Digital Commons Network^™

The Constitutionality Of Copyright Term Extension: How Long Is Too Long, Jane C. Ginsburg, Wendy J. Gordon, Arthur R. Miller, William F. Patry

Faculty Scholarship

I am Professor William Patry of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. I will be the moderator of this star-studded debate on the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

This panel will try to determine, on the great continuum of limited times that the Constitution prescribes for copyright in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, the term of protection that Congress has actually fixed. In other words: How long is too long? Sonny's bill establishes a term of protection of life plus seventy years for individual authors for works created on or after January 1, 1978. The bill retroactively …

Search And Seizure – Police Searches On Public School Campuses In New Mexico – State V. Tywayne H., Michael W. Doyle

Faculty Scholarship

In State v. Tywayne H. the New Mexico Court of Appeals held that the lowered standard of reasonable suspicion that the United States Supreme Court applied to school officials in New Jersey v. T.L.O. would not apply to police officers invited onto a public school campus if the police officers conducted the search solely at their own discretion. Thus, the court held that a police officer will be held to the standard of probable causefor searches on public school campuses. Prior to Tywayne H., New Mexico courts had not addressed the standard to which police would be held when …

Three Issues For The City In The 21st Century, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The title for this year’s program of the Section on Urban, State and Local Government Law of the Association of American Law Schools is The City in the 21st Century. These three articles provide a stimulating introduction to three issues that are likely to be central to the study of the city in the twenty-first century-as they were in the twentieth century and in the nineteenth century: the interplay of local and regional forces in land development, the battles among interest groups to control city hall, and the role of local government in promoting local economic development. These issues are …

The Influence Of Amicus Curiae Briefs On The Supreme Court, Joseph D. Kearney, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The last century has seen little change in the conduct of litigation before the United States Supreme Court. The Court's familiar procedures – the October Term, the opening-answering-reply brief format for the parties, oral argument before a nine-member Court – remain essentially as before. The few changes that have occurred, such as shortening the time for oral argument, have not been dramatic.

The Article is organized as follows. Part I provides an overview of amicus curiae activity in the Supreme Court over the last fifty years, tracking the increase in amicus filings and in the Court's citation and quotation of …

Are Mental States Relevant For Statutory And Constitutional Interpretation, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Judges in the United States must interpret statutes and constitutions. Largely because these texts are framed in the English language, a language shared by legislators, judges, and other citizens, judges employ sufficiently common techniques to sustain a coherent practice. Lawyers can often say with some confidence how judges will construe particular legal provisions, and, when they have serious doubts, they can sketch the likely alternatives. But we are now in an era of sharp theoretical disagreement over what judges do when they interpret authoritative texts.

In difficult cases of statutory interpretation, are judges mainly trying to give language its ordinary …

Recent Supreme Court Employment Law Developments, Olatunde C.A. Johnson, Douglas D. Scherer

Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses recent employment law developments at the United States Supreme Court. Employment law cases took center stage during the October 1997 and 1998 Terms of the Supreme Court and important employment law cases were pending, or have been decided, during the October 1999 Term. This article briefly surveys the Court's employment law cases during the October 1997 Term, focusing more extensively on the Court's employment law cases during the October 1998 Term, and then discusses two very important employment law cases before the Court during the October 1999 Term, involving the constitutionality of the Age Discrimination in Employment …

How Persuasive Is Natural Law Theory?, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This Article, in honor of John Finnis, evaluates the persuasiveness of one central element of natural law theory – its claim to an objective moral truth discoverable by reason. Although I stand outside the tradition, my interest in natural law theory goes back to my college days. John Finnis, especially in his work Natural Law and Natural Rights, has much enriched my understanding of moral, political, and legal philosophy. Prior to that book, natural lawyers and analytic jurists had little to say to each other; by and large, the members of each group had scant respect for the scholarly endeavors …

Dignity And Victimhood, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

If Sandy Kadish has reminded us of limitations of consequentialist approaches to the criminal law and has proposed persuasive resolutions of issues that deontological perspectives reveal, Meir Dan-Cohen has jarred us to rethink fundamental premises about rules in the criminal justice system. His Essay is an example of his ingenuity for unsettling understandings. The Essay reads easily and seems deceptively straightforward, but it is rich in nuance and its themes are complex. This Response identifies the various themes and evaluates their plausibility. I take Professor Dan-Cohen's Essay as a preliminary exploration of a major subject, and I have responded accordingly, …

Death Matters – A Reply To Latzer And Cauthen, James S. Liebman, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

The legal treatment of capital punishment in the United States "rests squarely on the predicate that the penalty of death is qualitatively different from a sentence of imprisonment, however long. Death, in its finality, differs more from life imprisonment than a 100-year prison term differs from one of only a year or two. This predicate is among "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society" and determine whether a punishment is "cruel and unusual" in violation of the Constitution. Because "'[f]rom the point of view of the defendant, [death] is different in both its severity …

An Institutional Emphasis, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Schwartz is an important scholar of the interface between the difficult moral concept of privacy and the new information technologies. Someday a book will tell the story of modem history through the lens of privacy: village lives well known to neighbors; the claims of the national state (taxes, military service); the social welfare state; and the possibilities and dangers of modem biology. As Paul Schwartz has written, DNA and other tools can tell us a great deal about ourselves and can improve our lives; they can also tell employers, drug companies, prospective in-laws, and the police things we prefer …

Patterns Of Legal Change: Shareholder And Creditor Rights In Transition Economies, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

This paper analyses changes in the legal protection of shareholder and creditor rights in 24 transition economies from 1990 to 1998. It documents differences in the initial conditions and a tendency towards convergence of formal legal rules as the result of extensive legal reforms. Convergence seems to be primarily the result of foreign technical assistance programs as well as of harmonisation requirements for countries wishing to join the European Union. The external supply of legal rules not withstanding, the pattern of legal reforms suggests that law reform has been primarily responsive, or lagging, rather than leading economic development. In comparison, …

A Citizen Of Fine Spirit, Douglas R. Heidenreich

Faculty Scholarship

William T. Francis was (1869-1929), by most measures, the most successful of the early African American alumni of William Mitchell College of Law's predecessor law schools. Francis was a skilled lawyer, an adroit politician, a popular orator, a vigorous crusader for human and civil rights, and a respected U.S. diplomat.

National Self Determination In Historical Perspective 1789/1989 The Legacy Of The French Revolution For Today's Debates, Chimene Keitner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Balancing Public Health Against Individual Liberty: The Ethics Of Smoking Regulations, Thaddeus Mason Pope

Faculty Scholarship

Ten years ago, philosopher Robert E. Goodin published "No Smoking: The Ethical Issues." Goodin argued that the liberty of smokers can be justifiably limited for two reasons: to prevent harm to third persons and to prevent harm to smokers themselves under circumstances which make their decision to smoke substantially non-autonomous. In this article Thaddeus Pope reexamines the harm principle and the soft paternalism principle in light of more recent legal developments, gives them additional content, and carefully demarcates the justificatory scope of each. Pope also defines and defends a third liberty-limiting principle, hard paternalism, arguing that the liberty of smokers …

The Public Choice Of Choice Of Law In Software Transactions: Jurisdictional Competition And The Dim Prospects For Uniformity, Edward J. Janger

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Wyoming's Residential Rental Property Act-A Critical Review, Arthur R. Gaudio

Faculty Scholarship

Residential leases have been more or less an orphan child in the Wyoming legal structure, perhaps with understandable social and economic reason. With a small body of landlord tenant law based primarily on outdated common law principles, the protections that a tenant can expect are quite limited. The Wyoming legislature took a significant step in an attempt to deal with some of the more pressing issues presented by residential leases. In its 1999 session, it adopted, and the governor signed, an act entitled "Residential Rental Property." The Act obligates landlords to provide tenants in residential rental properties with units that …

Introduction To The Articles Presented By Three Rising Stars In Bankruptcy Scholarship, Samuel Bufford

Faculty Scholarship

Bankruptcy law is one of the fundamental legal structures necessary to the functioning of a market economy. In the common law tradition of the United States and England, bankruptcy law dates back to 1542. Bankruptcy law's origins are even more ancient, with roots extending back to at least the Hammaurabi Code and the Law of Moses. In the transition to market economies and Western-style legal systems in Central and Eastern Europe, the development of a viable bankruptcy law is one of the first priorities. This, the United States bankruptcy law that forms the background for this symposium is central to …

Fine-Tuning Tasini: Privileges Of Electronic Distribution And Reproduction, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is arguably the soundest copyright court in the nation. In Tasini v. New York Times, it handled a challenge brought by a group of freelance writers against publishers and database proprietors. The controversy, now pending in the United States Supreme Court, has wide importance because it will determine what entitlements attach to a publisher who purchases a privilege to include a freelancer's story in the publisher's magazine or newspaper. Essentially, the issue is whether a publisher, who has not purchased the story's copyright and has not obtained an explicit …

Recommendations For Durable Solutions For Palestinian Refugees: A Challenge To The Oslo Framework, Susan M. Akram, Terry Rempel

Faculty Scholarship

For more than five decades Palestinian refugees have been denied international protection. Some five million persons, comprising two-thirds of the Palestinian people, and nearly one-third of the global refugee population, have remained without a durable solution to their plight. More than half of all Palestinian refugees lack basic day-to-day protection, such as physical security, freedom of movement, and access to employment. Today, the Palestinian refugee problem is one of the largest and longest running refugee problems in the world.

Evaluating Mistakes In Intellectual Property Law: Configuring The System To Account For Imperfection, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, the author argues that in assessing the performance of the intellectual property laws, it is useful to conceive of intellectual property law as a system comprised of both interacting decision-makers and other sets of law. Those decisionmakers include Congress, the PTO, and courts, and the other relevant laws include antitrust and contract. The author reviews the major intellectual property statutes, illustrating ways in which different institutions may be situated to correct the errors of another and how antitrust and contract also can work to correct errors in the scope of protection. The Essay concludes by arguing that …

Shaping Competition On The Internet: Who Owns Product And Pricing Information, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Faculty Scholarship

Historically, markets have almost always fallen short of satisfying the conditions for and providing consumers with the benefits of perfect competition. Certain characteristics of electronic markets, however, enhance the possibility that e-commercel will be conducted in an environment that comes closer to attaining the perfectly competitive ideal than that of most conventional markets.

Foreword To Amicus Brief On The Status Of Palestinian Refugees Under International Refugee Law, Guy Goodwin-Gill, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

Palestinian refugees have a status that is unique under international refugee law. Unlike any other group or category of refugees in the world, Palestinians are singled out for exceptional treatment in the major international legal instruments which govern the rights and obligations of states towards refugees: the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol; the Statute of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; and, specifically with regard to the Palestinians, the Regulations governing the mandate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East. Almost all states …

Unbending Gender: Why Work And Family Conflict And What To Do About It, Joan Williams, Jamie Boyle, Adrienne Davis, Martha Ertman, Nancy Polikoff, Katharine B. Silbaugh, Lucie White, Susan Carle, Leti Volpp

Faculty Scholarship

PROCEEDINGS PROFESSOR WILLIAMS: I am going to talk fast, and talk short as an introduction to this panel. First, just a very few words about the norm of parental care. The goal-my goal, anyway, in using the norm of parental care which, of course, started out really as the norm of mother care-is to try to use the momentum of domesticity to bend our current gender to use the norm of parental care as a way of democratizing access to domesticity, which has always been classbased.

The Man On The Moon, Immortality, And Other Millennial Myths: The Prospects And Perils Of Human Genetic Engineering, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The year 2000 provides an opportunity to reflect and speculate on human life in the year 3000. We cannot know what human life will be like a thousand years from now, but we can and should think seriously about what we would like it to be. What is unique about human beings and about being human? What makes humans human? What qualities of the human species must we preserve to preserve humanity itself? What would a "better human" be like? If genetic engineering techniques work, are there human qualities we should try to temper, and ones we should try to …

Symposium: Advances In Biomaterials And Devices, And Their Financing, Ronald A. Cass, Michael S. Baram, Steven Bauer, Joyce Wong, Martin Yarmush, Joshua Tolkoff, Rufus King

Faculty Scholarship

My name is Professor Michael Baram and I direct the Center for Law and Technology here at the law school. Today's meeting is the third annual Technology Law Symposium to be held here, sponsored by the high technology law firm of Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault, LLP and the Center for Law and Technology.

Our meeting today is focused on an exciting area of research and product development. This area involves the use of conventional as well as new genetically engineered biomaterials in new medical device configurations for implantation and with the purpose of restoring bodily functions, regenerating tissue, bone, cartilage, …

The Logic Of Egalitarian Norms, Kenneth Simons

Faculty Scholarship

"The Logic of Egalitarian Norms" was prompted by a recent article by Christopher J. Peters, "Equality Revisited," 110 Harv. L. Rev. 1210 (1997), arguing that the concept of equality is self-contradictory and sometimes leads to absurd results, such as the multiplication of wrongs or wasteful "leveling down" of social benefits. Peters' view is shared by other recent skeptical commentators who question the value of egalitarian norms or who worry that such norms are often misleading. The article defends egalitarian logic against such skepticism in a wide variety of legal domains.

The Insolvent Life Care Provider: Who Leads The Dance Between The Federal Bankruptcy Code And State Continuing-Care Statutes, Nathalie Martin

Faculty Scholarship

Continuing-care retirement communities provide seniors with an attractive option to traditionaln ursing homes. These arrangementsa llow seniors to live in a pleasant, independent environment for as long as possible, and then receive life time nursing care when it is needed. Residents of these communities pay a large upfront entry fee in exchange for the promise of life time nursing care. When continuing care facilities file for bankruptcy, however, residents risk losing their large upfront entry fee, which drastically reduces the value of these arrangements to consumers. In this Article, Professor Nathalie Martin analyses these risks against a host of state …

A Proposal For A New Massachusetts Notoriety For Profit Law: The Grandson Of Sam, Sean J. Kealy

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, two women stood convicted of highly publicized major crimes in Massachusetts. Katherine Ann Power ("Power") was a fugitive who committed felony-murder in 1970. She led a life on the run as a fugitive until 1993 when she revealed her true identity and surrendered to authorities to face the consequences of her crimes. Louise Woodward ("Woodward"), an au pair originally from England, gained notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean when she was convicted of killing the baby entrusted to her care. Both women captured the attention of the national media for months and reportedly had opportunities …

Tobacco, The Food And Drug Administration, And Congress, Leonard H. Glantz, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Smoking has been the number-one target of public health professionals in the United States for more than a decade because it is the leading cause of premature death. Nonetheless, no unified public health strategy has been developed. In 1995, with the strong endorsement of President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Dr. David Kessler, announced that the agency had jurisdiction over tobacco and would regulate cigarettes as “drug-delivery devices. The tobacco companies objected and sued the FDA, arguing that Congress had not given the FDA jurisdiction over their product. The …

Rules For Research On Human Genetic Variation: Lessons From Iceland, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Research on genetic variation aims to understand how genes function and requires the comparison of DNA samples from groups of individuals to identify variations that might have importance for health or disease. This work is easier if the samples are linked to accurate medical records and genealogic information. Iceland has medical records for all its citizens going back to World War I and detailed genealogic information going back even further. Because Iceland's small population (270,000) has long been isolated and homogeneous, it is thought by many to be an ideal place to search for disease-related genes. Journalists have cavalierly labeled …