Digital Commons Network^™

Defendants' Brief In The School Finance Case: Mcduffy V. Robertson: An Excerpt And A Summary, Douglas H. Wilkins, Robert H. Blumenthal, Mary Connaughton

Faculty Scholarship

The wisdom of promoting public education in the Commonwealth was recognized by the earliest settlers, the framers of the Constitution, and many subsequent legislatures, officials, educators and citizens. The opinions of the Department, the Secretary of Education, the Governor and various educators, contained in the stipulation, demonstrate that a policy of supporting public education is as important today as ever.²

The implementation of this policy goal by the Legislature and municipalities involves choices that are at the heart of representative government: how much public money to raise, how best to allocate the money among education and the many other …

A Property Right In Self-Expression: Equality And Individualism In The Natural Law Of Intellectual Property, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

This Article argues that a properly conceived natural-rights theory of intellectual property would provide significant protection for free speech interests. This is more than just an academic exercise. Judges have failed to use the First Amendment to provide extensive protection for free expression in intellectual property cases, in part because they mistakenly find a warrant for strong "authors' rights" in a philosophy of natural law. Natural rights theory, however, is necessarily concerned with the rights of the public as well as with those whose labors create intellectual products. When the limitations in natural law's premises are taken seriously, natural rights …

The Reception Of Canon Law And Civil Law In The Common Law Courts Before 1600, David J. Seipp

Faculty Scholarship

English common law practitioners and judges borrowed much of the conc structure for their body of legal knowledge from the legal culture of continen Europe over the centuries. Their surviving writings show a marked increa the use of Roman legal classifications in the century before 1600: public private, criminal and civil, real and personal, property and possession, con and delict, among other examples. Those who perpetuated the learning of English royal courts in the sixteenth century had begun fitting it in framework borrowed from the two great bodies of 'learned law' taught in universities of Europe: civil (Roman) law and …

The Habeas Hagioscope, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

If you would understand American law, American politics, and the elusive difference between the two, look no further. Federal habeas corpus for state prisoners opens a window on the workings of our national government, overt and covert. I mean in this Article to describe the scene that is revealed. A rich account of experience in recent years can contribute to a deeper understanding of our government by arranging the players and the set in context and sequence. The record will show a number of things to be true.

Litigation Cost Allocation Rules And Compliance With The Negligence Standard, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines compliance, incentives to bring suit, and incentives to settle in a negligence regime under alternative litigation cost allocation rules. Four allocation rules are considered: the American rule, which requires each party to pay his own costs; the British rule, which requires the losing party to pay the winning party's costs in addition to his own; the prodefendant rule, which requires the defendant to pay only his own costs if he loses and nothing otherwise; and the proplaintiff rule, which requires the plaintiff to pay only his own costs if he loses and nothing otherwise.

Finessing The Siting Conundrum, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

There is a place that today's industrial society desperately wishes to find. In prior eras, people sought Nirvana or the Fountain of Youth or Shangri-La – states of mind (or nothingness) as much as places, really. The object of today's quest has no neighbors, no endangered or threatened species, no hydraulic link to precious groundwater; ideally, it has no connection to the biosphere at all.

That place is called "away," as in, "Let's dig up this contamination and haul it away," or, "We need to take this waste away." The public and private sectors in the United States have spent …

The Incompleat Burkean: Bruce Ackerman's Foundation For Constitutional History, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

With this book, the first in a projected series of at least three volumes, Bruce Ackerman confirms what attentive readers of his law review articles of the past ten years have already known-he is the most original and important writer on constitutional theory in the contemporary English-speaking world. We the People: Foundations, despite its informal, sometimes overly talky style, is not an easy book. Filled to the brim, even to overflowing, and containing many gestures in the direction of arguments to be made in future volumes rather than the substance of the arguments themselves, it presents both the casual reader …

Constitutional Identity, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The aim of this Article is to introduce and clarify a new way of thinking about decisions in close cases, particularly those that address basic issues of constitutional law. When constitutional language fails to offer an unequivocal directive for decision, the recourse of the judge is not always to look "outward" toward overarching principles of political morality. In an illuminating array of cases, the acceptable way to resolve the disputes and to explain the results is to turn "inward" and reflect upon the legal culture in which the dispute is embedded. The way to understand this subcategory of decisions is …

Conflicts Of Copyright Ownership Between Authors And Owners Of Original Artworks: An Essay In Comparative And International Private Law, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

Most, if not all, copyright laws distinguish between ownership of the incorporeal copyright, and ownership of chattels. A generally-accepted corollary holds that alienation of the chattel that constitutes the material form of a copyrighted work does not carry the copyright with it. Applying this principle to works of the visual arts, it should be clear that sale of a painting, even if it is the only "copy" of a work, is not a transfer of the exclusive rights under copyright to reproduce the work or to create derivative works based on the painting. Similarly, ownership of the copyright confers no …

Investment Companies As Guardian Shareholders: The Place Of The Msic In The Corporate Governance Debate, Ronald J. Gilson, Reinier Kraakman

Faculty Scholarship

Comparative corporate governance is both necessary and hard. Recent scholarship has identified the political and historical contingency of the American pattern of corporate governance. The Berle-Means corporation, with its separation of management and risk bearing and the attendant agency conflict between managers and shareholders, is now widely recognized as being as much a creature of the American pattern of law and politics as the handiwork of neutral market forces. This recognition underscores the need to place the American experience in a comparative perspective. Other patterns of corporate governance can provide both insights into the operation of our own and a …

Happy Birthday, Harter: A Reappraisal Of The Harter Act On Its 100th Anniversary, Joseph Sweeney

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Longterm Strategies In Japanese Environmental Litigation, Setsuo Miyazawa

Faculty Scholarship

Japan's reputation for unusually strong emphasis on the avoidance of public conflict and therefore for de-emphasis of legal institutions suggests an arid, hostile environment for litigators, especially those who lack substantial resources. In a study of a quasi-class action lawsuit by Japanese air pollution victims, we find that litigation can be developed as a tool in the pursuit of a social movement's wider objectives despite the paucity of resources within the Japanese legal system. Our research documents the many ways in which the delays, obstacles, and costs that characterize the litigation environment in Japan have been either neutralized or turned …

The Poverty Of Academic Rhetoric, Frederick Mark Gedicks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Feminism And Disciplinarity: The Curl Of The Petals, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

In this Symposium, feminism has been invited to take a place alongside such well-established disciplines as history, philosophy, and economics in a consolidated exploration of interdisciplinary approaches to law. While sincerely extended – the feminist entry is not the only one that women are writing – and generously unbounded as to scope, ... the invitation raises what for many is a prior question: Is feminism a discipline at all?

As the feminist delegate to this interdisciplinary Symposium, I have therefore taken as my initial task consideration of the issue implicit in the invitation: feminism's credentials as a discipline. I explore …

The Item Veto In State Courts, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Contemporary debates about state constitutional law have concentrated on the role of state constitutions in the protection of individual rights and have paid less attention to the state constitutional law of government structure.This is ironic since the emergence of a state jurisprudence of individual rights has been hampered by the similarity of the texts of the state and federal constitutional provisions concerning individual rights, whereas many state constitutional provisions dealing with government structure have no federal analogues, and thus state jurisprudence in this area is free to develop outside the dominating shadow of the Federal Constitution and the federal courts. …

Cunning Stunts: From Hegemony To Desire A Review Of Madonna's Sex, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

What is sex? Is it an accidental or contingent property that every person can be said to have? I am brunette and female, but the Pope is bald and male. Or, is sex more constitutive, that is, an essential part of who we are? In this respect, the claim is often made that women experience the world ditfierently than men. Or, is sex something we do?

If we consider sex as an adjective, can we or should we be able to manipulate it like a new hair style? Or does the notion of sexual malleability trivialize the significance …

Equality And Diversity: The Eighteenth-Century Debate About Equal Protection And Equal Civil Rights, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Living, as we do, in a world in which our discussions of equality often lead back to the desegregation decisions, to the Fourteenth Amendment, and to the antislavery debates of the 1830s, we tend to allow those momentous events to dominate our understanding of the ideas of equal protection and equal civil rights. Indeed, historians have frequently asserted that the idea of equal protection first developed in the 1830s in discussions of slavery and that it otherwise had little history prior to its adoption into the U.S. Constitution. Long before the Fourteenth Amendment, however – long before even the 1830s …

Natural Rights, Natural Law, And American Constitutions, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Natural rights and natural -law are ideas that frequently seem to have something in common with the elusive shapes of a Rorschach test. They are suggestive of well-defined, recognizable images, yet they are so indeterminate that they permit us to see in them what we are inclined to see. Like Rorschach's phantasm-inducing ink blots, natural rights and natural law are not only suggestive but also indeterminate – ideas to which each of us can plausibly attribute whatever qualities we happen to associate with them. For this reason, we may reasonably fear that natural rights and natural law are ideas often …

Employee Rights In The European Community: A Panorama From The 1974 Social Action Program To The Social Charter Of 1989 , Roger J. Goebel

Faculty Scholarship

Certainly, in the eyes of the drafters of the EEC Treaty, social progress was inseparably linked with economic progress, and both were intimately related to the goal of a "union among the peoples of Europe." The Court of Justice has also recognized the importance of social policy, stating that "the Community ...is not merely an economic union," but rather has a "double aim, which is at once economic and social ..." In view of the capital importance thus accorded to the social aspect of the European Community, it is surprising that the Community's achievements in the social sphere, both through …

The Protective Power Of The Presidency, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Walter Bagehot's still-admired study of the English Constitution distinguished between its "dignified" and "efficient" parts. Bagehot argued that the English Constitution's "dignified" theory of parliamentary supremacy masked the (then) dominant reality of cabinet government. Attacking what he described as the "literary" theory of the American Constitution, Woodrow Wilson posited a similar distinction. Writing in 1885, Wilson asserted that the "literary" theory of American government embodied in Federalist's "ideal checks and balances of the federal system" obscured its efficient principle: "government by the chairmen of the Standing Committees of Congress." An ardent admirer of ministerial government, Wilson especially lamented the condition …

The Eclipse Of Reason: A Rhetorical Reading Of Bowers V. Hardwick, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

In a careful and compelling reading of the text of the Supreme Court's opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, Janet Halley provides a meticulous map of the misprisions by which the Hardwick Court "exploit[s] confusion about what sodomy is in ways that create opportunities for the [judicial] exercise of homophobic power." According to Professor Halley, the duplicitous mechanisms the Hardwick Court marshals in reasoning about sodomy entail a mobilization of two "incommensurable articulations": the idea of the sodomitical act, on the one hand, and that of personal identity, on the other.

Professor Halley rightly insists that an anti-homophobic critique …

Copyright Without Walls?: Speculations On Literary Property In The Library Of The Future, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This essay considers the application and adaptation of copyright law to the library of the future. In this "library without walls," works will be accessible by computer to users near and far. While a printed book usually is read by only one person at a time, that same book in digital format may be simultaneously consulted by as many users as have PCs linked by modem to the library. Where collecting quotations from printed sources today requires transcription or photocopying, in the library of the future it may be possible to download and print out excerpts, or even the entire …

The Transformation Of Morton Horwitz, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

In 1977, Morton Horwitz published his astonishing first book, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860. Looking back, two things could be said of the reception of the Transformation: the book was subjected to extremely searching and ultimately quite successful criticism, while at the same time it dominated the field of American legal history for more than a decade, as no book had before, or has since. Like almost all other historians of American law trained in the years following 1977, my education in the craft of legal history was decisively affected by the Transformation. My first published work was a …

Judicial Opinions As Binding Law And As Explanations For Judgments, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

To what extent does the executive branch have autonomous powers of legal interpretation? The issue is often broadly framed in terms of two disparate understandings of the allocation of interpretative power: "judicial supremacy" and "departmentalism." In this paper, I shall speak of two different understandings of judicial opinions: the idea that judicial opinions (or at least the "holdings" of opinions) are legally binding on actors in the executive branch, and the idea that opinions are, from the perspective of executive actors, merely explanations for judicial judgments. I adopt this locution because it focuses more precisely on the core of the …

Mandatory Prelicensure Legal Internship: An Idea Whose Time Has Come Again, Stephen R. Alton

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the wisdom of imposing an internship requirement on aspiring lawyers as a prerequisite for licensure. It is my position that such a requirement can be beneficial to the new attorney, to the profession, and to the public and should thus be mandated for all those who seek admission to the practice of law. This Article begins by briefly examining the history in the United States of law-office, apprenticeship as a means of legal education. I then proceed to an examination of modern internship requirements in England and Canada. There follows a discussion of some of the more …

Efficiency And Individualism, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Law and economics-the systematic application of neoclassical price theory to legal problems 1 -has dominated the legal academy in recent years. One recent study found that law and economics "for several decades appears to have pervaded about one quarter of scholarship in elite law reviews,"2 and that figure may seriously understate the theory's influence.3 A number of justifiably wellregarded scholarly journals devote themselves almost exclusively to economic analysis of law, and the subject is now a regular part of law school curricula.' Perhaps most importantly, law and economics is a pervasive and influential presence in informal academic discussions. Even legal …

Competition Law And Anticompetitive Professional Behavior Affecting Health Care, Frances H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Critical Reexamination Of The Takings Jurisprudence, Glynn S. Lunney Jr

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Constitution forbids both the federal and state governments from taking private property for public use in the absence of just compensation. In determining whether particular government actions require compensation, the members of the U.S. Supreme Court have agreed that the purpose of the constitutional compensation requirement is "to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole." The members of the Court have also agreed that whether justice and fairness require compensation will turn upon a two-step inquiry. First, government action …

The Law Between The Bar And The State, Susan P. Koniak

Faculty Scholarship

The traditional understanding of the relation between law and professional legal ethics is that legal ethics covers matters not covered by law; that ethics sits passively above law, starting where law leaves off. In this Article, Professor Susan Koniak argues that this understanding is wrong. She asserts that professional ethics are in competition and conflict with law as it is embodied in the pronouncements of courts and legislatures. Although "law" is usually considered to be the near exclusive preserve of the state, the Article contends that private groups also have "law," but it is usually called "ethics." The legal profession's …

The Eichmann Trial, The Jewish Question, And The American-Jewish Intelligentsia, Pnina Lahav

Faculty Scholarship

The abduction, trial, and execution of Adolf Karl Eichmann by the state of Israel, fifteen years after the shutdown of the crematoria at Auschwitz, challenged the American Jewish intelligentsia to confront the Jewish question.4 What does it mean to be a Jew in America and who is an American Jew? Is the Jewish history of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust also a part of American-Jewish history? Is there a lesson in the destruction of European Jewry-the triumph of anti-Semitism, the failure of assimilation-relevant to American Jews? Is there a national component to being Jewish? Are Jews a people? If so, is …