Digital Commons Network^™

From Blackstone To Holmes: The Revolt Against Natural Law Historic Proponents And The Critics Of Higher Law, Albert Alschuler

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No abstract provided.

What The Law Should (And Should Not) Learn From Child Development Research, Emily Buss

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No abstract provided.

Feminist Fundamentalism On The Frontier Between Government And Family Responsibility For Children, Mary Anne Case

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No abstract provided.

A Global Architecture For Medical Counter-Measure Preparedness Against Bioviolence, Zachary D. Clopton, Barry Kellman

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No abstract provided.

The Race For The Bottom In Corporate Governance, Frank H. Easterbrook

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No abstract provided.

Corporate Philanthropy And The Market For Altruism, M. Todd Henderson, Anup Malani

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Academics and businesspeople have long debated the merits of corporate philanthropy. It is our contention that this debate is too narrowly focused on the role of corporations. There is a robust market for philanthropic works--which we call the market for altruism--in which nonprofit organizations, the government, and for-profit corporations compete to do good works. In this Essay, we describe this market and the role corporations play in satisfying the demand for altruism. We conclude that corporations should only engage in philanthropy when they have a comparative advantage over nonprofits and the government. Moreover, the government must avoid discriminating--particularly when setting …

A Bargaining Power Theory Of Default Rules, Omri Ben-Shahar

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This Essay explores the merits of a new criterion for default rules in incomplete contracts: filling gaps with terms that are favorable to the party with the greater bargaining power. It argues that some of the more common gaps in contracts involve purely distributive issues, such as the contract price, for which it is impossible to choose a unique, joint-maximizing, "most efficient" term. Instead, the term that mimics the hypothetical bargain in these settings must be sensitive to the bargaining power of the parties-the term they would have chosen to divide the surplus in light of their relative bargaining strengths. …

Odds And Ends: An Epstein-Inspired Look At Luck, Lee Anne Fennell

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No abstract provided.

You Too Can Create A Simulation Exercise (Or Even A Course), Jeff Leslie, James F. Hogg, Daniel Jaffe, Praveen Kosuri

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No abstract provided.

Are American Ceos Overpaid, And, If So, What If Anything Should Be Done About It?, Richard A. Posner

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No abstract provided.

The Disintegration Of Intellectual Property - A Classical Liberal Response To A Premature Obituary, Richard A. Epstein

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This Article plays off the title of Thomas Grey's well-known article, The Disintegration of Property, which argued in part that the ceaseless consensual fragmentation and recombination of property rights revealed some inner incoherence of the underlying private property institutions. I take the opposite position and treat this supposed disintegration of private property as evidence of its robust nature, not only for land but for all forms of intellectual property. Low transaction costs facilitate the creation of efficient regimes of property rights. I use this framework to critique modern intellectual property rights cases that limit the use of injunctive relief in …

Printed Document Authentication Using Texture Coding, Jonathan Blackledge, Khaled Mahmoud

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The use of image based information exchange has grown rapidly over the years in terms of both e-to-e image storage and transmission and in terms of maintaining paper documents in electronic form. Further, with the dramatic improvements in the quality of COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) printing and scanning devices, the ability to counterfeit electronic and printed documents has become a widespread problem. Consequently, there has been an increasing demand to develop digital watermarking techniques which can be applied to both electronic and printed images (and documents) that can be authenticated, prevent unauthorized copying of their content and, in the case of printed …

Lessons For Nama From Valuation Practices, Thomas Power

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By adopting accounting values and not economic value, auctioneers and valuers contribute to property market inefficiency. The reaction to this global financial and real asset meltdown is for tighter regulation. But the difficulties now being experienced in global asset markets are not new– it’s just that it is much bigger. The common denominator is accounting based valuations.

From Warranted To Valuable Belief: Local Government, Climate Change, And Giving Up The Pickup To Save Bangladesh, Jerrold A. Long

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Although the public discourse about efforts to address global climate change understandably focuses on national- and international-level efforts, in the United States much of the authority for regulating greenhouse gas emitting activities resides with state and local governments. Many local governments have initiated efforts to address global climate change in some fashion. But this article argues that there remains a disconnect between the local causes and global consequences of climate change sufficient to prevent the adoption of durable and effective local efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, individuals remain largely unable to connect their personal decisions with …

The Role Of Information And Communication Technology In Small Italian Logistics Enterprises, Pietro Evangelista, Edward Sweeney

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Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is widely regarded as a key integration enabler in contemporary supply chain configurations. Furthermore, recent years have seen the vertical disintegration of supply chains as increasing numbers of manufacturers and retailers outsource significant parts of their supply chain functionality. In this environment, Third Party Logistics (3PL) providers - the majority of which are small companies - play a pivotal role. This raises important questions about the usage of ICT in this sector. However, there is a paucity of research in the field of small 3PLs with little empirical investigation into the usage of ICT by …

Digital Camera Photographing In Measuring Propagation Loss Properties Of Ion2exchange Planar Optical Waveguides, Ling-Hua Jia, Feng Qiu, Jian Ying, Ti Yun-Jiang, Jie Z|Heng, Pengfei Wang, Gerald Farrell

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The digital photographs of propagation lines of ion-exchange planar glass optical waveguides were taken by a common digital camera.According to the profile of light intensity of propagation lines,the attenuation curves were fitted and the propagation losses of the waveguides were calculated.The waveguides were treated by annealing process,and propagation losses properties were studied before and after annealing,respectively.The results show that the loss of waveguide increases with the mode.The loss in 0 mode decreases from 2.148 9 dB·cm－1 to 0.746 0 dB·cm－1.

Misalignment Limits For A Singlemode-Multimode-Singlemode Fiber-Based Edge Filter, Agus Hatta, Gerald Farrell, Pengfei Wang, Ginu Rajan, Yuliya Semenova

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Misalignment effects on the spectral characteristics of edge filters based on singlemode–multimode–singlemode (SMS) fibre structures are investigated numerically and experimentally. A modal propagation analysis is used with a set of guided modes calculated using the finite-difference method to determine the transmission loss of the SMS-based edge filters. A limit for the tolerable misalignment of the SMS fiber-based edge filter is proposed, beyond which the spectral performance of the SMS structure degrades unacceptably. The numerical results are verified experimentally with good agreement.

Randomization In Adjudication, Adam M. Samaha

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Flipping a coin to decide a case is among the most serious forms of judicial misconduct. Yet judges react quite differently to other types of lotteries. Judges tend to tolerate or encourage deliberately random decisions in nonjudicial settings ranging from military drafts to experimental welfare requirements. Equally striking, most adjudicators now embrace randomization within their own institutions: they commonly use lotteries to assign incoming cases to each other. This practice creates a remarkable tension. Because adjudicators vary in competence and ideology, randomizing their case assignments will effectively randomize outcomes in a subset of merits decisions. We might then ask whether …

Debunking Blackstonian Copyright (Reviewing Neil Weinstock Netanel, Copyright's Paradox (2008)), Shyam Balganesh

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No abstract provided.

Tort Experiments In The Laboratories Of Democracy, Alexandra B. Klass

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This Article considers the broad range of tort experiments states have undertaken in recent years as well as the changing attitudes of Congress and the Supreme Court toward state tort law. Notably, as states have engaged in well-publicized tort reform efforts in the products liability and personal injury areas, they have also increased tort rights and remedies to address new societal problems associated with privacy, publicity, consumer protection, and environmental harm. At the same time, however, just as the Supreme Court was beginning its so-called federalism revolution of the 1990s to limit Congressional authority in the name of states' rights, …

The Regulation Of Creativity Under The Wipo Internet Treaties, Ruth Okediji

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The WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WIPO Internet Treaties) recite a need for a digital copyright framework to facilitate 'adequate solutions to questions raised by new economic, social, cultural and technological developments.' It can hardly be contested that the social and cultural developments to which the Treaties refer do not derive from the cultural or economic conditions (much less technological developments) of the developing and least-developed countries. Consistent with their predecessors, the WIPO Internet Treaties marginalize collaborative forms of creative engagement with which citizens in the global South have long identified and continue in the …

A Local Government By Any Other Name, In Proceedings Of The Washington State Association Of Municipal Attorneys, Hugh D. Spitzer

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This paper reviews the categories that Washington legislators and the Washington State Supreme Court have used to classify and describe local government units. It then describes how the large array of classifications—and the lack of consistent interpretation and use of those labels—leads to confusion and unnecessary litigation. After presenting several case studies of the effects of confusing definitions, the paper suggests that legislation reducing the number of terms classifying local governments would benefit lawyers, judges, local government and the general public. It specifically recommends that "municipal corporation" become the standard category for almost all local governments, and that "governmental body" …

Professionalizing Moral Deference, Michael Hatfield

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As I write this Essay, legal memoranda about torture, once again, are headline news. This Essay considers these memoranda. However, this Essay does not address the legality of torture or the legal limits of interrogation or even if lawyers who provide bad advice on these issues should be punished. Instead, this Essay uses what has come to light about the "torture memoranda" to consider broader issues about the contemporary state of becoming and being an American lawyer. With new memoranda being released, for the sake of convenience, this Essay refers only to the best-known example (at least as things currently …

The Federal Circuit's Licensing Law Jurisprudence: Its Nature And Influence, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

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The Federal Circuit serves as the central appellate court for U.S. patent law appeals. Outside of patent law, scholars have noted the Federal Circuit’s distinct lack of influence on the law. Thus, unnoticed, the Federal Circuit has become one of the most influential actors in the creation of intellectual property licensing law. Its influence reaches across all areas of intellectual property, industries, and all federal circuits and state courts. But the Federal Circuit’s influence on licensing law is more than just a matter of academic interest: licensing is critical to innovation in the information economy. Licenses underlie the creation and …

Revisiting The Thames Formula: The Evolving Role Of The International Maritime Organization And Its Member States In Implementing The 1982 Law Of The Sea Convention, Craig H. Allen

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Despite the findings that marine casualty rates have "plummeted" and the safety record of the oil transport industry has "significantly improved," high visibility pollution incidents in the last decade like those involving the tankers Erika and Prestige off the coast of Europe, together with the chronic problems of illegal and unregulated fishing and dismal labor conditions for many seafarers led a United Nations-chartered consultative group of leading international organization representatives to conclude that there is an "urgent" need to improve State performance in the implementation and enforcement of the international maritime legal regime.

There is less agreement, however, in how …

A New Deal For End Users? Lessons From A French Innovation In The Regulation Of Interoperability, Jane K. Winn, Nicolas Jondet

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In 2007, France created the Regulatory Authority for Technical Measures (lAutoritj de Rdgulation des Mesures Techniques or ARMT), an independent regulatory agency charged with promoting the interoperability of digital media distributed with embedded "technical protection measures" (TPM), also known as "digital rights management" technologies (DRM). ARMT was established in part to rectify what French lawmakers perceived as an imbalance in the rights of copyright owners and end users created when the European Copyright Directive (EUCD) was transposed into French law as the "Loi sur le Droit d'Auteur et les Droits Voisins dans la Société de l'Information" (DADVSI).

ARMT is both …

Are "Better" Security Breach Notification Laws Possible?, Jane K. Winn

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This Article will evaluate the provisions of California's pioneering security breach notification law (SBNL) in light of "better regulation" or "smart regulation" criteria in order to highlight the costs of taking a narrowly focused, piecemeal approach and the benefits of taking a more comprehensive perspective to the problems of identity theft and information security. Just as the basic structure of SBNLs was borrowed from environmental law, this Article will borrow from decades of analysis of the impact of environmental regulation to evaluate the likely impact of SBNLs.

Just as environmental laws can be used to reduce externalities created through the …

Globalization And Standards: The Logic Of Two-Level Game, Jane K. Winn

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The emergence of a global information architecture has fueled regulatory competition among nations and regions to set information and communication technology (“ICT”) standards. Such regulatory competition can be thought of as a two level game: level one is competition to set ICT standards within a nation or region; level two is competition to set the global ICT standards with reference to local standards.

The United States and the European Union are global leaders in setting ICT standards, and compete to set global ICT standards based on different local regulatory cultures: the U.S. is a “liberal market economy” (“LME”) within which …

Improving Efficiency In A Campus Chilled Water System Using Exergy Analysis, Justin M. Harrell, James A. Mathias

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This paper evaluates the central chilled water system of the Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC) campus using exergy-based cost accounting to quantify the magnitudes and cost impacts of internal losses with the goals of maximizing chiller capacity utilization and minimizing the unit cost of delivered chilled water. Two independent systems, each comprised of a primary-secondary-tertiary distribution network and cooled by a 12,300 kW (3,500 RT) steam-turbine driven centrifugal chiller, were modeled as control volume networks using steady-state rate balances for energy, exergy, and cost. An extensive set of measurements, collected over the 2006 cooling season, was used as the input …

Music Score Approval Plans In Research Libraries: A Survey Of Librarian Satisfaction With And Without Approval Plans, Elizabeth J. Cox, Roger Cross, John Ballestro

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In this study, the researchers submitted a music score approval plan survey to all ARL libraries. Two surveys were created, one for libraries with music score approval plans, one for those without. Forty-four surveys were returned. The authors’ purpose was to analyze and discuss the survey results, incorporating elements of the scholarly work preceding this study. Discussions, roundtables, and listservs participated in by music librarians over the years formed the basis of the topic at hand. The goal was to ascertain whether these discussions and underlying assumptions of approval plans held true to the real world.