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Articles 1 - 11 of 11

Full-Text Articles in Law

Disruption And Deference, Olivier Sylvain Jan 2015

Disruption And Deference, Olivier Sylvain

Faculty Scholarship

Online video streaming applications enable users to watch over the-air broadcast programs at any time and almost on any device. As such, they challenge the pertinence of traditional video distribution law and the broadcast network system on which it is based. Congress enacted the Transmit Clause of the 1976 Copyright Act to resolve the high-stakes tussle between broadcasters and cable providers. But, today, that provision is ill-suited to resolving whether unauthorized streaming infringes on broadcasters’ copyright to perform works publicly. Its scope is ambiguous enough that judges across the country were notably divided on whether it reaches online video distribution—that …


Wireless Localism: Beyond The Shroud Of Objectivity In Federal Spectrum Administration, Olivier Sylvain Jan 2013

Wireless Localism: Beyond The Shroud Of Objectivity In Federal Spectrum Administration, Olivier Sylvain

Faculty Scholarship

Recent innovations in mobile wireless technology have instigated a debate between two camps of legal scholars about how policymakers should structure federal administration of the electromagnetic spectrum. The first argues that the Federal Communications Commission should define spectrum use rights more clearly and give spectrum licensees near fee-simple property rights in frequencies that they can use and sell in secondary markets as they wish. The second camp argues that, rather than award exclusive licenses to the highest bidder, the FCC ought to open much if not most of the spectrum to unlicensed use by smartphones and tablets equipped with the …


The Unenforceable Corrupt Contract: Corruption And Nineteenth Century Contract Law, Zephyr Teachout Jan 2011

The Unenforceable Corrupt Contract: Corruption And Nineteenth Century Contract Law, Zephyr Teachout

Faculty Scholarship

This paper explores the 19th century practice of courts refusing to enforce "corrupt" contracts as against public policy.


Gender And Nation-Building: Family Law As Legal Architecture Symposium - Nation Building: A Legal Architecture: Articles And Essays, Tracy E. Higgins, Rachel P. Fink Jan 2008

Gender And Nation-Building: Family Law As Legal Architecture Symposium - Nation Building: A Legal Architecture: Articles And Essays, Tracy E. Higgins, Rachel P. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Although the discipline of family law in the western legal tradition transcends the public/private law boundary in many ways, it is the argument of this Essay that family law, in the private law sense of defining the rights and obligations of members of a family, forms an important part of the legal architecture of nation-building in at least three ways. First, access to the resources of the nation-state devolves through biologically and culturally gendered national boundaries, both reflecting and reinforcing the differential status of men and women in the sphere of the family. Second, the social institution of the family …


Do You See What I See - Reflections On How Bias Infiltrates The New York City Family Court - The Case Of The Court Ordered Investigation, Leah A. Hill Jan 2007

Do You See What I See - Reflections On How Bias Infiltrates The New York City Family Court - The Case Of The Court Ordered Investigation, Leah A. Hill

Faculty Scholarship

That the Family Court is ill-equipped to address the needs of the hundreds of thousands of cases handled therein is not news. Exploding caseloads, complex problems, and minimal resources are just a few of the ingredients that combine to undermine the Court's ability to fulfill its promise. What has been given less attention until very recently is the extent to which the Family Court's failures disproportionately impact low-income families of color. Any analysis of the Court's impact or efficacy must consider the context I have described in my observations of the Court- the images of black and brown litigants hurrying …


Truth, Deterrence, And The Impeachment Exception , James L. Kainen Jan 2007

Truth, Deterrence, And The Impeachment Exception , James L. Kainen

Faculty Scholarship

James v. Illinois permits illegally-obtained evidence to impeach defendants, but not defense witnesses. Thus far, all courts have construed James to allow impeachment of defendants' hearsay declarations. This article argues against allowing illegally-obtained evidence to impeach defendants' hearsay declarations because doing so unduly diminishes the exclusionary rule's deterrent effect. The distinction between impeaching defendants and defense witnesses disappears when courts allow prosecutors to impeach defendants' hearsay declarations. Because defense witnesses report exculpatory conduct of a defendant who always has a substantial interest in disguising his criminality, their testimony routinely incorporates defendant hearsay. Defense witness testimony thus routinely paves the way …


Rational Recreation And The Law: The Transformation Of Popular Urban Leisure In Victorian England , Rachel Vorspan Jan 2000

Rational Recreation And The Law: The Transformation Of Popular Urban Leisure In Victorian England , Rachel Vorspan

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, Rachel Vorspan investigates the complex role played by the courts in the social and cultural transformation of Victorian England. Through focusing on judicial rulings in the recreational as well as political and industrial contexts she explains how the English judiciary played an important function in "rationalizing" the major institutions and practices of urban leisure


Freedom Of Assembly And The Right To Passage In Modern English Legal History , Rachel Vorspan Jan 1997

Freedom Of Assembly And The Right To Passage In Modern English Legal History , Rachel Vorspan

Faculty Scholarship

This Article suggests, on the broadest level, that the history of the "right to passage" in the past two centuries is explicable only in terms of the complex interaction between formal legal doctrine on the one hand and social and political pressures on the other. Specific challenges to public order significantly shaped the evolution of legal rules, but these rules, once established, constrained official action and compelled the authorities at critical junctures to develop countervailing strategies. This exploration confirms that neither an externalist nor internalist approach to legal history by itself adequately explains historical change and, moreover, that the relative …


Reflections On From Slaves To Citizens Bondage, Freedom And The Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship And Its Impact On Law And Legal Historiography, Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 1995

Reflections On From Slaves To Citizens Bondage, Freedom And The Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship And Its Impact On Law And Legal Historiography, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

The thesis of Professor Donald Nieman's paper, "From Slaves to Citizens: African-Americans, Rights Consciousness, and Reconstruction," is that the nation experienced a revolution in the United States Constitution and in the consciousness of African Americans. According to Professor Nieman, the Reconstruction Amendments represented "a dramatic departure from antebellum constitutional principles,"' because the Thirteenth Amendment reversed the pre-Civil War constitutional guarantee of slavery and "abolish[ed] slavery by federal authority." The Fourteenth Amendment rejected the Supreme Court's "racially-based definition of citizenship [in Dred Scott v. Sandford4], clearly establishing a color-blind citizenship” and the Fifteenth Amendment "wrote the principle of equality into the …


Common-Law Background Of Nineteenth-Century Tort Law, The , Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 1990

Common-Law Background Of Nineteenth-Century Tort Law, The , Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

A century ago Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., examined the history of negligence in search of a general theory of tort. He concluded that from the earliest times in England, the basis of tort liability was fault, or the failure to exercise due care. Liability for an injury to another arose whenever the defendant failed "to use such care as a prudent man would use under the circumstances.” A decade ago Morton J. Horwitz reexamined the history of negligence for the same purpose and concluded that negligence was not originally understood as carelessness or fault. Rather, negligence meant "neglect or failure …


Enforcement Provisions Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1866: A Legislative History In Light Of Runyon V. Mccrary, The Review Essay And Comments: Reconstructing Reconstruction, Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 1988

Enforcement Provisions Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1866: A Legislative History In Light Of Runyon V. Mccrary, The Review Essay And Comments: Reconstructing Reconstruction, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this Comment is to examine the history of the enactment and early enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 from the perspective of the remedies Congress sought to provide to meet the problems that necessitated the legislation. Its main foci are the statute's enforcement provisions and their early implementation, an aspect of the history of the statute that has not been fully considered in relation to section one, the provision that has received the most scholarly attention. The occasion of this study is the Supreme Court's reconsideration of Runyon v. McCrary' in Patterson v. McLean Credit …