Digital Commons Network^™

Inventing Norms, William Hubbard

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Patent law strives to promote the progress of technology by encouraging invention. Traditionally, scholars contend that patent law achieves this goal by creating financial incentives to invent in the form of exclusive rights to new technology. This traditional view of invention, however, fails to recognize that inventors are motivated by more than money. Like most people, inventors are also motivated by social norms, that is, shared normative beliefs favoring certain actions while disfavoring others. This Article argues that many Americans embrace social norms that favor and encourage successful invention. Because of these "inventing norms" inventors enjoy enhanced personal satisfaction and …

Failure Of The Current Anti-Corruption Strategy In Afghanistan, Hugh Barrett Mcclean

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Corruption has come to the forefront in Afghanistan as the United States tries to balance efforts to back anti-corruption strategies while maintaining a positive relationship with the Karzai government. Stalled corruption cases suggest corruption in Afghanistan is systemic and not limited to a particular governing body or official. It is clear that corruption exists in both the upper and lower echelons of Afghan society, and will continue to exist until the U.S.-backed anti-corruption teams are accepted by the Afghan government. The strengthening of key institutions continues to be the recommended international model. As demonstrated in the United States, the integration …

Fortuity And Forensic Familial Identification, Natalie Ram

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On July 7, 2010, Los Angeles police announced the arrest of a suspect in the Grim Sleeper murders, so called because of a decade-long hiatus in killings. The break in the case came when California searched its state DNA database for a genetic profile similar, but not identical, to the killer’s. DNA is inherited in specific and predictable ways, so a source-excluding partial match might indicate that a close genetic relative of the matching offender was the Grim Sleeper. California’s apparent success in this case has intensified interest in policymaking for source-excluding partial matching. To date, however, little information about …

Big Brother Is Watching: The Reality Show You Didn't Audition For, J. Amy Dillard

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In 1984, at the height of the Reagan-era war on drugs, the Supreme Court created a bright-line exception to Fourth Amendment protection by declaring that no person had a reasonable expectation of privacy in an area defined as an open field. When it created the exception, the Court ignored positive law and its own jurisprudence that the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. The open fields doctrine allows law enforcement officers to enter posted, private areas that are not part of a house or its curtilage for brief surveillance. The Supreme Court has never “extended the open fields doctrine to …

Punitive Damages Vs. The Death Penalty: In Search Of A Unified Approach To Jury Discretion And Due Process Of Law, José F. Anderson

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The role of the jury in awarding monetary damages to plaintiffs in a wide range of civil cases has captured the attention of the media, contemporary non-fiction writers, and reform-minded politicians in recent years. Particular attention has been focused on huge jury awards, which has led many commentators to criticize the wisdom of permitting juries to move so much money from one place to another. Although the right to a jury trial, and with it the exercise of broad judicial discretion, is constitutionally based, many reform efforts have moved toward removing juries from cases both as to the subject matter …

The Viability Of Multi-Party Litigation As A Tool For Social Engineering Six Decades After The Restrictive Covenant Cases, José F. Anderson

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Six decades ago, a group of lawyers sought ways to overturn the racially restrictive covenants that were common across the United States. These restrictions on integrated neighborhoods were the first legal battleground of the civil rights movement using the courts of civil justice to remove what many thought were immoral restrictions on the rights of free people. The most famous of those cases was Shelley v. Kraemer, but the doctrine that emerged from that particular case was actually a series of separate, multi-party lawsuits in various locations, using teams of lawyers acting in concert with each other to achieve justice. …

Reverse Settlements As Patent Invalidity Signals, Gregory Dolin

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Over the last decade a new type of settlements, commonly referred to as “reversed payment settlements” or simply “reverse settlements,” emerged in litigation over patents covering pharmaceutical products. What differentiates these new settlements from their traditional counterparts is that whereas traditionally, the alleged trespasser on someone else's rights pays the rights-holder to settle the litigation, in these new settlements it is the rights holder that pays the alleged trespasser. These settlements are a direct consequence of the various incentives provided by the Hatch-Waxman Act - an Act designed to increase competition between brand name and generic manufactures of pharmaceutical products. …

Book Review: The Free Press Crisis Of 1800: Thomas Cooper's Trial For Seditious Libel, Eric Easton

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This article was an invited book review of a book of the same title by Peter Charles Hoffer. Hoffer, Distinguished Research Professor of History at the University of Georgia, has published this accessible case history as part of the University Press of Kansas’s Landmark Law Cases & American Society series, which he co-edits.

The book discusses one of the cases arising as a result of the Alien & Sedition Act under the presidency of John Adams, mostly targeting Republicans who editorialized against the Adams administration.

The American "Rule": Assuring The Lion His Share, James Maxeiner

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Court costs in American civil procedure are allocated to the loser (“loser pays”) as elsewhere in the world. When American civil procedure took shape in the 1840s, American lawyers thought that losing parties ought to indemnify winning parties against all expenses of lawsuits. Yet today, attorneys’ fees – the lion’s share of expenses in the words of the General Report – are not allocated this way. By practice – and not by legal rule – attorneys’ fees fall on the parties that incur them. Those fees are not set by statute or court decision, but by agreement between parties and …

In An Academic Voice: Antisemitism And Academy Bias, Kenneth Lasson

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Current events and the recent literature strongly suggest that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are often conflated and can no longer be viewed as distinct phenomena. The following paper provides an overview of contemporary media and scholarship concerning antisemitic/anti-Zionist events and rhetoric on college campuses. This analysis leads to the conclusion that those who are naive about campus antisemitism should exercise greater vigilance and be more aggressive in confronting the problem.

The Properties Of Instability: Markets, Predation, Racialized Geography, And Property Law, Audrey Mcfarlane

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A central, symbolic image supporting property ownership is the image of stability. This symbol motivates most because it allows for settled expectations, promotes investment, and fulfills a psychological need for predictability. Despite the symbolic image, property is home to principles that promote instability, albeit a stable instability. This Article considers an overlooked but fundamental issue: the recurring instability experienced by minority property owners in ownership of their homes. This is not an instability one might attribute solely to insufficient financial resources to retain ownership, but instead reflects an ongoing pattern, exemplified throughout the twentieth century, of purposeful involuntary divestment of …

Cybertrash, Max Stul Oppenheimer

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Information stored in a physical object receives the same Fourth

Amendment protection as the physical object in which it is stored.

As information moves online, it becomes independent of physical

objects, and therefore traditional rules must be reexamined. Others

have argued persuasively/ and courts appear receptive to the

argument, that online communications and data should receive the

same protection as their analogs embodied in the physical world.

Even assuming that this conclusion will be universally accepted, a

troubling consequence remains: the clear weight of authority holds

that Fourth Amendment protection does not apply to information

embodied in discarded physical trash. …

Maryland Lawyers Who Helped Shape The Constitution: Father Of Freedom - Charles Hamilton Houston, José F. Anderson

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For most Americans, Charles Hamilton Houston is barely a footnote in history. Born in 1896, this Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Amherst College and Harvard educated African-American lawyer went on to win eight of nine cases in the United States Supreme Court. He designed the legal strategy for the historic Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483 (1954). He was the first African American to be elected to the Harvard Law Review and the first to earn the degree Doctor of Juridical Science Degree

By 1950 he would be laid to rest, exhausted by his brutal multi-state law reform …

Senator Edward Kennedy: A Lion For Voting Rights, Gilda R. Daniels

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Senator Edward Kennedy was considered the Lion of the United States Senate. He was also a Lion for civil rights, fighting for justice and equality. Passion, patience and perseverance all describe Senator Kennedy’s approach to legislation. He worked across the political ideological aisle for the furtherance of civil and human rights. His political perspective was never shaded with shadows of personal benefit.

Throughout his career, Senator Kennedy continued to champion civil rights issues, such as, voting, education, housing, and disability rights. During his almost five decades in the United States Senate, he seized many opportunities to highlight and forward the …

Hot Crimes: A Study In Excess, Steven P. Grossman

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Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. . . . [I]ts nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) restored to; . . . sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten . . . at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such as those in legal and social policy or even …

"Sweet Childish Days": Using Developmental Psychology Research In Evaluating The Admissibility Of Out-Of-Court Statements By Young Children, Lynn Mclain

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A three-year-old child, while being bathed by her babysitter, innocently mentions that her “pee-pee” hurts. When the babysitter asks the child how she hurt it, she says, “Uncle Ernie (her mother’s boyfriend) told me not to tell.” A subsequent medical examination reveals that the child has gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease.

By the time of trial, the child is four and-a-half-years old. When questioned by the trial judge, she cannot explain to the judge’s satisfaction, “the difference between the truth and a lie.” Moreover, she has no long term memory of the incident. The judge rules the child incompetent to …