Law Commons^™

Income Tax Treaty Arbitration, William W. Park

Faculty Scholarship

Notwithstanding similar fiscal objectives, countries that conclude income tax treaties often arrive at radically different results when treaty language is applied to a practical problem. The task of resolving disagreement on treaty interpretation falls either to national courts or to joint efforts by the tax administrations to work out differences on a voluntary basis. Neither alternative is satisfactory. Judicial proceedings lack political neutrality and yield inconsistent results. And the process for "mutual agreement" among competent fiscal authorities is fraught with delays and uncertainty.

Authors, Publishers And Public Goods: Trading Gold For Dross, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

The article seeks to clarify what is at stake - and what is not - in the litigation challenging the constitutional validity of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). First, the article distinguishes between the CTEA's retrospective term extension of copyright term and the retrospective extensions enacted by prior Congresses. The article suggests that the CTEA provisions are constitutionally questionable in ways that earlier retrospective extensions may not have been. To hold the CTEA unconstitutional would not make all other term extensions vulnerable.

Second, the article shows how non-creative physical activities such as digitization and film preservation have …

Patent Settlement Agreements: Preliminary Views, Joseph F. Brodley, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Faculty Scholarship

Settlements between S competitors in patent cases raise important and sensitive antitrust issues. Patent settlement agreements may create or maintain a monopoly in technology or innovation markets and may also effectuate a monopoly or cartel in related goods markets. Indeed, absent the patent rights, certain terms of patent settlement agreements may be per se antitrust violations. Further, anticompetitive patent settlements-unlike most antitrust conspiracies-are enforceable in court, providing the parties with an effective means of preventing the cheating that is the bane of cartels. Thus, the antitrust risk that a settlement agreement may operate as a disguised cartel has long been …

The Magic Lantern Revealed: A Report Of The Fbi's New Key Logging Trojan And Analysis Of Its Possible Treatment In A Dynamic Legal Landscape, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Magic Lantern presents several difficult legal questions that are left unanswered due to new or non-existent statutes and case law directly pertaining to the unique situation that Magic Lantern creates. ²⁵ The first concern is statutory. It is unclear what laws, if any, will apply when Magic Lantern is put into use.²⁶ The recent terrorist attacks in the United States have brought the need for information as a matter of national security to the forefront. Congress recently passed legislation (i.e. USA PATRIOT Act) ²⁷ that dramatically modifies current surveillance law, thus further complicating the untested waters of a …

After Orange County: Reforming California Municipal Bankruptcy Law, Frederick Tung

Faculty Scholarship

Because of federal constitutional concerns, a municipal entity may resort to federal bankruptcy protection only with the authorization of its state. Federal law requires that a municipality be "specifically authorized" under state law to file for bankruptcy protection. Existing California law provides fairly broad authorization for its municipalities, but the statute is in need of both technical and substantive revision. After discussing constitutional concerns and surveying other states' approaches to municipal bankruptcy authorization, Professor Tung recommends a system of discretionary access, in which the governor holds discretionary power to approve, disapprove, or condition a municipality's access to bankruptcy.

From Monopolists To Markets?: A Political Economy Of Issuer Choice In International Securities Regulation, Frederick Tung

Faculty Scholarship

It is ironic that during a time of corporate scandal and regulatory soul searching, one of the most spirited debates among corporate and securities law scholars has focused on reform proposals for international securities regulation that essentially call for corporate self-regulation. Scholars have called for international regulatory competition in securities law, arguing that each issuer of securities should be able to pick its own securities regulatory regime. While these "issuer choice" proponents argue for a diversity of and competition among securities laws of the various nations, their proposals also ironically depend on uniformity - or at least international consensus - …

Cloning And The U.S. Congress, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In the immediate aftermath of the birth of Dolly the sheep, the national debate over the banning of human cloning focused almost exclusively on the issue of safety. President Bill Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission, for example, recommended in 1997 that Congress impose a five-year moratorium on attempts to clone a human because of the likely physical harm to the cloned infant. Congress did not act on this suggestion, but even if it had, that moratorium would already be almost over. Cloning is now back on the congressional agenda, with a new focal point: the creation of cloned embryos for …

Delegation And Original Meaning, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

The nondelegation doctrine may be dead as doctrine, but it is very much alive as a subject of academic study. Concurring opinions by Justices Thomas and Stevens in the American Trucking case raise anew the question whether the nondelegation doctrine has any grounding in the Constitution's text and structure. The answer is "yes." The nondelegation doctrine flows directly from the doctrine of enumerated powers: the executive and judiciary have no enumerated power to make law, and Congress has no enumerated power to constitute them as lawmakers. The correct formulation of the Constitution's nondelegation doctrine was outlined by Chief Justice Marshall …

Osad Moralny A Teoria Prawa (Moral Judgment And Legal Theory), David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

My theme is the role of moral judgment in legal theory. My thesis is that moral judgment provides an important constraint on various aspects of legal theory. I shall illustrate that thesis by discussing, first, the so-called "separation" of law and morals (Section I); secondly, legal interpretation (Section II); and thirdly, the "rule of law" ideal (Section III).

The Managing Lawmaker In Cyberspace: A Power Model, Tamar Frankel

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is about power - the ability to gain obedience whether by captivating followers, persuading skeptics or awarding and withdrawing economic benefits. The purpose of this Article is to analyze how the power of the Internet Corporation for Names and Numbers ("ICANN") was created, augmented, strengthened and reined in. Many controversies surround ICANN, including the very foundation of its existence - the need for a single "root" in the Internet naming infrastructure - its organizational form and accountability, and the utterances, policies and actions of its management.

The purpose of this Article is not to argue and prescribe but …

Comments On Open Source Genomics, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

I am going to make a few comments in the spirit of those made by Josh. I think the topic of Dan's paper is very interesting. It covers a lot of ground, and I do not have time to talk about more than a single issue. Josh's began discussing the similarity between academic research and open source, and then analyzed GPL. I want to go back to the first issue Josh raised and argue that, unlike Josh, I see some fairly significant differences between open source software and genomics. I want to talk about the cooperative ethic in the open …

Lessons From The World Conference Against Racism, Peggy Maisel

Faculty Scholarship

It is difficult to get people to remember, let alone focus on the accomplishments and ongoing challenges that emerged during the United Nations sponsored World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance (the WCAR) held just over a year ago in Durban, South Africa. The reason is simple: that conference ended on September 8, 2001, and what we remember about that period is now permanently obscured by what happened just three short days later. But the events of September 11 make it more imperative than ever that we address the evils of racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia. It …

Business Method Patents And Patent Floods, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

Technological breakthroughs occasionally set off floods of inventions and associated patents. The decline of the business method exception to patentability is likely to increase the frequency of patent floods. Future technological breakthroughs might now cause two different patent floods: a flood of patents covering the relevant technology, and a flood of patents covering business methods in the new market opened by the breakthrough. Furthermore, a technological breakthrough is no longer a precondition for a patent flood. Any factor that opens a new market might cause a future flood of business method patents.

A flood of related patents in a new …

Dimensions Of Negligence In Criminal And Tort Law, Kenneth Simons

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores different dimensions of the concept of negligence in the law. The first sections focus on the fundamental distinction between conduct negligence (unreasonable creation of a risk of harm), a conception that dominates tort law; and cognitive negligence (unreasonable failure to be aware of a risk, either through inadvertence or mistake), a conception that is much more important in criminal law. The last major section identifies five significant institutional functions served by a legal negligence standard: expressing a legal norm in the form of a standard rather than a rule; personifying fault; empowering the trier of fact to …

Bioterrorism, Public Health, And Civil Liberties, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The prospect of having to deal with a bioterrorist attack, especially one involving smallpox, has local, state, and federal officials rightly concerned. Before September 11, most procedures for dealing with a bioterrorist attack against the United States were based on fiction. Former President Bill Clinton became engaged in the bioterrorism issue in 1997, after reading Richard Preston's novel The Cobra Event. In Tom Clancy's 1996 Executive Orders, the United States is attacked by terrorists using a strain of Ebola virus that is transmissible through the air. To contain the epidemic, the President declares a state of emergency, orders that …

Moral Progress, Mental Retardation, And The Death Penalty, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Two major aspects of the death penalty in the United States directly involve physicians: how the death penalty is carried out and who is subject to execution. As a matter of constitutional law, both are governed by the prohibition against “cruel and unusual” punishment in the Eighth Amendment. The meaning of “cruel and unusual,” unlike every other part of the U.S. Constitution, is determined by public opinion as it reflects society's evolving standards of decency. With regard to how the death penalty is carried out, the role of physicians in capital punishment has been controversial for more than two decades. …

The Changing Face Of Recognition In International Law: A Case Study Of Tibet, Robert D. Sloane

Faculty Scholarship

The concept of state recognition in public international law has long been mired in a (pejoratively) academic debate between the "declaratory" and "constitutive" schools. This article strives to reappraise and recast recognition through analysis of the history and status of Tibet and its government-in-exile. I argue that, for analytic purposes, we must distinguish three forms of recognition: first, political recognition, the formal acts by which one sovereign recognizes another's claim to statehood or legitimate governance; second, legal recognition, a judgment of recognition based on some set of reasonably objective legal criteria; and third, civil recognition, the force of popular moral …

Foreword: Phase Ii Of The Genetics Revolution: Sophisticated Issues For Home And Abroad, Frances H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

The distinguished health law and policy scholars we invite to contribute to the American Journal of Law & Medicine's annual symposium issue are given carte blanche to write about any aspect of the designated topic that appeals to them. The authors in this year's genetics symposium, The Genetic Revolution: Conflicts, Challenges and Conundra, are already well known for their work in the field-in fact three of them have just co-authored the only casebook specifically dedicated to the law, policy and ethics of geneticsl-and we deliberately asked them for relatively short pieces on the theory that taken together their articles would …

Comment On Data Protection Statutes And Bioinformatic Databases, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

We have heard from the lawyer, the advocate's perspective of some of the legal issues involved in database protection and bioinformatics, and now we are going to hear an academic perspective on these issues. Professor Dennis Karjala is a professor at the Arizona State University College of Law with an interesting background. He has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and taught in that field before going to law school at Boalt, and he is an internationally renowned expert on copyright law and computer law issues. Professor Karjala is going to talk to us about database protection issues. His presentation will …

The Place Of Marriage In Democracy's Formative Project, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

Shoring up the institution of marriage is a theme in the "mar riage movement" and in recent legislative debates over welfare reform and family policy. One common premise is that strength ening marriage and renewing a "marriage culture" is vital to national health and that the best way for government, at all lev els, to strengthen and support families and to foster the well being of children is to promote and support marriage (Marriage Movement; Bush, 2002) Calls to renew civil society identify marital, two-parent families as foremost among the seedbeds of civic virtue upon which our Nation depends for …

Protecting The Endangered Human: Toward An International Treaty Prohibiting Cloning And Inheritable Alterations, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

We humans tend to worry first about our own happiness, then about our families, then about our communities. In times of great stress, such as war or natural disaster, we may focus temporarily on our country but we rarely think about Earth as a whole or the human species as a whole. This narrow perspective, perhaps best exemplified by the American consumer, has led to the environmental degradation of our planet, a grossly widening gap in living standards between rich and poor people and nations and a scientific research agenda that focuses almost exclusively on the needs and desires of …

Medical Privacy And Medical Research: Judging The New Federal Regulations, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Americans support both protecting the privacy of medical records and encouraging medical research. Thus, it is not surprising that a move to change practices in these two areas has generated attention and comment. The new federal regulations, promulgated under the authority of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), were adopted to protect the privacy of medical records. They were not specifically designed to facilitate or limit medical research. Nonetheless, the regulations have prompted strong objections from the biotechnology industry and from academic medicine. The Association of American Medical Colleges and the Biotechnology Industry Organization have argued …

Adventures With Lori Andrews, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The subtitle of Lori Andrew's autobiographical The Clone Age is "Adventures in the New World of Reproductive Technology."' This may seem an odd characterization of the life of a legal scholar, but adventures is just right to chronicle the life of this academic legal activist. Lori's legal adventures began at Yale Law School and continue in Chicago, where she was a researcher at the American Bar Association for over a decade and is now professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law and Director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology. Her adventures in health law can also be …

Habermas's Discourse Theory Of Law And Democracy, Hugh Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

In his 1992 book, "Between Facts and Norms," Jürgen Habermas develops a two-part theory of law and democracy. This article examines the first part – the “reconstructive” part – in which Habermas seeks the most basic principles that justify modern legal and political orders, as well as the institutions and practices through which those principles are realized. Habermas's aims in this part of his theory are ambitious. His largest goal is to reconcile classic tensions in political theory, most notably the tension between basic rights and democracy – or, in terms of American legal theory, the “countermajoritarian difficulty.” He argues …

Excuse And Justification In The Law Of Fair Use: Commodification And Market Perspectives, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Over twenty years ago, the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. reprinted my article, "Fair Use as Market Failure" (82 Columbia Law Review 1600 (1982), available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3577724. That 1982 piece suggested that an underlying pattern governs the protean forms of "fair use", and I employed the notion of market failure to reveal and explain how the pattern functioned. Since then, some misunderstandings of my argument have arisen.

I am pleased to publish in this, the Fiftieth Anniversary issue of the Journal of the Copyright Society, a clarification – and partial amendment – of my position. As …

Reply To Grimes: Illusory Distinctions And Schisms In Tying Law, Keith N. Hylton, Michael Salinger

Faculty Scholarship

We applaud Professor Grimes's thoughtful analysis of the D.C. Circuit's decision in United States v. Microsoft (Microsoft III) and of our article. Professor Grimes has entered into precisely the debate that we argued should lay the foundation for the law on tying. In addition, one of Professor Grimes's themes is that the issues of tying law cannot be viewed in isolation but, instead, within a coherent philosophy of antitrust. We agree with him on that principle.