Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 12 of 12
Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
Restatements Of Statutory Law: The Curious Case Of The Restatement Of Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Peter S. Menell
Restatements Of Statutory Law: The Curious Case Of The Restatement Of Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Peter S. Menell
Faculty Scholarship
For nearly a century, the American Law Institute’s (ALI) Restatements of the Law have played an important role in the American legal system. And in all of this time, they refrained from restating areas of law dominated by a uniform statute despite the proliferation and growing importance of such statutes, especially at the federal level. This omission was deliberate and in recognition of the fundamentally different nature of the judicial role and of lawmaking in areas governed by detailed statutes compared to areas governed by the common law. Then in 2015, without much deliberation, the ALI embarked on the task …
Rules, Tricks And Emancipation, Jessie Allen
Rules, Tricks And Emancipation, Jessie Allen
Book Chapters
Rules and tricks are generally seen as different things. Rules produce order and control; tricks produce chaos. Rules help us predict how things will work out. Tricks are deceptive and transgressive, built to surprise us and confound our expectations in ways that can be entertaining or devastating. But rules can be tricky. General prohibitions and prescriptions generate surprising results in particular contexts. In some situations, a rule produces results that seem far from what the rule makers expected and antagonistic to the interests the rule is understood to promote. This contradictory aspect of rules is usually framed as a downside …
Value Hypocrisy And Policy Sincerity: A Food Law Case Study, Joshua Ulan Galperin
Value Hypocrisy And Policy Sincerity: A Food Law Case Study, Joshua Ulan Galperin
Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications
t is tempting to say that in 2017 there is a unique problem of hypocrisy in politics, where words and behaviors are so often in opposition. In fact, hypocrisy is nothing new. A robust legal and psychological literature on the importance of procedural justice demonstrates a longstanding concern with developing more just governing processes. One of the important features of this scholarship is that it does not focus only on the consequences of policymaking, in which behaviors, but not words, are relevant. Instead, it respects the intrinsic importance of fair process, lending credence not only to votes but also to …
Legal Rhetoric And Social Science: A Hypothesis For Why Doctrine Matters In Judicial Decisionmaking, Brett Waldron
Legal Rhetoric And Social Science: A Hypothesis For Why Doctrine Matters In Judicial Decisionmaking, Brett Waldron
Pace International Law Review Online Companion
In the realm of American jurisprudence, little draws more excitement or controversy than investigating the role of federal judges in our constitutional order. Yet, at the same time, the scholarly literature has not settled upon a singular descriptive device to explain how federal judges actually carry out this role. In broad strokes, current academic commentary appears to be divided on the issue of whether fidelity to the law or fidelity to political ideology largely determines how judges decide cases. This division, however interesting it may be, should not be afforded the luxury of being examined on a level playing field. …
The Normativity Of Copying In Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
The Normativity Of Copying In Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
All Faculty Scholarship
Not all copying constitutes copyright infringement. Quite independent of fair use, copyright law requires that an act of copying be qualitatively and quantitatively significant enough or “substantially similar” for it to be actionable. Originating in the nineteenth century, and entirely the creation of courts, copyright’s requirement of “substantial similarity” has thus far received little attention as an independently meaningful normative dimension of the copyright entitlement. This Article offers a novel theory for copyright’s substantial-similarity requirement by placing it firmly at the center of the institution and its various goals and purposes. As a common-law-style device that mirrors the functioning of …
Echoes Of The Impact Of Webb V. Mcgowin On The Doctrine Of Consideration Under Contract Law: Some Reflections On The Decision On The Approach Of Its 75th Anniversary, Stephen J. Leacock
Echoes Of The Impact Of Webb V. Mcgowin On The Doctrine Of Consideration Under Contract Law: Some Reflections On The Decision On The Approach Of Its 75th Anniversary, Stephen J. Leacock
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Foreseeability And Copyright Incentives, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Foreseeability And Copyright Incentives, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
All Faculty Scholarship
Copyright law’s principal justification today is the economic theory of creator incentives. Central to this theory is the recognition that while copyright’s exclusive rights framework provides creators with an economic incentive to create, it also entails large social costs, and that creators therefore need to be given just enough incentive to create in order to balance the system’s benefits against its costs. Yet, none of copyright’s current doctrines enable courts to circumscribe a creator’s entitlement by reference to limitations inherent in the very idea of incentives. While the common law too relies on providing actors with incentives to behave in …
From Judging Culture To Taxing 'Indians': Tracing The Legal Discourse Of The 'Indian Mode Of Life', Constance Macintosh
From Judging Culture To Taxing 'Indians': Tracing The Legal Discourse Of The 'Indian Mode Of Life', Constance Macintosh
Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press
In this article I consider how judicial decision making characterizes Indigenous peoples’ culture outside the context of determinations under section 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982. I am concerned with how contemporary jurisprudence sometimes subjects Indigenous people to stereotyped tests of Aboriginality when they seek to exercise legislated rights. These common law tests of Aboriginality tend to turn on troubling oppositional logics, such as whether or not the Indigenous person engages in waged labour or commercial activities. These tests arose in historic legislation and policy that were premised on social evolutionary theory and were directed at determining whether an Indigenous …
Aesthetic Judgment And Legal Justification, Guyora Binder
Aesthetic Judgment And Legal Justification, Guyora Binder
Journal Articles
Although criticized as illegitimate, literary elements are necessary features of legal argument. In a modern liberal state, law motivates compliance by justifying controversial prescriptions as products of an appropriate process for representing the will of society. Yet because law constructs the will of individual and collective actors in representing them, its representations are necessarily figurative rather than mimetic. In evaluating law's representation of society, citizens of the liberal state are also shaping their own ends. Such self-expressive choices, subjective but non-instrumental, entail aesthetic judgment. Thus the literary elements of rhetorical figuration and aesthetic appeal are fundamental, rather than merely ornamental, …
Franchisor Liability For The Torts Of Its Franchisees: The Case For Substituting Liability As A Guarantor For The Current Vicarious Liability, John L. Hanks
Faculty Articles
The author reviews the justifications for applying the law of vicarious liability in the franchising context and concludes that its application is often inefficient and arbitrary. He argues that the employee-independent contractor dichotomy used by courts to determine franchisor liability is not well-suited to franchising, where the relationship encompasses both concepts. He proposes that vicarious liability not be applied in the franchising context. Instead, the courts by case law or state legislatures by statute should impose a guarantor status on franchisors that would expose them to liability for the torts of the franchisees only if the franchisee was unavailable to …
Retroactivity And Legal Change: An Equilibrium Approach, Jill E. Fisch
Retroactivity And Legal Change: An Equilibrium Approach, Jill E. Fisch
All Faculty Scholarship
In this Article, Professor Fisch assesses currrent retroactivity doctrine and proposes a new framework for retroactivity analysis. Current law has failed to reflect the complexity of defining retroactivity and to harmonize the conflicting concerns of efficiency and fairness that animate retroactivity doctrine. By drawing a sharp distinction between adjudication and legislation, the law has also overlooked the similarity of the issues that retroactivity raises in both contexts. Professor Fisch's analysis, influenced by the legal process school, uses an equilibrium approach to connect retroactivity analysis to theories of legal change. Instead of focusing on the nature of the new legal rule, …
Interjurisdictional Preclusion, Full Faith And Credit And Federal Common Law: A General Approach, Stephen B. Burbank
Interjurisdictional Preclusion, Full Faith And Credit And Federal Common Law: A General Approach, Stephen B. Burbank
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.