Digital Commons Network^™

Research Stories: Video Tales From The Summer Associate Workplace, Susan Herrick

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Physicians Who Break The Law, Diane E. Hoffmann

Faculty Scholarship

This paper takes as its starting point a recent article by Prof. Sandra Johnson, Regulating Physician Behavior: Taking Doctors “Bad Law” Claims Seriously. In the article, Johnson focuses on doctors who comply with the law despite their belief that the law is “bad”, i.e., causes them to behave in ways that are harmful to their patients. In Physicians Who Break the Law, I explore cases where physicians break the law claiming that it is “bad”. In this exploration, I focus on two areas of physicians’ lawbreaking: (1) violations of business-related laws, in particular, insurance fraud; and (2) violations of laws …

Saving Facebook, James Grimmelmann

Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the law and policy of privacy on social network sites, using Facebook as its principal example. It explains how Facebook users socialize on the site, why they misunderstand the risks involved, and how their privacy suffers as a result. Facebook offers a socially compelling platform that also facilitates peer-to-peer privacy violations: users harming each others’ privacy interests. These two facts are inextricably linked; people use Facebook with the goal of sharing some information about themselves. Policymakers cannot make Facebook completely safe, but they can help people use it safely.

The Article makes …

The Ethical Visions Of Copyright Law, James Grimmelmann

Faculty Scholarship

This symposium essay explores the imagined ethics of copyright: the ethical stories that people tell to justify, make sense of, and challenge copyright law. Such ethical visions are everywhere in intellectual property discourse, and legal scholarship ought to pay more attention to them. The essay focuses on a deontic vision of reciprocity in the author-audience relationship, a set of linked claims that authors and audiences ought to respect each other and express this respect through voluntary transactions.

Versions of this default ethical vision animate groups as seemingly antagonistic as the music industry, file sharers, free software advocates, and Creative Commons. …

Autonomy Feminism: An Anti-Essentialist Critique Of Mandatory Interventions In Domestic Violence Cases, Leigh S. Goodmark

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Necessity And Presidential Prerogative: Does Presidential Discretion Undergird Or Undermine The Constitution?, Michael P. Van Alstine

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

National Governance: Still Stumbling Toward Sustainability, John C. Dernbach

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Note To Athletes, Nfl, And Nba: Dog Fighting Is A Crime, Not A Sport, Phyllis G. Coleman

Faculty Scholarship

Americans were finally forced to face the issue of animal abuse and professional athletes when investigators discovered 66 pit bulls, in addition to dog fighting equipment, at a home owned by "pro football's most electrifying quarterback." Although Michael Vick insisted he did not live in the house, and initially denied knowledge of any such activity on his Virginia property, stories of his involvement continued to swirl around the Atlanta Falcons' franchise player. On July 17, 2007, Vick and three others were indicted by a federal grand jury for competitive dog fighting, procuring and training pit bulls for fighting, and conducting …

Red Detachment Of Women And The Enterprise Of Making ‘Model’ Music During The Chinese Cultural Revolution, Clare Sher Ling Eng

Faculty Scholarship

Artworks produced with official sanction during periods marked by turmoil and human suffering are challenging subjects for scholars who would like to discuss them in a fair and responsible manner. If they aestheticize the works’ form and political affiliation, how would they be doing justice to these works whose creation and content are so meshed with the politics of their time? On the other hand, can an approach that takes ideology into account be developed that does not appear to ignore, condone or support the odious acts of violence associated with those periods? This article explores the latter question with …

Electronic Contracting Cases 2008-2009, Juliet M Moringiello, William L Reynolds

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

How To Improve Empirical Desert, Adam Kolber

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Madison In Post-9/11 Cyberspace: Applying Federalist No. 10 To The Online Battle For ‘Hearts And Minds’, Dawinder S. Sidhu

Faculty Scholarship

To be sure, there are at least a few problems with the approach of drawing upon the Framers for guidance with respect to the issues of the day. First, the Framers did not reach consensus on all matters. The famous rivalry between the Alexander Hamilton, a staunch nationalist from New York who favored a strong federal banking system and central government, and Jefferson, a republican from Virginia who preferred an agrarian lifestyle and trusted the people to do right by American society, perhaps best illustrates the fact that the Framers themselves were not in lockstep as to the makeup of …

Securities Laws In Soap Operas And Telenovelas: Are All My Children Engaged In Securities Fraud?, Elena Marty-Nelson

Faculty Scholarship

Securities law images are broadcast to millions worldwide through soap operas and telenovelas. Doctors, and professionals in other fields, have recognized the power of dramatic serials. They have generated a rich body of scholarship demonstrating how these mediums of popular culture impart health messages or effect social change. This author describes some of those empirical studies and suggests that legal scholars conduct similar empirical or ethnographic studies, particularly on the impact of portrayals of complex legal issues such as securities fraud in serials. The author explains differences and similarities between telenovelas and soap operas and compares portrayals of legal issues …

Improving The Odds Of Government Accountability In The Disaster-Prone Era: Using The 9/11 Fund Factors To Remedy The Problem Of Toxic Katrina Trailers, Olympia Duhart

Faculty Scholarship

This article analyzes the dangers surrounding the toxicity levels in the trailers issued to Katrina survivors by FEMA, and identifies serious medical complications stemming from the temporary homes. Lack of government oversight in the process led to the distribution of formaldehyde-laced trailers that cost the government more than $2 billion and continue to poison residents years after the storm. Furthermore, the failures connected to disaster relief are even more disturbing in this disaster-prone era. More importantly, this paper also proposes the creation of a Toxic Trailer Fund to compensate residents of toxic FEMA trailers. Using the factors implicitly established by …

Note To Athletes, Nfl, And Nba: Dog Fighting Is A Crime, Not A Sport, Phyllis G. Coleman

Faculty Scholarship

Phyllis Coleman, Note to Athletes, NFL, and NBA: Dog Fighting is a Crime, Not a Sport, 3 Journal of Animal Law & Ethics 85 (2009). Americans were finally forced to face the issue of animal abuse and professional athletes when investigators discovered 66 pit bulls, in addition to dog fighting equipment, at a home owned by "pro football's most electrifying quarterback." Although Michael Vick insisted he did not live in the house, and initially denied knowledge of any such activity on his Virginia property, stories of his involvement continued to swirl around the Atlanta Falcons' franchise player. On July …

Mode Dercalization In 1d Photonic Crystal Lasers, Yeheng Wu, Kenneth D. Singer, Rolfe G. Petschek, Hyunmin Song, Eric Baer, Anne Hiltner

Faculty Scholarship

We have investigated the formation of in-bandgap delocalized modes due to random lattice disorder as determined from the longitudinal mode spacing in a distributed Bragg laser. We were able to measure the penetration depth, and from transfer matrix simulations, determine how the localization length is altered for disordered lattices. Transfer matrix simulations and studies of the ensemble average were able to connect the gap delocalized modes to localized modes outside of the gap as expected from consideration of Anderson localization, as well as identify the controlling parameters.

Building Mixed-Income Communities: Documenting The Experience In Chicago Mixed-Income Development Study, Mark L. Joseph

Faculty Scholarship

Te goal of the research study is to inform a broad audience—including the developers and their social service partners, the Chicago Housing Authority, other community and public agency stakeholders, and other local and national practitioners and policymakers—about the early unfolding of and emerging lessons from the mixedincome component of the Plan for Transformation.

The Practice Of Ethics, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

Faculty Scholarship

The point of this talk is not to school you in the practice of ethics, but to raise questions about the practice of ethics. There is a standard picture of the practice of ethics that goes like this:

Ethical theory is done in a classroom. It is divided into normative theory, meta-ethics, and descriptive ethics. Students learn to see how the ethics in their society and community works; they learn how to discover true ethical beliefs and sometimes discover them during class. Through meta-ethics, they understand what it is to have an ethical belief. Then –and here comes the practice …

The Notsogolden Years Why Hate Crime Legislation Is Failing A Vulnerable Aging Population, Helia Garrido Hull

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

My Lawyer Told Me To Say I'M Sorry: Lawyers, Doctors, And Medical Apologies, Peter B. Knapp

Faculty Scholarship

The role of apologies in litigation has received a great deal of attention in the last ten years. This is particularly true of “medical apologies,” those expressions of regret and, in some cases, admissions of responsibility made by health care professionals. Two recent trends have prompted examination of medical apologies. First, widely reported empirical studies suggest that patients and their families may be less likely to bring malpractice lawsuits following adverse outcomes if treating physicians have apologized. Second, over about the past ten years, two-thirds of the states have adopted statutes that exclude these apologies from evidence if there is …

Remedies, Antitrust Law, And Microsoft: Comment On Shapiro, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

The subject of remedies is a relatively under-theorized area of antitrust law, and Professor Shapiro has done the antitrust community a great favor by offering some innovative and useful theoretical insights on the design of antitrust remedies. He applies his theoretical insights to the Microsoft III case to reach the conclusion that the remedies adopted were inadequate to restore competition in the market for software platforms. In this review, I will offer additional theoretical insights on remedies and explain my reasons for rejecting his conclusions on Microsoft III.

Cognition And Star Trek: Learning And Legal Education, Kate Bloch

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Evidence Code Section 802: The Neglected Key To Rationalizing The California Law Of Expert Testimony, David L. Faigman, Edward J. Imwinkelried

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A House Divided: The Invisibility Of The Multiracial Family, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Jacob Willig-Onwuachi

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is an invited special projects paper for the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. It examines how society and law work together to frame the normative ideal of intimate couples and families as both heterosexual and monoracial. This Article sets out to accomplish three goals. First, it examines the daily social privileges of monoracial, heterosexual couples as a means of revealing the invisibility of interracial marriages and families within our society. Specifically, Part II of this Article uses the work of Professor Peggy McIntosh to identify unacknowledged monoracial, heterosexual-couple privileges and list unearned privileges, both social and legal, …

The Presumption Of Guilt: Systemic Factors That Contribute To Ineffective Assistance Of Counsel In California, Laurence A. Benner

Faculty Scholarship

Our adversary system of criminal justice is premised upon the belief that effective advocacy by counsel for both the prosecution and the defense, conducted within a process founded upon principles of fundamental fairness, will "best promote the ultimate objective that the guilty be convicted and the innocent go free." The exoneration of the wrongfully convicted by the California Innocence Project and other innocence projects across the county has revealed, however, that our criminal justice system is sometimes deeply flawed. In theory, every person accused of a serious crime comes to court protected by a presumption of innocence and the promise …

Bargaining Power And Background Law, Nancy Kim

Faculty Scholarship

Power in contract law typically refers to the bargaining strength of each contracting party in relation to the other. In assessing the relative bargaining power of each party, courts and commentators often consider factors specific to the parties, such as socio-economic status and education level. In this Essay, I suggest another factor that affects the power of the parties in negotiating or modifying their agreement, one that I refer to as the "background law." The background law is the substantive law that governs the subject matter of the contract. This Essay focuses specifically on the background law of copyrights and …

Criminal Lying, Prosecutorial Power, And Social Meaning, Lisa Kern Griffin

Faculty Scholarship

This article concerns the prosecution of defensive dishonesty in the course of federal investigations. It sketches a conceptual framework for violations of 18 U.S.C. § 1001 and related false-statement charges, distinguishes between harmful deception and the typical investigative interaction, and describes the range of lies that fall within the wide margins of the offense. It then places these cases in a socio-legal context, suggesting that some false-statement charges function as penalties for defendants’ refusal to expedite investigations into their own wrongdoing. In those instances, the government positions itself as the victim of the lying offense and reasserts its authority through …

Wanting The Truth: Comparing Prosecutions Of Investigative And Institutional Deception, Lisa Kern Griffin

Faculty Scholarship

Defensive dishonesty in criminal investigations has increasingly been prosecuted without standards for identifying harmful deception or other meaningful checks on prosecutorial discretion. Although they are often grouped together statistically and evaluated as comparable crimes, there is a clear distinction between investigative lies and in-court perjury. The differences between the offenses—including the standards for prosecution, the perceived victim, and the purposes of bringing charges—suggest reasons to reconsider the current approach to investigative lies such as false statements. More truth is produced, and arguably more cooperation results, when the government focuses on the quality of the information flow. The structural protections in …

Foreign Officials And Sovereign Immunity In U.S. Courts, Curtis A. Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Grading Arson, Michael T. Cahill

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.