Law Commons^™

Fire, Metaphor, And Constitutional Myth-Making, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

From the standpoint of traditional legal thought, metaphor is at best a dash of poetry adorning lawyerly analysis, and at worst an unjustifiable distraction from what is actually at stake in a legal contest. By contrast, in the eyes of those who view law as a close relative of ordinary language, metaphor is a basic building block of human understanding. This article accepts that metaphor helps us to comprehend a court's decision. At the same time, it argues that metaphor plays a special role in the realm of constitutional discourse. Metaphor in constitutional law not only reinforces doctrinal categories, but …

Be Not Afraid Of Change: Time To Eliminate The Corporate Practice Of Medicine Doctrine, Nicole Huberfeld

Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that the corporate practice of medicine doctrine is a physician-centric, guild type doctrine that is misplaced in the present incarnation of the American healthcare system and that does nothing to improve quality, efficiency, or accountability. The paper focuses on three key reasons that the corporate practice of medicine doctrine should be laid to rest. First, the motives for creating the corporate practice of medicine doctrine are long gone, as physicians have not been able to operate as a guild of autonomous providers of healthcare for quite some time. Second, it is disingenuous to pretend that physicians are …

Governing By Negotiation: The Internet Naming System, Tamar Frankel

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is about the governance of the Internet naming system. The subject is fascinating, not simply because the naming system is an important system affecting the Internet, although it is; and not because the Internet is important, although it is. The subject is fascinating because it offers a rare opportunity to examine and learn from the evolution of an incoherent governance structure. The naming system is special in that it is the product of a new technology; it reflects the changes and pressures brought by the new technology, and involves the interests of government and private entities, domestic and …

Judges As Film Critics: New Approaches To Filmic Evidence, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

This Article exposes internal contradictions in case law concerning the use and admissibility of film as evidence. Based on a review of more than ninety state and federal cases dating from 1923 to the present, the Article explains how the source of these contradictions is the frequent miscategorization of film as “demonstrative evidence,” evidence that purports to illustrate other evidence, rather than to be directly probative of some fact at issue. The Article further demonstrates how these contradictions are based on two venerable jurisprudential anxieties. One is the concern about the growing trend toward replacing the traditional testimony of live …

Speech And Strife, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

The essay strives for a better understanding of the myths, symbols, categories of power, and images deployed by the Supreme Court to signal how we ought to think about its authority. Taking examples from free speech jurisprudence, the essay proceeds in three steps. First, I argue that the First Amendment constitutes a deep source of cultural authority for the Court. As a result, linguistic and doctrinal innovation in the free speech area have been at least as bold and imaginative as that in areas like the Commerce Clause. Second, in turning to cognitive theory, I distinguish between formal legal argumentation …

Is Equity Compensation Tax Advantaged?, David I. Walker

Faculty Scholarship

Employees who receive stock options and other forms of equity compensation generally are able to defer paying tax on this compensation for years, sometimes decades. In a rising market this deferral results in a tax benefit at the employee level. This article asks whether the employee-level tax benefit in a rising market results in a global tax advantage for companies that rely heavily on equity compensation and their employees. There are two primary issues. First, on initial inspection one might conclude that the employee-level benefit in a rising market is offset by a disadvantage in a stagnant or declining market. …

Parks As Gyms? Recreational Paradigms And Public Health In The National Parks, Jay D. Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

When scholars and policymakers think about the relationship between public health and environmental law and policy, they likely think first about controlling pollution and other toxic substances. As other articles have amply demonstrated, water pollution, air pollution, and other environmental toxins can have significant deleterious effects on the public's health. Scholars rightly pay serious attention to these relationships, and policymakers wisely devise methods and strategies to ameliorate the public health risks posed by these polluting substances.

Although pollution control might be the most obvious and important intersection between environmental policy and public health, legal and policy decisions regarding the management …

Making A Federal Case Of It: Sabri V. United States And The Constitution Of Leviathan, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

The popular expression “Don't make a federal case out of it!” only makes sense if federal involvement is something unusual or special that is reserved for matters of urgent national interest. It assumes that a “federal case” is, or at least ought to be, something relatively rare and noteworthy.

For the founding generation, federal involvement in people's affairs, especially through the criminal law, was in fact a relatively rare and noteworthy event. In The Federalist, James Madison told the citizens of New York that the powers of the proposed new national government “will be exercised principally on external objects, as …

Legal And Ethical Duties Of Lawyers After Sarbanes-Oxley, Susan P. Koniak, George M. Cohen, Roger C. Cramton

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the legal and ethical duties of lawyers after Sarbanes-Oxley, focusing on the application, interpretation and ambiguities of the SEC rule implementing Section 307. Although our primary frame of reference will be on the SEC's new rules as an aspect of lawyer regulation, those rules are part of federal securities laws and should be considered in that aspect, i.e., whether they advance the purposes of the federal securities laws. The rules affecting lawyers should not be assessed in a vacuum as a mere turf war between federal regulators on the one hand and the organized bar and its …

The Abcs Of Global Governance Of Embryonic Stem Cell Research: Arbitrage, Bioethics And Cloning, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Symposium: Stem Cell Research and Human Cloning: Where Do We Draw the Line: Symposium Transactions

Thank you for that introduction, which reminds me that I used to do regulatory work for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, primarily as a member of the Board of Registration in Medicine, and we had real regulations, real law, that could be enforced. What I am going to talk about today is not "fake law," but a kind of law that is often seen as more like ethics-international law. There is really no such thing as global bioethics governance, but I would like to think that …

Where Have The Great Inventers Gone?, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

The author expands on the idea that the patent system has been a hinderance to collaborative innovation.

Reparations And Equal Opportunity, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

This paper offers a sympathetic interpretation of reparations claims made on behalf of African Americans and suggests how they could properly be honored. It reviews the federal government’s role in supporting racial subordination and its continuing failure to address the inequitable consequences, which public policy now largely ignores. It sketches a national rectification project, comprising a comprehensive set of public programs that would attack the persisting legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. The programs can be justified by the government’s duty to insure equal opportunity for our society’s children and, most urgently, by corrective justice, because the inequities are attributable …

Forcible Medication For Courtroom Competence: The Case Of Charles Sell, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The right to refuse treatment is firmly recognized in U.S. law. Competent persons have the legal right to refuse treatment, even life-sustaining treatment, and incompetent patients can also refuse treatment through an advance directive, by naming a health care agent to make decisions for them or by having a person who knows their wishes express them.

American Bioethics And Human Rights: The End Of All Our Exploring, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In his compelling novel Blindness, José Saramago tells us about victims stricken by a contagious form of blindness who were quarantined and came to see themselves as pigs, dogs, and “lame crabs.” Of course, they were all human beings - although unable to perceive themselves, or others, as members of the human community. The disciplines of bioethics, health law, and human rights are likewise all members of the broad human rights community, although at times none of them may be able to see the homologies, even when responding to a specific health challenge.

The boundaries between bioethics, health law, and …

The Social Insurance Crisis And The Problem Of Collective Saving: A Commentary On Shaviro's 'Reckless Disregard', David I. Walker

Faculty Scholarship

Long-range Social Security and Medicare spending projections vastly exceed projected program revenues. If left unchecked, the resulting fiscal imbalance (estimated at $40 to $70 trillion in present value terms) would fall primarily on future generations. To avoid generational inequity, and perhaps fiscal meltdown, Professor Daniel N. Shaviro and others propose immediate fiscal austerity. This reply Commentary argues that near-term austerity is unlikely to play a significant role in overcoming the fiscal imbalance, which can be thought of as a balloon payment due mid-twenty-first century. Significant near-term fiscal austerity would eliminate the public debt and replace it with a public surplus. …

Judges As Film Critics: New Approaches To Filmic Evidence, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

This Article exposes internal contradictions in case law deciding the use and admissibility of film as evidence. Based on a review of more than ninety state and federal cases dating from 1923 to the present, the Article explains how the source of these contradictions is the frequent miscategorization of film as "demonstrative evidence," that category of evidence that purports to illustrate other evidence rather than to be directly probative of some fact at issue. The Article further demonstrates how these contradictions are based on two venerable jurisprudential anxieties. One is the concern about the growing trend toward replacing the traditional …

An Offer Of Firm Resettlement, Robert D. Sloane

Faculty Scholarship

The Attorney General lacks discretion to grant asylum to any refugee "if, prior to arrival in the United States, he or she entered into another nation with, or while in that nation received, an offer of permanent resident status, citizenship, or some other type of permanent resettlement." This rule, the doctrine of firm resettlement, is unique among the mandatory bars to asylum in the United States. It does not reflect a societal judgment about the moral fitness of an asylum applicant's character-as, for example, does the bar that prohibits granting asylum to persons with a history of violent criminal behavior. …

Bidder Collusion And Antitrust Law: Refining The Analysis Of Price Fixing To Account For The Special Features Of Auction Markets, Robert Marshall, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

Courts and commentators have painstakingly analyzed antitrust policy toward horizontal price fixing, but surprisingly, one of the most common forms of price fixing--bidder collusion-has escaped the sustained attention of antitrust lawyers. We attribute this inattention to the mistaken belief that the economics of bidder collusion is essentially equivalent to the economics of price fixing in posted-price markets. However, there are significant differences regarding the economics of collusion in auction and procurement markets as compared to posted-price markets, and we derive antitrust policy recommendations that apply specifically to bidder collusion in this article.

Negotiating Gender And (Free And Equal) Citizenship: The Place Of Associations, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This article focuses on the place of associations within John Rawls's political liberalism and in feminist liberalism. It revisits crucial components of political liberalism in light of feminist criticisms, such as those of Susan Moller Okin and Martha Nussbaum, that political liberalism's protection of associational life hinders women's free and equal citizenship. Offering a different reading of Rawls, it finds greater potential to draw on political liberalism to support such citizenship. It then brings liberal feminist ideas about the place of associations into dialogue with recent feminist work on gender, rights, and culture calling for models of rights within culture …

An Alternative Model To United States Bar Examinations: The South African Community Service Experience In Licensing Attorneys, Peggy Maisel

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the system of educating and licensing attorneys in South Africa to determine whether that country’s experience can provide guidance to jurisdictions in the United States that are considering proposals to reduce or eliminate the importance of bar examinations. The analysis set out here is supplemented by a companion article, providing a first-hand account of the South African system by Ms. Thuli Mhlungu, who was educated and sought admission to the bar during the last years of apartheid and the early years of the new democratic regime.

Examining the situation in South Africa makes particular sense because South …

A Framework For Reparations Claims, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

These remarks, prepared for the Boston College Third World Law Journal Reparations Symposium, compare the goals and viability of reparations claims as tort suits. I contrast two approaches observed in the claims: a "doing justice" model, which involves seeking compensation in important cases of uncorrected uncompensated injustice, and a "social welfare" model that seeks to change the distribution of wealth. Claims under the first category are far more consistent with tort doctrine and likely to meet their goals than social welfare-based claims.

The Merchandising Right: Fragile Theory Or Fait Accompli?, Stacey Dogan

Faculty Scholarship

Trademark merchandising is big business. One marketing consultant estimated the global market for licensing and marketing sports-related merchandise at $17 billion in 2001. With this much money at stake, it's no surprise that trademark holders demand royalties for use of their marks on shirts, key chains, jewelry, and related consumer products. After all, the value of these products comes largely from the allure of thetrademarks, and it seems only fair to reward the party that created that value . . . doesn't it?

It turns out that the answer is more complicated than this intuitive account would predict. Trademark law …

Trademarks And Consumer Search Costs On The Internet, Stacey Dogan

Faculty Scholarship

In theory, trademarks serve as information tools, by conveying product information through convenient, identifiable symbols. In practice, however, trademarks have increasingly been used to obstruct the flow of information about competing products and services. In the online context, in particular, some courts have recently allowed trademark holders to block uses of their marks that would never have raised an eyebrow in a brick-and-mortar setting - uses that increase, rather than diminish, the flow of truthful, relevant information to consumers. These courts have stretched trademark doctrine on more than one dimension, both by expanding the concept of actionable "confusion" and by …

The Changing World Of Employee Benefits, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

When I graduated from law school in 1985, there were no courses offered in employee benefits law. Nor, as near as I can recall, was ERISA ever discussed in any of the labor and employment classes I took. There was no mention in the introductory labor law course or in other classes about employment discrimination, union organizing, and employment arbitration. Now, in contrast, many law schools include a course on employee benefits and ERISA, and students hoping to work in the labor and employment area frequently find that ERISA work is plentiful, and traditional NLRA work is not. This, of …

Politics, Morals And Embryos, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Bioethics in the United States reflects US culture and tends to be pragmatic, market-oriented and insular. Add embryo politics to this mix and, over the past few years, the result has been a bioethics that has become so narrow and selfabsorbed as to be virtually irrelevant to the rest of the world. Not all the blame for this can be placed on President George W. Bush’s political agenda for his President’s Council on Bioethics, now in its third year of operation, but much can. The council has made public bioethics the servant of politics by pursuing a narrow, embryo-centric agenda. …

Making Workshops Work, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

The internal faculty workshop is a staple of the modern law school environment. It serves both social and intellectual functions within the faculty community. Socially, workshops are among the few occasions when large numbers of faculty assemble in the same room to do anything other than argue about appointments or the academic calendar. They are also often the primary-or even the only-way in which faculty learn what their colleagues in different fields are doing.' Intellectually, workshops are intended to improve the work product of the presenters and to sharpen or expand the thinking of the audience members.

Can Consumer-Choice Plans Satisfy Patients? Problems With Theory And Practice In Health Insurance Contracts, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

Much scholarship has considered whether health care - and insurance - should be distributed by voluntary contract or subject to government standards or regulation. Contracts will likely play a key distributive role in any future health care system. Yet we do not fully understand where private contracting does and does not work to further the goals of equitable access to affordable care. This article examines the role of health insurance policies in defining and enforcing access to medical care, focusing on private employment-based group health benefit plans. It describes models of consumer choice health plans and critiques their capacity for …

Interpretative Equality As A Structural Imperative (Or 'Pucker Up And Settle This!'), Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

To serious students of the Constitution, Chief Justice Marshall's discussion of judicial review in Marbury v. Madison was about judicial equality-the power of the courts, co-equal to the similar powers of the legislative and executive departments, to construe and apply the Constitution in the course of their duties. To less serious students of the Constitution, Marbury was about judicial supremacy-the supposedly paramount power of courts to interpret and apply the Constitution in a fashion that binds other legal actors, including the legislative and executive departments and state officials.

Do We Have A Right To Speak With Another's Language? Eldred And The Duration Of Copyright, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

The law embodies two contradictory sets of rights and interests pertaining to copyright and speech. On the one hand. stand authors' claims to deserve compensation and control over their works. On the other hand stand the public's claims to be free to build on and deploy the cultural works that pervade daily life.

Extremely Preterm Birth And Parental Authority To Refuse Treatment: The Case Of Sidney Miller, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Disputes between physicians and patients over medical care have tended toward resolution in both the courts and ethics committees, with each of these bodies ultimately deciding that the informed, competent patient must be the final decision maker. Parents, too, have the authority to make medical decisions for their children, but these decisions can be challenged if physicians do not believe they are medically reasonable. One bioethical issue, however, is as intractable today as it was 30 years ago, when it began to be publicly discussed: the extent of parental authority to refuse life-sustaining medical treatment for an extremely premature infant. …