Law Commons^™

A Tribute To Bob Lloyd, Douglas A. Blaze

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Teaching Contract Drafting Using Real Contracts, Brian Krumm, Sharon Pocock, Shelley Dunck

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Innovative Transactional Pedagogies, Joan Macleod Heminway

Scholarly Works

Our law schools are embracing in a more powerful way innovative transactional pedagogies that address not only theory, policy, and doctrine, but also legal skills. This transcribed panel discussion explores three of these pedagogies – teaching corporate finance as advanced contract drafting, teaching numeracy, and teaching substance and skill in contract drafting through the use of in-office meetings and analytical memos – and describes how they are being implemented in law teaching. The panel was part of the “Transactional Education: What’s Next?” conference hosted by the Emory University School of Law’s Center for Transactional Law and Practice on June 4-5, …

Quieting Cognitive Bias With Standards For Witness Communications, Melanie Wilson

Scholarly Works

Last year, as part of a project to revise the ABA Criminal Justice Standards for Prosecution and Defense Functions, the ABA Criminal Justice Section initiated round-table discussions with prosecutors, criminal defense lawyers, and academics throughout the United States. The Standards under review provide aspirational guidance for all criminal law practitioners. This Article stems from the Criminal Justice Section's undertaking. It considers the wording, scope, and propriety of several of the proposed changes that address lawyer-witness communications. It begins with a discussion of the effects of cognitive bias on these communications and explains why carefully tailored standards may lessen the detrimental …

Righting The Historical Record: A Case For Appellate Jurisdiction Over Appeals Of Sentences For Reasonableness Under 28 U.S.C. § 1291, Briana Lynn Rosenbaum

Scholarly Works

This Article is the first to analyze critically the jurisdictional basis for the Supreme Court’s mandate in United States v. Booker that all courts of appeals review the length of criminal sentences for “reasonableness.” The availability of appellate review has expanded greatly since the Booker opinion, and, indeed, recent research shows that the number of sentence appeals has risen. Unfortunately, the Court did not explain the jurisdictional basis for its expanded “reasonableness review.” The omission is not trivial. For decades, federal courts have held that courts of appeals do not have jurisdiction to review the length of criminal sentences. This …

Headline Kidnappings And The Origins Of The Lindbergh Law, Barry Cushman

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Passive-Voice References In Statutory Interpretation, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court regularly references grammar rules when interpreting statutory language. And yet grammar references play a peculiar role in the Court's statutory cases—often lurking in the background and performing corroborative work to support a construction arrived at primarily through other interpretive tools. The inevitable legisprudential question triggered by such references is, why does the Court bother? If grammar rules provide merely a second, third, or fourth justification for an interpretation reached through other interpretive canons, then what does the Court gain—or think it gains—by including such rules in its statutory analysis?

This essay examines these questions through the lens …

Ferdinand Pecora: The Hellhound Of Wall Street, Michael A. Perino

Faculty Publications

Few Americans today know who Ferdinand Pecora was, although he was once a media superstar, a nearly daily fixture in newspapers and radio broadcasts across the country. With the onset of our current economic woes his name has slowly begun to crop up again. In April 2009, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for a new "Pecora Commission" to investigate "what happened on Wall Street." The next week, the Senate invoked Pecora's name in voting to create an independent committee to investigate the financial crisis, and in January 2010 the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission held its first hearings.

Pecora, a diminutive …

The Ethics Of Unbranding, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

This Essay explores the ethical implications of the phenomenon of "unbranding" that has recently been discussed in popular and scholarly literature. It compares two extant definitions of unbranding and examines each under alternative ethical theories of trademark law, specifically deontological and consequentialist theories. With respect to each of these theories, the Essay examines the ethical questions raised by the existence of asymmetric information between brand owners and consumers. This includes asymmetries not only with regard to information about products, but also with regard to information about consumer decision-making processes. The latter asymmetry presents conflicts between deontological and consequentialist conclusions regarding …

Originality Proxies: Toward A Theory Of Copyright And Creativity, Eva E. Subotnik

Faculty Publications

This article contends that a definitive account of originality as a legal construct is not possible and that, as a result, the current low threshold for originality should be maintained. Under this analysis, most photographs, so long as they comply with certain requirements, should be granted protection, at the very least, against exact copying (for example, through digital copying and pasting). Arriving at this conclusion, however, requires a return to first principles, that is, to the copyright concepts of authorship and originality. These concepts saw their most recent articulation by the Supreme Court in the 1991 landmark decision of Feist …

Providing Effective Feedback, Jennifer Carr

Scholarly Works

This article discusses the process of giving effective feedback in an academic context. Effective feedback gives students a clear explanation of what they should do, concrete steps for doing it, and the ability to ascertain whether those steps have adequately addressed the problem. The author discusses five steps that go into providing effective feedback to students.

Learning By Magic - It Is Not A Trick, Stephen Gerst

Stephen A Gerst

No abstract provided.

Environmental Laws And Sustainability: An Introduction, John Dernbach, Joel Mintz

John C. Dernbach

In this introduction to the special issue of Sustainability on environmental laws and sustainability, we attempt to synthesize key lessons from the issue’s ten substantive articles. These lessons involve the use of law to achieve integrated decision-making, the use of pre-existing laws to foster sustainability, the centrality of sub-national governments in achieving sustainability, the background law of unsustainable development, the growing importance of climate change, the need to use law to protect and restore ecological integrity, the importance of judicial review and nongovernmental organizations, the need to translate sustainability into specific legal principles, the challenge of creating an appropriate national …

Let's Focus On Forms For Teaching, Jalae Ulicki

Jalae Ulicki

Sex And Hiv Disclosure, Aziza Ahmed, Beri Hull

Aziza Ahmed

No abstract provided.

Feminism, Power, And Sex Work In The Context Of Hiv/Aids: Consequences For Women's Health, Aziza Ahmed

Aziza Ahmed

No abstract provided.

Method, Community And Comparative Law: An Encounter With Complexity Science, David J. Gerber

David J. Gerber

Assume that you are attending a symposium on comparative law being held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Society for Comparative Law. Comparative law scholars from many universities are present, and a few legal practitioners are attending as well. One speaker begins as follows: “This talk will be about complex adaptive systems—the emerging science of complexity.” Based on experience in similar contexts, I would anticipate several common reactions among members of the audience. The most common might be “he’s in the wrong room.” Another set of reactions is likely to be “What? What’s that? Never heard of …

The Virtual Construction Of Legality: 'Griefing' & Normative Order In Second Life, Eric M. Fink

Eric M Fink

This article examines the construction of legality in a virtual world, seeking to under-stand how informal social order emerges as residents construct meaning around interpersonal conflicts and interact on the basis of such meaning. ‘Griefing’, a form of disruptive behavior common to virtual worlds, provides a lens through which to investigate emergent social norms and boundaries in the virtual world of Second Life. Identifying and distinguishing rhetorical frames in Second Life residents’ understandings of and responses to griefing, the study aims to elucidate the social meaning of griefing and its place in the construction and maintenance of social order.

'Mass Of Madness': Jurisprudence In E.M. Forster's A Passage To India, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

Law-and-literature scholars have paid scant attention to E. M. Forster’s oeuvre, which abounds in legal information and which situates itself in a unique jurisprudential context. Of all his novels, A Passage to India (1924) interrogates the law most rigorously, especially as it implicates massive programs of ‘liberal’ imperialism and ‘humanitarian’ intervention, as well as less grand but equally dubious legal apparatuses – jail, bail, discovery, courtrooms – that police and pervert Chandrapore, the fictional Indian city in which the novel is set. The study of law in Anglo-India is particularly telling, if troubling, because India served as ‘a model for …

Equality Dissonance: Jurisprudential Limitations And Legislative Opportunities, Lia Epperson

Lia Epperson

Exploring Ethical Issues And Examples By Using Sport, Adam Epstein, Bridget Niland

Adam Epstein

The purpose of the paper is to offer suggestions to engage your students when arriving at the ethics portion of your business law, legal environment, or sports law course. With due respect given to the classic theory of ethics, the paper offers ethical issues in the context of sport at all levels, including youth sport, interscholastic, intercollegiate, professional and the Olympic Games. Unique topics include sport-related fraud, the use of performance-enhancing drugs and technology, raging parents, running up the score, and whether the myriad of NCAA bylaws genuinely reflect and promote fundamental principles of amateurism, sportsmanship, and education.