Law Commons^™

The Fcc And The “Pre-Internet”, John Blevins

Indiana Law Journal

Network neutrality has dominated broadband policy debates for the past decade. While important, network neutrality overshadows other policy levers that are equally important to the goals of better, cheaper, and more open broadband service. This lack of perspective has historical precedent—and understanding this history can help refocus today’s policy debate. In the 1960s and 1970s, telephone companies threatened the growth of the nascent data industry. The FCC responded with a series of rulemakings known as the “Computer Inquiries” proceedings. In the literature, Computer Inquiries enjoys hallowed status as a key foundation of the Internet’s rise.

This Article, however, argues that …

“I Must Tell The Whole World”: Septimus Smith As Virginia Woolf’S Legal Messenger, Riley H. Floyd

Indiana Law Journal

This Note explores the disjunctive moral gap between a civilian ethic of mutual responsibility and the laws of war that eschew that ethic. To illustrate that gap, this Note conducts a case study of Virginia Woolf’s rendering of shell shock in her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. The war put mass, mechanized killing at center stage, and international law permitted killing in war. But Woolf’s character study of Septimus Smith reveals that whether war-associated killing is “criminal” requires more than legal analysis. An extralegal approach is especially meaningful because it demonstrates the difficulty of processing and rationalizing global conflict that plays …

Terra Firma As Open Seas: Interpreting Kiobel In The Failed State Context, Drew F. Waldbeser

Indiana Law Journal

This Note will ultimately argue that, despite the expansive language in Kiobel, the Court’s reasoning does not necessarily foreclose all “foreign-cubed” claims. Suits alleging human rights violations originating from conduct that took place in failed states avoid the concerns the Court emphasized in Kiobel. The Court should allow jurisdiction for human rights offenses in failed states, despite their “foreign-cubed” nature, because the already existing rationale for allowing jurisdiction for international piracy offenses is highly analogous.

Part I of this Note explores the ATS jurisprudence leading up to and including Kiobel. Besides exploring the tensions and policy interests courts are grappling …

Innovation Heuristics: Experiments On Sequential Creativity In Intellectual Property, Stefan Bechtold, Christopher Buccafusco, Christopher Jon Sprigman

Indiana Law Journal

All creativity and innovation build on existing ideas. Authors and inventors copy, adapt, improve, interpret, and refine the ideas that have come before them. The central task of intellectual property (IP) law is regulating this sequential innovation to ensure that initial creators and subsequent creators receive the appropriate sets of incentives. Although many scholars have applied the tools of economic analysis to consider whether IP law is successful in encouraging cumulative innovation, that work has rested on a set of untested assumptions about creators’ behavior. This Article reports four novel creativity experiments that begin to test those assumptions. In particular, …

The Prosser Myth Of Transferred Intent, Peter B. Kutner

Indiana Law Journal

The main theme of this Article is that Prosser advanced a mythical doctrine of transferred intent. What Prosser asserted to be the law was not the law when he wrote his article on transferred intent and amended his treatise. The cases he relied on to support his conclusions on transferred intent did not support them. Moreover, despite Prosser’s great influence on American tort law, Prosser’s position on transferred intent is not the law now and should not be. Its consequences are undesirable. Recognition of transferred intent as a basis of liability is due primarily to its inclusion in the First …

Title Ix, Sexual Assault, And The Issue Of Effective Consent: Blurred Lines—When Should “Yes” Mean “No”?, Lori E. Shaw

Indiana Law Journal

This Article is intended to set the process in motion by providing the DOE and the educational institutions governed by Title IX with a proposed standard for “effective consent.” Part I provides an overview of the realities of campus life in the 2010s, delving into the root causes of sexual assault and other forms of unwanted sexual contact. Sexual hookups and binge drinking, two aspects of campus life inextricably linked to one another and to unwanted sexual contact, are explored in depth.

Part II presents an overview of the traditional role, structures, and processes of the student-conduct system. It then …

University Ip: The University As Coordinator Of The Team Production Process, Samuel Estreicher, Kristina A. Yost

Indiana Law Journal

This Article focuses on intellectual property (IP) issues in the university setting. Often, universities require faculty who have been hired in whole or in part to invent to assign inventions created within the scope of their employment to the university. In addition, the most effective way to secure compliance with the Bayh-Dole Act, which deals with ownership of inventions involving federally funded research, is for the university to take title to such inventions. Failure to specify who has title can result in title passing to the government. Once the university asserts ownership, it then decides whether to process a patent …

Does Rigorously Enforcing Arbitration Agreements Promote “Autonomy”?, Hiro N. Aragaki

Indiana Law Journal

In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has helped transform arbitration law into a radical private-ordering regime in which freedom of contract has come to eclipse public regulation. Arbitration jurisprudence justifies this transformation in part on a profound and longstanding commitment to the ideal of individual autonomy, understood as the freedom—lacking in litigation—to select a disputing process best suited to one’s needs.

In this Article, I question the cogency of this justification. I argue, first, that autonomy has had different and sometimes conflicting meanings even within arbitration jurisprudence. Second, depending on the meaning one ascribes to autonomy, it is at …

The Two Faces Of The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Emily Berman

Indiana Law Journal

When former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked a massive trove of information about secret intelligence-collection programs implemented under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in the summer of 2013, U.S. surveillance activities were thrust to the forefront of public debate. This debate included the question of whether and how to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (“FISA Court”), the statutorily created secret court that reviews government applications to conduct surveillance in the United States. This discussion, however, has underemphasized a critical feature of the way the FISA Court works. As this Article will show, since the terrorist attacks of …

The Sons Of Indiana: Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity And The Fight For Civil Rights, Gregory S. Parks, Wendy Marie Laybourn

Indiana Law Journal

The common narrative about African Americans’ quest for social justice and civil rights during the twentieth century consists, largely, of men and women working through organizations to bring about change. The typical list of organizations includes, inter alia, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. What are almost never included in this list are African American collegiate-based fraternities. However, at the turn of the twentieth century, a small group of organizations emerged founded on personal excellence, the development and sustainment of fictive-kinship ties, …

A Welfarist Perspective On Lies, Ariel Porat, Omri Yadlin

Indiana Law Journal

Should a Muslim employee who, in order to avoid discrimination, falsely stated in his job interview that he is Christian be fired for his dishonesty? Should a buyer of a tract of land who, before contracting, conducted an expensive investigation that revealed a high likelihood of mineral deposits be subject to liability for fraud because he told the seller he knew nothing about the land’s mineral potential before purchase? Is a doctor violating her legal duties toward her patient if she convinces him to get vaccinated on the pretext that it is in his best interest when it is instead …

Taking The Oceanfront Lot, Josh Eagle

Indiana Law Journal

Oceanfront landowners and states share a property boundary that runs between the wet and dry parts of the shore. This legal coastline is different from an ordinary land boundary. First, on sandy beaches, the line is constantly in flux, and it cannot be marked except momentarily. Without the help of a surveyor and a court, neither the landowner nor a citizen walking down the beach has the ability to know exactly where the line lies. This uncertainty means that, as a practical matter, ownership of some part of the beach is effectively shared. Second, the common law establishes that the …

Absolute Conflicts Of Law, Anthony J. Colangelo

Indiana Law Journal

This Article coins the term “absolute conflicts of law” to describe situations of overlapping laws from different states that contain simultaneous contradictory commands. It argues that absolute conflicts are a unique legal phenomenon in need of a unique doctrine. The Article extensively explores what absolute conflicts are; how they qualitatively differ from other doctrines like true conflicts of law, act of state, and comity; and classifies absolute conflicts’ myriad doctrinal manifestations through a taxonomy that categorizes absolute conflicts as procedural, substantive, mixed, horizontal, and vertical.

The Article then proposes solutions to absolute conflicts that center on the rule of law …

Congress, Tribal Recognition, And Legislative-Administrative Multiplicity, Kirsten Matoy Carlson

Indiana Law Journal

Most descriptions of federal recognition by political scientists, anthropologists, and legal scholars focus on an administrative process run by the Office of Federal Acknowledgment (OFA) within the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). To the extent that scholars discuss the role of Congress in recognizing Indian nations, they suggest that it plays a diminishing one. In fact, this misconception pervades the field. Most scholars assume that Congress has largely ceded control over the recognition of Indian nations to the BIA.

This discrepancy begs the question: Who has it right? Hollywood screenwriters or the academic experts? The answer to this question matters …

Standing For (And Up To) Separation Of Powers, Kent H. Barnett

Indiana Law Journal

The U.S. Constitution requires federal agencies to comply with separation-of-powers (or structural) safeguards, such as by obtaining valid appointments, exercising certain limited powers, and being sufficiently subject to the President’s control. Who can best protect these safeguards? A growing number of scholars would allow only the political branches—Congress and the President—to defend them. These scholars would limit or end judicial review because private judicial challenges are aberrant to justiciability doctrine and lead courts to meddle in minor matters that rarely affect regulatory outcomes.

This Article defends the right of private parties to assert justiciable structural causes of action, arguing that …

The Right To Attention, Jasper L. Tran

Indiana Law Journal

What marketing, contracts, and healthcare—specifically informed consent and mandatory ultrasounds—have in common is the right to attention from the information receiver. However, scholarship most often focuses on the communicator’s perspective (e.g., how much information the communicator discloses) or on the information itself, but surprisingly, not much on the receiver’s perspective.

This dearth of scholarship from the information receiver’s perspective is problematic, because the information receiver is often the “little guy” in the conversation. We own and are entitled to our attention because attention is a property right and part of our individual dignity. Yet advertisement companies and scam artists freely …

Identifying Criminals’ Risk Preferences, Murat C. Mungan, Jonathan Klick

Indiana Law Journal

There is a 250-year-old presumption in the criminology and law enforcement literature that people are deterred more by increases in the certainty rather than increases in the severity of legal sanctions. We call this presumption the Certainty Aversion Presumption (CAP). Simple criminal decision-making models suggest that criminals must be risk seeking if they behave consistently with CAP. This implication leads to disturbing interpretations, such as criminals being categorically different from law-abiding people, who often display risk-averse behavior while making financial decisions. Moreover, policy discussions that incorrectly rely on criminals’ risk attitudes implied by CAP are ill informed, and may therefore …

Silencing Grand Jury Witnesses, R. Michael Cassidy

Indiana Law Journal

This Article addresses one crucial aspect of the ongoing debate about grand jury transparency. Assuming that well over half the states and the federal government continue to employ the grand jury to investigate felony offenses, and assuming that these proceedings continue to be shielded from public view, should witnesses themselves be allowed to discuss their testimony with the press or with each other? This larger question raises two narrow but very important subsidiary issues. First, does a prosecutor who conditions a written proffer or cooperation agreement with a grand jury witness on the witness’s promise not to inform other targets, …

The Merits Of Tax Competition In A Globalized Economy, David Elkins

Indiana Law Journal

Since the turn of the current century, leading transnational organizations and academic scholarship have identified tax competition among countries as one of the scourges of the international tax regime. Both the EU and the OECD have warned that tax competition erodes the tax bases of Member States and impedes their ability to provide essential services. Commentators have argued that unrestrained competition is driving tax rates on mobile sources of income to (or close to) zero, a process that jeopardizes the very existence of the welfare state, exacerbates problems of global poverty, and deprives developing countries of funds that they desperately …

Collapsing Illusions: Standards For Setting Efficient Contract And Other Defaults, Steven J. Burton

Indiana Law Journal

In this Essay, Professor Burton analyzes and evaluates four commonly used standards for setting efficient default rules and standards. Based on two theoretical insights, he shows that three of them collapse upon analysis into the fourth, a Coasian standard that turns out to be a dead end. The theoretical upshot is that the Coase Theorem often is a good reason to use defaults rather than mandatory rules or standards. But neither the theorem nor reference to a transaction-costless world sustains particular defaults. To set an efficient default, the law should guide courts toward supplying terms that parties should have adopted …

Children Once, Not Forever: Harper Lee’S Go Set A Watchman And Growing Up, Allen Mendenhall

Indiana Law Journal

The narratives of Jean Louise in To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman are as consistent as lived experience, which is marked by disruption and contingency, ambiguity and rupture, fragmentation and complexity. Only the careless would have accepted Jean Louise and Atticus as one-dimensional, self-contained figures unspoiled by the mores, customs, and vocabularies of their white discursive community. Such a sanitized view of Jean Louise and Atticus erases and rewrites rather than represents history in its disturbing, enlightening variety and complexity. Jean Louise and Atticus are not stock character types; their thoughts and behaviors are irreducible and inexhaustible.

The Double-Edged Sword Of Health Care Integration: Consolidation And Cost Control, Erin C. Fuse Brown, Jaime S. King

Indiana Law Journal

The average family of four in the United States spends $25,826 per year on health care. American health care costs so much because we both overuse and overpay for health care goods and services. The Affordable Care Act’s cost control policies focus on curbing overutilization by encouraging health care providers to integrate to pro-mote efficiency and eliminate waste, but the cost control policies largely ignore prices. This article examines this overlooked half of health care cost control policy: rising prices and the policy levers held by the states to address them. We challenge the conventional wisdom that reducing overutilization through …

Beyond Transparency: The Semantics Of Rulemaking For An Open Internet, Reza Rajabiun

Indiana Law Journal

In trying to promote the development of an open Internet, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has primarily tried to encourage network providers to be transparent about their traffic management practices and quality of service prioritization policies. Dominant network operators have successfully challenged this minimalist approach to addressing end-user concerns about the rise of a two-tiered Internet, motivating the FCC to engage in yet another public consultation process to assess its future approach to the problem. This article maps the debate using Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools that allow us to build a systematic picture of the positions of the …

Parents Involved And The Struggle For Historical Memory­, Mark Tushnet

Indiana Law Journal

In his Jerome Hall Lecture, Professor Tushnet addresses the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education in the more recent case of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1 (PICS), which struck down the voluntary school integration programs used in Seattle and Louisville. As Chief Justice Roberts wrote, an important “debate” in the PICS case was over “which side is more faithful to the heritage” of Brown v. Board of Education. That debate is part of what historians have called the struggle for historical memory. The politics of memory in PICS is not simply a struggle …

Indiana’S Texting-While-Driving Ban: Why Is It Not Working And How Could It Be Better?, Emma Gormley

Indiana Law Journal

This Note will identify and examine obstacles standing in the way of more effective enforcement of Indiana’s texting while driving ban and make recommendations on how to achieve greater success. Part I will take a closer look at what makes texting while driving so dangerous, situating it within the larger context of distracted driving. Part II will then focus on Indiana’s legislative response in particular, breaking down the texting-while-driving laws and discussing impediments to widespread and consistent enforcement. Part III explores alternative strategies for combating those impediments to enforcement, drawing from the approaches of other areas of law and extralegal …

It Saves To Be Healthy: Using The Tax Code To Incentivize Employer-Provided Wellness Benefits, Hilary R. Shepherd

Indiana Law Journal

With lifestyle-related disease on the rise and an increasing number of employers being held responsible for providing health insurance to their employees, we as a society have incentives to promote wellness, even if only to cut health care costs. Part I of this Note outlines a brief history of employer-provided wellness benefits and provides a concise summary of the employer-provided wellness benefits available. Part II analyzes the relevant federal income tax law, specifically, the fringe benefits provision of the Internal Revenue Code, and concludes that under existing tax law, on-premises gym facilities do not yield any taxable income to employees, …

Wiggle Room: Problems And Virtues Of The Inwood Standard, Rian C. Dawson

Indiana Law Journal

This Note investigates the origins of Inwood that led to the slim opinion with wide influence. It argues that the very vagueness for which scholars and practitioners have decried Inwood is the case's greatest virtue: Inwood provides a flexible standard that has allowed the common law to evolve and address new business models. Part I discusses the origins of contributory infringement in intellectual property. Part II investigates the Inwood case and the climate of trademark law at the time Inwood was litigated. It also dissects the majority opinion and Justice White's concurrance. Part III examines the Inwood standard's evolution at …

Ranking Law Schools With Lsats, Employment Outcomes, And Law Review Citations, Alfred L. Brophy

Indiana Law Journal

This Article offers an alternative to the much-discussed U.S. News & World Report rankings. Where U.S. News rankings are affected by a wide variety of factors —some of which are criticized as irrelevant to what prospective students care about or should care about—this Article looks to three variables: the median LSAT score of entering students, which seeks to capture the quality of the student body; the percentage of the graduating students who are employed at nine months following graduation at full-time, permanent, JD-required jobs (a separate analysis excludes school-funded positions and solo practitioners from this variable); and the number of …

The Eighth Amendment’S Lost Jurors: Death Qualification And Evolving Standards Of Decency, Aliza Plener Cover

Indiana Law Journal

The Supreme Court’s inquiry into the constitutionality of the death penalty has over-looked a critical “objective indicator” of society’s “evolving standards of decency”: the rate at which citizens are excluded from capital jury service under Witherspoon v. Illinois due to their conscientious objections to the death penalty. While the Supreme Court considers the prevalence of death verdicts as a gauge of the nation’s moral climate, it has ignored how the process of death qualification shapes those verdicts. This blind spot biases the Court’s estimation of community norms and dis-torts its Eighth Amendment analysis.

This Article presents a quantitative study of …

Rfras And Reasonableness, Steve Sanders

Indiana Law Journal

The organized opponents of legal and social equality for gays and lesbians, particularly the foes of marriage for same-sex couples, have coalesced in recent years around the rallying cry of "religious liberty." In 2015, the conflict between LGBT rights and religious liberty intensified as legislators in seventeen states considered adopting Religious Freedom Restoration Acts (RFRAs). Most of the national attention focused on Indiana, where legislators adopted a RFRA under pressure from religious conservatives, only to later amend it under pressure from business and civic leaders over concerns that the law sent a message endorsing anti-gay discrimination.

RFRAs, which typically require …