Digital Commons Network^™

Catalytic Impact Of Information Technology On The New International Financial Architecture, Jane K. Winn

Articles

The sudden emergence of the Internet as a global network threatens to eclipse the importance of the global information infrastructure painstakingly built by financial institutions and their regulators over the past three decades. The open public nature of the Internet threatens the value of the closed proprietary networks developed by financial institutions that now face serious problems in integrating their legacy systems and new Internet systems.

Information system security, once a dreary back office matter, is now central to the success of e-commerce business plans. Before financial institutions can capitalize on their expertise in information system security, they will have …

Contest And Consent: A Legal History Of Marital Rape, Jill Elaine Hasday

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No abstract provided.

Contest And Consent: A Legal History Of Marital Rape, Jill Elaine Hasday

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No abstract provided.

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 …

The Sounds Of Silence: The Libertarian Ethos Of Erisa Preemption, Stephen F. Befort, Christopher J. Kopka

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In the Winter of 1996, the Harvard Journal on Legislation published an article entitled in part, The Last Article About the Language of ERISA Preemption?' Absent the question mark, one might have thought it a bold (and hopefully accurate) statement. Yet, as the question mark suggests, no scholar has been able to provide the definitive answer regarding the scope of ERISA preemption.

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 …

Civilizing The Natives: Marriage In Post-Apartheid South Africa, David L. Chambers

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South Africa is a land of many cultures. For several hundred years, British and Afrikaaner whites controlled the country, systematically manipulating black people to the whites' advantage. For the most part, however, whites tolerated the continuation within black communities of traditional marriage practices that white Christians considered uncivilized. In 1994, South Africa changed governments. A black majority Parliament came to power, adopting a consitution dedicated to equality and human dignity. Four years later, Parliament adopted a new marriage law that, though permitting some of the external trappings of the traditional marriage system to continue, eliminated by law much of the …

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 …

Governments, Citizens, And Injurious Industries, Hanoch Dagan, James J. White

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In this Article, Professors Hanoch Dagan and James White study the most recent challenge raised by mass torts litigation: the interference of governments with the bilateral relationship between citizens and injurious industries. Using the tobacco settlement as their case study, Dagan and White explore the important benefits and the grave dangers of recognizing governments' entitlement to reimbursement for costs they have incurred in preventing or ameliorating their citizens' injuries. They further demonstrate that the current law can help capture these benefits and guard against the entailing risks, showing how subrogation law can serve as the legal foundation of the governments' …

Dna As Evidence: Viewing Science Through The Prism Of The Law, Peter Donnelly, Richard D. Friedman

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In this article, we analyze a problem related to DNA evidence that is likely to be of great and increasing significance in the near future. This is the problem of whether, and how, to present evidence that the suspect has been identified through a DNA database search. In our view, the two well-known reports on DNA evidence issued by the National Research Council (NRC) have been badly mistaken in their analysis of this problem. The mistakes are significant because the reports have carried great authority with American courts; moreover, the DNA Advisory Board of the FBI has endorsed the second …

Reading Texts, Reading Traditions: African Masks And American Law, James Boyd White

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My subject in this Essay is the relation between a text or other artifact and the tradition against which it acts. I want to begin by borrowing from a book that seems to me to represent a model-not the only model, of course, but a very good one-of a certain kind of cultural investigation. The book is Inventing Masks by Z.S. Strother, an art historian at Columbia University who specializes in African art. Its material subject is a set of face masks made by the Central Pende, an African people in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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 …

A Problem Of Process In Wto Jurisprudence: Identifying Disputed Issues In Panels And Consultations, Glenn R. Butterton

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No abstract provided.

Derrick Bell's Toolkit--Fit To Dismantle That Famous House Derrick Bell Lecture, Richard Delgado

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No abstract provided.

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.

America As Pattern And Problem, Carl E. Schneider

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Since the days of Tocqueville, foreign observers have seen America as both a pattern and a problem. They still do, and in ways that illuminate the way law deals with bioethical issues both here and abroad. America was long exceptional in having a written constitution, in allowing its courts the power of judicial review, and in letting courts exercise that power to develop and enforce principles of human rights. Today, that pattern looks markedly less exceptional. After the Second World War, Germany and Japan were persuaded to adopt constitutions that included human rights provisions and that endowed courts with the …

Linking The Visions, James Boyd White

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It is a major tendency of legal studies in our time to focus upon questions of general social policy, with argument centered on which theory or methodology ought to determine such matters. My own attention has been differently focused, on the nature and quality of legal thoughts itself, and of legal expression. It is to these matters that the work I do with the humanities – literature, classics, philosophy, and translation – many speaks.

Lilly V. Virginia Glimmers Of Hope For The Confrontation Clause?, Richard D. Friedman

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In 1662, in The Case of Thomas Tong and Others, which involved charges of treason against several defendants, the judges of the King's Bench conferred on a crucial set of points of procedure. As reported by one of the judges, Sir John Kelyng, the judges agreed unanimously that a pretrial confession made to the authorities was evidence against the Party himself who made the Confession, and indeed, if adequately proved could support a conviction of that party without additional witnesses to the treason itself. But -- again unanimously, and quite definitively -- the judges also agreed that the confession cannot …

Three Faces Of Private Property, Michael A. Heller

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Private property is a rather elusive concept. Any kid knows what it means for something to be mine or yours, but grownup legal theorists get flustered when they try to pin down the term. Typically they, actually we, turn to a familiar analytic toolkit: including, for example, Blackstone's image of private property as "sole and despotic dominion"; Hardin's metaphor of the "tragedy of the commons"; and, more generally, the division of ownership into a trilogy of private, commons, and state forms. While each analytic tool has a distinguished pedigree and certain present usefulness, each also imposes a cost because it …

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; …

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

Articles

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?

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 …

The First Amendment Problem With The Motive Restrictions In The Rules Of Professional Conduct Lead Article, Carol Rice Andrews

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No abstract provided.

Shihō Ni Nani O Nozomu Ka [What I Desire For The Justice System], Daniel H. Foote

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Explanatory Note: In 1999, the Japanese government established the Justice System Reform Council and charged that Council with “clarifying the role to be played by justice in Japanese society” and examining and deliberating measures necessary to realize an appropriate system. The Council met from 1999 through 2001. In its final report it recommended major reforms to numerous aspects of the justice system, many of which were achieved (including the enactment of over twenty significant pieces of legislation, along with a wide range of reforms that did not require legislative action). In 2000, as the Reform Council was embarking work on …

Why Lawyers Have Often Worn Strange Clothes, Claimed To Work For Free--And Been Hated, Hugh D. Spitzer

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Why have lawyers and judges always adorned themselves in ancient regalia? Obviously, they must symbolically transform themselves from private individuals into "law speakers" for the community. They become tools of a longstanding legal system, and special clothes offer clues to others (and reminders to themselves) that they have special responsibilities, both to their clients and to the community at large. The "retro" clothes that lawyers and judges wear also remind everyone that law is old that it isn't meant to change rapidly, and that it offers stability and predictability in a changing world.

The Most Creative Moments In The History Of Environmental Law: "The Whats", William H. Rodgers, Jr.

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In preparation for this symposium piece, Professor Rodgers asked a number of his colleagues active in the field of environmental law to identify what they considered to be the most creative moments in the history of environmental law. He gave no specific instructions with his request other than providing a definition of what he considered to be a creative moment: "A legal initiative that advances environmental law with a new level of analysis, new structure, or new institutional bridge. "

This article is a compilation of the numerous responses the author received. The responses formulate a detailed and informative description …

Patent Infringement Damages In Japan And The United States: Will Increased Patent Infringement Damage Awards Revive The Japanese Economy?, Toshiko Takenaka

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This Article will look at the impact of the new Japanese legislation on patent infringement damages and will discuss whether the increase in damage awards contributes to the creation of breakthrough technology. To understand this impact, Part I will discuss pre-1998 legislation damages and highlight the difference between damages awarded by United States courts and those awarded by Japanese courts, by comparing United States and Japanese case examples. In examining the general tort and patent law theories, Part I will also try to identify the source of the difference and discuss how this difference is reflected in current United States …

Patent Infringement Damages In Japan And The United States: Will Increased Patent Infringement Damage Awards Revive The Japanese Economy?, Toshiko Takenaka

Articles

Accordingly, this Article will look at the impact of the new Japanese legislation on patent infringement damages and will discuss whether the increase in damage awards contributes to the creation of breakthrough technology. To understand this impact, Part I will discuss pre-1998 legislation damages and highlight the difference between damages awarded by United States courts and those awarded by Japanese courts, by comparing United States and Japanese case examples. In examining the general tort and patent law theories, Part I will also try to identify the source of the difference and discuss how this difference is reflected in current United …

Gray's Ghost—A Conversation About The Onshore Trust, Karen E. Boxx

Articles

A trust is an arrangement whereby one person (the trustor) transfers property to another person (the trustee) and directs the trustee to hold the property for the benefit of another person (the beneficiary). Multiple persons may fill each role; for example, there can be several beneficiaries or co-trustees. One person may play several of these roles; for example, the trustor may also serve as trustee or may be a beneficiary of the trust. However, if the same person plays all three roles alone, then no trust is created.

A self-settled trust is a trust that a person settles, or establishes, …