Law Commons^™

The Debilitating Effect Of Exclusive Rights: Patents And Productive Inefficiency, William Hubbard

All Faculty Scholarship

Are we underestimating the costs of patent protection? Scholars have long recognized that patent law is a double-edged sword. While patents promote innovation, they also limit the number of people who can benefit from new inventions. In the past, policy makers striving to balance the costs and benefits of patents have analyzed patent law through the lens of traditional, neoclassical economics. This Article argues that this approach is fundamentally flawed because traditional economics rely on an inaccurate oversimplification: that individuals and firms always maximize profits. In actuality, so-called "productive inefficiencies" often prevent profit maximization. For example, cognitive biases, bounded rationality, …

Realities Of Religio-Legalism: Religious Courts And Women's Rights In Canada, The United Kingdom, And The United States, Anissa Helie, Marie Ashe

Publications and Research

Religio-legalism – the enforcement of religious law by specifically-religious courts that are tolerated or endorsed by civil government – has long operated against women’s interests in liberty and equality. In the 21st century, religious tribunals – Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim – operate throughout the world. Almost all are male-dominated, patriarchal, and sex-discriminatory. Harms to women produced by Muslim or sharia courts have come into focus in recent years, but present realities of religio-legalism operating through Christian and Jewish – as well as Muslim – religious courts in Western nations have been under-examined.

This essay by Ashe and Helie documents …

Your View: ‘Do Not Track’ Should Apply To Drivers, Too, Hillary B. Farber

Faculty Publications

Location tracking data can reveal quite a bit of information about a person when it is all pieced together. Just by knowing where and when a person frequents certain places we can know about his/her recreational habits, religious affiliations, professional affiliations, relationship status, personal health and hygiene, social preferences and contacts, and so much more. That is why it is so important to regulate the use of location tracking technology. There are a variety of efforts afoot to rein in government use of such technology – this op-ed is concerned with automated license plate readers.

The Constitutional Limit Of Zero Tolerance In Schools, Derek W. Black

Faculty Publications

With the introduction of modern zero tolerance policies, schools now punish much more behavior than they ever have before. But not all the behavior is bad. Schools have expelled the student who brings aspirin or fingernail clippers to campus, who does not know that a keychain knife in his backpack, or who reports having taken away a knife from another student in order to keep everyone safe. Despite challenges to these examples, courts have upheld the suspension and expulsion of this good-faith, innocuous behavior. With little explanation, courts have opined that the Constitution places no meaningful limit on the application …

Putting A Face To A Name: Visualising Human Rights, Vera Mackie

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

In this essay, I focus on a text which attempts to deal with human rights issues in an accessible media format, Kälin, Müller and Wyttenbach’s book, The Face of Human Rights. I am interested in this text as an attempt to translate between different modes of communicating about human rights, which we might call the academic mode, the bureaucratic mode, the activist mode and the popular media mode. There are significant gaps between the academic debates on human rights, the actual language and protocols of the bodies devoted to ensuring the achievement of basic human rights, the language of activists, …

The Establishment Of Juvenile Courts And The Fulfilment Of Vietnam's Obligations Under The Convention On The Rights Of The Child, Thi Thanh Nga Pham

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

This article situates child protection by Vietnam’s judicial bodies in relation to the requirements of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other international instruments in juvenile justice. It demonstrates that Vietnam’s legislation and practices do not fully comply with international standards and that there remains a significant gap between the letter of the law and its implementation. Party-government policy on judicial reform, however, creates the potential for establishing juvenile courts in Vietnam. The feasibility of such juvenile courts, and the implications for Vietnam meeting its obligations under the Convention, are also surveyed.

Extensive Food Adulteration In Bangladesh: A Violation Of Fundamental Human Rights And The State’S Binding Obligations, S M. Solaiman, Abu Noman Mohammad Atahar Ali

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

© The Author(s) 2014. The right to life is inherently connected with the right to food which implies that any foodstuff be nutritious and safe. The government of Bangladesh bears binding obligations to protect these rights under both international human rights instruments and its national constitution. The violation of these rights has, nonetheless, been commonplace causing numerous human deaths and terminal diseases. The perpetrators have been adulterating foods, flouting laws with impunity and taking advantage of regulatory impotence and governmental lenience for decades. Laws exist in books, regulators subsist in theory, but consumers die without remedies. This situation must not …

Developments In The Right To Defence For Juvenile Offenders Since Vietnam’S Ratification Of The Convention On The Rights Of The Child, Thi Thanh Nga Pham

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

This article examines Vietnam’s legal changes and law enforcement practices in regards to the right to defence of juvenile offenders since Vietnam ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990. A combination of research methods is employed, including document analysis, statistical analysis, and selected case studies. The findings of the research indicate that Vietnam has demonstrated considerable improvement in acknowledging the right to defence of juvenile offenders in its law. The contemporary Vietnamese regulations are similar to the CRC’s requirements about legal assistance for juvenile offenders. The implementation of the law, however, confronts difficulties as …

Submission To United Nations Committee On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities Draft General Comment On Article 12 – Equal Recognition Before The Law, Fleur Beaupert, Linda Roslyn Steele

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

We support the Draft General Comment on Article 12 – Equal Recognition Before the Law (‘Draft General Comment’). Our submission is primarily concerned with drawing the Committee’s attention to issues around mental capacity. We argue that despite the Committee’s urging in the Draft General Comment for a split between legal capacity and mental capacity, mental capacity (and the related disciplines, professions, institutions and practices of psychology, psychiatry and neuropsychology through which mental capacity is defined and assessed) will continue to have cultural and material significance to the realisation of article 12 and the human rights of people with disability generally. …

“To Corral And Control”: Stop, Frisk, And The Geography Of Freedom, Anders Walker

All Faculty Scholarship

This article revisits the emergence of stop and frisk law in the 1960s to make three points. One, the impetus for formalizing police stops arose midst confusion generated by Mapp v. Ohio, the landmark Warren Court opinion incorporating the exclusionary rule to the states. Two, police over-reactions to Mapp intersected with fears of urban riots, leading to a formalization of stop and frisk rules that aimed at better containing inner city minority populations. Three, the heightened control of urban streets coupled with the heightened protection of the private home bore geographic implications, interiorizing liberty in ways that perpetuated a national …

Nonprofits, Speech, And Unconstitutional Conditions, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Journal Articles

This Article proposes a new constitutional framework for approaching the issue of speech-related conditions on government funding received by nonprofits and demonstrates the application of this framework by applying it to the disputes that have reached the Supreme Court in this area. It argues that speech rights are generally inalienable as against the government under the First Amendment, and therefore any abridgement of such rights by the government – whether direct or indirect – is subject to strict scrutiny. As a result, the government is not permitted to buy an organization’s speech (or silence) absent a compelling governmental interest in …