Digital Commons Network^™

Who’S Afraid Of The Apa? What The Patent System Can Learn From Administrative Law, Stuart M. Benjamin, Arti K. Rai

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, widespread dissatisfaction with the perceived poor quality of issued patents has spurred a diverse range of groups to call for reform of administrative procedures. Strikingly, however, most calls for reform pay little attention to principles of administrative law. Similarly, judges (in particular the judges of the Federal Circuit) have treated patent law as an exception to the Administrative Procedure Act, and to administrative law more generally. In this Article, Professors Benjamin and Rai contend that this treatment is doctrinally incorrect and normatively undesirable. Standard principles of administrative law provide the appropriate approach for judicial review in the …

Harnessing And Sharing The Benefits Of State Sponsored Research, Arti K. Rai, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years data-sharing has been a recurring focus of struggle within the scientific research community as improvements in information technology and digital networks have expanded the ways that data can be produced, disseminated, and used. Information technology makes it easier to share data in publicly accessible archives that aggregate data from multiple sources. Such sharing and aggregation facilitate observations that would otherwise be impossible. But data disclosure poses a dilemma for scientists. Data have long been the stock in trade of working scientists, lending credibility to their claims while highlighting new questions that are worthy of future research funding. …

The Story Of Ingersoll-Rand V. Ciavatta: Employee Inventors In Corporate Research & Development — Reconciling Innovation With Entrepreneurship, Catherine Fisk

Faculty Scholarship

Most inventors work as employees for the majority of their careers and are often required as a condition of employment to sign a contract drafted by the firm's lawyers giving the firm exclusive control over as broad a range of economically valuable information and innovation that the lawyers think is legally feasible. Such contracts typically claim as firm property - both during and after an employee's term of employment - the nebulous category of "proprietary information," along with the slightly more clearly (though still poorly) defined category of "trade secrets." These contracts, variously known as "invention assignment agreements" or "holdover …

The Promise (And Limits) Of Neuroeconomics, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Neuroeconomics - the study of brain activity in people engaged in tasks of reasoning and choice - looks set to be the next behavioral economics: a set of findings about how people make decisions that casts both light and doubt on widely accepted premises about rationality and social life. This essay explains what is most exciting about the new field and lays out some specific research tasks for it. By enabling researchers to view the mind at work, neuroeconomics calls into question the value of a methodological premise of twentieth-century empiricism, sometimes called positivism or behaviorism: that people are black …

The King Of Rockingham County And The Original Bridge To Nowhere, Barak D. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter, reveals the story -- the clash of personalities, the economic tensions, and the political significance -- behind Rockingham County v. Luten Bridge Co. Since its publication in 1929, the opinion has proceeded to leave an impression on generations of law students. Luten Bridge, a staple in most contracts casebooks, is known today as the paradigmatic case that demonstrates the duty to mitigate damages in contract law, whereby a nonbreaching party is not compensated for performance that occurs after the other party announces an intention to breach. This chapter takes on three objectives: it identifies the case's original importance, …

In Defense Of Regulatory Peer Review, James Salzman, J.B. Ruhl

Faculty Scholarship

The debate over application of peer review to the regulatory decisions of administrative agencies has heated up in the last year. Part of the larger and controversial sound science movement, mandating peer review for certain types of agency decisions has recently been championed by the White House and proponents in Congress. Indeed, this past January the Office of Management and Budget finalized guidelines requiring peer review for large classes of agency activities. These initiatives have not gone unchallenged, and a fierce debate has resulted between those who claim peer review will strengthen the scientific basis of agency decisions and those …

Contesting Anticompetitive Actions Taken In The Name Of The State: State Action Immunity And Health Care Markets, Clark C. Havighurst

Faculty Scholarship

The so-called state action doctrine is a judicially created formula for resolving conflicts between federal antitrust policy and state policies that seem to authorize conduct that antitrust law would prohibit. Against the background of recent commentaries by the federal antitrust agencies, this article reviews the doctrine and discusses it's application in the health care sector, focusing on the ability of states to immunize anticompetitive actions by state licensing and regulatory boards, hospital medical staffs, and public hospitals, as well as anticompetitive mergers and agreements. Although states are free, as sovereign governments, to restrict competition, the state action doctrine requires that …

Contract As Statute, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi

Faculty Scholarship

Formalists contend that courts should apply strict textual analysis in interpreting contracts between sophisticated commercial parties. Sophisticated parties have the expertise and means to record their intentions in writing, reducing the litigation and uncertainty costs surrounding incomplete contracts. Moreover, to the extent courts misinterpret contracts, sophisticated parties may simply rewrite their contracts to clarify their true intent. We argue that the formalist approach imposes large costs on even sophisticated parties in the context of boilerplate contracts. Where courts make errors in interpreting boilerplate terms, parties face large collective action problems in rewriting existing boilerplate provisions. Any single party that attempts …

Understanding Change In International Organizations: Globalization And Innovation In The Ilo, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

This Article uses an interdisciplinary approach to explain why the International Labor Organization (ILO) has been given surprisingly short shrift in recent debates over the role of IOs in addressing the many transborder collective action problems that globalization has fostered. I review the ILO's past and its present with two broad objectives in mind. First, I seek to correct a misperception among international lawyers and legal scholars that the ILO is a weak and ineffective institution. The organization's effectiveness in creating and monitoring international labor standards has fluctuated widely during its nearly ninety-year existence. Over the last decade, however, the …

Criminal Justice Collapse: The Constitution After Hurricane Katrina, Brandon L. Garrett, Tania Tetlow

Faculty Scholarship

The New Orleans criminal justice system collapsed after Hurricane Katrina, resulting in a constitutional crisis. Eight thousand people, mostly indigent and charged with misdemeanors such as public drunkenness or failure to pay traffic tickets, languished indefinitely in state prisons. The court system shut its doors, the police department fell into disarray, few prosecutors remained, and a handful of public defenders could not meet with, much less represent, the thousands detained. This dire situation persisted for many months, long after the system should have been able to recover. We present a narrative of the collapse of the New Orleans area criminal …

Welfare Polls: A Synthesis, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

"Welfare polls" are survey instruments that seek to quantify the determinants of human well-being. Currently, three welfare polling formats are dominant: contingent valuation (CV) surveys, quality-adjusted life year (QALY) surveys, and happiness surveys. Each format has generated a large, specialized, scholarly literature, but no comprehensive discussion of welfare polling as a general enterprise exists.This Article seeks to fill that gap.

Part I describes the trio of existing formats. Part II discusses the current and potential uses of welfare polls in governmental decisionmaking. Part III analyzes in detail the obstacles that welfare polls must overcome to provide useful well-being information, and …

Qalys And Policy Evaluation: A New Perspective, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Checks And Balances: Congress And The Federal Court, Paul D. Carrington

Faculty Scholarship

This essay was published as a chapter in Reforming the Supreme Court: Term Limits for Justices (Paul D. Carrington & Roger Cramton eds, Carolina Academic Press 2006). Its point is that Congress has long neglected its duty implicit in the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers to constrain the tendency of the Court, the academy and the legal profession to inflate the Court's status and power. The term "life tenure" is a significant source of a sense of royal status having not only the adverse cultural effects noted by Nagel, but also doleful effects on the administration and enforcement of …

Teaching Reflective Lawyering In A Small Case Litigation Clinic: A Love Letter To My Clinic Papers Presented At The Ucla/Ials Conference On Enriching Clinical Education, Ian Weinstein

Faculty Scholarship

This article describes a live client, small case, teaching and learning centered, criminal defense clinic set in a high volume urban court. It offers concrete suggestions about how clinical educators can help students develop analytic and technical skills. The clinic model is conceived in three phases: giving students the opportunity to develop a contextualized understanding of the client; guiding students through strategic analysis and planning; and focusing students' litigation strategies on executing their tactical vision for their client. The article argues that this clinical setting structures the students' experiences so that they develop a complex and deeply moral lawyerly problem …

Grave Building: A Tribute To Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., And His Evolving Legacy, Robin A. Lenhardt

Faculty Scholarship

This tribute celebrates the tremendous legal career of Professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. It highlights his many contributions to the legal profession and academy, including his role in preparing a cadre of lawyers for the 21st Century; body of scholarship focusing on racial justice issues; and instrumental role in developing new approaches to civil rights lawyering.

Death Bed, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

Lethal injection is this country's primary method of execution, adopted for use by all but one of the thirty-seven death penalty states, as well as the federal government. It is predictable, then, that questions would arise the moment such a widely accepted form of punishment becomes especially vulnerable to an Eighth Amendment attack, as recent cases have shown. This article discusses this author's involvement as an expert in one of these cases, Baze v. Rees, which concerned a 2005 challenge to the constitutionality of lethal injection in Kentucky. While the Baze court upheld the constitutionality of Kentucky's lethal injection procedure, …

‘No Net Loss’ - Instrument Choice In Wetlands Protection, James Salzman, J.B. Ruhl

Faculty Scholarship

While not a high priority issue for most people, the public has long recognized the general importance of wetlands. Since President George H.W. Bush's campaign in 1988, successive administration have pledged to ensure there would be "no net loss" of wetlands. Despite these continuous presidential pledges to protect wetlands, in recent decades, as more and more people have moved to coastal and waterside properties, the economic benefits from developing wetlands (and political pressures on obstacles to development) have significantly increased. Seeking to mediate the conflict between no net loss of wetlands and development pressures, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) …

Tribal Self-Determination At The Crossroads, Kevin Washburn

Faculty Scholarship

The tribal self-determination initiative that began transforming federal Indian policy thirty years ago has reached a crossroads. Despite its transformative effects on tribal governments and the widespread belief that self-determination has been a successful federal approach to Indian affairs, no significant new self-determination program has been initiated at the congressional level in several years. This Article looks to the tribal self-determination initiative's past to gain insights about its future. It also briefly surveys existing tribal self-determination programs and concludes that far more work needs to be done to achieve tribal self-determination. Drawing on the author's broader work, it finds one …

Litigating To Regulate: Massachusetts V. Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew P. Morriss

Faculty Scholarship

By a 5-4 vote in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court took yet another significant step away from the Framers' vision of the judiciary and toward a politicized Supreme Court sitting as a super-legislature and super-regulator. The Court substituted its judgment for that of the politically accountable branches of the federal government. By dramatically loosening the rules of standing, the Court invited those unhappy with the federal government's failure to regulate in a particular manner in any substantive area to use the federal courts to force federal agencies to regulate. In short, the Court encouraged interest groups …

Moral Hazard And The Initial Public Offering, A. Christine Hurt

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Exit Structure Of Venture Capital, D. Gordon Smith

Faculty Scholarship

Venture capital contracts contain extensive provisions regulating exit by the venture capitalists. In this Article, Professor Smith employs financial contracting theory in conjunction with original data collected from 367 venture-backed companies to analyze these exit provisions. He concludes that the combination of exit provisions in a typical venture capital relationship serves to lock venture capitalists into the investment during the initial stage. In later stages of the relationship, the venture capitalists acquire increasing control over exit by securing additional seats on the board of directors and by obtaining contractual exit rights. The result is a sophisticated transfer of control from …

Kentucky River At The Intersection Of Professional And Supervisory Status: Fertile Delta Or Bermuda Triangle?, Marley S. Weiss

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Structural Allostery And Binding Of The Transferrin·Receptor Complex, Guozhong Xu, Mark R. Chance

Faculty Scholarship

The structural allostery and binding interface for the human serum transferrin (Tf)-transferrin receptor (TfR) complex were identified using radiolytic footprinting and mass spectrometry. We have determined previously that the transferrin C-lobe binds to the receptor helical domain. In this study we examined the binding interactions of full-length transferrin with receptor and compared these data with a model of the complex derived from cryoelectron microscopy (cryo-EM) reconstructions (Cheng, Y., Zak, O., Aisen, P., Harrison, S. C. & Walz, T. (2004) Structure of the human transferrin receptor-transferrin complex. Cell 116, 565-576). The footprinting results provide the following novel conclusions. First, we report …

The Compression Of Dark Matter Halos By Baryonic Infall, Stacy S. Mcgaugh

Faculty Scholarship

The initial radial density profiles of dark matter halos are laid down by gravitational collapse in hierarchical structure formation scenarios and are subject to further compression as baryons cool and settle to the halo centers. Here we describe an explicit implementation of the algorithm, originally developed by Young, to calculate changes to the density profile as the result of adiabatic infall in a spherical halo model. Halos with random motion are more resistant to compression than are those in which random motions are neglected, which is a key weakness of the simple method widely employed. Young's algorithm results in density …

Proportionality As A Principle Of Limited Government, Alice Ristroph

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Back To The Future: Regional Differences In New Mexico Water Rights, G. Emlen Hall

Faculty Scholarship

You could say that I am here this morning as an advance man of tomorrows detailed talks on the active water rights management regulations that were recently adopted by the Office of the State Engineer, because I am going to talk about those a little bit in a historical context. You could also say that I am here to warm you up to that topic, so that you are ready for tomorrow's detailed controversial discussion of those. My job as the warmer up may be simply to inform you about the acronym that people are using in my world to …

Malpractice Reform As A Health Policy Problem, William M. Sage

Faculty Scholarship

Calling malpractice reform a "health policy problem" means that we should analyze it in terms of the quality of health care, access to health care, and the cost of health care-the basic health policy triad with which we all are familiar. We immediately recognize patient safety as a health policy problem because it is obviously about quality. We may believe there is so much slack in the health care system that we can make major improvements in patient safety without excessive cost. But ultimately, there are going to be cost-safety tradeoffs, which are also health policy concerns. We tend not …

Dspace, Institutional Repositories And The Open Access Movement: Why Should You Care?, Carol A. Parker

Faculty Scholarship

The amount of digital scholarly output grows daily, yet only a small fraction of legal scholarly communication is published in traditional venues such as law reviews and journals. Some of this digital scholarly communication makes it to the Web and becomes a resource often referred to as "gray literature," but this can be a haphazard process at best. The UNM School of Law Library employs DSpace, an open source digital institutional repository, to enable the Law faculty to collect, preserve, index, and distribute their digital work, as well as to provide a community for peer review of works in progress. …

An Unnatural Disaster: The Aftermath Of Hurricane Katrina, David M. Driesen, Alyson Flournoy, Sheila Foster, Eileen Gauna, Robert L. Glicksman, Carmen G. Gonzalez, David J. Gottlieb, Donald T. Hornstein, Douglas A. Kysar, Thomas O. Mcgarity, Catherine A. O'Neill, Clifford Rechtschaffen, Christopher Schroeder, Sidney Shapiro, Rena I. Steinzor, Joseph P. Tomain, Robert R.M. Verchick, Karen Sokol

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Aftermath Of Hurricane Katrina, An Unnatural Disaster, Eileen Gauna

Faculty Scholarship

This report analyzes key policy decisions, as well as actions and inaction under health, safety, and environmental laws, that could have better protected New Orleans from the effects of Katrina before the hurricane and those that could have improved the emergency response in its wake. In the area of public health, safety, and the environment, the paper explores the implementation of wetlands law and policy, bad decisions regarding the construction and maintenance of the levee system designed to protect New Orleans, pollution prevention and clean-up laws, and energy policy. In the area of emergency response, it reviews policy decisions related …