Digital Commons Network^™

Bridging The Digital Divide: Equality In The Information Age, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

The digital revolution has transformed the lives of many, but also has left untouched the lives of many others. As a result, a large segment of the world population misses out on the tremendous political, social, economic, educational, and career opportunities created by the digital revolution. This gap between the information haves and have-nots is commonly referred to as the digital divide.

Although evidence suggested that the digital divide in the United States is closing, the same is not true for the less developed countries. In light of the alarming disparities between the information haves and have-nots, the Howard M. …

Unrealized Torts, Benjamin C. Zipursky, John C.P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Most Dangerous Branch, Martin S. Flaherty

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Redeeming The Welshed Guarantee: A Scheme For Achieving Justiciability, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, I suggest that Congress re-pass its progressive legislation under the jurisdictional basis of its Guarantee Clause power. While arguments for justiciability continue to be made, a pragmatic way to achieve it has not been spelled out. Part II will lay out versions of republicanism I hope to see discussed in the context of the Guarantee Clause. Part III will explore republicanism's excessive attention on the courts, recommending the aforementioned approach of Jeremy Waldron. Part IV will briefly suggest how some of the legislation recently curtailed by the Supreme Court might be justified under a theory of legislative, …

World Trade Organization's Anti-Discrimination Jurisprudence: Free Trade, National Sovereignty, And Environmental Health In The Balance, The , Ari Afilalo, Sheila Foster

Faculty Scholarship

A discussion of how the World Trade Organization (WTO) resolves disputes centering on the tension between the free trade commit ment of the General Agreement on the Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and domestic policies regarding such matters as environmental, health, consumer, and labor protection. This article describes this evolving jurisprudential framework and the cases that comprise it, and illustrates how this framework articulates and applies an anti-discrimination norm that pervades the GATT. If properly articulated and applied, we argue, the anti-discrimination jurisprudence of the WTO will foster the trade interests that underlie the GATT up to the point where the …

Principles For Water, Andrew P. Morriss, Bruce Yandle, Terry L. Anderson

Faculty Scholarship

Water issues are often contentious. How much water can one individual use? What must the water quality of water returned from use be? How much water must be allocated to uses such as maintaining sufficient instream flows for aquatic species? For the last century, the United States has largely such answered questions through command and control regulatory schemes rather than through markets and common law dispute resolution processes. The choice of regulation by institutions over other mechanisms has meant a reliance on centralized decisionmaking and a rejection of both the market's more decentralized institutions and the common law.

Recently, water …

Shareholders As Principals, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Pluralism And Democratic Politics: Reflections On The Interpretive Approach Of Baker V. Carr, Guy-Uriel Charles

Faculty Scholarship

Baker v. Carr is one of the Supreme Court's most important opinions, not least because its advent signaled the constitutionalization of democracy. Unfortunately, as is typical of the Court's numerous forays into democratic politics, the decision is not accompanied by an apparent vision of the relationship among democratic practice, constitutional law, and democratic theory. In this Article, Professor Charles revisits Baker and provides several democratic principles that he argues justifies the Court's decision to engage the democratic process. He examines the decision from the perspective of one of its chief contemporary critics, Justice Frankfurter. He sketches an approach, described as …

Fencing Off Ideas: Enclosure & The Disappearance Of The Public Domain, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Canadian Armed Forces Under United States Command, Michael Byers

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Crime And Consciousness: Science And Involuntary Acts , Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

This Article confronts this clash between legal and scientific perspectives on consciousness by proposing new ways to structure the voluntary act requirement so that it incorporates the insights of modern science on the human mind. Part I examines the criminal law's voluntary act requirement, particularly in the context of the MPC's influential provision, which reflects the law and psychology of the era in which the MPC was originally developed--the 1950s. Part II analyzes the new science of “consciousness,” a term that typically refers to the sum of a person's thoughts, feelings, and sensations, as well as the everyday circumstances and …

Recognizing The Interdependence Of Rights In The Antidiscrimination Context Through The World Conference Against Racism , Catherine Powell, Jennifer H. Lee

Faculty Scholarship

This background paper assesses the importance of integrating gender into efforts to address racial discrimination and related intolerance in the WCAR process. While this background paper primarily focuses on racial discrimination, the analysis may be applied to xenophobia and related intolerance where these experiences are "raced" experiences. Addressing these forms of intolerance in a comprehensive manner requires unmasking the ways in which race intersects with gender and other status. A gender analysis is needed to make racism more fully visible, because "racial discrimination does not always affect men and women equally or in the same way." Women often experience compounded …

Retributive Justice: Its Social Context, Neil Vidmar

Faculty Scholarship

Until relatively recently, social psychologists have given less attention to retributive justice than to other forms of justice, such as distributive and procedural justice. Although interest in retributive justice is increasing, the fact remains that social psychological research on retribution has tended to ignore, or at least downplay, the insights of sociologists in deference to an approach that examines how individuals respond to deviant acts. Without rejecting psycholgical analyses, this chpater draws attention to the social context and social consequences of retributive justice. Group dynamics are at play in a wide array of settings in which people respond to rule …

Case Studies Of Pre- And Mid-Trial Prejudice In Criminal And Civil Litigation, Neil Vidmar

Faculty Scholarship

This article presents a number of case studies involving pre- and mid-trial prejudice in criminal and civil litigation. The cases reveal deficiencies in the way that prejudicial publicity has been conceptualized and operationalized in many simulation experiments. The studies reveal that potential juror prejudices that concern lawyers and judges involve more than just main effects of mass media. Pre- and mid-trial prejudice also involves more general prejudices, gossip and rumor, the assertion of community normative values about justice, and conformity pressures. Four categories of prejudice recognized in American law are described and labeled: interest, specific, generic and conformity prejudice. The …

From Having Copies To Experiencing Works: The Development Of An Access Right In U.S. Copyright Law, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This essay addresses how current U.S. copyright law responds to new forms of distribution of copyrighted works, through the emerging right to control digital access to copyrighted works, as set out in § 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. When the exploitation of works shifts from having copies to directly experiencing the content of the work, the author's ability to control access becomes crucial. Indeed, in the digital environment, without an access right, it is difficult to see how authors can maintain the exclusive Right to their Writings that the Constitution authorizes Congress to secure. Even if Congress …

The Storrs Lectures: Liberals And Romantics At War: The Problem Of Collective Guilt, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Somehow we in the West thought the age of war was behind us. After nuking Hiroshima, after napalming Vietnam, we had only distaste for the idea and the practice of war. The thought of dying for a noble cause, the pursuit of honor in the name of patria, brotherhood in arms – none of this appealed to us anymore. "I hate war and so does Eleanor," opined FDR in the oft-repeated lyrics of Pete Seeger. War became a subject for ironic disdain. As Tom Lehrer caught the mood of the 1960s: "We only want the world to know that …

Playing Favorites With Shareholders, Stephen J. Choi, Eric Talley

Faculty Scholarship

One of the most vexing historical debates in corporate law concerns whether regulations or markets are better equipped to address managerial agency costs within public corporations. Although corporate law scholars have traditionally favored immutable legal imperatives as an elixir for misaligned incentives,an increasing number of commentators place greater faith in market mechanisms to accomplish the same task. While many such mechanisms operate simultaneously (including markets for output, labor, and capital), perhaps none has received more attention than the oft-celebrated "market for corporate control" as a means for achieving deterrence. By providing a constant and credible risk of hostile acquisitions, the …

Remembering Gary – And Tort Theory, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Tort theory has had a brief but wondrous history. Los Angeles and the UCLA School of Law lie at the core of that history – much more, I am sure, than is likely to be remembered.

Illegalized Sexual Dissent: Sexualities And Nationalisms, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, Katherine Franke explores how dissent becomes a different, and in some ways more interesting, phenomenon when the dissenter emerges not from outside the political horizon drawn by the state, but rather from within it, and as an integral part of the state's project of governance. In these cases, the state calls up a set of subjects who are in some fundamental sense positioned to gain state, if not public, disfavor. These subjects are then isolated, excised or otherwise managed in ways that further state interests. Three cases are discussed in which the production of sexual outlaws proves …

Discretion In Long-Term Open Quantity Contracts: Reining In Good Faith, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Long-term contracts often promise to deliver the seller's full output, the buyer's requirements, or some variation on these. For example, an electric utility might enter into a thirty year contract with a coal mine promising that it will take all the coal needed to supply a particular generating plant. These open quantity contracts have raised two issues. The first is whether the promise was illusory. If the utility had no duty to take any coal, a court could have found that there was no consideration and, therefore, no contract. While there was a time when full output and requirements contracts …

The Contested Right To Vote, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

For those who believe the United States is a representative democracy with a government elected by the people, the events of late 2000must have been more than a little disconcerting. In the election for our most important public office – our only truly national office – the candidate who received the most popular votes was declared the loser while his second place opponent, who had received some 540,000 fewer votes, was the winner. This result turned on the outcome in Florida, where approximately 150,000 ballots cast were found not to contain valid votes. Further, due to flaws in ballot design, …

Endowment Effects Within Corporate Agency Relationships, Jennifer H. Arlen, Matthew L. Spitzer, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Behavioral economics is an increasingly prominent field within corporate law scholarship. A particularly noteworthy behavioral bias is the "endowment effect" – the observed differential between an individual's willingness to pay to obtain an entitlement and her willingness to accept to part with one. Should endowment effects pervade corporate contexts, they would significantly complicate much common wisdom within business law, such as the presumed optimality of ex ante agreements. Existing research, however, does not adequately address the extent to which people manifest endowment effects within agency relationships. This article presents an experimental test for endowment effects for subjects situated in an …

Measured Interpretation: Introducing The Method Of Correspondence Analysis To Legal Studies, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Harcourt develops and advocates a method to more rigorously measure and evaluate how qualitative “social meaning” variables relate to legal practices and public policies. The method integrates in-depth qualitative interviews with an experimental free associational component, map analysis of the interviews, and a methodology, correspondence analysis, that remains little known in the United States despite its acceptance in other parts of the world. Correspondence analysis, according to Professor Harcourt, is a tool that allows researchers to visually represent the relationship between structures of social meaning and the contexts and practices within which they are embedded. This method opens up …

Separability And Competence-Competence In International Arbitration: Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit? Can Something Indeed Come From Nothing?, Robert H. Smit

Faculty Scholarship

The doctrine of separability provides that an arbitration clause is “separable” from the contract containing it and thus may survive a successful challenge to the validity of the contract. The doctrine of competence-competence provides that arbitrators have jurisdiction to decide challenges to the arbitration agreements upon which their own jurisdiction is based. These two doctrines have appropriately been called the conceptual cornerstones of international arbitration as an autonomous and effective form of international dispute resolution. The doctrines, taken together, ensure that the parties’ intent to arbitrate any disputes that arise out of their international contractual relationship is effectuated without undue …

Autonomy, Self-Governance, And The Margin Of Appreciation: Developing A Jurisprudence Of Diversity Within Universal Human Rights, Douglas Lee Donoho

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Traits And Tools For Ethical Environmental Advocates In Florida, Brion L. Blackwelder

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Escaping The Common Law's Shadow: Standing In The Light Of Laidlaw, Robert V. Percival, Joanna B. Goger

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Standing Upright: The Moral And Legal Standing Of Humans And Other Apes, Adam Kolber

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

From Marbury V. Madison To Bush V. Gore: 200 Years Of Judicial Review In The United States, Stephen R. Alton

Faculty Scholarship

This Lecture consists of three parts. In the first part, I will lay out the background behind judicial review in the United States - the history, the theory, and the constitutional structure. In the second part of this Lecture, I will discuss some of the major United States Supreme Court cases that established and developed the doctrine of judicial review. In the third, and final, part, I will present the recent case of Bush v. Gore as an example of the major points that have been developed earlier. Finally, I will conclude with some general observations about judicial review and …

The Death Of Copyright: Digital Technology, Private Copying, And The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Glynn S. Lunney Jr

Faculty Scholarship

The advent of digital technology has increasingly stressed copyright's ability to protect adequately creative works. By widely dispersing the ability to make near-perfect copies, digital technology renders copyright's traditional approach of controlling unauthorized copying by direct legal action against the individual copier increasingly anachronistic. Fearing copyright's inability to cope with the resulting risk of widespread private copying, copyright producers requested and Congress enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"). The DMCA prohibits almost entirely the use and distribution of decryption technology that would defeat encryption-based controls placed on digital works, and thereby enables copyright producers to rely on encryption to …