Law Commons^™

The Conservative-Libertarian Turn In First Amendment Jurisprudence, Steven J. Heyman

All Faculty Scholarship

Conservative constitutional jurisprudence in the United States has an important libertarian dimension. In recent years, a conservative majority of the Supreme Court has strengthened the constitutional protections for property rights, recognized an individual right to own firearms, imposed limits on the welfare state and the powers of the federal government, cut back on affirmative action, and held that closely held corporations have a right to religious liberty that permits them to deny contraceptive coverage to their female employees. This libertarian streak also can be seen in decisions on freedom of speech and association. In several leading cases, conservative judges have …

Regulating The End Of Life, Maurice Adams

The Morris Lecture in International and Comparative Law

Maurice Adams, Professor of General Jurisdiction, Vfund Professor of Democratic Governance and Rule of Law, and Vice Dean Education at Tilburg Law School in the Netherlands, delivered the 2014 Henry C. Morris Lecture in International and Comparative Law. Dr. Adams addressed the topic "Regulating the End of Life."

Euthanasia has been legalized in only three countries - the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Adams discussed various approaches to regulating euthanasia and circumstances under which these approaches could be adapted for use in other countries.

A Policy In Flux: New York State’S Evolving Approach To Human Subjects Research Involving Individuals Who Lack Consent Capacity (Forthcoming), Valerie Gutmann Koch

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Self, Privacy, And Power: Is It All Over?, Richard Warner, Robert H. Sloan

All Faculty Scholarship

The realization of a multifaceted self is an ideal one strives to realize. One realizes such a self in large part through interaction with others in various social roles. Such realization requires a significant degree of informational privacy. Informational privacy is the ability to determine for yourself when others may collect and how they may use your information. The realization of multifaceted selves requires informational privacy in public. There is no contradiction here: informational privacy is a matter of control, and you can have such control in public. Current information processing practices greatly reduce privacy in public thereby threatening the …

The Importance Of Conversation In Transitional Justice: A Study Of Land Restitution In South Africa, Bernadette Atuahene

All Faculty Scholarship

One of the most replicated findings of the procedural justice literature is that people who receive unfavorable outcomes are more likely to believe that the process was nonetheless legitimate if they thought that it was fair. Using interviews of 150 people compensated through the South African land restitution program, this article examines whether these findings apply in the transitional justice context where it is often unclear who the winners and losers are. The question explored is: When all outcomes are unfavorable or incomplete, how do people make fairness assessments? The central observation was that the ability of respondents and land …

Downstream Securities Regulation, Anita Krug

All Faculty Scholarship

Securities regulation wears two hats. Its “upstream” side governs firms in connection with their obtaining financing in the securities markets. That is, it regulates firms’ and issuers’ offers and sales of securities, whether in public offerings to retail investors or in private offerings to institutional investors. Its “downstream” side, by contrast, governs financial services providers, who assist with investors’ activities in those markets. Their services include providing advice regarding securities investments, as investment advisers do; aggregating investors’ assets for purposes of enabling those investors to invest their assets collectively, as mutual funds do; and acting as “middlemen” between buyers and …

Faculty Perspectives - Fall 2014, Iit Chicago-Kent College Of Law

Faculty Perspectives

This issue features exciting new work in intellectual property law by faculty members Lori Andrews, Christopher Buccafusco, and Edward Lee. Chicago-Kent's Intellectual Property Program is one of the strongest in the country, and it is due in part to the caliber of the original research presented here.

Also inside, César Rosado Marzán explores the potential of international framework agreements for labor organization.

Vol. 31, No. 4, Gary Bailey

The Illinois Public Employee Relations Report

The Workplace Bully in the Spotlight, by Gary Bailey

Recent Developments

Keynote Address: Stalemate Or Statesmen: What Is Needed To Move Forward Constructively With The Balancing Of America's Ip System?, David J. Kappos

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Trademark Extortionist Revisited: A Response To Vogel And Schachter, Kenneth L. Port

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

Trademark bullying (a.k.a. trademark extortion) is a very controversial notion in trademark litigation in the United States. There, for sure, is a lot of illegitimate trademark infringement happening. Anecdotally, we also know that trademark holders often overstep in the assertion of their otherwise legitimate rights. For the first time, this article documents how large a problem trademark bullying is and how often it happens. Trademark bullying occurs when there is evidence that a trademark holder asserts a non-famous mark against a non-competing entity on or in connection with goods or services into which the plaintiff has no reasonable expectation of …

Table Of Contents, Seventh Circuit Review

Seventh Circuit Review

No abstract provided.

Seventh Circuit Holds That Bankruptcy Trustee's "Strong-Arm" Powers Not Strong Enough For The Irs, Paul T. Geske

Seventh Circuit Review

In 2014, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit confronted, for the first time, the issue of whether a bankruptcy trustee can claw back assets that a bankrupt debtor fraudulently transferred to the federal government. Generally, government entities are immune to suit due to sovereign immunity, but the Bankruptcy Code abrogates federal sovereign immunity as to a number of Code provisions. One such provision is Section 544(b), often referred to as the source of the bankruptcy trustee's "strong-arm" powers. The strong-arm powers allow trustees to avoid transfers that would be fraudulent and voidable under state law. However, these …

Marriage Solemnization And The First Amendment's Neutrality Principle: Who May Solemnize A Marriage?, Claudia Cortes

Seventh Circuit Review

The most fundamental principle of the Establishment Clause is government neutrality towards religion. Pursuant to this principle of neutrality, the government may accommodate religious beliefs, but it can neither prefer religion over non-religion nor favor certain religious beliefs. In most states, a marriage does not become legal upon the state's mere issuance of a marriage license. Instead, marriage solemnization is required to create a legally recognized marriage. Marriage solemnization refers to a ceremony or a ritual by which two individuals take on their new status as husband and wife as well as to the set of procedures that must be …

Plead Guilty, You Could Face Deportation: Seventh Circuit Rules Misadvice And Nonadvice To Non-Citizens Has Same Effect Under The Sixth Amendment, Dana Cronkite

Seventh Circuit Review

The Sixth Amendment right to assistance of counsel has evolved since its inception. Originally, the right only meant that criminal defendants in federal cases were entitled to assistance of counsel of their choosing. The right was eventually applied to state criminal proceedings, and later interpreted to mean that criminal defendants had a right to effective assistance of counsel. This right is imperative in protecting a defendant's fundamental right to a fair trial. In 1984, the Supreme Court laid out a two-part test to determine whether a defendant's Sixth Amendment rights were violated by ineffective assistance of counsel. This test, known …

Unreasonable Religious Accommodation?: Fighting Irish Challenge The Opt-Out Form To The Affordable Care Act's "Contraceptive Mandate", Emily A. Herbick

Seventh Circuit Review

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) has been controversial from its inception, especially in regard to the "contraceptive mandate," which requires certain employers with group health plans to provide contraceptive coverage for their female employees without cost-sharing. In order to respect both the federal statutory right to contraceptive coverage and the religious rights of employers who provide health insurance for their employees, regulations were promulgated that provided exceptions to the contraceptive mandate. For example, religious employers who incorporate as non-profits are exempt from providing contraceptive coverage to their employees under the ACA. To receive this accommodation, …

Ka Bow! Seventh Circuit Knocks Down Trademark Claim, Sarah B. Virani

Seventh Circuit Review

Integral to the success of a business is its ability to protect its trademark. When another individual or business infringes upon a business's trademark, the infringed user can bring a claim under the Lanham Act, which codifies federal trademark law, in part to protect consumers from confusion as to the source of a product or service. An essential question is whether a trademark holder may, under the Lanham Act, bring a successful claim for trademark infringement against another for a fictional product.

The Seventh Circuit addressed this matter in Fortres Grand Corporation v. Warner Bros. Entertainment, in which the …

Katz And Dogs: The Best Path Forward In Applying United States V. Davis' Good Faith Exception To The Exclusionary Rule And How The Seventh Circuit Has Gone Astray, Arlo Walsman

Seventh Circuit Review

Sometimes, law enforcement officers violate the Fourth Amendment and in the process find and seize evidence they wish to use in a subsequent criminal prosecution. In these circumstances, a question that has long troubled courts, and a question that is becoming more and more difficult to answer, is whether such evidence should be admissible at trial.

In Weeks v. United States and Mapp v. Ohio, the Supreme Court established that evidence seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment was not admissible in federal and state prosecutions. This rule has become known as the exclusionary rule. However, in a line …

Silent Similarity, Jessica Litman

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

From 1909 to 1930, U.S. courts grappled with claims by authors of prose works claiming that works in a new art form—silent movies—had infringed their copyrights. These cases laid the groundwork for much of modern copyright law, from their broad expansion of the reproduction right, to their puzzled grappling with the question how to compare works in dissimilar media, to their confusion over what sort of evidence should be relevant to show copyrightability, copying and infringement. Some of those cases—in particular, Nichols v. Universal Pictures—are canonical today. They are not, however, well-understood. In particular, the problem at the heart …

Federal Circuit's Obviousness Test For New Pharmaceutical Compounds: Gobbledygook?, Douglas L. Rogers

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Restoring The Balancing Test: A Better Approach To Fair Use In Copyright, Charlie Penrod

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

Fair use analyses are overly vague and abstract. While the Copyright Act established four factors for courts to consider when determining if an alleged infringer’s use of copyrighted work is “fair”, these factors are not susceptible to easy interpretation. More importantly, once these factors have been interpreted, a trier of fact is instructed to balance these factors against each other. No effective method currently exists in guiding courts as to how to balance inherently disparate factors against each other, either in terms of intensity of the factors or how one factor might balance against another totally different factor. This article …

The End Of (Meta) Search Engines In Europe?, Martin Husovec

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Patent, But Where Is Home And Global Justice? A Rawlsian And Senian Inquiry, Deming Liu

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Mourning The Loss Of Copyright's Unsung Hero: Destruction Of The First Sale Doctrine, C. Todd Mosley

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Mind-Movies: Original Authorship As Applied To Works From "Mind-Reading" Neurotechnology, Theo Austin Bruton

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

U.S. courts frequently analyze new technology under copyright law. Over the years, the courts have applied copyright law to photographic cameras, computer programs, digital video recorders, and much more. However, a recent breakthrough in the neuroscience community may force judges to apply copyright standards in an unorthodox fashion. A group of researchers at UC Berkeley devised a process that reconstructs video sequences from the human brain, essentially creating a movie from the person’s mind. As this neurotechnology develops, it is uncertain how judges will apply copyright law to content taken directly from the brain. Nevertheless, this Article argues that such …

Keeping It Under Wraps: Trade Secrecy For Offshore Asset Protection Plans, Thomas A. Brunty

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Reconciling Twombly And Patent Pleadings Beyond The Text Of Form 18, Yoonhee Kim

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Chicago-Kent Magazine - Summer 2014, Iit Chicago-Kent College Of Law

Chicago-Kent Magazine

No abstract provided.

Saving The Federal Circuit, Paul R. Gugliuzza

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

In a recent, attention-grabbing speech, the Chief Judge of the Seventh Circuit, Diane Wood, argued that Congress should abolish the Federal Circuit’s exclusive jurisdiction over patent cases. Exclusive jurisdiction, she said, provides too much legal uniformity, which harms the patent system. In this response to Judge Wood’s thoughtful speech, I seek to highlight two important premises underlying her argument, neither of which is indisputably true.

The first premise is that the Federal Circuit actually provides legal uniformity. Judge Wood suggests that, due to the Federal Circuit’s exclusive jurisdiction, patent doctrine is insufficiently “percolated,” meaning that it lacks mechanisms through which …

We Want What's Ours: Learning From South Africa's Land Restitution Program (Oxford University Press), Bernadette Atuahene

All Faculty Scholarship

http://wewantwhatsours.com

Millions of people all over the world have been displaced from their homes and property. Dispossessed individuals and communities often lose more than the physical structures they live in and their material belongings, they are also denied their dignity. These are dignity takings, and land dispossessions occurring in South Africa during colonialism and apartheid are quintessential examples. There have been numerous examples of dignity takings throughout the world, but South Africa stands apart because of its unique remedial efforts. The nation has attempted to move beyond the more common step of providing reparations (compensation for physical losses) to instead …

Abolishing Exclusive Jurisdiction In The Federal Circuit: A Response To Judge Wood, Rochelle C. Dreyfus

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

Part of a symposium of responses to Chief Judge Wood’s suggestion for giving regional circuits a share of the Federal Circuit’s authority over patent law, this article argues that now that a degree of nationwide uniformity in patent law has been achieved, it would be a pity to disrupt it. While Chief Judge Wood is right that the law would improve with percolation, a change in the composition of the court, new procedures for challenging patents in the Patent and Trademark Office, a District Court pilot program, and satellite patent offices will bring to the debate new voices, different kinds …