Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
Articles 1 - 6 of 6
Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Jefferson’S Taper, Jeremy N. Sheff
Jefferson’S Taper, Jeremy N. Sheff
SMU Law Review
This Article reports a new discovery concerning the intellectual genealogy of one of American intellectual property law’s most important texts. The text is Thomas Jefferson’s often-cited letter to Isaac McPherson regarding the absence of a natural right of property in inventions, metaphorically illustrated by a “taper” that spreads light from one person to another without diminishing the light at its source. I demonstrate that Thomas Jefferson likely copied this Parable of the Taper from a nearly identical passage in Cicero’s De Officiis, and I show how this borrowing situates Jefferson’s thoughts on intellectual property firmly within a natural law theory …
A History Of The Law Of Assisted Dying In The United States, Alan Meisel
A History Of The Law Of Assisted Dying In The United States, Alan Meisel
SMU Law Review
No abstract provided.
An Evolutionary Theory Of Administrative Law, Karrigan S. Bork
An Evolutionary Theory Of Administrative Law, Karrigan S. Bork
SMU Law Review
Law evolves to accommodate change—this is axiomatic in most academic legal traditions. But in the era of the administrative state, with congressional gridlock and a judiciary hesitant to address policy questions, evolution of statutory law has become much more difficult. This leads to pent up demand for change in legal regimes. If the legislature and the courts cannot provide an outlet for this pressure, where does it go? How does the law continue to change? Although other scholars have looked to agencies as engines of legal change, we lack a theoretical framework to understand how that change happens. I argue …
Preserving Humanity’S Heritage In Space: Fifty Years After Apollo 11 And Beyond, Andrea J. Harrington
Preserving Humanity’S Heritage In Space: Fifty Years After Apollo 11 And Beyond, Andrea J. Harrington
Journal of Air Law and Commerce
As numerous governments and commercial entities plan ambitious expeditions into outer space and to celestial bodies, humanity’s heritage in space is threatened. Fifty years following the Apollo 11 landing, we have recognized the historic, scientific, and cultural importance of this event and other spacefaring firsts, but the existing means to protect the resulting heritage is inadequate. This Article examines the protections currently available to those objects and sites that represent the great achievements of humankind in using and exploring space, with a focus on Tranquility Base—the Apollo 11 landing site. Existing protections are analyzed under both cultural heritage law and …
Richard Posner: A Class Of One, Robert C. Farrell
Richard Posner: A Class Of One, Robert C. Farrell
SMU Law Review
Judge Richard Posner, best known for his contributions to the field of law and economics, has also made an outsized contribution to another area of the law—the equal protection class-of-one claim. By some combination of happenstance and design, Posner was able to shape the class-of-one doctrine even where his views were inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent. The Supreme Court’s initial exposition of the doctrine had identified an equal protection violation when there was intentionally different treatment of similarly situated persons without a rational basis for the difference in treatment. Posner insisted that this language included within it a requirement that …
Policing Narrative, Tal Kastner
Policing Narrative, Tal Kastner
SMU Law Review
Counter narrative, a story that calls attention to and rebuts the presumptions of a dominant narrative framework, functions as an essential tool to reshape the bounds of the law. It has the potential to shape the collective notion of what constitutes legal authority. Black Lives Matter offers a counter narrative that challenges the characterization of the shared public space, among other aspects of contemporary society, as the space of law. Using the concept of necropower—the mobilization and prioritization of the state’s power to kill—I analyze the contested physical and conceptual space of law exposed by the counter narrative of Black …