Digital Commons Network^™

Television And The Public Interest, Cass R. Sunstein

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The communications revolution has thrown into question the value of imposing public interest obligations on television broadcasters. But the distinctive nature of this unusual market-with "winner-take-all"features, with viewers as a commodity, with pervasive externalities from private choices, and with market effects on preferences as well as the other way around-justifies a continuing role for government regulation in the public interest. At the same time, regulation best takes the form, not of anachronistic command-and-control regulation, but of (1) disclosure requirements, (2) economic incentives ("pay or play"), and (3) voluntary self-regulation through a privately administered code. Some discussion is devoted to free …

American Advice And New Constitutions Global Affairs Experiences, Cass R. Sunstein

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No abstract provided.

The Constitutional Perils Of Moderation: The Case Of The Boy Scouts, Richard A. Epstein

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No abstract provided.

Internet And The Dormant Commerce Clause, The, Jack L. Goldsmith, Alan O. Sykes

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No abstract provided.

Regulatory Competition Or Regulatory Harmonization - A Silly Question, Alan O. Sykes

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The debate over 'competition versus harmonization' in regulatory policy often confuses the pertinent alternatives. This comment argues that neither pure regulatory competition nor complete regulatory harmonization is desirable or feasible where important international cross-border effects of regulation arise. Instead, a considerable degree of cooperation is almost always needed, yet non-homogeneity of regulatory policies is almost always desirable as well. This proposition holds virtually regardless of the subject matter of regulation.

Introducing Negotiation And Drafting Into The Contracts Classroom, Carol Chomsky, Maury Landsman

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It is by now almost a commonplace to say that the first year of law school should include skills-focused opportunities in addition to the massive doses of legal doctrine and analysis that form the core of the first year curriculum. 1 Understanding contracts only through the lens of litigated disputes gives students a very limited picture of what lawyers do with respect to contracts and little opportunity to develop the skills of effective representation and artful and precise drafting needed to avoid such litigation. Moreover, the necessary emphasis on contract doctrine may obscure the degree to which many contract-related problems …

A Review Of The 51st Session Of The United Nations Sub-Commission On Promotion And Protection Of Human Rights, David Weissbrodt, Mayra Gomez, Bret Thiele

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The United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (Sub-Commission)' met at the European Headquarters of the UN in Geneva, Switzerland, from 2 August through 27 August 1999 for its fifty-first session. The Sub-Commission is a subsidiary body of the Commission on Human Rights (Commission).

Pride And Prejudice: A Study Of Connections, Mary Louise Fellows

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Although customs surrounding attribution require that only I be named as author of this Article, that fact obscures other truths about this Article. 1 One way for readers to appreciate this Article as reflecting group activity at the same time it reflects my own individual effort is the literary allusion in the title to Jane Austen and her work. I feel a particular connection to Jane Austen because she seems neither to have enjoyed nor sought the solitary life many of us imagine novelists live. When Austen finds herself, after ten years of having written virtually nothing, back in a …

Unlocking The Mysteries Of Holy Trinity: Spirit, Letter, And History In Statutory Interpretation, Carol Chomsky

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In 1892, the Supreme Court construed the Alien Contract Labor Act of 1885, which barred importation of “any alien” under contract to perform “labor or service of any kind,” as not prohibiting a New York church from hiring a British pastor to occupy its vacant pulpit. “[A] thing may be within the letter of the statute and yet not within the statute because not within its spirit, nor within the intention of its makers,” wrote Justice David Brewer in Holy Trinity Church v. United States. Brewer's opinion is a touchstone for those seeking to overcome plain statutory language, but is …

The Easy Case For Derivatives Use: Advocating A Corporate Fiduciary Duty To Use Derivatives, Edward Adams, David E. Runkle

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This Article hypothesizes that directors have a duty to shareholders to investigate and evaluate how derivatives could minimize risk to their organization. Even more, corporations have a duty to use derivatives if overall portfolio risk will thereby be reduced. Part I of this Article defines and describes the major types of derivatives and explains how and why they are used. Part II investigates the risks of derivatives, comparing these risks to other investment instruments. Part III introduces a new conceptualization of derivatives through exploration of three issues surrounding their use: (1) brokers' liabilities to investors when financial losses result; (2) …

The Secrecy Interest In Contract Law, Omri Ben-Shahar, Lisa Bernstein

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A long and distinguished line of law-and-economics articles has established that in many circumstances fully compensatory expectation damages are a desirable remedy for breach of contract because they induce both efficient performance and efficient breach. The expectation measure, which seeks to put the breached-against party in the position she would have been in had the contract been performed, has, therefore, rightly been chosen as the dominant contract default rule. It does a far better job of regulating breach-or-perform incentives than its leading competitors-the restitution measure, the reliance measure, and specific performance. This Essay does not directly take issue with the …

Legal Representation For Children In Protection Proceedings: Two Distinct Lawyer Roles Are Required, Donald N. Duquette

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The thesis of this article is that it is a mistake to try to develop a single lawyer role for children in protection cases which tries to accommodate their developing capacities from infants to articulate teens. Sometimes a child needs a traditional attorney; sometimes a best interests advocate. We should adopt different standards for the different lawyer roles. Trying to define a single lawyer role for children of all ages and all capacities is an impossible task. This article argues that we should resolve the ambivalence not by adopting a client-directed or a best interests approach, but by having two …

Who Owns The Customer? The Emerging Law Of Commercial Transactions In Electronic Customer Data, Jane Kaufman Winn, James R. Wrathall

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The Information Revolution is changing the way commerce acted and value is defined within transactions. Before the Internet and "e-business" took center stage, "electronic commerce" meant electronic data interchange, just-in-time inventory systems, supply chain automation, and corporate reengineering.

But the rise of the Internet as a communications medium has coincided with a shift in management focus, from merely trying to improve the efficiency of business logistics systems to a more holistic perspective on improving customer relationships. Intangible assets such as intellectual property rights, human capital in the form of employee knowledge, and established relationships with customers and suppliers are playing …

Micro-Raman Study Of Stress Distribution Generated In Silicon During Proximity Rapid Thermal Diffusion, M. Nolan, T. Perova, R. A. Moore, C. J. Moore, Kevin Berwick, H. S. Gamble

Articles

proximity rapid thermal diffusion (RTD). A compressive stress was found on the whole silicon wafer after 15 s RTD. After 165 s RTD, the distribution of the stress across the wafer was found to be different: compressive at the edge and tensile at the middle. Thermal stress was relieved in the RTD wafers via slip dislocations. These slip dislocations were observed in the product wafers using optical microscopy. Slip lines propagated from the wafer edge to the wafer centre in eight preferred positions of maximum induced stress. The thermally induced stress and the slip dislocation density increased with time spent …

Scenario Building: A Suitable Method For Strategic Property Planning?, John Ratcliffe

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The scenario method has been widely used by decision-makers in business, industry and government for over thirty years as an unrivalled technique to learn about the future before it happens. This paper examines the principles, practice and pitfalls of scenario building with the prime aim of presenting the technique as one singularly relevant to the study of future property investment, development and management decisions and land use policy formulation. The origins of the approach from its military based beginnings, through the popularised global environmental applications to the current widescale use by industry and commerce are traced. Some definitions are advanced …

Wrong Turn In Cyberspace: Using Icann To Route Around The Apa And The Constitution, A. Michael Froomkin

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The Internet relies on an underlying centralized hierarchy built into the domain name system (DNS) to control the routing for the vast majority of Internet traffic. At its heart is a single data file, known as the "root." Control of the root provides singular power in cyberspace.

This Article first describes how the United States government found itself in control of the root. It then describes how, in an attempt to meet concerns that the United States could so dominate an Internet chokepoint, the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) summoned into being the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers …

Delaware Law As Applied Public Choice Theory: Bill Cary And The Basic Course After Twenty-Five Years, William Wilson Bratton

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No abstract provided.

Telecommunications In The Twenty-First Century: Global Perspectives On Community And Diaspora Among Netcitizens, Madeleine M. Plasencia

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The Internet brings heady communications opportunities to those who have access to the Internet. Yet, mounting evidence has proven that a gap or divide exists on Internet usage and access. The divide exists within the United States and, increasingly, on a global basis. Part I of this Article introduces the term "digital divide" and explores the deployment of advanced telecommunications in the United States. Part II traces patterns of access to the Internet based on race and income and subordinates the statistical evidence to the realities of lack of access, and lends a human face to contextualize the real losses …

An Essay On Texas V. Lesage, Christina B. Whitman

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When I was invited to participate in this symposium, I was asked to discuss whether the causation defense developed in Mt. Healthy City School District Board of Education v. Doyle applied to cases challenging state action under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As I argue below, it seems clear that Mt. Healthy does apply to equal protection cases. The Supreme Court explicitly so held last November in Texas v. Lesage. But the implications of Lesage go beyond questions of causation. The opinion suggests that the Court may be rethinking (or ignoring) its promise in Carey v. Piphus …

The Usury Trompe L'Oeil, James J. White

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This Article demonstrates how the interaction of a federal statute passed in 1864,1 a case decided by the Supreme Court in 1978,2 and modem technology has legally debarred every state legislature from controlling consumer interest rates in its state-but not from passing laws that appear to do so-and has politically debarred the Congress from setting federal rates to replace the state rates. As a consequence, the elaborate usury laws on the books of most states are only a trompe l'oeil, a "visual deception... rendered in extremely fine detail ... ." The presence of these finely detailed laws gives the illusion …

Lifting The Veil: The Arts, Broadcasting And Irish Society, Brian O'Neill

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This article examines the role played by broadcasting in Irish artistic and cultural life from independence in 1922 to 1960 with the onset of formal modernization. It examines the cultural context for the arts in early independent Ireland in which a mood of ambivalence and sometimes outright hostility to high culture prevailed. Rather than a profound disjunction between pre- and post-modernizing phases of Irish history, however, this article argues that there were important lines of continuity in cultural experience, in particular middle-class experience of the arts, which continue to inform Irish cultural life up to the present. Such cultural experience …

Re-Examining The Role Of Patents In Appropriating The Value Of Dna Sequences, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

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As public and private sector initiatives race to complete the sequence of the human genome, patent issues have played a prominent role in speculations about the significance of this achievement. How much of the genome will be subject to the control of patent holders, and what will this mean for future research and the development of products for the improvement of human health? Is a patent system developed to establish rights in mechanical inventions of an earlier era up to the task of resolving competing claims to the genome on behalf of the many sequential innovators who elucidate its sequence …

Official Elitism Or Institutional Self Interest - 10 Reasons Why Uc-Davis Should Abandon The Lsat (And Why Other Good Law Schools Should Follow Suit) Edward L. Barrett, Jr. Lecture On Constitutional Law, Richard Delgado

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No abstract provided.

Memorial: Margaret Althea Goldblatt (1948-2000), Margaret A. Leary

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Margaret Goldblatt, who died on June 15, 2000, in Cape Town, South Africa, after a year-long battle with cancer, was a rare combination of librarian and entrepreneur. She had both a sense of humor and a sense of professionalism that endeared her to those who knew her. Many of her colleagues knew her only through telephone and e-mail communications, for she worked the last several years from the office of Ward and Associates, located in the home she shared with her husband Peter Ward and her two children, Clea Goldblatt, age 21, and Zachary Ward, age 11.

Festschrift: Lee Loevinger, Layman E. Allen

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Lee Loevinger is well-known and recognized for his outstanding achievements as a Minnesota Supreme Court Justice, as Assistant United States Attorney General for Antitrust, and as a superb practicing attorney. Perhaps less appreciated are his extraordinary contributions to the intersection of law and science generally and more particularly to the nurturing of the application of computer technology to law in its infancy.

Constitutional Federalism, Individual Liberty, And The Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act Of 1998, Adam C. Pritchard

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This Article proceeds in four parts. Part I provides background on the historical development of constitutional federalism, the Supreme Court's decisions in this area, and the apparent demise of constitutional limits on federal power. Part II then reviews the Court's revival of constitutional federalism over the last decade. Based on this review, I argue that the Supreme Court's current federalism doctrine can be understood as a "constrained libertarianism" that attempts to use constitutional structure as a check on government interference with individual liberty. In this model, states are respected in our constitutional system because of the counterbalance that they provide …

Autistic Contracts (Symposium), James J. White

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In this paper I address the question whether the law should affirm the offeror's inference and should bind the offeree to the terms proposed by the offeror even in circumstances where the offeree may not intend to accept those terms and where an objective observer might not draw the inference of agreement from the offeree's act. Modem practice and current proposals concerning contract formation in Revised Article 2 and in the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (nee Article 2B) press these issues on us more forcefully than old practices and different law did. 1 But contractual autism is not new; …

Analyze This: A Law And Economics Agenda For The Patent System, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

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Legal scholars and economists might enhance the value and impact of their work by making more effective use of each other's knowledge and capabilities. Legal scholars can offer a more nuanced understanding of the legal rules that underlie the patent system and the doctrinal levers that might be manipulated in furtherance of public policy goals. Economists bring to bear a set of analytical and methodological tools that could shed considerable light on what these doctrinal levers are doing and which of them we ought to be manipulating. Together, we have a better chance of asking the right questions and thinking …

Building Pediatric Law Careers: The University Of Michigan Law School Experience, Melissa Breger, Suellyn Scarnecchia, Frank E. Vandervort, Naomi Woloshin

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There are several obstacles to training and supporting pediatric lawyers. Children are a relatively new group of clients and law schools have not traditionally provided pediatric training. The required training is particularly challenging to deliver because it is inherently interdisciplinary, requiring faculty and students to look outside of the law school to obtain necessary knowledge. The greatest obstacle to developing the careers of pediatric lawyers is the low pay and low prestige typically afforded children's lawyers. As a result, law students reasonably question the likelihood of developing a successful career in the field. The number of available jobs is limited …

Development And Implementation Of The C-Print Speech-To-Text Support Service, Michael Stinson, Barbara Mckee, Lisa Elliot

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In this chapter we provide an overview of the growth of this system from an idea to a system that hundreds of deaf and hard of hearing students depend on everyday for communication access and learning. This chapter addresses the following questions regarding the development and implementation of C-Print. Why is there a need for the system? How does C-Print work? What have been the phases in creating the current system? What is the research evidence regarding its effectiveness and limitations? How might the system change in the future as new technologies emerge?