Digital Commons Network^™

Sociolegal Islands?, Daniel H. Foote

Articles

In 1992, in an address at the American Society of Comparative Law annual meeting, Professor Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School bemoaned the state of comparative legal studies in the United States. Many scholars specialized in comparative law, she observed. But at Harvard and other law schools, they were like islands; they conducted research and teaching largely in isolation, having little contact with the core curriculum or other faculty. From the many nods of agreement. it was evident she had voiced a common concern.

Primarily due to increased globalization, the situation has changed. At many law schools comparative perspectives …

Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court: Managing Constitutional Conflict In An Authoritarian, Aspirationally Islamic State, Clark B. Lombardi

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No abstract provided.

Confusion And Convergence In Consumer Payments: Is Coherence In Error Resolution Appropriate?, Anita Ramasastry

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At present, there are no uniform rules governing retail payment systems in the United States. Checks, credit cards, debit cards, and new types of payment systems—such as stored-value cards and prepaid cards—are governed by different rules and provide consumers with varying protections. In addition, several phenomena may have confused consumers about the type of consumer protections they have when using different payment systems. First, new types of intermediaries have developed—such as online funds transmission and electronic bill presentment and payment—that piggyback on existing payment systems. Second, electronic check conversion systems may convert customer checks into a different payment system—electronic funds …

Teaching Contradiction: A Case Study, Michael Townsend

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One of the most difficult realities confronting first-year law students is that American legal education is simultaneously theoretical and metatheoretical. At one moment students are at the "theoretical" level, by which I mean that they work "within" or "inside" the "black letter" in the context of various factual settings. In the next instant, students move to the "meta-theoretical" level, talking "about" the black letter from a number of "perspectives." That is, they slide between "learning law" and "learning about law." Many students find such transitions to be problematic, bewildering, and even stressful.

One response, for students and teachers alike, is …

“Whites Only Tree,” Hanging Nooses, No Crime?: Limiting The Prosecutorial Veto For Hate Crimes In Louisiana And Across America, Tamara F. Lawson

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News coverage of three nooses hanging from the "whites only tree" at Jena High School, in Jena, Louisiana, created public outcry. Criticism rose as the public learned that District Attorney Reed Walters exercised his prosecutorial discretion to decline to press charges against the white students that admitted hanging the nooses, yet over zealously charged black students with attempted murder for conduct normally considered a battery or a school-yard-fight. The apparent lack of equity in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion became the focus of heated debate. Although the Jena High School incidents occurred in 2006, the Jena story is unpleasantly reminiscent …

The Other Famous Marks Doctrine, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

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Debates on protection for famous trademarks often center around state and federal antidilution laws. Both the old Federal Trademark Dilution Act of 1995 and the new Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2006 have generated many law review articles and numerous symposia. The dilution law focuses on trademarks deemed famous within U.S. boundaries. A debate on protection for famous trademarks today is incomplete without a discussion of the other famous marks doctrine. The other famous marks doctrine recognizes marks famous in other countries without actual use in the country where a user adopts the trademark on similar goods and services.

In …

Justice Scalia’S “Renegade Jurisdiction”: Lessons For Patent Law Reform, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

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Justice Scalia called the Eastern District of Texas ("EDTX") the "renegade jurisdiction." Critics label it the "rocket-docket" for patents. All blame it on the ills of patent litigation, demanding for national reform. This Article challenges the prevailing myths with an empirical quantitative study of more than 27,000 patent cases filed in the last decade and a qualitative study on patent forum shopping. This Article contends that the proposed venue reforms will not prevent litigants from shopping for a favorable forum in which to resolve patent litigations. This Article suggests that instead of the quick fixes vis-à-vis proposed venue reform legislation …

Selling It First, Stealing It Later: The Trouble With Trademarks In Corporate Transactions In Bankruptcy, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

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Why does AI get two bites of the “Apple” trademark? Should AI be allowed to grant the right to use the trademark “perpetual and exclusive” with the sale of the music division and steal it back for free, ten years later? This article is part of an ongoing and broader inquiry into the intersection of trademark, contract and bankruptcy laws. This article argues that recent bankruptcy decisional law, notably the In re Exide Technologies decision, misunderstands the “perpetual and exclusive” trademark transaction, deeming it as an ordinary “license” when it is truly an outright sale. This article explains that the …

Reasonableness And Objectivity: A Feminist Discourse Of The Fourth Amendment, Dana Raigrodski

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This article suggests that a critical reexamination of the Fourth Amendment and its jurisprudence through feminist lenses can shed new light and add to our understanding of it. These insights, in turn, can and should generate a positive feminist Fourth Amendment jurisprudence—a distinctive feminist voice to be integrated systematically into the law of search and seizure, leading to a transformation of the Fourth Amendment itself. Applying feminist theories to particular issues and normative layers of current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence may help guide us through the more difficult task of imagining a feminist jurisprudence of search and seizure law.

The Influence Of Law On Sea Power Doctrines: The New Maritime Strategy And The Future Of The Global Legal Order, Craig H. Allen

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For much of the 2006-07 academic year, elements of the US Naval War College facilitated an elaborate process designed to provide the intellectual foundations for the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) and his staff to draw upon in drafting a new maritime strategy. The process brought together experts from throughout the world to take part in workshops, strategic foundation "war" games, conferences and listening sessions.

It was my privilege as the Charles H. Stockton Chair of International Law to serve as legal advisor throughout the process. This article summarizes the contributions of the Naval War College International Law Department (ILD) …

Time Well Spent: An Economic Analysis Of Daylight Saving Time Legislation, Steve P. Calandrillo, Dustin E. Buehler

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Several nations implemented daylight saving time legislation in the last century, including the United States. The United States briefly experimented with year-round daylight saving time twice—during World War II and the energy crises in the 1970s. Agency studies and congressional hearings from the 1970s show several benefits of year-round daylight saving time, along with potential disadvantages. These studies are dated, and much has changed in the last thirty years. While congressional efforts to extend daylight saving time in 2007 have again focused on the energy savings this legislation would produce, far more meaningful benefits have been largely ignored.

This Article …

The Dangers Of The Digital Millennium Copyright Act: Much Ado About Nothing?, Steve P. Calandrillo, Ewa A. Davison

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In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a landmark piece of legislation aimed at protecting copyright holders from those who might manufacture or traffic technology capable of allowing users to evade piracy protections on the underlying work. At its core, the DMCA flatly prohibits the circumvention of “technological protection measures” in order to gain access to copyrighted works, but provides no safety valve for any traditionally protected uses.

While hailed as a victory by the software and entertainment industries, the academic and scientific communities ties have been far less enthusiastic. The DMCA’s goal of combating piracy is …

A "New Approach" To Standards And Consumer Protection, Jane Winn, Nicolas Jondet

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As consumer use of information and communication technology (ICT) products grows, the importance of ICT standards in consumer markets also grows. While standards for manufactured products were once developed at the national level in formal standards bodies, standards for ICT products today are more likely to be developed by informal standards bodies that target global markets, creating new challenges for national consumer protection laws.

As part of the process of creating a single market, the EU developed an innovative and successful form of “coregulation” known as the “New Approach” that coordinated the work of legislators and standards developers to reduce …

Biodiversity, Baking And Boiling, Endangered Species Act Turning Down The Heat, Anna T. Moritz, Kassie R. Siegel, Brendan R. Cummings, William H. Rodgers, Jr.

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Today the Earth faces an extinction event on a scale second only to Earth's largest mass extinction, the Permian-Triassic event, which occurred 250 million years ago. Upwards of 70 percent of the Earth's species could be at risk of extinction with a 3.5°C (6.3°F) rise in temperature, which could occur by the end of this century.

The driver is global warming, caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. As such, a rational climate policy is needed immediately to prevent the complete collapse of biodiversity. Yet, the United States—the world's largest cumulative contributor to emissions—is in a state of paralysis when it …

Real Collaborative Context: Opinion Writing And The Appellate Process, Tom Cobb, Sarah Kaltsounis

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Several questions motivated us to begin experimenting with new and more ambitious forms of collaboration in our teaching. We aimed to infuse the classroom with what might be called “real collaborative context.” We looked for instances of collaboration that actually occur in the legal process and asked students to participate in those processes in order to gain a better understanding of the social aspects of legal practice and jurisprudence.

Our hope is that students will experience collaboration not so much as a classroom performance whose main goal is to assist in learning something else that could also be taught in …

A Model Compound Study: The Ecotoxicological Evaluation Of Five Organic Contaminants With A Battery Of Marine Bioassays, Ailbhe Macken, Michelle Giltrap, Barry Foley, Evin Mcgovern, Brendan Mchugh, Maria Davoren

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This paper describes the ecotoxicological evaluation of five organic contaminants frequently detected in marine sediments (tributyltin, triphenyltin, benzo[a]pyrene, fluoranthene, and PCB 153) using three marine species (Vibrio fischeri, Tetraselmis suecica, and Tisbe battagliai). The sensitivity of each species varied for all compounds. The triorganotins were consistently the most toxic to all species. The applicability of each test system to assess the acute toxicity of environmental contaminants and their use in Toxicity Identification Evaluation (TIE) is discussed. Suitability of the Microtox and T. battagliai tests for employment in TIE studies were further assessed through spiking experiments with tributyltin. Results demonstrated that …

Acquiring Innovation, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey A. Maine

Articles

In recent years, the innovation market has witnessed a new business model involving companies that are mere patent holding shells and not operating entities. They have no customers or products to offer, but they do have an aggressive tactic of using patent portfolios to threaten other operating companies with potential infringement litigation. The strategy is executed with the end goal of extracting handsome settlements. Acquisitions of patents for offensive use have become a major concern to operating companies because such acquisitions pose the threats of patent injunction, interrupting the business and crippling further innovation.

While many operating companies today know …

Ask, Don’T Tell: Ethical Issues Surrounding Undocumented Workers’ Status In Employment Litigation, Christine N. Cimini

Articles

The presence of an estimated 11.5 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, of which an estimated 7.2 million are working, has become a flashpoint in the emerging national debate about immigration. Given these statistics, it is not surprising that many undocumented workers suffer injuries in the workplace that are typically legally cognizable. Even though undocumented workers are entitled to a number of legal remedies related to their employment, seeking legal relief often raises heightened concerns about the disclosure of their status. This article explores lawyers' increasingly complex ethical obligations with regard to a client's immigration status in the context …

Macniven V. Westmoreland And Tax Advice Using “Purposive Textualism” To Deal With Tax Shelters And Promote Legitimate Tax Advice, Scott A. Schumacher

Articles

The last few years have seen a flurry of activity aimed at the tax shelter industry. Beginning with the “covered opinion” rules of Treasury Circular 230 in 2005, the government has adopted several changes to the standards applicable to tax advice, all in an effort stop abusive tax shelters. Most recently, both Congress (in 2007) and Treasury (in 2008) have revised the standards applicable to tax advice to require that a position have a “more likely than not” chance of succeeding on the merits, or the position must be disclosed to the IRS. While the government’s desire for reform is …

When Deterrence And Death Mitigation Fall Short: Fantasy And Fetishes As Gap-Fillers In Border Regulation, Mary D. Fan

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Drawing on fieldwork and political theory with Lacanian psychoanalytic influences, this article analyzes how fantasy and fetishes help sustain strategies shown to be no solution to U.S. border control problems. More than a decade after the official launch of the border control paradigm of "prevention through deterrence," predicated on the assumption that ramping up walls, barriers, policing, and the human costs of border crossing would deter, there has been scant evidence of deterrence and much evidence of diversion of migrants to more dangerous crossing points where death rates have soared. Attempts to mitigate the cost to life have also proved …

Insights From Clinical Teaching: Learning About Teaching Legal Writing From Working On Real Cases, Helen A. Anderson

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I began teaching legal writing in 1994, but I've since had the occasional foray into practice through supervising students who represented clients in our state's appellate courts. I directed an appellate clinic for two years, and most recently supervised two students who briefed and argued a case in the Washington State Supreme Court. These experiences have taught me some important lessons that I have brought back to my legal writing classes. The clinical cases have not only reminded me what writing for practice really entails, and how hard it is to follow our sage writing advice, but they have given …

Transitioning The Family Business, Dwight Drake

Articles

By any measure, family-dominated businesses are the backbone of the American economy. Although a large majority of family businesses are managed by senior family members who are older than age 55 and more than 80 percent of such senior family members claim that they want the business to remain in the family, less than 30 percent of such businesses have tackled the challenge of developing a plan for transitioning the business to the next generation.

For over 90 percent of such families, this planning challenge is aggravated by the fact that they have no diversified wealth: the family’s wealth is …

Encouraging Diversity In Law School Deanships, Kellye Y. Testy

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Introduction to a symposium.

Jacobus Tenbroek, Participatory Justice, And The Un Convention On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities, Michael Ashley Stein, Janet E. Lord

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No abstract provided.

Effect Of Uva Fluence Rate On Indicators Of Oxidative Stress In Human Dermal Fibroblasts, James D. Hoerter, Christopher S. Ward, Kyle D. Bale, Admasu N. Gizachew, Rachelle Graham Rachelle Graham, Jaclyn Reynolds, Melanie E. Ward Melanie E. Ward, Chesca Choi, Jean-Leonard Kagabo, Michael Sauer, Tara Kuipers, Timothy Hotchkiss Timothy Hotchkiss, Nate Banner, Renee A. Chellson, Theresa Ohaeri, Langston Gant, Leah Vanderhill

Articles

During the course of a day human skin is exposed to solar UV radiation that fluctuates in fluence rate within the UVA (290-315 nm) and UVB (315-400 nm) spectrum. Variables affecting the fluence rate reaching skin cells include differences in UVA and UVB penetrating ability, presence or absence of sunscreens, atmospheric conditions, and season and geographical location where the exposure occurs. Our study determined the effect of UVA fluence rate in solar-simulated (SSR) and tanning-bed radiation (TBR) on four indicators of oxidative stress---protein oxidation, glutathione, heme oxygenase-1, and reactive oxygen species--in human dermal fibroblasts after receiving equivalent UVA and UVB …

On An Integrable Two-Component Camassa-Holm Shallow Water System, Adrian Constantin, Rossen Ivanov

Articles

The interest in the Camassa-Holm equation inspired the search for various generalizations of this equation with interesting properties and applications. In this letter we deal with such a twocomponent integrable system of coupled equations. First we derive the system in the context of shallow water theory. Then we show that while small initial data develop into global solutions, for some initial data wave breaking occurs. We also discuss the solitary wave solutions. Finally, we present an explicit construction for the peakon solutions in the short wave limit of system.

Algebraic Discretization Of The Camassa-Holm And Hunter-Saxton Equations, Rossen Ivanov

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The Camassa-Holm (CH) and Hunter-Saxton (HS) equations have an interpretation as geodesic flow equations on the group of diffeomorphisms, preserving the H1 and H.1 right-invariant metrics correspondingly. There is an analogy to the Euler equations in hydrodynamics, which describe geodesic flow for a right-invariant metric on the infinitedimensional group of diffeomorphisms preserving the volume element of the domain of fluid flow and to the Euler equations of rigid body whith a fixed point, describing geodesics for a left-invariant metric on SO(3). The CH and HS equations are integrable bi-hamiltonian equations and one of their Hamiltonian structures is associated to the …

Non-Existence Of A Minimizer To The Hartree-Fock Functional, Michael Melgaard, Mattias Enstedt

Articles

In the presence of an external magnetic field, we prove absence of a ground state within the Hartree-Fock theory of atoms and molecules. The result is established for a wide class of magnetic fields when the number of electrons is greater than or equal to 2Z + K, where Z is the total charge of K nuclei. Positivity properties are instrumental in the proof of this bound for the maximal ionization

Existence Of A Solution To Hartree-Fock Equations With Decreasing Magnetic Field, Mattias Enstedt, Michael Melgaard

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In the presence of an external magnetic field, we prove existence of a ground state within the Hartree–Fock theory of atoms and molecules. The ground state exists provided the magnetic field decreases at infinity and the total charge of nuclei exceeds , where is the number of electrons. In the opposite direction, no ground state exists if .

Comparative In Vitro Cytotoxicity Study Of Silver Nanoparticle On Two Mammalian Cell Lines, Gordon Chambers, Sanchali Mukherjee, Alan Casey, Niall Ó Claonadh

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In this study the cytotoxic effect of commercially available silver (Ag) nanoparticle was evaluated using human dermal and cervical cancer cell lines. Prior to the cellular studies a full particle size characterisation was carried out using Dynamic Light Scattering (DLS), Transmission Electron Microscopy and Scanning Electron Microscopy in distilled water and cell culture media. The Zeta Potential (ZP)associated with the Ag nanoparticle was also determined in order to assess its stability in the solutions and its possible interaction with the media. The DLS and ZP study have suggested interaction of Ag nanoparticles with the media, which can lead to secondary …