Law Commons^™

Unmasking Undue Influence, Ray D. Madoff

Ray D. Madoff

The substantial passage of wealth that occurs upon death in the United States each year brings into focus the tension between the belief that people should be able to dispose of their wealth as they wish and society’s interest in maintaining social stability. Nowhere is this tension more apparent than in the doctrine of undue influence. The dominant paradigm presents the undue influence doctrine as providing a double benefit of protecting freedom of testation as well as preventing overreaching by others. In this Article, the author challenges the dominant paradigm by demonstrating how the undue influence doctrine denies freedom of …

Where No Man Has Gone Before: Star Trek And The Death Of Cultural Relativism In America, Kenneth Anderson

Kenneth Anderson

The Preemption Pentad: Federal Preemption Of Products Liability Claims After Medtronic [V. Lohr], Robert B. Leflar, Robert S. Adler

Robert B Leflar

Taking the language of the federal consumer protection statutes out of historical context and inattentive to those laws' original purposes, judges dissatisfied with the expansion of state products liability law have in recent years read preemption provisions of these federal statutes to bar a wide range of claims that would otherwise be viable under state law. In Medtronic v. Lohr, the Supreme Court (per Justice Stevens) severely constrained the scope of the federal preemption defense in the context of the federal medical device law. But the implications of the Medtronic decision for cases involving products in other regulatory categories remain …

The Remoteness That Betrays Desire, Kenneth Anderson

Kenneth Anderson