Legal History Commons^™

Whose Music Is It Anyway?: How We Came To View Musical Expression As A Form Of Property -- Part I, Michael W. Carroll

Working Paper Series

Many participants in the music industry consider unauthorized downloading of music files over the Internet to be “theft” of their “property.” Many Internet users who exchange music files reject that characterization. Prompted by this dispute, this Article explores how those who create and distribute music first came to look upon music as their property and when in Western history the law first supported this view. By analyzing the economic and legal structures governing musicmaking in Western Europe from the classical period in Greece through the Renaissance, the Article shows that the law first granted some exclusive rights in the Middle …

Marbury V. Madison And Modern Judicial Review, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

This Article compares the realist critique of Marbury with several revisionist defenses of that decision. Realists claim to see Marbury as essentially political and thus as the fountainhead of modern judicial review. Revisionists claim to see the decision as legalistically justified and thus inconsistent with current practices. Close examination, however, indicates that, despite sharp rhetorical differences, these two accounts are largely complementary rather than inconsistent. Each envisions Marbury as embodying elements of both political realism and legal formalism. Once the false argument about whether Marbury was either political or legal is put aside, it is possible to trace the influence …

Politicizing The Crime Against Humanity: The French Example, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

The advantages of world adherence to universally acceptable standards of law and fundamental rights seemed apparent after the Second World War, as they had after the First. Their appeal seems ever greater and their advocates ever more persuasive today. The history of law provides evidence that caution may be in order, however, and that the human propensity to ignore what transpires under the surface of law threatens to dull and silence the ongoing self-examination and self-criticism required in perpetuity by the law if it is to be correlated with justice.

This Essay presents one side, the dark side, of the …