Law Commons^™

International Commercial Dispute Resolution, William W. Park, Andrea K. Bjorklund, Jack J. Coe

Faculty Scholarship

A recent Court of Appeals decision has made it more difficult for judges in the United States to second-guess arbitrators in international cases. To understand the significance of the recent decision, one must remember that the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) has been interpreted to permit vacatur of awards in an international arbitration on the same grounds available in domestic cases. Thus, a litigant who is unhappy with an arbitrator's decision gets a chance to re-argue the case by alleging "manifest disregard of the law," a ground for judicial review created fifty years ago by Supreme Court dictum.

Unpatriotic Acts: An Introduction, Sadiq Reza

Faculty Scholarship

John Walker Lindh. Zacarias Moussaoui. Jose Padilla. Richard Reid. Who reading these lines does not instantly recognize the names of these men? Or at least their assigned noms de guerre: American Taliban, 20th hijacker, dirty bomber, shoe bomber. For two and a half years these names and others have flitted through our daily copies of The New York Times like shadow characters in a play, along with black-and-white photographs underneath which black-and-white text tells us of their alleged (and sometimes proven) wrongdoing and the latest developments in their tribulations (and sometimes trials) with our government. But the men themselves are …

A Brief History Of Author-Publisher Relations And The Outlook For The 21st Century, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Faculty Scholarship

The Fiftieth Anniversary Edition of the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. provides a particularly appropriate forum in which to discuss the current state of the copyright system. By some accounts, U.S. copyright law has been fabulously successful, encouraging the growth of industries whose copyrighted products both enrich American culture and contribute significant value to the economy.

Copyright As Tort Law's Mirror Image: 'Harms', 'Benefits', And The Uses And Limits Of Analogy, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

This pair of papers involves a reprinting of "Of Harms and Benefits: Torts, Restitution, and Intellectual Property," 21 J. LEGAL STUDIES 449 (1992), along with an introduction to that article for students, entitled "Copyright as Tort's Mirror Image". Both involve comparisons between statutory intellectual property law and common law doctrines.

"Copyright as Tort's Mirror" uses personal injury law to introduce students to copyright, making a link between the doctrines through the notion of "externalities". Just as tort law discourages wastefully harmful behavior by making perpetrators bear some of the costs inflicted, copyright law encourages beneficial behavior by enabling authors to …

Reexamining The Posse Comitatus Act: Toward A Right To Civil Law Enforcement, Sean J. Kealy

Faculty Scholarship

The military is currently prohibited by federal statute from participating in domestic law enforcement. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 ("PCA") establishes criminal penalties for people who willfully use members of the Army or the Air Force to execute the laws. Although a product of the Reconstruction Era, this law reflects a strong American tradition against the domestic use of the military that stretches back before the founding of the nation.

Intellectual Property Law, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter for the OXFORD HANDBOOK ON LEGAL STUDIES provides an overview of the theoretical literature in Intellectual Property, and suggests directions for further study. The emphasis is on economic analysis, but effort is made to embrace other perspectives as well.

An Exclusive Right To Evoke, Stacey Dogan

Faculty Scholarship

Ten years ago, in White v. Samsung Electronics America, the Ninth Circuit held that a robot violated Vanna White's publicity rights. Since the White decision, the tendency to equate evocation with infringement in trademark and right of publicity cases has only grown. In contrast to this expansionist trend in trademark and right of publicity law, however, courts in recent copyright cases have arguably backed off from a strong right to evoke. This Article identifies these trends and suggests some reasons for concern over an exclusive right to evoke. The author argues that if we wish to preserve a rich commons …

Code Versus The Common Law, Stacey Dogan

Faculty Scholarship

The explosion of peer-to-peer file sharing has forced a reexamination of the essential structure of copyright law in the United States. In a digital, interconnected world, the dispersion of copying and distribution activities makes it more difficult for copyright holders to identify users who derive value from their works. And at least theoretically, the inability to capture such value could ultimately jeopardize the incentive to produce and distribute creative expression.

There is widespread disagreement over what, if anything, should be done about these threats. While suggestions range from copyright abandonment to digital lockup, two of the principal proposals share an …

Who Should Regulate Class Action Lawyers?, Nancy J. Moore

Faculty Scholarship

Ethical issues arise frequently in class action litigation. These issues include conflicts of interest, solicitation, application of the no-contact rule, the reasonableness of attorneys' fees, and the attorney-witness rule. There has been considerable difficulty applying existing rules of conduct to these situations, partly because of confusion regarding the relationship among class counsel, the named class representatives and absent members of the class. Thus as to conflicts of interest - perhaps the most pressing problem facing class action lawyers - it has been said that a "strict reading of the conflict of interest rules in class actions should be tempered, because …

Intimate Affiliation And Democracy: Beyond Marriage?, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This article takes up the question: Should family law and policy move beyond marriage? It assesses a spectrum of answers to that question. Rejecting proposals, on the one hand, to shore up traditional marriage, and, on the other, to abolish marriage, it argues that family law and policy should not move wholly beyond marriage, but should support marriage in a way that better fosters greater equality within and among families. The article is part of a symposium on "Marriage, Families, and Democracy," published in 32 Hofstra Law Review 23-421 (2003).

Controlling Opportunistic And Anti-Competitive Intellectual Property Litigation, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

It is useful to think of intellectual property (IP) law both as a system of property rights that promotes the production of valuable information and as a system of government regulation that unintentionally promotes socially harmful rent-seeking. This Article analyzes methods of controlling rent-seeking costs associated with opportunistic and anti-competitive IP lawsuits. My thinking is guided to some extent by the analysis of procedural measures for controlling frivolous litigation, and analysis of antitrust reforms designed to control strategic abuse of antitrust law. These analogies lead me to focus on pre-trial and post-trial control measures that reduce the credibility of weak …

An Empirical Test Of Justice Scalia's Commitment To The Rule Of Law, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

On January 13, 2001, barely one month after the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, a group of 554 legal academics calling themselves "Law Professors for the Rule of Law" took out a full-page ad in the New York Times that essentially accused the Court's majority of being faithless to the rule of law. In full, the advertisement read: BY STOPPING THE VOTE COUNT IN FLORIDA, THE U.S. SUPREME COURT USED ITS POWER To ACT AS POLITICAL PARTISANS, NOT JUDGES OF A COURT OF LAW We are Professors of Law at 120 American law schools, from every part of …

Towards A Legal History Of American Criminal Theory: Culture And Doctrine From Blackstone To The Model Penal Code, Gerald F. Leonard

Faculty Scholarship

Many writers in recent decades have objected to the utilitarian aspects of substantive criminal law that cannot be squared with modern, retributivist versions of criminal justice. One particular target of the retributivists has been the use of strict liability, especially as it is applied in statutory rape cases. This article is an effort, not to take sides between utilitarians and retributivists, but to historicize the ideas and assumptions on all sides of the debates in criminal law, including the debate about strict liability in statutory rape.

Discovering very little historical work on the subject, I offer the first general intellectual …

Pharmacogenomics, Genetic Tests, And Patent-Based Incentives, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

Pharmacogenomics promises to revolutionize medicine by using genetic information to guide drug therapy. Genetic tests will help doctors improve drug safety and efficacy by better matching patients and drugs. This Article evaluates the effectiveness of patent-based incentives to create genetic tests, and the optimal mix of public and private sector pharmacogenomic R&D. Drug patent owners have a strong incentive to develop genetic tests that predict adverse drug reactions and allow them to market drugs that otherwise would be shelved. Incentives are also strong for genetic tests that are created as part of the drug development process. Incentives tend to be …

Should The Model Penal Code's Mens Rea Provisions Be Amended?, Kenneth Simons

Faculty Scholarship

The Model Penal Code approach to mens rea was a tremendous advance. The MPC carefully defines a limited number of mens rea terms, firmly establishes element analysis in place of offense analysis, and recognizes that the doctrine of mistake is part and parcel of the basic analysis of mens rea.

However, a revised Code could improve the drafting of the mens rea provisions in a number of respects:

* Clarify how to distinguish result, circumstance, and result elements

* Simplify the definitions of knowledge and purpose

* Perhaps eliminate the category of mens rea as to conduct

* Clarify the …

Arbitrage, Bioethics, And Cloning: The Abcs Ofgestating A United National Cloning Convention, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

America's inability to craft a regulatory ethics of abortion has led to a
wild west of unregulated research with human embryos and pregnant
women by our private infertility industry. Because of an "all or nothing"
research mentality, it is becoming increasingly impossible to suggest
outlandish and reckless reproductive research possibilities without seeing
them actually pursued. And if even the wild west seems a bit inhospitable
to particular research goals, such as cloning to produce the genetic duplicate
of an existing person, media darlings like Severino Antinori and Zavos
Panos, and even members of the Raelian cult, clone press conferences
(since …

Presidential Power In Transitions, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

The transition between presidencies has long created controversies. Whether the issue is "midnight judges" or "midnight regulations," presidential action at the end of a term has long provoked scrutiny and criticism. Presidents have also raised eyebrows at the beginning of their terms when they assert their authority and try to undo what their predecessor in office left behind. More than one president has taken action aimed specifically at "midnight regulations," such as ordering a freeze on the issuance of new regulations, a review of regulations issued at the end of the prior administration and other similar action. This article looks …