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Full-Text Articles in Law

Disclosure's Effects: Wikileaks And Transparency, Mark Fenster Feb 2012

Disclosure's Effects: Wikileaks And Transparency, Mark Fenster

Mark Fenster

Constitutional, criminal, and administrative laws regulating government transparency, and the theories that support them, rest on the assumption that the disclosure of information has transformative effects: disclosure can inform, enlighten, and energize the public, or it can create great harm or stymie government operations. To resolve disputes over difficult cases, transparency laws and theories typically balance disclosure’s beneficial effects against its harmful ones. WikiLeaks and its vigilante approach to massive document leaks challenge the underlying assumption about disclosure’s effects in two ways. First, WikiLeaks’s ability to receive and distribute leaked information cheaply, quickly, and seemingly unstoppably enables it to bypass …


Are Those Who Ignore History Doomed To Repeat It?, Peter Decherney, Nathan Ensmenger, Christopher S. Yoo Jan 2011

Are Those Who Ignore History Doomed To Repeat It?, Peter Decherney, Nathan Ensmenger, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

In The Master Switch, Tim Wu argues that four leading communications industries have historically followed a single pattern that he calls “the Cycle.” Because Wu’s argument is almost entirely historical, the cogency of its claims and the force of its policy recommendations depends entirely on the accuracy and completeness of its treatment of the historical record. Specifically, he believes that industries begin as open, only to be transformed into closed systems by a great corporate mogul until some new form of ingenuity restarts the Cycle anew. Interestingly, even taken at face value, many of the episodes described in the …


Race, Sex, And Rulemaking: Administrative Constitutionalism And The Workplace, 1960 To The Present, Sophia Z. Lee Jan 2010

Race, Sex, And Rulemaking: Administrative Constitutionalism And The Workplace, 1960 To The Present, Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article uses the history of equal employment rulemaking at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Power Commission (FPC) to document and analyze, for the first time, how administrative agencies interpret the Constitution. Although it is widely recognized that administrators must implement policy with an eye on the Constitution, neither constitutional nor administrative law scholarship has examined how administrators approach constitutional interpretation. Indeed, there is limited understanding of agencies’ core task of interpreting statutes, let alone of their constitutional practice. During the 1960s and 1970s, officials at the FCC relied on a strikingly broad and affirmative interpretation of …


Indianizing Hollywood: The Debate Over Bollywood's Copyright Infringement, Hariqbal Basi Dec 2009

Indianizing Hollywood: The Debate Over Bollywood's Copyright Infringement, Hariqbal Basi

Hariqbal Basi

For decades, the mainstream Indian film industry, known as Bollywood, has remade copyrighted Hollywood films for the Indian audience without legal repercussions. This practice has gone unnoticed by Hollywood until recently, and accusations have since been brought against Indian filmmakers for copyright infringement. This note provides an in depth analysis of why these potentially infringing films have only become the subject of litigation over the last two years, cultural arguments advanced by Indian filmmakers for why their remakes should constitute original, and not infringing, works, and what the effects of litigation have been. As the two industries become increasingly intertwined, …


Advertising And Intermediaries In Provision Of Legal Services: Bates In Retrospect And Prospect, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr. Jan 2005

Advertising And Intermediaries In Provision Of Legal Services: Bates In Retrospect And Prospect, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


The Opacity Of Transparency, Mark Fenster Dec 2004

The Opacity Of Transparency, Mark Fenster

Mark Fenster

The normative concept of transparency, along with the open government laws that purport to create a transparent public system of governance promise the world—a democratic and accountable state above all, and a peaceful, prosperous, and efficient one as well. But transparency, in its role as the theoretical justification for a set of legal commands, frustrates all parties affected by its ambiguities and abstractions. The public’s engagement with transparency in practice yields denials of reasonable requests for essential government information, as well as government meetings that occur behind closed doors. Meanwhile, state officials bemoan the significantly impaired decision-making processes that result …