Digital Commons Network^™

Making Something Out Of Nothing: The Law Of Takings And Phillips V. Washington Legal Foundation, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier

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Phillips v. Washington Legal Foundation held that interest on principal amounts deposited into IOLTA accounts is the property of the various clients who handed over the money but expressed no view as to whether the Texas IOLTA program worked a taking, or, if it did, whether any compensation was due. The debates among the justices about the meaning of private property, argued in terms of contextual and conceptual severance, are unlikely to prove fruitful. We elaborate a better approach in terms of the underlying purposes of just compensation. We conclude that efficiency and justice are best served by uncoupling matters …

The Cutting Edge Of Poster Law, Michael A. Heller

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Students place tens of thousands of posters around law schools each year in staircases, on walls, and on bulletin boards. Rarely, however, do formal disputes about postering arise. Students know how far to go-and go no farther despite numerous avenues for postering deviance: blizzarding, megasigns, commercial or scurrilous signs. What is the history of poster law? What are its norms and rules, privileges and procedures? Is poster law effident? Is it just?

The Boundaries Of Private Property, Michael A. Heller

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If your house and fields are worth more separately, divide them; if you want to leave a ring to your child now and grandchild later, split the ownership in a trust. The American law of property encourages owners to subdivide resources freely. Hidden within the law, however, is a boundary principle that limits the right to subdivide private property into wasteful fragments. While people often create wealth when they break up and recombine property in novel ways, owners may make mistakes, or their self-interest may clash with social welfare. Property law responds with diverse doctrines that prevent and abolish excessive …

The Tentative Case Against Flexibility In Commercial Law, Omri Ben-Shahar

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Well-rooted in modern commercial law is the idea that the law and the obligations that it enforces should reflect the empirical reality of the relationship between the contracting parties. The Uniform Commercial Code ("Code") champions this tradition by viewing the performance practices formed among the parties throughout their interaction as a primary source for interpreting and supplementing their explicit contracts. The generous recognition of waiver and modifications, as well as the binding force the Code accords to course of performance, course of dealings, and customary trade usages, effectively permits unwritten commercial practices to vary and to erode explicit contractual provisions.

Jury Reform At The End Of The Century: Real Agreement, Real Changes, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

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Complaints about the jury system and calls for its reform are nothing new-they have probably existed as long as the jury system itself. Warren Burger called for the reform of the civil jury in 1971'; in 1905 William Howard Taft decried the contemporary tendency "to exalt the jury's power beyond anything which is wise or prudent .... ,2 Judges complain to judges, lawyers complain to lawyers, legal academics write articles about the jury for other legal academics, social scientists report their research on juries to other social scientists, and the jurors themselves go home and express their exasperation to their …

Enhancing Autonomy For Battered Women: Lessons From Navajo Peacemaking, Donna Coker

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In this Article, Professor Donna Coker employs original empirical research to investigate the use of Navajo Peacemaking in cases involving domestic violence. Her analysis includes an examination of Navajo women's status and the impact of internal colonization. Many advocates for battered women worry that informal adjudication methods such as Peacemaking ignore domestic hierarchies of power and thus facilitate the batterer's ongoing violence against the victim. Those who endorse the use of Navajo Peacemaking and other systems of restorative justice believe that such processes are better equipped to cut through the batterer's denial and victim blaming and are more likely to …

The Use Of Preclusion Doctrine, Antisuit Injunctions, And Forum Non Conveniens Dismissals In Transnational Intellectual Property Litigation, Peter Nicolas

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Conflicting standards among the federal circuits over the applicability of inherent powers in the transnational intellectual property context and the divided authority regarding the jurisdiction of U.S. federal courts over foreign intellectual property claims severely hamper the ability of federal district courts to use these tools in such a manner so as to prevent parties in transnational intellectual property suits from engaging in strategic behavior. This Comment seeks to reconcile these conflicts where possible and, where irreconcilable, to demonstrate that the text and history of federal statutes conferring subject matter jurisdiction on federal courts and placing limits on their issuance …

How Copyleft Uses License Rights To Succeed In The Open Source Software Revolution And The Implications For Article 2b, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

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The computer industry moves from one “next great thing” to the next “next great thing” with amazing speed. Graphical user interface, object-oriented programming, client-server computing, multimedia software, Java applets, the network computer, and the Internet have all been hailed as technological breakthroughs at one time or another. Some of these promising developments fizzle, some evolve and succeed slowly, and some revolutionize the industry overnight.

Led by a group of software developers known as “hackers,” the latest “next great thing” is “open source” software. The word “source” refers to software in source code form. Source code is the collection of instructions …

Despatches From The Front: Recent Skirmishes Along The Frontiers Of Electronic Contracting Law, Jane Kaufman Winn, Michael Rhoades Pullen

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This Article will provide a short overview of the current efforts in the United States and the European Union to reform contract law to accommodate recent innovations in electronic contracting. Whether changes are needed to current contract law doctrines governing contract formation, effectiveness of contract terms, choice of law and forum provisions, special protections for consumers, and signature and writing requirements, revisions in these areas have all proved controversial. Even in those areas where a consensus may be emerging on whether law reform may be appropriate in some form, consensus is often still lacking with regard to the specific legislation …

Breaking Out Of "Custody": A Feminist Voice In Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Dana Raigrodski

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In this Essay, I suggest that reexamination of this field of law through a feminist lens can shed new light and add to the understanding of constitutional criminal procedure. These insights, in turn, can and should generate a positive feminist jurisprudence of criminal procedure—a distinctive feminist voice to be integrated systematically into our constitutional criminal procedure and our criminal justice system. Applying feminist legal theories to particular areas of constitutional criminal procedure may help guide us through the more difficult task of constructing a positive feminist jurisprudence of constitutional criminal procedure. Many areas of constitutional criminal procedure lend themselves as …

What Law Librarians Collect, Frank Houdek, Penny A. Hazelton

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Law librarians describe their personal collections—what they collect for fun, not for their libraries.

Penny Hazelton's contribution, Postage Stamps, begins on page 601.

The Hedgehog And The Fox: Distinguishing Public And Private Sector Approaches To Managing Risk For Internet Transactions, Jane Kaufman Winn

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In his essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin used an ancient Greek proverb comparing these animals as a metaphor to express a deep division among thinkers and writers in their understanding of the human condition. In this essay, I extend the metaphor to contrast the differing approaches to risk management taken by the public sector in the exercise of its sovereign functions and that taken by members of the private sector in the conduct of commercial transactions. In light of the differences in these basic approaches to questions of risk management, I will evaluate some widely discussed …

Useful Arts In The Information Age, Alan L. Durham

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No abstract provided.

The Anatomy Of American Caste Civil Rights In The Next Millennium, Bryan K. Fair

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From Special Privilege To General Utility: A Continuation Of Willard Hurst's Study Of Corporations, Susan Pace Hamill

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California's Racial History And Constitutional Rationales For Race-Conscious Decision Making In Higher Education Symposium: Race And The Law At The Turn Of The Century, Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic

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No abstract provided.

A Right Of Access To Court Under The Petition Clause Of The First Amendment: Defining The Right, Carol Rice Andrews

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The Midas Touch: The Lethal Effect Of Wealth Maximization, Jeanne L. Schroeder

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The article critically examines the concept of wealth maximization in law and economics, arguing that it is fundamentally flawed due to its inability to account for the distinction between exchange value and use value. Wealth maximization, rooted in the masculine regime of possession and exchange, represses the feminine act of enjoyment, leading to a paradox where achieving its goal would result in the collapse of the market system. The analysis draws on Lacanian theory to explore the sexual impasse underlying this paradox, suggesting that the pursuit of wealth without consideration for enjoyment is self-destructive and unsustainable.

Democratic Formalism, A Matter Of Interpretation, Cass R. Sunstein

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The End Of The Market: A Psychoanalysis Of Law And Economics, Jeanne L. Schroeder

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The perfect market is the end of all actual markets - it is their ideal form. In normative economics, actual markets are the means of achieving the end or ideal of the perfect market. But this means that to achieve a perfect market would result in the end of all actual markets. Despite the centrality of the ideal of the perfect market in the subset of law and economics scholarship based on classical price theory, there is surprisingly little literature on its parameters. In this Commentary, Professor Schroeder examines this literature in order to explicate the nature of this ideal. …

Thinking Like A Lawyer Or Acting Like A Judge: A Response To Professor Simon, David Yellen

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Professor William Simon argues that the principal professional responsibility of all lawyers should be to "seek justice."' He defines this as pursuing the client's rights, but not the client's interests, if those interests are incompatible with the "truth." As a concrete example of this approach, Professor Simon states that it would normally be inappropriate for a lawyer to subject a vulnerable, but accurate, witness to cross examination intended to create the impression that the witness' testimony was mistaken.

In my view, Professor Simon's position would not really further "justice" at all. In these brief comments, by focusing on the likely …

No Church For The Poor - ''Angela's Ashes'', Eamon Maher

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Material reproduced by kind permission of Doctrine and Life

The Problematics Of Moral And Legal Theory, Richard A. Posner

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In these Holmes Lectures, delivered a century after the publication of Oliver Wendell Holmes's great essay The Path of the Law, Judge Posner argues for an essentially Holmesian conception of the proper relations among modern normative moral philosophy ("academic moralism"), morality, and law. Academic moralism, he argues, lacks either the intellectual cogency or the emotional power to change people's beliefs or behavior; the power to do so resides in "moral entrepreneurs," which academic moralists emphatically are not. Academic moralism's lack of cogency disqualifies it to guide judicial decisionmaking even - in fact, especially - in cases involving controversial moral issues, …

Separation Of Powers And The Separate Treatment Of Contract Claims Against The Federal Government For Specific Performance, Richard Henry Seamon

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No abstract provided.

Bankruptcy's Uncontested Axioms, Douglas G. Baird

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The Internet And The Abiding Significance Of Territorial Sovereignty, Jack L. Goldsmith

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Pennsylvania Coal V. Mahon: The Erratic Takings Jurisprudence Of Justice Holmes, Richard A. Epstein

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Pennsylvania Coal V. Mahon: The Erratic Takings Jurisprudence Of Justice Holmes, Richard A. Epstein

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Reply To Critics Of The Problematics Of Moral And Legal Theory, Richard A. Posner

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Explaining The Public Wariness Of Juries, Albert W. Alschuler

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No abstract provided.