Digital Commons Network^™

Reflections On Air Capture: The Political Economy Of Active Intervention In The Global Environment; An Editorial Comment, Edward A. Parson

Articles

When global climate change came onto domestic and international policy agendas in the late 1980s, only two types of response were initially considered: reducing emissions by improving efficiencies or switching to lower or non-carbon energy sources; and adapting to the anticipated changes. Since that time the agenda of potential responses has been progressively expanded, principally by adding various ways to intervene in the global carbon cycle or the climate to break the connection between emissions of greenhouse gases and the resultant climate changes. Three types of these “intervening” responses are now, to varying degrees, present in policy debate: biological sequestration …

Using Court Records For Research, Teaching, And Policymaking: The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, Margo Schlanger, Denise Lieberman

Articles

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is, wisely, planning the future of its enormous collection of relatively recent court records. The pertinent regulation, a “records disposition schedule” first issued in 1995 by the Judicial Conference of the United States in consultation with NARA, commits the Archives to keeping, permanently, all case files dated 1969 or earlier; all case files dated 1970 or later in which a trial was held, and “any civil case file which NARA has determined in consultation with court officials to have historical value.” Other files may be destroyed 20 years after they enter the federal …

The Economics Of Open Access Law Publishing, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

The conventional model of scholarly publishing uses the copyright system as a lever to induce commercial publishers and printers to disseminate the results of scholarly research. Recently, we have seen a number of high-profile experiments seeking to use one of a variety of forms of open access scholarly publishing to develop an alternative model. Critics have not quarreled with the goals of open access publishing; instead, they've attacked the viability of the open access business model. If we are examining the economics of open access publishing, we shouldn't limit ourselves to the question whether open access journals have fielded a …

Harnessing And Sharing The Benefits Of State-Sponsored Research: Intellectual Property Rights And Data Sharing In California's Stem Cell Initiative, Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Arti K. Rai

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This Article discusses data sharing in California's stem cell initiative against the background of other data sharing efforts and in light of the competing interests that CIRM is directed to balance. We begin by considering how IP law affects data sharing. We then assess the strategic considerations that guide the IP and data policies and strategies of federal, state, and private research sponsors. With this background, we discuss four specific sets of issues that public sponsors of data-rich research, including CIRM, are likely to confront: (1) how to motivate researchers to contribute data; (2) who should have access to the …

What's Real For Law?, Jospeh Vining

Articles

Law is not academic. The univeristy if not its home. Law is in the wider world and is pervasive there, in language, thought, and action.

Relative Access To Corrective Speech: A New Test For Requiring Actual Malice, Aaron Perzanowski

Articles

This Article reexamines the First Amendment protections provided by the public figure doctrine. It suggests that the doctrine is rooted in a set of out-dated assumptions regarding the media landscape and, as a result, has failed to adapt in a manner that accounts for our changing communications environment.

The public figure doctrine, which imposes the more rigorous actual malice standard of fault on defamation plaintiffs who enjoy greater access to mass media, was constructed in an era defined by one-to-many communications media. Newspapers, broadcasters, and traditional publishers exhausted the Court's understanding of the means of communicating with mass audiences. As …