Law Commons^™

Surfing For Protection: Why Websites Should Be Categorically Excluded From Trade Dress Protection, Matt Mikels

CommLaw Conspectus: Journal of Communications Law and Technology Policy (1993-2015)

No abstract provided.

Protecting The Free Flow Of Information: Federal Shield Laws In The Digital Age, Arielle Giordano

CommLaw Conspectus: Journal of Communications Law and Technology Policy (1993-2015)

No abstract provided.

The Evolution Of Innovation And The Evolution Of Regulation: Emerging Tensions And Emerging Opportunities In Communications, Larry Downes, John W. Mayo

CommLaw Conspectus: Journal of Communications Law and Technology Policy (1993-2015)

No abstract provided.

Guarding Against Abuse: The Costs Of Excessively Long Copyright Terms, Derek Khanna

CommLaw Conspectus: Journal of Communications Law and Technology Policy (1993-2015)

No abstract provided.

Guidelines And Best Practices For Large And Mass Tort Mdls (First Edition), Duke Law School Center For Judicial Studies

Bolch Judicial Institute Publications

Mass-tort MDLs dominate the federal civil docket, yet they present enormous challenges to transferee judges assigned to manage them. There is little official guidance and no rules specific to the management of mass-tort MDLs, often requiring the transferee judge to develop procedures out of whole cloth.

Beginning in 2013, the Bolch Judicial Institute (then the Center for Judicial Studies) sought to address this issue through a series of annual bench-bar conferences. From these conferences came the Guidelines and Best Practices for Large and Mass-Tort MDLs document, which is designed to help judges and legal practitioners understand and efficiently navigate complex …

Minelaying And The Impediment Of Passage Rights, Wolff Heintschel Von Heinegg

International Law Studies

Since their first extensive use in the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War naval mines have continued to pose a considerable threat to innocent shipping. States reacted by adopting the 1907 Hague Convention VIII, which has been the only international instrument on the matter to date. In view of the fact that more than 80 percent of imports and exports are shipped by sea, freedom of navigation and, in particular, transit and archipelagic sea lanes passage rights must be preserved to the greatest extent possible. The present article deals with the question of whether international rules and principles provide effective protection of international …

Vawa After The Party: Implementing Proposed Guidelines On Campus Sexual Assault Resolution, Mary P. Koss, Elise C. Lopez

City University of New York Law Review

No abstract provided.

Senior Day 2014, University Of Michigan Law School

Commencement and Honors Materials

Program for the December 19, 2014 University of Michigan Law School Senior Day

Does Tort Law Empower?, Anthony J. Sebok

Faculty Online Publications

Ori Herstein’s How Tort Law Empowers takes on the question of whether and how tort law empowers victims. Herstein presents himself as a friendly critic of civil recourse theory, and offers an amendment that he claims makes the theory both more plausible and less interesting. Like many friendly amendments, it is an offer that must be carefully examined before it is accepted.

Anthropology, Human Rights, And Legal Knowledge: Culture In The Iron Cage, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

In this article, I draw on ethnography in the particular zone of engagement between anthropologists, on the one hand, and human rights lawyers who are skeptical of the human rights regime, on the other hand. I argue that many of the problems anthropologists encounter with the appropriation and marginalization of anthropology's analytical tools can be understood in terms of the legal character of human rights. In particular, discursive engagement between anthropology and human rights is animated by the pervasive instrumentalism of legal knowledge. I contend that both anthropologists who seek to describe the culture of human rights and lawyers who …

Market Collaboration: Finance, Culture, And Ethnography After Neoliberalism, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

In the wake of the disasters of March 2011, financial regulators and financial-risk management experts in Japan expressed little hope that much could be done nor did they take great interest in defining possible policy interventions. This curious response to regulatory crisis coincided with a new fascination with culturalist explanations of financial markets, on the one hand, and a resort to what I term “data politics”—a politics of intensified data collection—on the other. In this article, I analyze these developments as being exemplary of a new regulatory moment characterized by a loss of faith in both free market regulation and …

Is The Law Hopeful?, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

This essay asks what legal studies can contribute to the now vigorous debates in economics, sociology, psychology, philosophy, literary studies and anthropology about the nature and sources of hope in personal and social life. What does the law contribute to hope? Is there anything hopeful about law? Rather than focus on the ends of law (social justice, economic efficiency, etc.) this essay focuses instead on the means (or techniques of the law). Through a critical engagement with the work of Hans Vaihinger, Morris Cohen and Pierre Schlag on legal fictions and legal technicalities, the essay argues that what is “hopeful” …

Ethnography In The Realm Of The Pragmatic: Studying Pragmatism In Law And Politics, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

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Transdisciplinary Conflict Of Laws Foreword: Cavers's Double Legacy, Karen Knop, Ralf Michaels, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

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Representing In-Between: Law, Anthropology, And The Rhetoric Of Interdisciplinarity, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

This article considers how lawyers and nonlawyers discuss the contribution of interdisciplinary scholarship to the law as a means of rethinking the relationship between these differences. The article first examines the arguments of the nineteenth-century lawyer Henry Maine and of the twentieth-century anthropologist Edmund Leach on the subject, and notes the difference between Maine's emphasis on "movement" from one theoretical discovery to another and Leach's emphasis on creating relationships between disciplines by exploiting a "space in between" the two. Then, turning to contemporary scholarship in legal anthropology, "Law and Society," and the sociology of law, the article critiques the rigid …

From Multiculturalism To Technique: Feminism, Culture, And The Conflict Of Laws Style, Karen Knop, Ralf Michaels, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

The German Chancellor, the French President, and the British Prime Minister have each grabbed world headlines with pronouncements that their states' policies of multiculturalism have failed. As so often, domestic debates about multiculturalism, as well as foreign policy debates about human rights in non- Western countries, revolve around the treatment of women. Yet feminists are no longer even certain how to frame, let alone resolve, the issues raised by veiling, polygamy, and other cultural practices oppressive to women by Western standards. Feminism has become perplexed by the very concept of "culture." This impasse is detrimental both to women's equality and …

Property As Legal Knowledge: Means And Ends, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

This article takes anthropologists’ renewed interest in property theory as an opportunity to consider legal theory-making as an ethnographic subject in its own right. My focus is on one particular construct – the instrument, or relation of means to ends, that animates both legal and anthropological theories about property. An analysis of the workings of this construct leads to the conclusion that rather than critique the ends of legal knowledge, the anthropology of property should devote itself to articulating its own means.

Models And Documents: Artefacts Of International Legal Knowledge, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

This article draws upon one year of ethnographic research at United Nations conferences to challenge some common academic assumptions about what it means to "do" international law. The article compares the work of academic international lawyers - founded in making models of an international system - to the work of practitioners - exemplified by the work of making documents, and demonstrates the particular, peculiar nature of each kind of knowledge, from the point of view of the observer. This leads to a set of conclusions concerning how an academic study of international law influenced by an appreciation of the particularity …

International Law In Domestic Courts: A Conflict Of Laws Approach, Ralf Michaels, Karen Knop, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

The relationship between international law and domestic law is rarely understood as a conflict of laws. Understanding it in this way opens up a parallel with the field of conflict of laws: the field for which the relationship between legal systems, especially the role of another system's jurisdiction, laws, and judgments vis-à-vis the domestic legal system, are exactly the bread-and-butter issues. We argue for such an approach to international law in domestic courts: an approach that we elaborate as "theory through technique." In our view, conflicts should be seen broadly as the discipline that developed to deal with conflicts between …

The Anti-Network: Private Global Governance, Legal Knowledge, And The Legitimacy Of The State, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

Global private law has become the source of both anxiety and euphoria. Inherent in this fascination is the assumption that global private law threatens the legitimacy of the state by taking over its functions through new techniques of governance. In this article, I build upon research in one arena of global private governance, the production of legal documentation for the global swap markets, to challenge the most prominent assumptions about private law beyond the state. I argue that rather than focusing on how global private law is or is not an artifact of state power, a body of private norms, …

Wigmore's Treasure Box: Comparative Law In The Era Of Information, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

This article revisits the work of a canonical but quixotic figure in early American comparative law, John Henry Wigmore, as a lens through which to imagine what comparative law's role might be in the era of globalization. Wigmore's "pictorial method", compared here to the "treasure boxes" of Ming and Ch'ing Dynasty Chinese emperors, in which precious objects of different scales and eras were appreciated aesthetically side by side, presents a challenge to the many "modernist" approaches to comparative law in existence today. An exploration of the intellectual history of comparative law through the disjuncture of Wigmore's work engenders a treatment …

The View From The International Plane: Perspective And Scale In The Architecture Of Colonial International Law, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

No abstract provided.

A New Agenda For The Cultural Study Of Law: Taking On The Technicalities, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

This article urges humanistic legal studies to take the technical dimensions of law as a central focus of inquiry. Using archival and ethnographic investigations into developments in American Conflict of Laws doctrines as an example, and building on insights in the anthropology of knowledge and in science and technology studies that focus on technical practices in scientific and engineering domains, it aims to show that the technologies of law - an ideology that law is a tool and an accompanying technical aesthetic of legal knowledge - are far more central and far more interesting dimensions of legal practice than humanists …

Is New Governance The Ideal Architecture For Global Financial Regulation?, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

A central challenge for international financial regulatory systems today is how to manage the impact of global systemically important financial institutions (G-SIFIs) on the global economy, given the interconnected and pluralistic nature of regulatory regimes. This paper focuses on the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and proposes a new research agenda for the FSB’s emerging regulatory forms. In particular, it examines the regulatory architecture of the New Governance (NG), a variety of approaches that are supposed to be more reflexive, collaborative, and experimental than traditional forms of governance. A preliminary conclusion is that NG tools may be effective in resolving some …

User Friendly: Informality And Expertise, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

No abstract provided.

Introducing Discipline: Anthropology And Human Rights Administrations, Iris Jean-Klein, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

Anthropologists engage human rights administrations with an implicit promise that our discipline has something unique to offer. The articles in this special issue turn questions about relevance and care so often heard in the context of debates about human rights outside in. They focus not on how anthropology can contribute to human rights activities, but on what anthropological encounters with human rights contribute to the development of our discipline. They ask, how exactly do we render the subject relevant to anthropology? Reflecting on some ways anthropologists in this field have dispensed care for their subjects, the authors highlight two modalities …

Managing Regulatory Arbitrage: An Alternative To Harmonization, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

This policy-oriented article argues for deploying conflict of laws doctrines as a tool of coordination in international financial governance.

Rights Inside Out: The Case Of The Women's Human Rights Campaign, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

This essay traces the relationship between activists and academics involved in the campaign for “women’s rights as human rights” as a case study of the relationship between different classes of what I call “knowledge professionals” self-consciously acting in a transnational domain. The puzzle that animates this essay is the following: how was it that at the very moment at which a critique of “rights” and a reimagination of rights as “rights talk” proved to be such fertile ground for academic scholarship did the same “rights” prove to be an equally fertile ground for activist networking and lobbying activities? The paper …

Foreword: Accountability For International Crimes And Serious Violations Of Fundamental Human Rights, Madeline Morris, Karen Knop, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

No abstract provided.

Wigmore's Shadow, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

Riles relates how John H. Wigmore, professor and Dean of the Northwestern Law School, fanned her interest in legal and literary fiction. Wigmore provided dozens of examples of legal fictions bundled together in the singular, and seemingly straightforward technical device of modern collateral. From this premise, she analyzes the difference between a legal fiction and a literary fiction, and examines the factors that make legal fiction distinctively legal.