Digital Commons Network^™

The Juvenile Death Penalty And International Law, Curtis A. Bradley

Articles

The United States is almost alone among nations in permitting the execution of juvenile offenders. Citing this fact, along with a variety of legal and historical materials, litigants and scholars are increasingly claiming that the United States’ use of the juvenile death penalty violates international law. This Article examines the validity of this claim,from the perspective of both the international legal system and the U.S. legal system.

Based on a detailed examination of the United States’ interaction with treaty regimes and international institutions since the late 1940s,the Article concludes that the international law arguments against the juvenile death penalty have …

Manhattan The Vast Wasteland Revisited, Cass R. Sunstein

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No abstract provided.

Keeping Secrets, Dale Carpenter

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The right to privacy is the power to keep secrets. It is a power conferred in one form or another by the Constitution, by statute, and by tort law. It hinders the ability of the government and other citizens to know things about us that we -- often for very good reasons - would rather not have them know. It is a power that acts as a counterweight to the power of the state and of other citizens to monitor-often for very good reasons-what we do, what we read, what we say, and with whom we associate

Labor And Employment Law At The Millennium: A Historical Review And Critical Assessment, Stephen F. Befort

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This Article uses a historical perspective as a basis to analyze the current state of labor and employment law in the United States. The Article first chronicles the decline in collective governance and the corresponding rise in the governmental regulation of the individual employment relation during the past 50 years, and attempts to ascertain the socio-economic forces contributing to this evolution. The Article then critiques the current state of workplace legal rules and finds a number of deficiencies in terms of both efficiency and equity. The Article pays particular attention to the impact of globalization and the resulting exacerbation in …

Narrative Relevance, Imagined Juries, And A Supreme Court Inspired Agenda For Jury Research, Richard O. Lempert

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This paper has its roots in Old Chief v. United States, a case the Supreme Court of the United States decided in 1997. I will begin by describing this case; then comment on its implications for the Supreme Court’s conception of the jury, and conclude by examining the agenda one may draw from it for empirical jury research. Old Chief arose when Johnny Lynn Old Chief was charged not only with assault with a dangerous weapon and using a firearm in the commission of a crime of violence, but also with violating a law that forbids convicted felons from possessing …

Taxes Vs. Fees: A Curious Confusion, Hugh D. Spitzer

Articles

Provides an analytical framework for categorizing varoius types of taxes and user charges and distinguishing between them, applying both economic and legal concepts.

Cyberproperty And Judicial Dissonance: The Trouble With Domain Name Classification, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

The nature of cyberspace continues to be woven into the fabric of our daily existence. Not surprisingly, cyberspace and the expansion of e-commerce pose challenges to existing law, particularly the legal definition of cyberproperty domain names. The nature of cyberspace allows many e-companies to possess no traditional assets such as buildings and inventories. Some e-companies own few computers, often using service providers to maintain their web sites. In the virtual space that e-companies inhabit, the primary assets that e-companies own are intangibles such as domain names, customer information, and intellectual property that includes business method patents, copyrights, and trademarks.

Domain …

Social Networks And Electronic Commerce In China, Jane K. Winn

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Communication technologies that make up the emerging global information infrastructure have the power to regulate online behavior. Social networks in Chinese society have survived the growth of formal legal institutions and liberalization of China's economy, but it is not clear whether they can survive the regulatory pressures created by global information technology networks.

The spread of electronic commerce technologies in China may strengthen legal institutions and open local markets to international competition, but is likely to be resisted by all the same interests that resist those changes in other contexts. The Chinese response to the spread of electronic commerce might …

Emerging Issues In Electronic Contracting, Technical Standards And Law Reform, Jane K. Winn

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The explosive growth of electronic commerce transactions in recent years has added fuel to efforts to harmonize international commercial law. Organizations such as the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT), the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) and the Hague Conference on Private International Law are all participating in an emerging global debate concerning the changes that should be made to the form or substance of international commercial law to accommodate innovation in the technology of international trade.

Many of the important legal issues raised by cross-border electronic commerce in the 1970s and 1980s have …

Business-To-Business (B2b) Trade Exchanges: Current Marketplace Information Flow, Jack Cook

Articles

Marketplace communication channels in most industries are complicated by the presence of thousands of buyers and sellers maintaining business-to-business (B2B) relationships with one another. The conglomeration of these channels has produced an intricate network of unique relationships between these partners that simulataneously encourages inefficient, non-standardized, information-flow transaction platforms. Through trading partners such a sales representatives, brokers, or distributors, "Buyer A" maintains a unique business relationship with each of its suppliers (see Figure 1). For every transaction process conducted between "Buyer A" and its respective supplier, a different means of communication may be utilized (Girishankar).

Protecting Privacy In Today's Knowledge Based Society, Jack Cook, Kristin Kinsella, David Pang

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With the growing use of the Internet in everyday life, consumers are increasingly concerned about personal privacy. This paper examines issues concerning consumer privacy and provides solutions available to protect that privacy.

Using Evaluations To Break Down The Male Corporate Hierarchy: A Full Circle Approach, Edward Adams

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This Article explores full circle evaluations in detail, arguing that corporate boards should implement such systems. Part I details full circle evaluations and explains the benefits associated with the use of such systems. Part II describes the potential legal duty to implement full circle evaluation systems. Part III argues that full circle evaluations consider the input of all persons in the corporation, thereby increasing the extent to which decisions concerning promotions are based on objective factors of merit and facilitating the advancement of women in the workplace. Part IV concludes that in light of all of the aforementioned considerations, the …

Form And Substance In Cyberspace, A. Michael Froomkin

Articles

In this Response to the preceding article by Joe Sims and Cynthia Bauerly, A. Michael Froomkin defends his earlier critique of ICANN. This Response first summarizes the arguments in Wrong Turn In Cyberspace, which explained why ICANN lacks procedural and substantive legitimacy. This Response focuses on how the U.S. government continues to assert control over the domain name system, and how this control violates the APA, the nondelegation doctrine as articulated by the Supreme Court in Carter Coal, and public policy. Professor Froomkin then proposes that ICANN's role be more narrowly focused away from policy making towards true …

Scale And Orientation-Invariant Scene Similarity Metrics For Image Queries, James Carswell

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In this paper we extend our previous work on shape-based queries to support queries on configurations of image objects. Here we consider spatial reasoning, especially directional and metric object relationships. Existing models for spatial reasoning tend to rely on pre-identified cardinal directions and minimal scale variations, assumption that cannot be considered as given in our image applications, where orientations and scale may vary substantially, and are often unknown. Accordingly, we have developed the method of varying baselines to identify similarities in direction and distance relations. Our method allows us to evaluate directional similarities without a priori knowledge of cardinal directions, …

Labor And Employment In The Academy - A Critical Look At The Ivory Tower: Proceedings Of The 2002 Annual Meeting Of The Association Of American Law Schools, Joint Program Of The Section On Labor Relations And Employment Law And Section On Minority Groups, Elizabeth M. Iglesias, Jo Anne Durako, Devon Wayne Carbado, Margaret E. Montoya, Michael A. Olivas, Rex R. Perschbacher, Douglas D. Scherer, Vicki Schultz

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No abstract provided.

The U'G'R'I'Z' Standard Star Setwork, J. Allyn Smith, Douglas L. Tucker, Stephen Kent, Michael Richmond, Masataka Fukugita, Takashi Ichikawa, Shin-Ichi Ichikawa, Anders M. Jorgensen, Alan Uomoto, James E. Gunn, Masaru Hamabe, Alin Tolea, Arne Henden, James Annis, Jeffrey R. Pier, Timothy A. Mckay, Jon Brinkmann, Bing Chen, Jon Holtzman, Kazuhiro Shimasaku, Donald G. York

Articles

We present the 158 standard stars that define the u'g'r'i'z' photometric system. These stars form the basis for the photometric calibration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The defining instrument system and filters, the observing process, the reduction techniques, and the software used to create the stellar network are all described. We briefly discuss the history of the star selection process, the derivation of a set of transformation equations for the UBVRcIc system, and plans for future work. (Refer to PDF file for exact formulas).

Expert Testimony On Fingerprints: An Internet Exchange, Richard D. Friedman, David H. Kaye, Jennifer Mnookin, Dale Nance, Michael Saks

Articles

In United States v. Llera Plaza, 188 F. Supp. 2d 549 (E.D. Pa. 2002), a federal district initially limited expert opinion testimony on fingerprint identifications because the government was unable to show that such identifications were sufficiently valid and reliable under Federal Rule of Evidence 702. Then, the court withdrew the opinion. This article reproduces an exchange of notes on the initial opinion submitted by five law professors.

Legal Knowledge, James Boyd White

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What do we know when we know the law? I asked a rabbi I know how he would answer that question with respect to Jewish law. Does someone know the law when he can repeat the rules that tell him what to do? Or when he can engage in the activity of reading them, sepa­rately or in conjunction with each other, and applying them sensibly to new circumstances? Is even that enough? My friend said it was not: he must know who he is in relation to the law, both as an individual and as a member of a people; …

A Partial Order On The Orthogonal Group, Colum Watt, Thomas Brady

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We define a natural partial order on the orthogonal group and completely describe the intervals in this partial order. The main technical ingredient is that an orthogonal transformation induces a unique orthogonal transformation on each subspace of the orthogonal complement of its fixed subspace.

Some Irrational Generalised Moonshine From Orbifolds, Rossen Ivanov, Michael Tuite

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We verify the Generalised Moonshine conjectures for some irrational modular functions for theMonster centralisers related to the Harada-Norton, Held, M12 and L3(3) simple groups based on certain orbifolding constraints. We find explicitly the fixing groups of the hauptmoduls arising in each case.

The Established And Potential Mediating Variables In The Child's Understanding Of Advertising Intent: Towards A Research Agenda, Margaret-Anne Lawlor, Andrea Prothero

Articles

This paper aims to explore in detail the issue of advertising intent, with particular reference to the child. The literature review examines the importance of age, and cognitive and social development in this field, and considers whether or not children can distinguish between television programming and advertising. What the literature review illustrates is that research studies thus far have conflicting viewpoints on these areas. Within the research to date, there are also a number of important issues which do not seem to be addressed. Most notably, there is little research which considers the impact of advertising upon children, from the …

Integrating The Activities Required To Recruit And Retain Profitable Customers In Contemporary Retail Banking, Susan Walsh

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Today’s high street retail bank faces a major challenge in integrating the marketing activities required both to recruit new customers and to retain existing profitable ones. The challenge involves a judicious mix of “transaction marketing” – mainly aimed at winning new clients – and of “relationship marketing”- largely aimed at retaining present ones. Evidence from a detailed qualitative study of marketing practice in a UK high street bank, a subsidiary of an Irish headquartered bank, demonstrates just how problematic achieving this balance can be. The date indicates that this bank underinvested in a number of activities that are of primary …

Public Vs. Proprietary Science: A Fruitful Tension?, Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Richard R. Nelson

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What should be public and what should be private in scientific research? The competitive sprint of public and private laboratories to complete the sequence of the human genome has brought this question to the fore. The same question frames the developing struggle over terms of access to human embryonic stem cell lines and the conflict between Microsoft and the open source movement over how best to promote software development. We expect such conflicts to become more widespread as the role of for-profit research expands in a broader range of scientific fields. Will science progress more swiftly and fruitfully if its …

How Theology Might Learn From Law (Symposium: The Theology Of The Practice Of Law), James Boyd White

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I want to start today with an account of the way lawyers think and speak, and then ask whether it might be useful for the theologically minded to take these practices and procedures seriously as a ground of comparison from which to look at their own. In doing this I shall look at the practice of law with an emphasis not on its social effects or ethical difficulties but on the nature of the activity itself, viewed from the inside, asking in particular what kind of knowledge it requires and creates in its practitioner. What does the lawyer learn from …

Simplified Rules Of Federal Procedure?, Edward H. Cooper

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Writing in 1924, seventy-eight volumes ago, Professor Edson R. Sunderland began The Machinery of Procedural Reform with this sentence: "Much has been said and written about the imperfections of legal procedure."' Much of his article describes circumstances in which procedural reform occurred only in response to conditions that had become "intolerable." A decade later, Congress enacted the Rules Enabling Act that still provides the framework for reforming federal procedure.2 The Enabling Act establishes a deliberate and open process for amending the rules initially adopted under its authority. It may take longer today to consider and adopt a single rule amendment …

The Conundrum Of Children, Confrontation, And Hearsay, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

The adjudication of child abuse claims poses an excruciatingly difficult conundrum. The crime is a terrible one, but false convictions are abhorrent. Often the evidence does not support a finding of guilt or innocence with sufficient clarity to allow a decision free of gnawing doubt. In many cases, a large part of the problem is that the prosecution's case depends critically on the statement or testimony of a young child. Even with respect to adult witnesses, the law of hearsay and confrontation is very perplexing, as anyone who has studied American evidentiary law and read Supreme Court opinions on the …

Proposed Amendments To Fed. R. Crim. P. 26: An Exchange: Remote Testimony, Richard D. Friedman

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Recently, the Supreme Court declined to pass on to Congress a proposed change to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 26 submitted to it by the Judicial Conference. In this Article, Professor Friedman addresses this proposal, which would allow for more extensive use of remote, video-based testimony at criminal trials. He agrees with the majority of the Court that the proposal raised serious problems under the Confrontation Clause. He also argues that a revised proposal, in addition to better protecting the confrontation rights of defendants, should include more definite quality standards, abandon its reliance on the definition of unavailability found in …

Justice Frank Murphy And American Labor Law, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Working people and disfavored groups were central concerns of Frank Murphy, the last Michigan Law School graduate to sit on the United States Supreme Court. In the pages of this Review, just over a half century ago, Archibald Cox wrote of him: "It was natural ...th at his judicial work should be most significant in these two fields [labor law and civil rights] and especially in the areas where they coalesce."' In this Essay, after a brief overview of Murphy the man, his days at the University of Michigan, and his career prior to the Court appointment, I shall review …

A Footnote For Jack Dawson, James J. White, David A. Peters

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Jack Dawson, known to many at Michigan as Black Jack, taught at the Law School from 1927 to 1958. Much of his work was published in the Michigan Law Review, where he served as a student editor during the 1923-24 academic year. We revisit his work and provide a footnote to his elegant writing on mistake and supervening events. In Part I, we talk a little about Jack the man. In Part II, we recite the nature and significance of his scholarly work. Part III deals briefly with the cases decided in the last twenty years by American courts on …

Looking Back On Planned Parenthood V. Casey, Christina B. Whitman

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Scholarship that tells us what is really at stake in the lives of people affected makes the law honest and responsive. Whether or not it directly shapes doctrine, this type of scholarship can capture imagination and influence judgment. The Michigan Law Review has published some of the best of this work: Yale Kamisar's articles on coerced confessions, Terry Sandalow's essay on affirmative action, Joe Sax and Phillip Hiestand's description of the emotional impact of living in a slum, Martha Chamallas and Linda Kerber's demonstration of how injuries that uniquely befall women have been dismissed as merely emotional wrongs, and, most …