Digital Commons Network^™

On Elián And Aliens: A Political Solution To The Plenary Power Problem, Victor C. Romero

Faculty Scholarship

The poignant story of a little boy fished out of the sea after losing his mother to the elements captured the country's imagination and ignited a political firestorm. The Elián González saga drew conflicting opinions from nearly every branch of American local, state, and federal governments.

This article takes no specific position on Elián's situation. Rather, this artivle values the González story for putting a human face on often faceless legal issues. More specifically, Elián's saga raises the following important question: When should the right of the human being to be treated as an individual trump the right of government …

Two Fallacies About Dna Data Banks For Law Enforcement, David H. Kaye

Faculty Scholarship

This commentary on the article Legal and Policy Issues in Expanding the Scope of Law Enforcement DNA Data Banks, 67 Brook. L. Rev. 127 (2001), by Mark Rothstein and Sandra Carnahan, argues that the case for confining law enforcement DNA databases to noncoding loci and to samples from individuals convicted of violent crimes is quite weak.

It describes alternative approaches, including the possibility of a population-wide database; the privacy implications of the loci now used in forensic identification; the law governing DNA dragnets; and the limits on DNA databases imposed by recent cases on searches and seizures. It notes the …

The Constitutionality Of Dna Sampling On Arrest, David H. Kaye

Faculty Scholarship

Every state now collects DNA from people convicted of certain offenses. Law enforcement authorities promote offender DNA databanking on the theory that it will identify offenders who commit additional crimes while or probation or parole, or after they have finished serving their sentences. Even relatively small databases have yielded such dividends. As these database searches uncover the perpetrators of rapes, murders, and other offenses, the pressure builds to expand the coverage of the databases.

Recent proposals call for extending not merely the scope of crimes for which DNA databanking would be used, but also the point at which the samples …

Intent To Use: A Failed Experiment?, Amy B. Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

When Congress enacted the Trademark Law Revision Act of 1988 ("TLRA"), it made the first truly radical change in trademark law since the passage of the Lanham Act in 1946. By adding Section 1(b) to the Lanham Act allowing applications for federal trademark registration to be based on an intent to use the mark, Congress for the first time provided a way to apply for federal trademark registration before actual use of a trademark. Congress made this change to bring United States law into closer conformity with the practice elsewhere in the world where use is not a prerequisite to …

Modeling: Placing Persuasion In Context, Myra G. Orlen

Faculty Scholarship

The Author discusses the use of a contextual model to teach persuasion and its proven success in first year classes at Western New England College School of Law.

The Political Economy Of Canada's "Widely Held" Rule For Large Banks, Eric J. Gouvin

Faculty Scholarship

All of the recent changes in foreign access to Canada's banking market have been essentially cosmetic-appearing to make foreign access more liberal while in reality changing the status quo very little. On one point, the so-called widely held rule, Canada does not even bother to pretend that its banking law is friendly to foreign entrants. Under this rule, no person or group may control ten percent or more of a Schedule I bank unless one first obtains the approval of the Minster of Finance. This rule makes foreign acquisition of a Schedule I bank virtually impossible. The widely held rule …

The Jury In The 21st Century: An Interdisciplinary Conference: Introduction, Susan Herman, Lawerence M. Solan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Convicting The Innocent Beyond A Reasonable Doubt: Some Lessons About Jury Instructions From The Sheppard Case, Lawrence Solan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Calm After The Storm: First Amendment Cases In The Supreme Court's 2000-2001 Term, Joel Gora

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Ali And The Ucc, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

I will speak at less length than some of my colleagues here for two reasons. One is, my knowledge of this subject is extremely limited. I've taught for thirty years, but in areas of law that have nothing to do with these. And, it is only on coming to the American Law Institute job a year ago, that I find myself learning about NCCUSL, learning about all these issues, and learning in substantive ways about commercial law. Suddenly, out of the repressed memory, have come back my experiences in Professor Brancher's course in commercial law. I didn't learn it then, …

The Newly Revised Cpr Rules For Non-Administered Arbitration Of International Disputes, Robert H. Smit

Faculty Scholarship

In August 2000, the Center for Public Resources Institute for Dispute Resolution (“CPR”) – one of the pre-eminent alternative dispute resolution organizations in the United States – announced revisions to its Rules for Non-Administered Arbitration of International Disputes (the “International Rules” or the “Rules”). CPR first promulgated its International Rules in April 1992 as an alternative – indeed, the only alternative currently available – to the international ad hoc arbitration rules issued in 1976 by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (the “UNCITRAL Rules”). According to the Chair of the CPR Committee that prepared the original CPR International …

Company Registration And The Private Placement Exemption, Merritt B. Fox

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last twenty years, there has been a steady shift in securities disclosure regulation away from its traditional transactional basis toward a system of company registration. Under the transaction based approach, each new public offering of a security has to be registered under the Securities Act of 1933 (the "1933 Act"), a requirement that reflects the SEC's traditional concern that the most important time to have high-quality disclosure is at the moment of a securities offering. Under the company registration approach, an established, publicly traded issuer would register just once, provide information thereafter on a periodic basis, and then …

Norm Internalization And U.S. Economic Sanctions, Sarah H. Cleveland

Faculty Scholarship

The fifty years since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have seen a revolution in the promulgation and universalization of human and labor rights. Human rights conventions have proliferated in the areas of civil and political rights, social and economic rights, and the rights of women, children, minorities, and refugees. Many of these conventions have been ratified by a majority of the nations of the world. International monitoring of human and labor rights compliance is conducted by international institutions such as the U.N. Human Rights Commission and the International Labour Organization (ILO), by regional entities such as …

Title Vii And Religious Liberty, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids religious discrimination in employment, raises in microcosm some extremely thorny questions about religious liberty; questions more familiar to most of us in constitutional settings. In focusing on these questions in their Title VII context, I am more interested in fundamental conceptual issues than in the precise details of what that law should be taken to provide.

Among the questions are: What is discrimination because of religion? How should religion be "defined"? How far should employers accommodate the religious exercise of workers? Under the First Amendment, how much accommodation can the …

On Insider Trading, Markets, And Negative Property Rights In Information, Zohar Goshen, Gideon Parchomovsky

Faculty Scholarship

Few issues have sparked as much debate and disagreement among Law and Economics scholars as the prohibition on insider trading. Ironically, the Supreme Court's attempts in Chiarella v. United States, Dirks v. Securities and Exchange Commission, and, most recently, in United States v. O'Hagan to clarify the scope and content of the ban on insider trading, and the subsequent reaction of the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), have only added fuel to the fire of the academic debate already raging on the issue.

The most intriguing feature of the debate on insider trading is that all contributors seek to promote …

The Soul Of A New Political Machine: The Online, The Color Line And Electronic Democracy, Eben Moglen, Pamela S. Karlan

Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, we want to suggest two ways in which people's experience with the Internet may affect how they think politics ought to be organized, and to consider the consequences for the political aspirations of minority communities. First, the notion of "virtual communities” – that is, communities that affiliate along nongeographic lines – may provide new support for alternatives to traditional geographic districting practices. As Americans become more comfortable with the idea that people can belong to voluntarily created, overlapping, fluid, nongeographically defined communities, which may be as important as the physical communities in which they live, they may …

Regulation Fd And Foreign Issuers: Globalization's Strains And Opportunities, Merritt B. Fox

Faculty Scholarship

The globalization of the market for securities has a persistent way of straining the traditional rationales for securities regulation. At the same time, the choices it forces upon us create the opportunity to better test empirically the desirability of the regulations being imposed. Regulation FD, which stands for "fair disclosure," is the most recent example where these twin effects of globalization arise. Regulation FD is arguably the most important change to the U.S. disclosure regime since the adoption of integrated disclosure almost two decades ago. Regulation FD is intended to stop the practice of "selective disclosure," whereby an issuer withholds …

Unocal Fifteen Year Later (And What We Can Do About It), Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

The coincidence of the new millennium and the fifteenth anniversary of the Delaware Supreme Court's announcement of a new approach to takeover law provides an occasion to evaluate a remarkable experiment in corporate law – the Delaware Supreme Court's development of an intermediate standard of review for appraising defensive tactics. This assessment reveals that Unocal has developed into an unexplained and likely inexplicable preference that control contests be resolved through elections rather than through market transactions. In doing so, the remarkable struggle between the chancery court and the supreme court for Unocal's soul is canvassed. The author also maintains that …

Crosby And The "One-Voice" Myth In U.S. Foreign Relations, Sarah H. Cleveland

Faculty Scholarship

In Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council, the Supreme Court invalidated a Massachusetts government procurement statute that barred state entities from doing business with companies that did business in Burma. The plaintiffs, an organization of private companies with foreign operations, challenged the law on constitutional and statutory preemption grounds, arguing that it improperly conflicted with federal foreign relations authority. The Supreme Court limited its holding to implied statutory preemption, finding that the Massachusetts provision improperly compromised the President's ability "to speak for the Nation with one voice." Crosby thus joined a long line of decisions in which the Supreme …

Berne Without Borders: Geographic Indiscretion And Digital Communications, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This lecture examines the role of borders in the Berne Convention at the time of the treaty's first passage in 1886, and today. The later 19th century was an era of increasing commerce and communication among countries whose domestic production and reproduction of works of authorship had vastly increased, thanks in part to new technologies, such as photography, lithography, and high-speed printing. But at that time, the frontiers between nations often frustrated authors' hopes for control over, or at least compensation for, the international exploitation of their works. Authors' rights ceased at their national boundaries; the world beyond foreboded not …

An Ounce Of Prevention Is A Poor Substitute For A Pound Of Cure: Confronting The Developing Jurisprudence Of Education And Prevention In Employment Discrimination Law, Susan Bisom-Rapp

Faculty Scholarship

This article challenges a widely shared conviction that has had a tremendous impact on employer practices and, most recently, on employment discrimination jurisprudence. More specifically, the piece interrogates the belief that employee education can prevent, or at least greatly curb, invidious employment discrimination prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and other civil rights statutes. This premise, broadly held and rarely questioned, has spawned a multi-billion dollar sexual harassment and diversity training industry staffed by consultants, attorneys, and human resource professionals, who offer programs aimed at litigation prevention. Yet, there is absolutely no empirical support for the premise …

The Secondary Effects Of Environmental Justice Litigation: The Case Of West Dallas Coalition For Environmental Justice V. Epa, Gregg P. Macey, Lawrence E. Susskind

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Voting (Insincerely) In Corporate Law, Zohar Goshen

Faculty Scholarship

Voting lies at the center of collective decision-making in corporate law. While scholars have identified various problems with the voting mechanism, insincere voting — in the forms of strategic voting and conflict of interests voting — is perhaps the most fundamental. This article shows that insincere voting distorts the voting mechanism at its core, undermining its ability to determine transaction efficiency. As further demonstrated, strategic and conflict of interests problems frequently coincide with one another: voting strategically often means being in conflict, and many fact patterns present aspects of both problems. Finally, this article claims that although the two problems …

Sales And Elections As Methods For Transferring Corporate Control, Ronald J. Gilson, Alan Schwartz

Faculty Scholarship

Delaware case law has rendered the tender offer obsolete as a method for purchasing a company whose directors oppose the acquisition. A potential acquirer facing target opposition today must run an insurgent director slate, in the expectation that its directors are more likely to sell. The Delaware courts have not justified their preference for elections over markets as the preferred vehicle for implementing changes in control. Informal scholarly analyses ask transaction cost questions, such as whether proxy contests are more costly than takeovers. This article attempts to break new ground by asking whether there are systematic differences in the performance …

Judicial Review Under Seqra: A Statistical Study, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Nearly 2000 judicial opinions were issued under the State Environmental Quality Review Act ("SEQRA") between its enactment in 1975 and the end of 2000. Almost 700 were issued from 1990 (when the author began undertaking an annual review of SEQRA cases for the New York Law Journal) through 2000. These numbers are large enough to serve as a basis for a statistically valid review of case outcomes.

This article is divided into five parts. Part I presents statistics on the SEQRA cases. Part II reviews the history of how the Court of Appeals has decided SEQRA cases. Part III …

Nixon V. Shrink Missouri Government Pac: The Beginning Of The End Of The Buckley Era?, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, the Supreme Court emphatically reaffirmed a key element of the campaign finance doctrine first articulated in Buckley v. Valeo a quarter-century earlier that governments may, consistent with the First Amendment, impose limitations on the size of contributions to election campaigns. Shrink Missouri was significant because the Eighth Circuit decision reversed by the Supreme Court had sought to strengthen the constitutional protection provided to contributions and had invalidated limitations on donations to Missouri state candidates that were actually higher than the limits on donations to federal candidates that the Supreme Court had previously …

Don't Ask Us To Explain Ourselves, Don't Tell Us What To Do: The Boy Scouts' Exclusion Of Gay Members And The Necessity Of Independent Judicial Review, Taylor Flynn

Faculty Scholarship

In Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, the U.S. Supreme Court held by a five to four majority that the Boy Scouts of America is entitled to ban gay persons from membership despite New Jersey's prohibition against sexual orientation discrimination. The Dale majority sharply departed from the Court's long line of expressive association cases, in which it has rejected the claims of private clubs that application of civil rights laws to their membership policies violates their associational rights. This Author argues that by "reading" the plaintiff in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale as a cipher for gay sex, and …

Genetic Testing For Susceptability To Disease From Exposure To Toxic Chemicals: Implications For Public And Worker Health Policies, Michael S. Baram

Faculty Scholarship

The Environmental Genome Program intends to identify "susceptibility genes" that would indicate if a person is more vulnerable to cancer or other disease as a result of exposure to certain chemicals in the workplace, the environment, foods, or other products. Research findings and the capability to test persons for such genes are likely to impugn and challenge health policies and regulatory programs that do not take genetic susceptibility into account when conferring health benefits and restricting chemical exposures. This article focuses on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and discusses four options available to this agency for protecting genetically …

What The Future Holds: Policy Choices In A Global Marketplace, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Faculty Scholarship

This essay's title is a misnomer. No one knows "What the Future Holds" in the global marketplace. We can, however, make some educated guesses about the issues that will assume particular importance in the next year or so. Thus, the essay might be more accurately titled, "What May or May Not Be the Important Issues in Internet Commerce in the Next Year or So'"-less catchy, admittedly, but closer to the truth.

Property Rights And Competition On The Internet: In Search Of An Appropriate Analogy, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Faculty Scholarship

Reasoning by analogy is a time-honored method of legal development. However, recent litigation exposes the weakness of applying legal principles developed in the "bricks and mortar" world by analogy to cyberspace. Using recent court decisions that discuss who may access a website and by what means, this Article illustrates how results can change depending on the analogy the court adopts. The Article argues that rather than searching for analogies, courts and legislators could more profitably devote their energies to understanding how the Internet differs from physical space, evaluating whether those differences call for new legal rules, and considering the conflicting …