Law Commons^™

One Size Does Not Fit All: A Framework For Tailoring Intellectual Property Rights, Michael W. Carroll

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The United States and its trading partners have adopted cultural and innovation policies under which the government grants one-size-fits-all patents and copyrights to inventors and authors. On a global basis, the reasons for doing so vary, but in the United States granting intellectual property rights has been justified as the principal means of promoting innovation and cultural progress. Until recently, however, few have questioned the wisdom of using such blunt policy instruments to promote progress in a wide range of industries in which the economics of innovation varies considerably.

Provisionally accepting the assumptions of the traditional economic case for intellectual …

Boumediene’S Quiet Theory: Access To Courts And The Separation Of Powers., Stephen I. Vladeck

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At the core of Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in Boumediene v. Bush are his repeated suggestions that habeas corpus is an integral aspect of the separation of powers, and that, as such, the writ remains relevant even when the individual rights of those who would seek its protections are unclear. And whereas some might view these passages as little more than rhetorical flourishes, it is difficult to understand the crux of Kennedy's analysis - of why the review available to the Guantanamo detainees failed to provide an adequate alternative to habeas corpus - without understanding the significance of his separation-of-powers …

Sexual Politics And Social Change, Darren L. Hutchinson

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The Article examines the impact of social movement activity upon the advancement of GLBT rights. It analyzes the state and local strategy that GLBT social movements utilized to alter the legal status of sexual orientation and sexuality following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick. Successful advocacy before state and local courts, human rights commissions, and legislatures fundamentally shifted public opinion and laws regarding sexual orientation and sexuality between Bowers and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas. This altered landscape created the “political opportunity” for the Lawrence ruling and made the opinion relatively “safe.”

Currently, GLBT rights …

Managing The Unmanageable: A Brief Accounting Of A Special Master’S Thirty Years Of Experience In Complex Litigation, Paul Rice

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Managing an efficient, but fair, pretrial process in a large and complex case has always been a challenge. With the advent of electronic communications and the corresponding explosion of privilege claims, this challenge has become significantly more difficult. Indeed, it is not uncommon for corporate parties to assert tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of privilege claims. Furthermore, the resolution of these privilege questions is often compounded by difficult choice of law questions that can have the result of different substantive principles being applied to identical discovery demands originating in different jurisdictions. Additionally, before addressing the increasingly voluminous …

Memorial To Barbara Ringer, Peter Jaszi

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The story goes that in 439 BC the retired consul Cincinnatus was summoned from the plow by the Senate and people of Rome. One more time, he saw the Republic through a time of particular peril, resigning office immediately afterwards to return to his rural retirement - to be transmuted into a timeless emblem of selfless probity. Episodes of this kind are even rarer in the annals of the U.S. civil service than in the Roman history. But I had the good fortune to be a witness to one such - Barbara Ringer's return to the Library of Congress in …

Alternative Software Protection In View Of In Re Bilski, Charles Duan, Lauren Katzenellenbogen, James Skelley

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The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's (CAFC) en banc decision, In re Bilski, redefined the standard for patenting processes including business methods and computer software. In Bilski, the Federal Circuit departed from the "useful, concrete, and tangible result" test it had established in State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. SignatureFinancialGroup,Inc., which had been the standard for the past ten years. The Federal Circuit returned to a test articulated nearly 40 years ago by the Supreme Court in Gottschalk v. Benson, and clarified that State Street was "never intended to supplant the Supreme Court's test.", Under …

Development And Outcomes Of Investment Treaty Arbitration, Susan Franck

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The legitimacy of investment treaty arbitration is a matter of heated debate. Asserting that arbitration is unfairly tilted toward the developed world, some countries have withdrawn from World Bank dispute resolution bodies or are taking steps to eliminate arbitration. In order to assess whether investment arbitration is the equivalent of tossing a two-headed coin to resolve investment disputes, this article explores the role of development status in arbitration outcome. It first presents descriptive, quantitative research about the developmental background of the presiding arbitrators who exert particular control over the arbitration process. The article then assesses how (1) the development status …

Financial Crisis Containment, Anna Gelpern

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This Article maps financial crisis containment - extraordinary measures to stop the spread of financial distress - as a category of legal and policy choice. I make three claims.

First, containment is distinct from financial regulation, crisis prevention and resolution. Containment is brief; it targets the immediate term. It involves claims of emergency, rule-breaking, time inconsistency and moral hazard. In contrast, regulation, prevention and resolution seek to establish sound incentives for the long term. Second, containment decisions deviate from non-crisis norms in predictable ways, and are consistent across diverse countries and crises. Containment invariably entails three kinds of choices: choices …

The Rise Of International Criminal Law: Intended And Unintended Consequences, Kenneth Anderson

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The rise of international criminal law has been one of the remarkable features of international law since 1990. One of the less-explored questions of international criminal law is its social effects, within the international community and the community of public international law, in other parts and activities of international law. In particular, what are the effects of the rise of international criminal law and its emerging system of tribunals on the rest of the laws of armed conflict? What are the effects upon apparently unrelated aspects of humanitarian and human rights law? What are the effects upon other large systems …

Aedpa, Saucier, And The Stronger Case For Rights-First Constitutional Adjudication, Stephen I. Vladeck

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As part of a symposium on new affirmative visions of the judicial role, this essay takes on the Supreme Court's increasing unwillingness to resolve constitutional questions in post-conviction habeas cases under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), as seen in decisions such as Wright v. Van Patten, 128 S. Ct. 743 (2008). In most cases in which AEDPA applies, a petitioner is only eligible for relief if a state court's constitutional error was unreasonable based on prior Supreme Court decisions (and not dicta). As a result, the Court has repeatedly concluded that a state court did …

Understanding The Federal Tort Claims Act: A Different Metaphor, Paul F. Figley

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When it enacted the Federal Tort Claims Act Congress waived the United States’ sovereign immunity for certain torts of the federal government. That waiver is subject to exclusions, exceptions, and limitations that may seem puzzling or counterintuitive. This essay explains the structure and operation of the Federal Tort Claims Act by comparing it to “a traversable bridge across the moat of sovereign immunity” (a metaphor used by Judge Max Rosenn in a slightly different context). The essay examines why Congress enacted the FTCA, the jurisdictional grant that allows some tort claims but not others, the pre-requisites to bringing suit, the …

This Field Is Our Field: Foreign Players, Domestic Leagues, And The Unlawful Racial Manipulation Of American Sport, N. Jeremi Duru

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Sport is a potent unifying force and a potentially powerful tool in bridging societal divides. As such, the increasing frequency of professional athletes leaving their home nations and continents to access employment opportunities abroad portends positively for greater cultural understanding in our global community. This paper argues, however, that in America’s professional sporting context, internationalization of sport plays an additional, unsavory, role – it serves as a means of manipulating leagues’ racial compositions. Studies conducted during the past twenty years reveal that spectators at professional American sporting contests – a substantial majority of whom are Caucasian – exhibit preferences for …

A New System Of Preventative Detention - Let's Take A Deep Breath, Jennifer Daskal

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Some have argued that the detention center at Guantanamo Bay cannot be closed until the U.S. passes new preventive detention laws that would allow it to detain those who cannot be tried but are considered too dangerous to release. This article rejects these claims, concluding that the existing criminal justice system can adequately deal with those who the U.S. should be seeking to detain. The article also warns of the costs of trying to set up an entirely new system of detention without charge. The article cautions that such a system will negate many of the reputational gains associated with …

International Climate Negotiations: Opportunities And Challenges For The Obama Administration, David Hunter

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This article is a discussion of the international dimensions of climate change policy facing the newly-elected Obama Administration, focusing on the Kyoto Protocol and subsequent Bali Road Map and Bali Action Plan. The Bali Action Plan set out a framework for negotiating a post-Kyoto agreement with binding commitments on all parties. The agreement is due to be finalized at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009, leaving the Obama Administration less than a year to shape its international climate policy and promote that policy effectively in the international negotiations.

The article addresses …

The Right Remedy For The Wrongly Convicted: Judicial Sanctions For Destruction Of Dna Evidence, Cynthia E. Jones

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Many state innocence protection statutes give courts the power to impose appropriate sanctions when biological evidence needed for postconviction DNA testing is wrongly destroyed by the government. Constitutional claims based on wrongful evidence destruction are governed by the virtually insurmountable "bad faith" standard articulated in Arizona v. Youngblood. The wrongful destruction of DNA evidence in contravention of state innocence protection laws, however, should be governed by the standards used to adjudicate other "access to evidence" violations in criminal cases, including disclosures mandated by the rules of criminal procedure, the Jencks Act, and Brady v. Maryland. Under the "access to evidence" …

The Appropriations Power And Sovereign Immunity, Paul F. Figley

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Discussions of sovereign immunity assume that the Constitution contains no explicit text regarding sovereign immunity. As a result, arguments about the existence - or nonexistence - of sovereign immunity begin with the English and American common-law doctrines. Exploring political, fiscal, and legal developments in England and the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this Article shows that focusing on common-law developments is misguided. The common-law approach to sovereign immunity ended in the early 1700s. The Bankers’ Case (1690–1700), which is often regarded as the first modern common-law treatment of sovereign immunity, is in fact the last in the …

Article 124, War Crimes, And The Development Of The Rome Statute, Shana Tabak

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No abstract provided.

Promises Of Accession: Reassessing The Trade Relationship Between Turkey And The European Union, Fernanda G. Nicola

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This Article reassesses the Turkey-European Union trade relationship in light of the doctrine of promissory estoppel. It argues that the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Yedaş Tarim should have used more explicitly the doctrine of promissory estoppel as an equitable device to create liability for the potential detriment suffered by Turkey in relying on the promises made by Brussels. Through an overview of Turkey-European Union (E.U.) relations from the early 1950s until today, with particular attention to accession negotiations and the trade relationship between Turkey and the European Economic Community, this Article highlights the anomalous trade context that characterizes …

Toward A Broadband Public Interest Standard, Anthony E. Varona

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Although they emerged seven decades apart, commercial broadcasting and the Internet were greeted with similar excited declarations of their potential to transform American democracy by hosting an electronic free marketplace of ideas that would inform and enlighten citizens and catalyze discussion on issues of public importance. The federal government played a central role in the initial development and proliferation of both technologies, but then assumed very different regulatory orientations to the two industries once they were commercialized. In broadcasting, the government took on an interventionist posture promoting civic republican First Amendment values by means of a variety of public interest …

Multiple Families, Multiple Goals, Multiple Failures: The Need For “Limited Equalization” As A Theory Of Child Support, Adrienne Jennings Lockie

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Current child support laws are based on flawed assumptions about families that fail to reflect family complexity and the realities of parenting. Further, there has been little reevaluation of the stated goals of child support law since they were first implemented thirty years ago. The stated goals — fiscal savings, children’s economic well-being, and parental involvement — have not been achieved and are increasingly unlikely to be achieved because they ignore the way that children in multiple families — families in which at least one parent has had another child with a different partner —compete for the limited resources of …

Climate Change, Corporate Strategy, And Corporate Law Duties, Perry E. Wallace

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Although greenhouse-gas management now ranks among the world’s great challenges, this status did not obtain instantly—or easily. Today, however, reservations about the validity of global warming as a major threat are fading. They are fading, appropriately, as rapidly as some ice sheets and glaciers are melting. Indeed, the steady flow of new, compelling evidence joins an already considerable base of scientific, economic, and other certainties about the subject.

The result of this evolution in climate-change certainty has been major change of global dimensions. In notable ways, the structures and the functions of governmental, economic, and social institutions around the world …

Offspring And Bodies: Dependency And Vulnerability In The Constitutional Jurisprudence Of Reproductive Rights, Ann Shalleck

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In this article, the author responds to Sherry Colb’s argument in "To Whom Do We Refer When We Speak of Obligations to “Future Generations”? Reproductive Rights and the Intergenerational Community," (77 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 1582 (2009)). Colb offered a new way to consider reproductive rights by delineating two distinct and not always overlapping interests at stake in giving meaning to and shaping the contours of the rights implicated in reproductive decisions. Through differentiating interests in bodily integrity and offspring selection, Colb disentangled underlying justifications for legal advocacy and judicial decisions and offered an interpretive frame through which to consider …

The Limits Of Advocacy, Amanda Frost

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Party control over case presentation is regularly cited as a defining characteristic of the American adversarial system. Accordingly, American judges are strongly discouraged from engaging in so-called “issue creation”—that is, raising legal claims and arguments that the parties have overlooked or ignored—on the ground that doing so is antithetical to an adversarial legal culture that values litigant autonomy and prohibits agenda setting by judges. And yet, despite the rhetoric, federal judges regularly inject new legal issues into ongoing cases. Landmark Supreme Court decisions such as Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938), and Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. …

Experiential Education And The Rule Of Law: Teaching Values Through Clinical Education In China, Elliott Milstein

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The author summarizes his discussions with Chinese law professors regarding the issues that separate American from Chinese attitudes in creating clinical legal education. The author observes that the baseline orientation of American lawyers to turn to the courts for redress is usually not the same for the Chinese, where bribery of judges is accepted. He also notes that in addition to teaching practical skills such as client interviewing and persuasive advocacy, American clinicians devote attention to value questions, such as client-centeredness, the demands and limits of zealous advocacy, and the commitment to bring about social justice. The inclusion of these …

Debunking The Myth Of Civil Rights Liberalism: Visions Of Racial Justice In The Thought Of T. Thomas Fortune, 1880-1890 Symposium: The Lawyer's Role In A Contemporary Democracy: Promoting Social Change And Political Values, Susan Carle

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This essay addresses the development of American understandings of the various roles of lawyers in building democracy by focusing on legal reform efforts in the American civil rights movement. In recent years, the supposed achievements of that movement have come under attack as part of a critique of the ideology of legal liberalism. That critique argues that civil rights lawyers and other activists too greatly emphasized court-focused strategies aimed at achieving what would turn out to be Pyrrhic "civil" rights victories-i.e., gains solely in "formal" equality through requirements enshrined in law as to how the state must treat its citizens.

The Inter-American System And Its Evolution, Claudio Grossman

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The American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man (hereinafter: American Declaration) and the American Convention on Human Rights (hereinafter: American Convention), are the two most important instruments of the Inter-American system for the protection and promotion of human rights. Supervision of compliance is carried out by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (hereinafter: the Commission) and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (hereinafter: the Court). The Commission fulfills its functions primarily through country reports analyzing the overall human rights situation in a country and through decisions on individual petitions presented by individuals who complain that their internationally protected …

When Human Experimentation Is Criminal, Song Richardson

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Medical researchers engaged in human experimentation commit criminal acts seemingly without consequence. Whereas other actors who violate bodily integrity and autonomy are routinely penalized with convictions for assault, fraud, and homicide, researchers escape criminal punishment. This Article begins to scrutinize this undercriminalization phenomenon and provides a framework for understanding why researchers are not prosecuted for their crimes. It argues that their exalted social status, combined with the perceived social benefit of their research, immunizes them from use of the criminal sanction. Whether these constitute sufficient grounds to give researchers a pass from punishment is a significant question because the state's …

Writer's Block - Resolve To Become A Better Writer, David Spratt

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No abstract provided.

Why Punctuation Matters; Part One, David Spratt

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No abstract provided.

Never Too Late To Go Home Again, David Spratt

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No abstract provided.