Digital Commons Network^™

The Incompatibility Of Due Process And Naked Statistical Evidence, G. Alexander Nunn

Faculty Scholarship

Numerous articles and commentaries have grappled with an undeniable feeling of injustice that comes from wrestling with naked statistical evidence. Even if, from a purely quantitative standpoint, the weight of the evidence supports the imposition of liability on a defendant, the sole use of probabilities to assess this liability seems innately unfair. This tension has spawned a great debate that questions the role of naked statistical evidence in today’s legal system. Contributing to this discourse, this Note argues that, in certain circumstances, the use of naked statistical evidence constitutes a due process violation. United States circuit courts have held that …

When Biopharma Meets Software: Bioinformatics At The Patent Office, Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Arti K. Rai

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars have spilled much ink questioning patent quality. Complaints encompass concern about incoming applications, examination by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”), and the USPTO’s ultimate output. The literature and some empirical data also suggest, however, that applications, examination, and output may differ considerably based on technology. Most notably, although definitions of patent quality are contested, quality in the biopharmaceutical industry is often considered substantially higher than that in information and communications technology (ICT) industries.

This Article presents the first empirical examination of what happens when the two fields are combined. Specifically, it analyzes the creation and early history …

The Uspto Patent Pro Bono Program, Jennifer M. Mcdowell, Saurabh Vishnubhakat

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, the United States Patent and Trademark Office has systematically been engaging the legal community with inventor assistance beyond the agency’s usual business of examining applications for patents and trademarks. The purpose of the USPTO’s effort has been to support innovators who are constrained by a lack of resources to pay for patent counsel necessary to protect the full scope of their inventions. This Article describes the brief history, flexible structure, and ongoing growth of that effort, embodied in the USPTO Patent Pro Bono Program. The Patent Pro Bono Program is a national network coordinated by the USPTO …

The Uniform Commercial Code Survey: Introduction, Jennifer S. Martin, Colin P. Marks, Wayne Barnes

Faculty Scholarship

The survey that follows highlights the most important developments of 2014 dealing with domestic and international sales of goods, personal property leases, payments, letters of credit, documents of title, investment securities, and secured transactions. Along with the usual descriptions of interesting judicial decisions in these areas, which are highlighted in the survey, there has also been important legislative progress. The 2010 amendments to U.C.C. Article 9 have been adopted in forty-nine states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, and introduced in Oklahoma. Those revisions were summarized in the Introduction to the 2009 survey. Additionally, the 2012 amendments to U.C.C. …

Coordination And Conflict: The Persistent Relevance Of Networks In International Financial Regulation, Robert B. Ahdieh

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last two decades, scholarly enthusiasm about transnational regulatory networks has seen something of a boom-and-bust cycle. Such networks – informal groupings of mid-level national officials, convened to develop nonbinding “soft law” norms of behavior in specialized fields of regulation – were identified as an important new phenomenon, were studied widely, and came to be seen as central pillars of the international legal order, especially in financial regulation. Yet today, regulatory networks go largely unmentioned in polite academic conversation: a kind of “he-who-must-not-be-named” of international law.

Among the many critiques of transnational networks that have contributed to this decline …

From Fedspeak To Forward Guidance: Regulatory Dimensions Of Central Bank Communications, Robert B. Ahdieh

Faculty Scholarship

In the face of the financial crisis that engulfed the globe beginning in 2007, the U.S. Federal Reserve quickly found itself without the key lever of monetary policy on which it had traditionally relied: short-term interest rate adjustments designed to move long-term rates, and thereby expected levels of lending, investment, and capital retention. By late 2008, short-term rates were already close to zero, yet unemployment remained strikingly high – with no sign of any likely renewal of bank lending or commercial investment.

Famously, the Fed embraced so-called quantitative easing – the purchase of massive volumes of public and private debt …

Behavioral Public Choice And The Law, Gary M. Lucas Jr., Slaviša Tasić

Faculty Scholarship

Behavioral public choice is the study of irrationality among political actors. In this context, irrationality means systematic bias, a deviation from rational expectations, or other departure from economists’ conception of rationality. Behavioral public choice scholars extend the insights of behavioral economics to the political realm and show that irrational behavior is an important source of government failure. This Article makes an original contribution to the legal literature by systematically reviewing the findings of behavioral public choice and explaining their implications for the law and legal institutions. We discuss the various biases and heuristics that lead political actors to support and …

Occupying The Constitutional Right To Housing, Lisa T. Alexander

Faculty Scholarship

The United States does not recognize a formal legal right to housing. Yet, the right to housing is alive in America. Using qualitative interviews and case studies, this Article is the first to argue that recent American housing rights movements, such as the Occupy Movements, Take Back the Land movements, and Home Defenders’ League, give legal meaning to an American constitutional right to housing. These social movements represent the right to housing in American law when they occupy and retain vacant and real estate–owned homes, defend home owners and renters from illegal evictions and foreclosures, encourage municipalities to use eminent …

Beyond The Visiting Room: A Defense Counsel Challenge To Conditions In Pretrial Confinement, Amber Baylor

Faculty Scholarship

Defense attorneys are well acquainted with the ill-considered and extreme use of solitary confinement in local jails. Isolation is one of many problems clients face while locked up in jail awaiting trial. Other common conditions of pretrial confinement include lack of mental health treatment, inadequate medical care, violence from corrections staff, and lack of protection from the violence of others. "Owing time", a recently dismantled practice, is just one example of jails' frivolous use of extreme isolation practices. At times, youth in the juvenile facility at Rikers were placed in solitary so often that there was a waitlist at the …

An Overlooked Key To Reversing Mass Incarceration: Reforming The Law To Reduce Prosecutorial Power In Plea Bargaining, Cynthia Alkon

Faculty Scholarship

The need to “do something” about mass incarceration is now widely recognized. When President Obama announced plans to reform federal criminal legislation, he focused on the need to change how we handle non-violent drug offenders and parole violators. Previously, former Attorney General Eric Holder announced policies to make federal prosecutors “smart on crime.” These changes reflect, as President Obama noted, the increasing bipartisan consensus on the need for reform and the need to reduce our incarceration rates. However, proposals about what to reform, such as President Obama’s, tend to focus on some parts of criminal sentencing and on prosecutorial behavior …

Lessons Learned From Ferguson: Ending Abusive Collection Of Criminal Justice Debt, Neil L. Sobol

Faculty Scholarship

On March 4, 2015, the Department of Justice released its scathing report of the Ferguson Police Department calling for “an entire reorientation of law enforcement in Ferguson” and demanding that Ferguson “replace revenue-driven policing with a system grounded in the principles of community policing and police legitimacy, in which people are equally protected and treated with compassion, regardless of race.” Unfortunately, abusive collection of criminal justice debt is not limited to Ferguson. This Article, prepared for a discussion group at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools conference in July 2015, identifies the key findings in the Department of Justice’s report …

Incubating Community Law Practices: Post-Graduate Models For Lawyer Training & Access To Law, Luz E. Herrera

Faculty Scholarship

While the greatest number of lawyers practice in solo and small firms, law schools do not devote sufficient resources to preparing law students for the opportunities and challenges that these types of law firms present. The recent economic recession has highlighted the need to better train lawyers to launch law practices right out of law school. However, experienced lawyers, law professors and state bar policy makers worry that individuals who start their own practices are not sufficiently trained to practice and could irreparably harm a client. Many new lawyers share that concern but also worry about the financial instability that …

Art Resale Royalty Options, Herbert I. Lazerow

Faculty Scholarship

Proposed federal law requires payments from the reseller of art to an artist when her work is resold. They can be conceptualized as a substitute for copyright royalties or for the profits of a joint venture between the artist and the collector. Application is analyzed by art type, especially multiples, place of sale, and nationality or residence of the seller, buyer, intermediary or artist, and by what constitutes a sale in a world of leases, exchanges, gifts, bequests, charitable donations, loans and casualty losses. If the base is gross sales price, is that the amount the seller receives, the amount …

Presidential Control Across Policymaking Tools, Catherine Y. Kim

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Funding The Costs Of Disease Outbreaks Caused By Non Vaccination, Robert L. Schwartz

Faculty Scholarship

While vaccination rates in the United States are high – generally over 90 percent – rates of exemptions have been going up, and preventable diseases coming back. 2014 is shaping to be one of the worst years for measles since 1994, with outbreaks generally starting from unvaccinated individuals and affecting primarily the unvaccinated. While pertussis is a more complex story, communities with high rates of exemptions are more vulnerable to outbreaks. Aside from their human cost and the financial cost of treatment imposed on those who become ill, outbreaks impose financial costs on an already burdened public health system, diverting …

Let Sleeping Regs Lie: A Diatribe On Regulation A'S Futility Before And After The J.O.B.S. Act, Neal F. Newman

Faculty Scholarship

Did Congress do the right thing when it attempted to revise Regulation A through Title IV of the J.O.B.S. Act or was their legislative effort an exercise in futility?

On April 4 2012, President Obama signed into law the J.O.B.S. (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act. The Act’s intent is to ease the regulatory burden on smaller companies when issuing securities in both private and public offerings. This paper’s specific focus is on the Act’s Title IV. Title IV makes revisions to Regulation A, a private securities offering exemption promulgated under the Securities Act of 1933.

A big problem with Regulation …

Synergy And Tradition: The Unity Of Research, Service, And Teaching In Legal Education, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reforming Reit Taxation (Or Not), Bradley T. Borden

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Drug Design Liability: Farewell To Comment K, Aaron Twerski, James A. Henderson Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Boundary Work In Environmental Law, Gregg P. Macey

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Cost Of Free Trade, Joel R. Paul

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Free Trade Then And Now, Or Still Manchester United, Maimon Schwarzschild

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Patent Trolls And Preemption, Paul Gugliuzza

Faculty Scholarship

Patent law is usually thought to be the domain of the federal government, not state governments. Yet over half the states have recently passed statutes outlawing unfair or deceptive assertions of patent infringement. The statutes are aimed at fighting so-called patent trolls, particularly those who send letters to users of allegedly infringing technology — as opposed to the manufacturers of that technology — demanding that each user purchase a license for a few thousand dollars or else face an infringement suit. The Federal Circuit, however, has held that state law claims challenging acts of patent enforcement are preempted by the …

Experiential Teaching In Theory And Practice: An Annotated International Business Transactions Syllabus, Maya Steinitz, Orit Shalomson, Naomi Steinitz-Edelman

Faculty Scholarship

In this short piece we provide an interactive, annotated International Business Transactions (IBT) syllabus. The introduction and annotations seek to connect the current discourse on experiential legal education to andragogy — the study of adult learning.

In 2013 we set out to re-develop a 3-credit IBT course. We applied various experiential pedagogical methodologies — developed initially to train Israeli air force pilots and later adapted to medical training and grounded in theoretical and empirical education research — to serve in a traditional IBT course. The goal was not only to develop legal skills such as negotiation, contract drafting, and client …

The Dependent Origins Of Independent Agencies: The Interstate Commerce Commission, The Tenure Of Office Act, And The Rise Of Modern Campaign Finance, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

Independent regulatory agencies are some of the most powerful institutions in the United States, and we think of them today as designed to be insulated from political control. This Article shows that their origins were the opposite: this model first emerged in the late nineteenth century because it offered more political control.

The modern executive's design of unitary presidential control over most offices, alongside "independent" regulatory agencies, took shape in the winter of 1886-1887. Congress repealed the Tenure of Office Act, giving the President the unchecked power to dismiss principal officers and ending the Senate's power to protect those officers. …

Villanelle For Susan Martyn, Elizabeth Mccuskey

Faculty Scholarship

A poem in honor of Susan Martyn

The Uniformed Topograhy Of Patent Scope, Janet Freilich

Faculty Scholarship

Setting and ascertaining patent scope are among the most important questions in patent law. However, we cannot accurately set patent scope. This is because patent scope has a sequence-of- information problem. Patent scope is set at the time that a patent is granted, while the information necessary to set and measure patent scope is not obtained until many years later. In consequence, the scope of any given patent is very likely to contain significant "error," meaning that the scope is broader or narrower than the theoretical ideal (the minimum amount of scope necessary to incentivize innovation). Deviation from the theoretical …

End The Popularity Contest: A Proposal For Second Amendment 'Type Of Weapon' Analysis, Cody Jacobs

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s recognition of an individual Second Amendment right to bear arms for self-defense raised many questions about the scope and content of that right. One issue that will become increasingly important in the years ahead, but that has received relatively little attention from scholars and courts, is the question of which “arms” are protected by that right. The Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller purports to lay out a test that asks whether the weapon at issue is in “common use” at the time the case is decided. This article critiques that test, arguing that …

Why Is There No Clear Doctrine Of Informed Consent For Lawyers?, Nancy J. Moore

Faculty Scholarship

Written as a contribution to a symposium issue of the Toledo Law Review honoring retiring professor Susan Martyn, this article takes as its starting point an early article by Professor Martyn entitled “Informed Consent in the Practice of Law.” In that article, Professor Martyn decried the inability of clients to control the course of their representation and urged state legislatures to remedy this situation by enacting legislation creating an action in damages based upon a lawyer’s failure to obtain the client’s informed consent. Such an action would be similar to common law actions that courts had recently recognized by patients …

Focusing The Multifactor Test For Employee Status: The Restatement’S Entrepreneurial Formulation, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

The American Law Institute’s twenty-first century mission to restate for the first time American employment law carried the responsibility to provide more clear guidance on the law’s critical distinction between employees and independent contractors. This distinction delineates the scope not only of federal employee protection and benefit statutes, but also of employee protections and benefits conferred by state statutory and common law.

A Restatement of Employment Law, however, like any Restatement, could not formulate clearer or otherwise more desirable doctrine from the whole cloth of the views and values of the Reporters or the ALI membership. The Restatement could not …