Jurisprudence Commons^™

Propertizing Fair Use, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

In its current form, fair use doctrine provides a personal defense that applies narrowly to the specific use by the specific user. The landmark case of Google v. Oracle, currently pending before the Supreme Court, illustrates why this is problematic. Even if the Court were to rule that Google’s use of Oracle’s Java API’s was fair, the ruling would not protect the numerous parties that developed Java applications for the Android operating system; it would only shelter Google and Google’s particular use. This is not an isolated problem; the per use/per user rule cuts across fair uses of copyrighted …

Preserving Life By Ranking Rights, John William Draper

Librarian Scholarship at Penn Law

Border walls, abortion, and the death penalty are the current battlegrounds of the right to life. We will visit each topic and more in this paper, as we consider ranking groups of constitutional rights.

The enumerated rights of the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments—life, liberty, and property—merit special treatment. They have a deeper and richer history that involves ranking. Ranking life in lexical priority over liberty and property rights protects life first and maximizes safe liberty and property rights in the absence of a significant risk to life. This is not new law; aspects of it …

Copyright As Market Prospect, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

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For many decades now, copyright jurisprudence and scholarship have looked to the common law of torts—principally trespass and negligence—in order to understand copyright’s structure of entitlement and liability. This focus on property- and harm-based torts has altogether ignored an area of tort law with significant import for our understanding of copyright law: tortious interference with a prospective economic advantage. This Article develops an understanding of copyright law using tortious interference with a prospect as a homology. Tortious interference with a prospect allows a plaintiff to recover when a defendant's volitional actions interfere with a potential economic benefit that was likely …

Teva And The Process Of Claim Construction, Lee Petherbridge Ph.D., R. Polk Wagner

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In Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc. v. Sandoz, Inc., the Supreme Court addressed an oft-discussed jurisprudential disconnect between itself and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit: whether patent claim construction was “legal” or “factual” in nature, and how much deference is due to district court decisionmaking in this area. In this Article, we closely examine the Teva opinion and situate it within modern claim construction jurisprudence. Our thesis is that the Teva holding is likely to have only very modest effects on the incidence of deference to district court claim construction but that for unexpected reasons the …

Human Survival, Risk, And Law: Considering Risk Filters To Replace Cost-Benefit Analysis, John William Draper

Librarian Scholarship at Penn Law

Selfish utilitarianism, neo-classical economics, the directive of short-term income maximization, and the decision tool of cost-benefit analysis fail to protect our species from the significant risks of too much consumption, pollution, or population. For a longer-term survival, humanity needs to employ more than cost-justified precaution.

This article argues that, at the global level, and by extension at all levels of government, we need to replace neo-classical economics with filters for safety and feasibility to regulate against significant risk. For significant risks, especially those that are irreversible, we need decision tools that will protect humanity at all scales. This article describes …

Why Law Now Needs To Control Rather Than Follow Neo-Classical Economics, John William Draper

Librarian Scholarship at Penn Law

Selfish utilitarianism, neo-classical economics, the directive of short-term income maximization, and the decision tool of cost-benefit analysis fail to protect our species from the significant risks of too much consumption, pollution, or population. For a longer-term survival, humanity needs to employ more than cost-justified precaution.

This article argues that, at the global level, and by extension at all levels of government, we need to replace neo-classical economics with filters for safety and feasibility to regulate against significant risk. For significant risks, especially those that are irreversible, we need decision tools that will protect humanity at all scales. This article describes …

The Dual-Grant Theory Of Fair Use, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

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Fair use is one of modern law's most fascinating and troubling doctrines. It is amorphous and vague, and notoriously difficult to apply. It is, at the same time, vitally important in copyright and perhaps the most frequently raised and litigated issue in the law of intellectual property.

This article offers a novel theory of fair use that provides both a better understanding of the underlying principles and better tools for applying the doctrine.

In contrast with the dominant understanding of fair use in the literature — that fair use addresses market failure — the article proposes viewing fair use as …

Wynne: It's Not About Double Taxation, Michael S. Knoll, Ruth Mason

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This Article discusses Wynne v. Comptroller, a dormant Commerce Clause case against Maryland pending before the Supreme Court. We use economic analysis to rebut Maryland’s claim that its tax regime does not discriminate against interstate commerce. We also argue that the parties’ framing of the central issue in the case as whether the Constitution requires states to relieve double taxation draws focus away from the discrimination question, and therefore could undermine the Wynnes’ case and lead to unjustified narrowing of the dormant Commerce Clause. We also show how our approach to tax discrimination resolves many of the issues that …

Corporate Law Doctrine And The Legacy Of American Legal Realism, Edward B. Rock

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In this contribution to a symposium on "Legal Realism and Legal Doctrine," I examine the role that jurisprudence plays in corporate law doctrine. Through an examination of paired cases from the United States and United Kingdom, I offer a case study of the contrasting influence on corporate law judging of American Legal Realism versus traditional U.K. Doctrinalism.

Specialist judges in both systems, aided by specialist lawyers, clearly identify and understand the core policy issues involved in a dispute and arrive at sensible results. Adjusting for differences in background law and institutions, it seems likely that the disputes would ultimately be …

Progressive Legal Thought, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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A widely accepted model of American legal history is that "classical" legal thought, which dominated much of the nineteenth century, was displaced by "progressive" legal thought, which survived through the New Deal and in some form to this day. Within its domain, this was a revolution nearly on a par with Copernicus or Newton. This paradigm has been adopted by both progressive liberals who defend this revolution and by classical liberals who lament it.

Classical legal thought is generally identified with efforts to systematize legal rules along lines that had become familiar in the natural sciences. This methodology involved not …

Conditional Spending And The Conditional Offer Puzzle, Mitchell N. Berman

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No abstract provided.

Coercion, Compulsion, And The Medicaid Expansion: A Study In The Doctrine Of Unconstitutional Conditions, Mitchell N. Berman

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The Supreme Court’s decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius regarding the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act produced three main holdings concerning two critical provisions of the Act. The first two holdings concerned the “individual mandate” that requires most Americans to maintain “minimum essential” health insurance. The third holding concerned “the Medicaid expansion,” which expanded the class of persons to whom the states must provide Medicaid coverage as a condition for receiving federal funds under the Medicaid program. By a vote of 7-2, the Court struck down this provision as an impermissible condition on …

Life After Bilski, Mark A. Lemley, Michael Risch, Ted Sichelman, R. Polk Wagner

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In Bilski v. Kappos, the Supreme Court declined calls to categorically exclude business methods—or any technology—from the patent law. It also rejected as the sole test of subject matter eligibility the Federal Circuit’s deeply-flawed machine-or-transformation test, under which no process is patentable unless it is tied to a particular machine or transforms an article to another state or thing. Subsequent developments threaten to undo that holding, however. Relying on the Court’s description of the Federal Circuit test as a “useful and important clue,” the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, patent litigants, and district courts have all continued to rely on …

Future Generations: A Prioritarian View, Matthew D. Adler

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Should we remain neutral between our interests and those of future generations? Or are we ethically permitted or even required to depart from neutrality and engage in some measure of intergenerational discounting? This Article addresses the problem of intergenerational discounting by drawing on two different intellectual traditions: the social welfare function (“SWF”) tradition in welfare economics, and scholarship on “prioritarianism” in moral philosophy. Unlike utilitarians, prioritarians are sensitive to the distribution of well-being. They give greater weight to well-being changes affecting worse-off individuals. Prioritarianism can be captured, formally, through an SWF which sums a concave transformation of individual utility, rather …

Bounded Rationality And Legal Scholarship, Matthew D. Adler

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Decision theory seems to offer a very attractive normative framework for individual and social choice under uncertainty. The decisionmaker should think of her choice situation, at any given moment, in terms of a set of possible outcomes, that is, specifications of the possible consequences of choice, described in light of the decisionmaker’s goals; a set of possible actions; and a "state set" consisting of possible prior "states of the world." It is this framework for choice which provides the foundation for expected utility theory, as demonstrated in the work of Leonard Savage. Problems arise, however, when the decisionmaker is boundedly …

The Economics Of International Labor Migration And The Case For Global Distributive Justice In Liberal Political Theory, Howard F. Chang

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Estimates of the magnitude of the gains that the world could enjoy by liberalizing international migration indicate that even partial liberalization would not only produce substantial increases in the world’s real income but also improve its distribution. Although the economic effects of immigration on native workers and distributive justice among natives are often advanced as reasons to reduce immigration, these concerns do not provide a sound justification for our restrictive immigration laws. Instead, the appropriate response to concerns about the distribution of income among natives is to increase the progressivity of our tax system. Protectionist immigration policies are not only …

The Disadvantages Of Immigration Restriction As A Policy To Improve Income Distribution, Howard F. Chang

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In this Article, I argue that tax and transfer policies are more efficient than immigration restrictions as instruments for raising the after tax incomes of the least skilled native workers. Policies to protect these native workers frol1'l immigrant competition in the labor market do no better at promoting distributive justice and are likely to impose a greater economic burden on natives in the country of immigration than the tax alternative. These immigration restrictions are especially costly given the disproportionate burden that they place on households with working women, which discourages fel1'wle participation in the labor force. This burden runs contrary …

Distributive Injustice And Private Law, Aditi Bagchi

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Imperfect rights are not held against any single person, and when violated, they do not ground a claim for any particular quantum of redress. The right to an adequate income may be an imperfect right. Because imperfect rights have been asserted only as claims against the state, and because they do not lend themselves to constitutional adjudication, they have had little traction. In my paper, I will emphasize that any claim on the state is derivative from the right held as against other citizens. Even those who believe that individuals have perfect social rights against the state should concede an …

Well-Being, Inequality And Time: The Time-Slice Problem And Its Policy Implications, Matthew D. Adler

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Should equality be viewed from a lifetime or “sublifetime” perspective? In measuring the inequality of income, for example, should we measure the inequality of lifetime income or of annual income? In characterizing a tax as “progressive” or “regressive,” should we look to whether the annual tax burden increases with annual income, or instead to whether the lifetime tax burden increases with lifetime income? Should the overriding aim of anti-poverty programs be to reduce chronic poverty: being badly off for many years, because of low human capital or other long-run factors? Or is the moral claim of the impoverished person a …

Criminalization Of Corporate Law: The Impact On Shareholders And Other Constituents, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

On The Moral Structure Of White-Collar Crime, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Meta-Blackmail And The Evidentiary Theory: Still Taking Motives Seriously, Mitchell N. Berman

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For generations, criminal law theorists, moral and political philosophers, and economists have struggled to resolve one of the law's great puzzles: whether, why, and under what circumstances the law should criminalize the conditional threat to do what is lawful. This is the so-called paradox of blackmail. Although libertarians have insisted that blackmail should be lawful, most commentators agree that at least some forms of blackmail are properly criminalized, disagreeing over the proper rationale. In his provocative article, Meta-blackmail, Russell Christopher presents a wholly novel argument in support of the libertarian conclusion. Christopher's argument relies upon the imaginary device of a …

Welfare, Dialectic, And Mediation In Corporate Law, William W. Bratton

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No abstract provided.

Wealth, Utility, And The Human Dimension, Jonathan Klick, Francesco Parisi

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Functional law and economics, which draws its influence from the public choice school of economic thought, stands in stark contrast to both the Chicago and Yale schools of law and economics. While the Chicago school emphasizes the inherent efficiency of legal rules, and the Yale school views law as a solution to market failure and distributional inequality, functional law and economics recognizes the possibility for both market and legal failure. That is, while there are economic forces that lead to failures in the market, there are also structural forces that limit the law’s ability to remedy those failures on an …

Of Patents And Path Dependency: A Comment On Burk And Lemley, R. Polk Wagner

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This Article delves into issues surrounding the relationship between technology and the patent law. Responding to Dan Burk and Mark Lemley's earlier article, Is Patent Law Technology-Specific?, the piece notes that the basic question posed by Burk and Lemley's article is a relatively easy question given the several doctrines that explicitly link the subject matter context of an invention to the validity and scope of related patents. This sort of technological exceptionalism (which this Article refers to as micro-exceptionalism) is both observable and easily justifiable for a legal regime directed to technology policy. In contrast, Burk and Lemley's identification of, …

Functional Law And Economics: The Search For Value-Neutral Principles Of Lawmaking, Francesco Parisi, Jonathan Klick

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No abstract provided.

Shareholder Value And Auditor Independence, William W. Bratton

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This Article questions the practice of framing problems concerning auditors’ professional responsibility inside a principal-agent paradigm. If professional independence is to be achieved, auditors cannot be enmeshed in agency relationships with the shareholders of their audit clients. As agents, the auditors by definition become subject to the principal’s control and cannot act independently. For the same reason, auditors’ duties should be neither articulated in the framework of corporate law fiduciary duty, nor conceived relationally at all. These assertions follow from an inquiry into the operative notion of the shareholder-beneficiary. The Article unpacks the notion of the shareholder and tells a …

How To Fix Wall Street: A Voucher Financing Proposal For Securities Intermediaries, Stephen Choi, Jill E. Fisch

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No abstract provided.

Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley And Accounting: Rules Versus Principles Versus Rents, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Lawyers On The Auction Block: Evaluation And Selection Of Class Counsel By Auction, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

The lead counsel auction has attracted increasing attention. Auction advocates argue that auctions introduce competitive market forces that improve the selection and compensation of class counsel. The benefits of the auction, the;' claim, include lower legal fees and better representation. Careful scrutiny reveals that auction advocates have overlooked substantial methodological problems with the design and implementation of the lead counsel auction. Even if these problems were overcome, the auction procedure is flawed: Auctions are poor tools for selecting firms based on multiple criteria, compromise the judicial role, and are unlikely to produce reasonable fee awards. Although the existing record is …