Digital Commons Network^™

Chief Justice Hughes' Letter On Court-Packing, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

After one of the great landslides in American presidential history, Franklin D. Roosevelt took the oath of office for the second time on January 20, 1937. As he had four years before, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, like Roosevelt a former governor of New York, administered the oath. Torrents of rain drenched the inauguration, and Hughes’ damp whiskers waved in the biting wind. When the skullcapped Chief Justice reached the promise to defend the Constitution, he “spoke slowly and with special emphasis.” The President responded in kind, though he felt like saying, as he later told his aide Sam Rosenman: …

Dealing With Evidentiary Deficiency, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Lack of information distorts litigation. Claims or defenses that a party might prove easily, or that might even be undisputed, in a world of perfect information can be difficult or impossible to prove in the real world of imperfect information. Some information deficiencies are inevitable, at least in the sense that we could not eliminate them without incurring undue social costs. In some cases, however, a person's conduct may have caused the deficiency. More generally, the person may have had available a reasonable alternative course of conduct that would have eliminated, or at least mitigated, the deficiency. Ariel Porat and …

Crime, Politics, And Race (Symposium: Justice And The Criminal Justice Process), Samuel R. Gross

Articles

The biggest problem with the criminal justice system is that too many crimes are committed-too many rapes, too many murders, too many robberies; too much violence that inflicts an untold amount of suffering and destruction on too many people. If that seems obvious, what follows should be equally obvious. The most important step to take to solve the problems of the criminal justice system is to reduce the number of crimes that are committed: to prevent crimes. The best thing we can do to help the victims of crime is to keep them from becoming victims in the first place. …

The Takings-Puzzle Puzzle, James E. Krier

Articles

My aim here is to unpack the regulatory takings problem in a way that suggests why it is intractable. The idea is to reveal some of the different types of ambiguity necessarily entailed in takings cases. Seeing these ambiguities, we readily can understand why the doctrine in this area is so confused and confusing; why there is, in short, a "takings puzzle." To my mind, it is much more difficult to understand why anyone would expect matters to be otherwise. This oddity I call the "takings-puzzle puzzle."

The Virtue Of Speed In Bankruptcy Proceedings, James J. White

Articles

In my opinion the principal difficulty with Chapter 11 is that it gives strong incentives to various Chapter 11 players to distort the priorities that were intended by Congress.

An Interdisciplinary Seminar In Child Abuse And Neglect With A Focus On Child Protection Practice, Suellyn Scarnecchia

Articles

Given the myriad of professionals involved in protecting children from abuse and neglect, legal practice in the field of child protection requires an understanding of the various disciplines these professionals represent. Professor Scarnecchia argues that such an understanding is necessary in order for the attorney to serve as a zealous advocate for her client. In hopes of creating this understanding in students at the University of Michigan, an interdisciplinary seminar in child abuse and neglect has been created. Professor Scarnecchia details the substantive content of the seminar, discussing specific issues that arise in protecting children. She explains that by using …

What Price Peace: From Nuremberg To Bosnia To The Nobel Peace Prize, Malvina Halberstam

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No abstract provided.

Making International Refugee Law Relevant Again: A Proposal For Collectivized And Solution-Oriented Protection, James C. Hathaway, R. Alexander Neve

Articles

International refugee law is in crisis. Even as armed conflict and human rights abuse continue to force individuals and groups to flee their home countries, many governments are withdrawing from the legal duty to provide refugees with the protection they require. While governments proclaim a willingness to assist refugees as a matter of political discretion or humanitarian goodwill, they appear committed to a pattern of defensive strategies designed to avoid international legal responsibility toward involuntary migrants. Some see this shift away from a legal paradigm of refugee protection as a source for enhanced operational flexibility in the face of changed …

Corporations, Criminal Law And The Color Of Money, Joseph Vining

Articles

This part of From Newton's Sleep, published by Princeton University Press in 1995 and in a paperback edition in early 1997, is reprinted by permission of the publisher. From Newton's Sleep is a book on the legal form of thought and its meaning for science and religion. It consists of some two hundred and fifty self-contained pieces arranged in eight sections. In its form, the book is much like and is meant to be much like the material with which lawyers routinely deal. Here, Law Quadrangle Notes excerpts a piece that touches on a subject of lively debate today, among …

International Taxation Of Electronic Commerce, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

This article submits proposals for taxing the digital economy on the basis of the benefits and single tax principles.

Bearing Arms In Washington State, Hugh D. Spitzer

Articles

Article I, Section 24 of the Washington State Constitution directly affects two "hot topics" today: first, the increase in the carrying of weapons by the citizenry (particularly concealed weapons, with or without permits) and, second, the increase in "citizen militias" in various parts of the state. Article I, Section 24 also presents interesting issues from a pure state-constitutional-law standpoint, because it represents one of the striking characteristics of state constitutions: these basic documents of civil society for each state represent centuries of buildup and accretion. State constitutional provisions can often be analyzed in terms of layering. In preparing a state …

Protecting And Promoting Wildlife And Habitat On State And Private Land In Washington's Arid Interior, Gregory A. Hicks

Articles

The object of this paper is to describe efforts now under way in the interior uplands of Washington State's Columbia Plain to restore and protect upland wildlife habitat and wildlife species in a busy and intensively used agricultural and range landscape. It is a landscape of greatly diminished ecological integrity, dominated by private land holdings, and where the remaining public lands are recovering from earlier periods of farming or grazing or still dedicated to productive use under lease or permit. Recent ecosystem assessments make clear that there are few areas of the Columbia Plain's original grass and shrub land which …

The Implied Warranty Of Merchantability In Software Contracts: A Warranty No One Dares To Give And How To Change That, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

Articles

A disclaimer of ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITING THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY, greets virtually everyone who prepares to use a computer software product. Software publishers disclaim the implied warranty of merchantability because they do not know what they might be promising if they give it. Though the disclaimer is routine, software publishers have little interest in needlessly eroding confidence in the quality of their products by conspicuously disclaiming a warranty with which their products may well comply. Disclaimers feed suspicion, voiced by industry critics, that software publishers care little about software quality or standing behind their products. Nonetheless, …

The Emerging Law Of Electronic Commerce, Amelia H. Boss, Jane Kaufman Winn

Articles

Although often not apparent to the average business person or even the average lawyer, changes are currently underway, both domestically and internationally, to adapt existing commercial law doctrines to accommodate electronic transactions and the technologies that underlie them. The Uniform Commercial Code (Code) is undergoing substantial revision in order to respond to changes in business practice and the use of electronic communications technologies. These revisions will provide many of the basic rules to support and facilitate electronic commerce, and, to the extent possible, are being coordinated with international efforts in the field.

While progress in the creation of uniform laws …

Observation And Investigation Of The Ferrielectric Subphase With High Qt Parameter., Yuri Panarin, O. Kalinovskaya, D.J. Vij, J.W. Goodby

Articles

Dielectric relaxation processes in an antiferroelectric liquid crystal ~AFLC! have been investigated over a wide range of frequencies from 1 Hz to 1 GHz. The AFLC under investigation possesses a variety of different ferrielectric, ferroelectric, and antiferroelectric phases. Dielectric and polarization measurements under direct bias voltage have been made with a view to clarifying the origin of the high-temperature ferrielectric phase, which appears between the AF and smectic-C* phases. This phase is assigned to an unstable ferrielectric phase with qT parameter greater than 1/2 ~according to the Ising model! or a doubly modulated incommensurate phase ~according to the expanded Landau …

Investigation Of The Ferrielectric Subphase With Qt>1/2 Under Bias Voltage, Yuri Panarin, O.E. Kalinovskaya, J.K. Vij

Articles

The properties of Femelectric phase with qT > 112 have been investigated using broadband dielectric spectroscopy and polarization measurements under the bias voltage. The field -induced sequence of phase transitions is found to be different fiom those of the conventional femelectric phases with qTS 112

A Study Of Antiferroelectric Liquid Crystals Using The Pyroelectric Technique, J.W. O'Sullivan, Yuri Panarin, J.K. Vij, A.J. Seed, M. Hird, J.W. Goodby

Articles

Antiferroelectric liquid crystals are studied using the pyroelecmc technique. The effects of temperature and applied voltage on the pyroelectric signal are examined. The pyroelecmc signal can detect phase changes that occur due to temperature and bias voltage. A high temperature femelecmc phase FiLC is found and the stability of this phase under different bias voltages is examined

Dedication To Professor Ralph W. Johnson, David H. Getches

Articles

This Indian law symposium issue of the Washington Law Review was inspired by the work of Professor Ralph W. Johnson, whose teaching and personal commitment to the field have motivated hundreds, if not thousands, of law students. The decision of the Editorial Board to dedicate the symposium to him might have been made by as many as thirty classes that have passed through the University of Washington School of Law. Those students have been introduced to and moved by Professor Johnson's elucidation of a field that is at once intellectually challenging and morally significant. Johnson's alumni have spread over the …

The Fearful Symmetry Of Gay Rights, Religious Freedom, And Racial Equality, Walter J. Walsh

Articles

A decade has now passed since Julia Cooper Mack authored her most controversial judicial opinion, Gay Rights Coalition of Georgetown University Law Center v. Georgetown University. That opinion provoked two acts of Congress aimed at its reversal, newspaper editorials from coast to coast, and over one hundred scholarly authors debating its wisdom. In this short essay, I shall suggest that this extended hermeneutic debate has yet to touch upon the deepest implications of Judge Mack's Georgetown opinion. While recent scholarship on this story praises Judge Mack's unusual ability to reconcile clashing interest groups, a more accurate account might be …

The Constitution's Pragmatic Balance Of Power Between Church And State, Marci A. Hamilton

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No abstract provided.

Juno Moneta: On The Erotics Of The Marketplace, Jeanne L. Schroeder

Articles

The article explores how property and the feminine, as legal fictions, facilitate the creation of subjectivity through the lens of Hegelian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. It critiques the liberal individual as an insufficient concept for subjectivity, arguing that subjectivity is constructed, not natural. The analysis examines how legal frameworks privilege masculine metaphors, such as possession, while repressing feminine ones, and posits that the pursuit of a perfect market represents a destructive ideal that undermines freedom and subjectivity.

The Unsolved Problem Of The Unfunded Mandate, Edward A. Zelinsky

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No abstract provided.

Diffraction From Polarization Holographic Gratings With Surface Relief In Side-Chain Azobenzene Polyesters, Izabela Naydenova, Ludmila Nikolova, Todor Todorov, N.C.R. Holme, P.S. Ramanujam, S. Hvilsted

Articles

We investigate the polarization properties of holographic gratings in side-chain azobenzene polyesters in which an anisotropic grating that is due to photoinduced linear and circular birefringence is recorded in the volume of the material and a relief grating appears on the surface. A theoretical model is proposed to explain the experimental results, making it possible to understand the influence of the different photoinduced effects. It is shown that at low intensity the polarization properties of the diffraction at these gratings are determined by the interaction of the linear and circular photobirefringences, and at larger intensity the influence of the surface …

Sport, Media And Sponsor: The Shifting Balance Of Power In The Sports Network, Rosita Wolfe, Tony Meenaghan, Paul O'Sullivan

Articles

As sport has become an important social and economic activity it is increasingly the subject of management analysis. This article adopts a network perspective to examine developments in the sports network. In particular, it examines relationships between network "actors" such as corporate sponsors, media and the owners of sport and analyses the changing balance of power in the sports network. Key media drivers of change in the network such as cable and satellite television, pay-per-view and digital technology are examined while the influence of sponsors and the issue of ambush marketing also influence the location of power in the sports …

The Human Constitution And Constitutive Law: A Prolegomenon, John O. Mcginnis

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No abstract provided.

The People: The Least Accountable Branch, Marci A. Hamilton

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No abstract provided.

Moral Discourse, Bioethics, And The Law, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

Dan Callahan follows a distinguished tradition when he uses the phrase "moral discourse" to describe the law's work. The frequency with which that image is deployed suggests its resonance and even rightness: When we think about the way society considers moral issues and develops moral positions, it can be useful to imagine the law as one of many social institutions that contribute to a social discussion. Nevertheless, this image is misleading. At least for our (graying and balding) genera- tions, the law is regarded as a worthy participant in American moral discourse preeminently because of its part in the civil …

The Power Of One: How The Individual Activist Can Make A Difference, Henry Spira

Articles

No abstract provided.

Deep Ccd Photometry And The Initial Mass Function Of The Core Of The Ob Cluster Berkeley 86, Hans J. Deeg, Zoran Ninkov

Articles

Based on photometry of deep CCD frames of the central region of the OB cluster Berkeley 86, we derive the cluster mass function. The absence of current star formation, and the cluster's young age of about 6Myrs, leads to the conclusion that the initial mass function (IMF) and the current mass function are identical for stars with m< 10msun_. In the range of 1.2-20msun_, an IMF with a slope of {GAMMA}=-1.3+/-0.3 is found. This value agrees well with other recent determinations of young clusters IMFs which are close to the classical Salpeter IMF with {GAMMA}=-1.35. Sections of the IMF of Berkeley 86 that are significantly steeper, or flatter, are most likely the result of a dip in the star's mass distribution in the range of 3.5-10msun_. Similar dips may have led to steep IMFs over narrow mass ranges, as reported in the literature for some other clusters. No sign for a low mass turn-over in the IMF of Berkeley 86 is found for masses extending down to 0.85 msun _ (Refer to PDF file for exact formulas).

The Good, The Bad, And The Frivolous Case: An Essay On Probability And Rule 11, Charles M. Yablon

Articles

This essay begins by asking why lawyers bring frivolous cases, cases which, under the standard definitions of frivolousness, have no chance of success and should never have been brought. Rejecting the usual answers of lawyer stupidity and greed, it offers a different view of the frivolous case --that most of the cases that have been challenged and sanctioned in recent years under Rule 11 were brought by lawyers bringing cases they reasonably believed had a low (but not zero) probability of success. This provides a more plausible explanation for wy lawyers persist in bringing such cases, since they are essentially …