Legal History Commons^™

Natural Law, Slavery, And The Right To Privacy Tort, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

In 1905 the Supreme Court of Georgia became the first state high court to recognize a freestanding “right to privacy” tort in the common law. The landmark case was Pavesich v. New England Life Insurance Co. Must it be a cause for deep jurisprudential concern that the common law right to privacy in wide currency today originated in Pavesich’s explicit judicial interpretation of the requirements of natural law? Must it be an additional worry that the court which originated the common law privacy right asserted that a free white man whose photograph is published without his consent in …

Spandrel Or Frankenstein's Monster? The Vices And Virtues Of Retrofitting In American Law, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Ancient mythology, literary fiction, and modern science fiction films all recount a similar cautionary tale: human ingenuity gives rise to a powerful invention, but through human fallibility and, in some tellings, venality, the invention becomes a monster and turns on its creators. Perhaps the most famous example is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which Dr. Frankenstein's attempt to fashion a living man from the dead remains of others succeeds, only then to go horribly awry. Such stories are timeless because they warn of the dangers of indelible features of human nature: hubris and short-sightedness. Recent large-scale catastrophes such as the 2010 …

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 …

The Obligatory Structure Of Copyright Law: Unbundling The Wrong Of Copying, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Backdrops, Stephen E. Sachs

Faculty Scholarship

The Constitution is often said to leave important questions unanswered. These include, for example, the existence of a congressional contempt power or an executive removal power, the role of stare decisis, and the scope of state sovereign immunity. Bereft of clear text, many scholars have sought answers to such questions in Founding-era history. But why should the historical answers be valid today, if they were never codified in the Constitution's text?

This Article describes a category of legal rules that weren't adopted in the text, expressly or implicitly, but which nonetheless have continuing legal force under the written Constitution. These …

The Evolution Of The Common Law And Efficiency, Nuno Garoupa, Carlos Liguerre

Faculty Scholarship

The efficiency of the common law hypothesis has generated a large bulk of literature in the last decades. The main argument is that there is an implicit economic logic to the common law; the doctrines in common law provide a coherent and consistent system of incentives which induce efficient behavior.

We start by observing that if the common law is overall evolutionarily efficient, we are left with no explanation for the important doctrinal differences across common law jurisdictions. The observation is more striking if we keep in mind that presumably the de jure initial condition was the same, namely English …

Legal Medievalism In Lex Mercatoria Scholarship, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

This short reaction piece to an article by Emily Kadens asks why a long-refuted story of an alleged uniform medieval lex mercatoria is still being maintained. The answer is that the story serves not as an actual history but instead as a foundation myth. Attempts to falsify the myth with historical data are therefore futile: the myth derives its value not from its truth value but from its symbolic power.