examples of this pervasive but stealthy phenomenon: embodiment …