Digital Commons Network^™

The Wrongs Of Legal Writing, John C. Dernbach

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Determining Limitation Periods For Actions Arising Under Federal Statutes, Neil Sobol

Faculty Scholarship

Time limitations for cause of action are an integral part of the American system of law. These limitations define time periods following the accrual of the right of action in which a litigant must assert his claim. If the litigant fails to commence his suit within the specified time period, the court will generally deny relief. Given that failure to commence a suit before the limitation period has expired may deny an injured party relief and allow a wrongdoer to escape without providing such relief, litigants must be able to determine the limitation periods that will apply to their particular …

The Privileges And Immunities Clause Of Article Iv, David S. Bogen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Medical And Psychotherapy Privileges And Confidentiality: On Giving With One Hand And Removing With The Other, Steven R. Smith

Faculty Scholarship

This Article reviews both the giving and the taking away: the protections afforded to confidentiality by privileges and legal duties, and the way those protections are eroded. The duties of professionals and others to maintain confidences are noted, but testimonial privileges are emphasized. This Article proposes reforms in the way we try to protect confidentiality and suggests that the protection of therapy confidences be dealt with as a coherent whole (privileges and obligations of confidentiality should be dealt with together). Exceptions to privileges should be reduced and narrowed, and federal law should recognize the desirability of a consistent approach to …

Better Late Than Never: Publication Of The Decisions From The 1845 Term Of The Republic Of Texas Supreme Court, James Hambleton, David A. Greenblatt

Faculty Scholarship

Two years ago, this column featured the rediscovery of a full year's worth of decisions issued by the Supreme Court of the Republic of Texas that had never been printed. Paulsen & Hambleton, Whatever Happened to 7845? The Missing Decisions of the Texas Supreme Court, 48 Tex. B.J. 830 (1985). Those decisions now have been collected and will appear in the December 1986 issue of the Texas Law Review (The Missing Cases of the Republic, 65 Texas L. Rev. 377 (1986)). Although none of the missing cases are likely to have any direct bearing on the outcome of the Texaco-Pennzoil …

Texas Session Laws: Same Chapter, Different Verse, James Hambleton, Jim Paulsen

Faculty Scholarship

An inconsistency in the publication of Texas session laws, beginning with the tag-end of the 68th Legislature, promises to create considerable confusion in finding and citing session laws. The problem stems from the fact that one publisher produced the paper pamphlet "advance sheets" for new laws, while another released the bound volumes of the same session laws. As one might expect, page numbers do not coincide.

Transnational Law-Making: Assessing The Impact Of The Vienna Convention And The Viability Of Arbitral Adjudication, Thomas E. Carbonneau

Faculty Scholarship

Questions concerning the future orientation of the process are more pressing and demand a definition of the international mission and role of arbitral adjudication. Nations share the perception that national economies are no longer autonomous, that they must function within a larger global framework. The question then becomes not whether a uniform international law of sales is needed, but rather how it is to be achieved. The transnational preeminence that arbitration has gained as a remedial mechanism makes it a likely vehicle for elaborating a common law of international contracts.

This article assesses the impact of the Vienna Convention upon …

Thomas Hobbes And The Invented Tradition Of Positivism: Reflections On Language, Power, And Essentialism, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Apartheid And The South African Judiciary, Lawrence G. Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

New Frontiers: The Expansion Of International Criminal Law, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Child Welfare Decisionmaking: In Search Of The Least Drastic Alternative, Marsha Garrison

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Masking Copyright Decisionmaking: The Meaninglessness Of Substantial Similarity, Amy B. Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

Traditionally courts have place great weight on the issue of substantial similarity in adjudicating copyright infringement lawsuits. Once success is proven, a court will usually find infringement if the works are viscerally determined to be substantially similar. This Article criticizes the traditional approach as failing adequately to distinguish copying from misappropriation, failing adequately to distinguish ideas from expression, failing to provide adequate guidelines for determining misappropriation, and as overlapping with fair use determinations. The Article also criticizes variations on the traditional approach imposed by the Third and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeal as not remedying the traditional approach's fundamental shortcomings. …

Major League Baseball's Monopoly Power And The Negro Leagues, Alfred Dennis Mathewson

Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that the demise of the Negro Leagues was caused by the confluence of several factors. First, the Negro Leagues operated with weak relational contract structures, a condition exacerbated by their over-reliance on star players. Second, and perhaps most important, integration forced the Negro Leagues to compete in a market dominated by the monopoly power of the Major Leagues. By 1922, perhaps earlier, the Major Leagues had acquired a monopoly over the market for White professional baseball players in the United States through its reserve system. Thereafter, the Major Leagues strengthened that monopoly with the development of Branch …

Self-Love And The Judicial Power To Appoint A Special Prosecutor Symposium On Special Prosecutions And The Role Of The Independent Counsel, James A. Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

Judicial appointment of private attorneys as special prosecutors has occurred and is permitted to occur in a variety of contexts other than when the executive branch is faced with a potential or actual conflict of interest. Until recently, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and, of course, district courts within the Second Circuit, have interpreted Rule 42(b) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to permit judicial appointment of a private attorney to prosecute conduct allegedly violative of a court order as criminal contempt. Courts have been most active in appointing private attorneys as special prosecutors in cases involving counterfeit …

The Puzzling Persistence Of The Constrained Prudent Man Rule, Jeffrey N. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Gordon examines a seeming paradox: How did a rule named for the "prudent man," with its connotations of wisdom and judiciousness, become a constraint that discourages trustees and other fiduciaries from making investments now regularly favored by prudent investors? He argues that the current understanding of the Prudent Man Rule, the standard governing investments by trustees and other financial fiduciaries, is founded on a narrow conception of risk and safety that has been superseded by contemporary understanding of markets and investments, and in particular, portfolio theory. He identifies three factors that have prevented the Rule from evolving in response …

In The End, Truth Will Out’...Or Will It?. ‘Merchant Of Venice,’ Act Ii, Scene 2, Donald Magnetti

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Bounds And Beyond: A Need To Reevaluate The Right Of Prison Access To The Courts, Steven D. Hinckley

Faculty Scholarship

The author argues that the 1977 United States Supreme Court decision in Bounds v. Smith insufficiently protects the right of prisoners to represent themselves before the courts by failing to require state and federal correctional facilities to establish and maintain adequately stocked prison law libraries and to provide prisoners with the option to use those libraries as their means of gaining meaningful access to the courts.

Social Theory And Political Practice: Unger's Brazilian Journalism, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a citizen of Brazil. While working on Politics, his large-scale treatise on social theory, he has been active in his country's politics. Among the fruits of these activities is a series of political and programmatic commentaries on Brazil published in the Brazilian press. The commentaries apply the style of political analysis and the general political program elaborated in Politics to the recent circumstances of Brazil. Thus, they give an extended illustration of Unger's general social theory. At the same time, they exemplify a form of political writing that attempts to combine ambitious critical social theory …

Why Kant, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

These essays are the outgrowth of a conference on Kantian Legal Theory held at the the Arden Homestead in Harriman, New York, September 26-28, 1986. Some of them are versions of papers originally presented at the conference (Weinrib, Murphy, Finnis, Fletcher); others are a response to the three days of provocative discussion (Richards, Grey, Benson). The underlying premise of the conference was that although philosophers and academic lawyers have devoted considerable attention to Kant's moral theory, very few have written much about Kant's legal theory. I should add: written in English. The recent German literature overflows with books and articles …

The Universal And The Particular In Legal Discourses, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

My target in this article is a set of views that I shall call the functionalist perspective of comparative law. Of course, the word "functionalist" stands for a number of different theories. In order to be precise about the view that I oppose, I shall set my sights on the arguments developed in Otto Kahn-Freund's inaugural lecture Comparative Law as an Academic Subject, published two decades ago.

Contract Law As A System Of Values, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

Contract law has changed dramatically since the heyday of free contract ideology. The false conflict in the cases and literature between facilitation of market transactions and regulation to achieve social aims has been transcended, largely due to the realization that social aims are behind all of contract law. In place of this false conflict, new questions about the values advanced through contract law have been posed. Contract theory needs an account of the values underlying doctrines that were previously justified (wrongly) as means to effectuate the intent of the parties. Hugh Collins has given us such an account in his …

Democracy, Autonomy, And Values: Some Thoughts On Religion And Law In Modern America, Frederick Mark Gedicks, Roger Hendrix

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Pyrrhic Victory: Daniel Goldman's Defeat Of Zoning In The Maryland Court Of Appeals, Garrett Power

Faculty Scholarship

Nowadays government regulation of the use of urban land is taken for granted. Such was not always the case. Some sixty years ago, the Maryland Court of Appeals held it unconstitutional for Zoning Commissioner J. Frank Crowther to deny a request for a permit to operate a tailor shop in the basement of a Eutaw Place home. This paper examines the case of Goldman v. Crowther. Goldman's story reads like a comic melodrama with a tragic ending. But the saga also illuminates the social condition - it sheds light and casts shadows on the practice of xenophobia, the nature …

Informed Consent For The Man On The Clapham Omnibus; An English Cure For The "American Disease"?, Frances H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Excessive Fines Clause And Punitive Damages Some Lessons From History, Calvin R. Massey

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Constitutional Right To Jury Trial: A Historical Exception For Small Monetary Claims, Margreth Barrett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Of Carrots And Sticks: Evaluating The Role Of The Class Action Lawyer, Mary Kay Kane

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Critical Legal Studies: The Death Of Transcendence And The Rise Of The New Langdells, Joan C. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Taking Kawashima Seriously: A Review Of Japanese Research On Japanese Legal Consciousness And Disputing Behavior, Setsuo Miyazawa

Faculty Scholarship

This paper discusses Japanese research on legal consciousness (ho-ishiki) and civil disputing. The author presents a recent explication of Takeyoshi Kawashima's concept of legal consciousness as a cultural factor and also proposes to explore the possibility of treating it as an individual, attitudinal factor. He also reviews large-scale surveys of aggregate-level culture and studies on individual-level disputing behavior. The need and possibility of a longitudinal study of individual disputing behavior that uses individual-level attitudes and regional culture as explanatory variables is suggested.

Public Rights And The Federal Judicial Power: From Murray's Lessee Through Crowell To Schor, Gordon G. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.