Legal Education Commons^™

When Standards Collide With Intellectual Property: Teaching About Standard Setting Organizations, Technology, And Microsoft V. Motorola, Cynthia L. Dahl

All Faculty Scholarship

Technology lawyers, intellectual property (IP) lawyers, or even any corporate lawyer with technology clients must understand standard essential patents (SEPs) and how their licensing works to effectively counsel their clients. Whether the client’s technology is adopted into a voluntary standard or not may be the most important factor in determining whether the company succeeds or is left behind in the market. Yet even though understanding SEPs is critical to a technology or IP practice, voluntary standards and specifically SEPs are generally not taught in law school.

This article aims to address this deficiency and create more practice-ready law school graduates. …

Private Standards And The Benzene Case: A Teaching Guide, Cary Coglianese, Gabriel Scheffler

All Faculty Scholarship

Private standards play a central role in the governance of economic activity. They also figure significantly in many public regulations, with more than 17,000 references to private standards contained in the federal regulatory code. Nevertheless, private standards remain largely overlooked in law school curricula. One clear example is Industrial Union Department, AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Institute (often referred to as the “Benzene Case”), a 1980 Supreme Court decision that is widely excerpted and discussed in major casebooks on administrative law, regulation, environmental law, and statutory interpretation. The Benzene Case raises several important legal issues, including the nondelegation doctrine, the use …

The Modigliani-Miller Theorem At 60: The Long-Overlooked Legal Applications Of Finance’S Foundational Theorem, Michael S. Knoll

All Faculty Scholarship

2018 marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller’s The Cost of Capital, Corporation Finance, and the Theory of Investment. Widely hailed as the foundation of modern finance, their article, which purports to demonstrate that a firm’s value is independent of its capital structure, is little known by lawyers, including legal academics. That is unfortunate because the Modigliani-Miller capital structure irrelevancy proposition (when inverted) provides a framework that can be extremely useful to legal academics, practicing attorneys and judges.

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

All Faculty Scholarship

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 …

Beyond Gilson: The Art Of Business Lawyering, Praveen Kosuri

All Faculty Scholarship

Thirty years ago, Ronald Gilson asked the question, “what do business lawyers really do?” Since that time legal scholars have continued to grapple with that question and the implicit question of how business lawyers add value to their clients. This article revisits the question again but with a more expansive perspective on the role of business lawyer and what constitutes value to clients.

Gilson put forth the theory of business lawyers as transaction cost engineers. Years later, Karl Okamoto introduced the concept of deal lawyer as reputational intermediary. Steven Schwarcz attempted to isolate the role of business lawyer from other …

Toward A Closer Integration Of Law And Computer Science, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Legal issues increasingly arise in increasingly complex technological contexts. Prominent recent examples include the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), network neutrality, the increasing availability of location information, and the NSA’s surveillance program. Other emerging issues include data privacy, online video distribution, patent policy, and spectrum policy. In short, the rapid rate of technological change has increasingly shown that law and engineering can no longer remain compartmentalized into separate spheres. The logical response would be to embed the interaction between law and policy deeper into the fabric of both fields. An essential step would …

Teaching Real Torts: Using Barry Werth's Damages In The Law School Classroom, Tom Baker

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Corporate Law As A Facilitator Of Self Governance, Edward B. Rock, Michael L. Wachter

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Law & Economics Perspective On A "Traditional" Torts Case: Insights For Classroom And Courtroom, Robert H. Lande

All Faculty Scholarship

This article is from a symposium, "Five Approaches to Legal Reasoning in the Classroom: Contrasting Perspectives on O'Brien v. Cunard S.S. Co. Ltd.," 57 Missouri L. Rev. 345 (1992). The symposium contains five articles that analyze this case from, respectively, traditionalist, Law & Economics, Critical Legal Studies, Feminist, and Critical Race Theories perspectives.

This article analyzes the O'Brien case from a Law & Economics perspective. It does so in a manner suitable for presentation in a Torts class or a Law & Economics class. It explains the basic terminology and approach. It analyzes the economics underlying the vaccination requirement, whether …