Digital Commons Network^™

Afrofuturism, Critical Race Theory, And Policing In The Year 2044, I. Bennett Capers

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Interpenetration Of Powers: Channels And Obstacles For Populist Impulses, Anya Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

Discussions of populism often focus on the most visible points of executive power: individual leaders. Yet individual leaders only accomplish things through administrative apparatuses that enable and support their power. Rejecting a political theology that imagines sovereignty as inhering in a single decision-maker, this article turns to political pragmatics focused on the people who populate the government. I draw on interviews with administrators in the government of two successful but quite different democracies. The first is the United States, an old, flagship democratic state. The second is Taiwan, which transitioned from a four-decade military dictatorship to a vibrant democracy in …

Law's Enterprise: Argumentation Schemes & Legal Analogy, Brian N. Larson

Faculty Scholarship

Reasoning by legal analogy has been described as mystical, reframed by skeptics using the deductive syllogism, and called “no kind of reasoning at all” by Judge Posner. Arguments by legal analogy happen every day in courtrooms, law offices, and law-school classrooms, and they are the essence of what we mean when we talk of thinking like a lawyer. But we have no productive and normative theory for creating and evaluating them. Entries in the debate over the last 25 years by Professors Sunstein, Schauer, Brewer, Weinreb, and others leave us at an impasse: The ‘skeptics’ are too focused on the …

A Hater's Guide To Geoblocking, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

Geoblocking restricts access to online content based on the user's geographical location. Territorially based access control is strongly disliked, if not passionately hated, by those who travel abroad frequently as well as those who consume a considerable amount of foreign content. While the past has seen the use of geoblocking as technological self-help, such a technique has now received growing support from policymakers and judges.

Commissioned for a symposium on "Intellectual Property in a Globalized Economy: United States Extraterritoriality in International Business," this article begins by briefly recounting five sets of arguments against geoblocking. The article then draws on the …

Transdisciplinarity At The Boundaries: Exploring A Sylvan Metaphor For Health, Peter J. Whitehouse

Faculty Scholarship

Transdisciplinarity is an action oriented intellectual and ethical endeavor to address complex ecological, economic, and political challenges that humans face. Language is viewed as a powerful tool for necessary cultural change. Blending art and science looking for the difficult to define but critically important hidden spaces between apparently rigid conceptual structures is a core of transdisciplinarity. Metaphor is a particular powerful tool for examining boundaries and developing creative blends of structures and processes. Forests are biologically and culturally critical to life on the planet. In this paper we explore, a performance character named Sylvanus, the Tree Doctor, named after the …

Distinguishing Different Kinds Of Property In Patents And Copyrights, Sean O'Connor

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Automation And Predictive Analytics In Patent Prosecution: Uspto Implications And Policy, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial-intelligence technological advancements bring automation and predictive analytics into patent prosecution. The information asymmetry between inventors and patent examiners is expanded by artificial intelligence, which transforms the inventor-examiner interaction to machine-human interactions. In response to automated patent drafting, automated office-action responses, "cloems" (computer-generated word permutations) for defensive patenting, and machine-learning guidance (based on constantly updated patent-prosecution big data), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) should reevaluate patent-examination policy from economic, fairness, time, and transparency perspectives. By conceptualizing the inventor-examiner relationship as a "patenting market," economic principles suggest stronger efficiencies if both inventors and the USPTO have better information …

Arrests As Guilt, Anna Roberts

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Of Online Reviews: The Trouble With Trolls And A Role For Contract Law After The Consumer Review Fairness Act, Wayne Barnes

Faculty Scholarship

The advent of the Internet has brought innumerable innovations to our lives. Among the innovations is the meteoric rise in the volume of e-commerce conducted on the Internet. Correspondingly, consumer-posted information about merchants, goods, and services has also begun to be a rich source of information for consumers researching a purchase online. This information takes many forms, but a major category is the narrative review describing the purchase and experience. Such reviews are posted on websites such as Yelp, Amazon and TripAdvisor, on apps, and on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The amount and volume of reviews has …

The Self-Delegation False Alarm: Analyzing Auer Deference’S Effect On Agency Rules, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

Auer deference holds that reviewing courts should defer to agen­cies when the latter interpret their own preexisting regulations. This doc­trine relieves pressure on agencies to undergo costly notice-and-com­ment rulemaking each time interpretation of existing regulations is neces­sary. But according to some leading scholars and jurists, the doc­trine actually encourages agencies to promulgate vague rules in the first instance, augmenting agency power and violating core separation of pow­ers norms in the process. The claim that Auer perversely encourages agencies to “self-delegate”—that is, to create vague rules that can later be informally interpreted by agencies with latitude due to judicial defer­ence—has helped …

Divergence And Convergence At The Intersection Of Property And Contract, Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci, Carmine Guerriero

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, we study rules that solve the conflict between the original owner and an innocent buyer of a stolen or embezzled good. These rules balance the protection of the original owner’s property and the buyer’s reliance on contractual exchange, thereby addressing a fundamental legal and economic trade-off. Our analysis is based on a unique, hand-collected dataset on the rules in force in 126 countries. Using this data, we document and explain two conflicting trends. There is a large amount of first-order divergence: both rules that apply to stolen goods and those that apply to embezzled goods vary widely …

On Reading, Jeffrey C. Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

What is reading?  Seeing and comprehending a contentful, written text counts as reading, of course, but that is simply the paradigm; it is not reading itself.  Blind people, e.g., often read using Braille.  It is sometimes claimed that one engages in reading when one listens to an audiobook.  So, my project in this paper is to address this question: What is the proper analysis of person S reads text W?  Surprisingly, no philosophical attempts to analyze reading exist; this question has (to my knowledge, anyway) yet to be tackled.  Can other sensory modalities be used to read?  What more …

Burning Down The House? The Appellate Body In The Centre Of The Wto Crisis, Bernard Hoekman, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

In December 2019 the WTO Appellate Body (AB) will cease to operate unless the United States stops blocking new appointments. The US argues the AB has exceeded its mandate and has indicated it wants to ensure that the AB performs the role originally assigned to it in 1995. This paper discusses the Uruguay round negotiating history with the view to establish what “going back to 1995” entails. It concludes that this should not be difficult assuming a willingness of the WTO membership to seriously consider the US concerns and acceptance by the US of a commitment by the membership to …

The Last Refuge Of Scoundrels: The Problem Of Truth In A Time Of Lying, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

This essay addresses the problem of truth today in light of the common belief, especially among progressives, that we have entered a post-truth age, as well as of the frequent claim that our post-truth society is the fault of postmodernists and their challenge to the objectivity of truth. The essay does not resolve the strategic question whether the post-truth argument is, as a purely tactical political matter, an effective approach to respond to the onslaught of misrepresentations and lies by President Donald Trump and the New Right. Instead, it explores the post-truth argument from a more synoptic perspective regarding the …

On Constructing A Knowledge Base Of Chinese Criminal Cases, Xiaohan Wu, Benjamin L. Liebman, Rachel E. Stern, Margaret Roberts, Amarnath Gupta

Faculty Scholarship

We are developing a knowledge base over Chinese judicial decision documents to facilitate landscape analyses of Chinese Criminal Cases. We view judicial decision documents as a mixed-granularity semi-structured text where different levels of the text carry different semantic constructs and entailments.We use a combination of context-sensitive grammar, dependency parsing and discourse analysis to extract a formal and interpretable representation of these documents. Our knowledge base is developed by constructing associations between different elements of these documents. The interpretability is contributed in part by our formal representation of the Chinese criminal laws, also as semi-structured documents. The landscape analyses utilizes these …

A Computational Analysis Of Constitutional Polarization, David E. Pozen, Eric L. Talley, Julian Nyarko

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is the first to use computational methods to investigate the ideological and partisan structure of constitutional discourse outside the courts. We apply a range of machine-learning and text-analysis techniques to a newly available data set comprising all remarks made on the U.S. House and Senate floors from 1873 to 2016, as well as a collection of more recent newspaper editorials. Among other findings, we demonstrate (1) that constitutional discourse has grown increasingly polarized over the past four decades; (2) that polarization has grown faster in constitutional discourse than in nonconstitutional discourse; (3) that conservative-leaning speakers have driven this …

Has Shoe Run Its Course?, David W. Ichel

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

“Unknown Symbols”: Online Legal Research In The Age Of Emoji, Jennifer L. Behrens

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last decade, emoji and emoticons have made the leap from text messaging and social media to legal filings, court opinions, and law review articles. However, emoji and emoticons’ growth in popularity has tested the capability of online legal research systems to properly display and retrieve them in search results, posing challenges for future researchers of primary and secondary sources. This article examines current display practices on several of the most popular online legal research services (including Westlaw Edge, Lexis Advance, Bloomberg Law, Fastcase, HeinOnline, and Gale OneFile LegalTrac), and suggests effective workarounds for researchers.

Owning Heller, Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

Recent historical research using big-data techniques casts doubt on whether District of Columbia v. Heller was rightly decided according to originalist methods. These new discoveries put originalists in a bind. Do they embrace “faint hearted” originalism: the idea that as between the need for stability in prior decision making, settled expectations, and the coherence of the law, some adulterated decisions must remain enforced for the greater good? Or do they follow Justice Thomas’s reasoning in Gamble v. United States, remain stout-hearted, and reject any prior decision that cannot be supported by the common linguistic usage of the founding era – …

The Well-Intentioned Purpose But Weak Epistemological Foundation Of Originalism, George C. Christie

Faculty Scholarship

The attraction of an originalist approach to constitutional interpretation is understandable. It is maintained that only that method can provide the judicial objectivity and certainty that constitutional adjudication requires. They claim that the traditional common-law evolutionary approach leads Supreme Court Justices to succumb to the temptation to fill in gaps in constitutional law and thereby ignore that major expansions in constitutional meaning and should be made in the way the Founders envisioned, namely by amendment of the Constitution. However difficult or impractical that process may be, it is the only way to avoid the politicization of the Court. Whether that …

Stevens, J., Dissenting: The Legacy Of Heller, Joseph Blocher, Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Brief Of Public Law Scholars As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioners, Chris Dove, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sports In The Courts: The Ncaa And The Future Of Intercollegiate Revenue Sports, Paul H. Haagen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

We The People: These United Divided States, Catherine Powell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Faithful Execution And Article Ii, Andrew Kent, Ethan J. Leib, Jed Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

Article II of the U.S. Constitution twice imposes a duty of faithful execution on the President, who must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” and take an oath or affirmation to “faithfully execute the Office of President.” These Faithful Execution Clauses are cited often, but their background and original meaning have never been fully explored. Courts, the executive branch, and many scholars rely on one or both clauses as support for expansive views of presidential power, for example, to go beyond standing law to defend the nation in emergencies; to withhold documents from Congress or the courts; or …

Love's Labors Found, Nicholas Allard

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Rule Of Persons, Not Machines: The Limits Of Legal Automation, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Statutory Interpretation As “Interbranch Dialogue”?, James J. Brudney, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

Much in the field of statutory interpretation is predicated on “interpretive dialogue” between courts and legislatures. Yet, the idea of such dialogue is often advanced as little more than a slogan; the dialogue that courts, legislators, and scholars are imagining too often goes unexamined and underspecified. This Article attempts to organize thinking about the ways participants and theorists conceive, and should conceive, of interbranch dialogue within statutory interpretation.

The Article itself proceeds by using a dialogic and dialectical method. It first develops various positions against “interbranch dialogue.” By invoking arguments from textualism, public choice, and positive political theory, it advances …

The Quantum Of Suspicion Needed For An Exigent Circumstances Search, Kit Kinports

Faculty Scholarship

For decades, the United States Supreme Court opinions articulating the standard of exigency necessary to trigger the exigent circumstances exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement have been maddeningly opaque and confusing. Some cases require probable cause, others call for reasonable suspicion, and still others use undefined and unhelpful terms such as "reasonable to believe" in describing how exigent the situation must be to permit the police to proceed without a warrant. Nor surprisingly, the conflicting signals coming from the Supreme Court have led to disagreement in the lower courts.

To resolve this conflict and provide guidance to law enforcement …

Reporting Certainty, James Macleod

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.