Law Commons^™

Privacy Losses As Wrongful Gains, Bernard Chao

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Perhaps nowhere has the pace of technology placed more pressure on the law than in the area of data privacy. Huge data breaches fill our headlines. Companies often violate their own privacy policies by selling customer data, or by using the information in ways that fall outside their policy. Yet, even when there is indisputable misconduct, the law generally does not hold these companies accountable. That is because traditional legal claims are poorly suited for handling privacy losses.

Contract claims fail when privacy policies are not considered contractual obligations. Misrepresentation claims cannot succeed when customers never read and rely on …

Testing The White Hat Effect In Patent Litigation, Bernard Chao, Roderick O’Dorisio

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Ideally, juries assess cases on the evidence presented at trial. To the extent that they are unrelated to the merits, the identities of the parties or their individual stories should not matter. But jurors are human, and both academics and practicing lawyers have long believed that how parties frame their cases to the jury can influence outcomes.' We examine two such frames common to patent law. First, we look at whether accused infringers can improve their chances of prevailing by being the aggressor. Prior studies have observed that accused infringers that file declaratory judgment actions to vindicate their rights win …

Time Is Money: An Empirical Assessment Of Non-Economic Damages Arguments, John Campbell, Bernard Chao, Christopher Robertson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Non-economic damages (pain and suffering) are the most significant and variable components of liability. Our survey of fifty-one U.S. jurisdictions shows wide heterogeneity in whether attorneys may quantify damages as time-units of suffering (per diem) or demand a specific amount (lump sum). Either sort of large number could exploit an irrational anchoring effect. We performed a realistic, online, video-based experiment with 732 human subjects. We replicated prior work showing that large lump sum demands drive larger jury verdicts, but surprisingly found no effect of similarly-sized per diem anchors. We did find per diem effects on binary liability outcomes, and thus …

Countering The Plaintiff’S Anchor: Jury Simulations To Evaluate Damages Arguments, John Campbell, Bernard Chao, Christopher Robertson, David Yokum

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Numerous studies have shown that the amount of a juror's damages decision is strongly affected by the number suggested by the plaintiffs attorney, independent of the strength of the actual evidence (a psychological effect known as "anchoring"). For scholars and policymakers, this behavior is worrisome for the legitimacy and accuracy of jury decisions, especially in the domain of non-economic damages (e.g., pain and suffering). One noted paper even concluded that "the more you ask for, the more you get. " Others believe that the damage demand must pass the "straight-face" test because outlandishly high demands will diminish credibility and risk …

Causation And Harm In A Multicomponent World, Bernard Chao

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

On September 17, 2015, the Federal Circuit issued another decision in the epic Apple v. Samsung smartphone war. This was the fourth court decision in the ongoing saga to deal with injunctions. Apple IV explained the level of proof necessary to satisfy the "causal nexus" requirement. This requirement had emerged as a response to patent litigations involving products with thousands of features, the vast majority of which are unrelated to the asserted patent. To prove a causal nexus, patentees seeking an injunction have to do more than just show that the infringing product caused the patentee irreparable harm. The harm …

The Infringement Continuum, Bernard Chao

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

For many years, patent law has struggled with the issue of permissible claim scope. A patent’s specification and its claims often suffer from a surprising disconnect. The specification generally describes an invention in terms of one or more specific implementations, suggesting a relatively narrow invention. But claims are drafted far more broadly. They frequently encompass unforeseen variations and even cover after-arising technology.

Although there are numerous existing doctrines that try to prevent claims from straying too far from their specification, these doctrines offer binary outcomes ill suited for patent law. Under these doctrines, as a claim encompasses subject matter further …

Ubi Jus, Ibi Remedium, Steven M. Schneebaum

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Justice Across Borders: The Struggle for Human Rights in U.S. Courts. By Jeffrey Davis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 320 pp.

Pretrial Publicity In Criminal Cases Of National Notoriety: Constructing A Remedy For The Remediless Wrong, Robert M. Hardaway, Douglas B. Tumminello

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Part I of this Article examines the history of pretrial publicity in American courts and explores the values that the Sixth Amendment seeks to protect. Part II criticizes the Supreme Court's current approach to the pretrial publicity problem. Part III analyzes case studies of nationally notorious trials. Part IV explores remedial measures reasonably calculated to nullify the effects of prejudicial publicity and cases in which a trial judge's omission of those measures constitutes reversible error. Finally, this Article concludes by setting forth a proposed standard that should be applied in order to ensure the defendant's right to a fair trial …

The Economics Of Discrimination: The Three Fallacies Of Croson, Martin J. Katz

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

In Part I, this Note examines the effects of discrimination in the marketplace to suggest a connection between current racial disparities" and past "no-fault" discrimination. Part II demonstrates why race-neutral policies are likely to prove ineffective for reducing these disparities. Finally, Part III argues that competitive, race-conscious affirmative action is unlikely to create a "moral hazard" and that the burden placed on nonminorities by such a program is justifiable.