Law Commons^™

Of Mutant Copyrights, Mangled Trademarks, And Barbie's Beneficence: The Influence Of Copyright On Trademark Law, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

In Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. Justice Scalia colorfully warned against resort to trademarks law to achieve protections unattainable by copyright, lest these claims generate "a species of mutant copyright law that limits the public's 'federal right to "copy and to use,"' expired copyrights." The facts of that controversy, in which the claimant appeared to be invoking time-unlimited trademark protection to end-run the exhausted (unrenewed) copyright term in a motion picture, justified the apprehension that unbridled trademark rights might stomp, Godzilla-like, over more docile copyright prerogatives. Unfortunately, in the Court's eagerness to forestall Darwinian disaster in intellectual …

Shape Stops Story, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

Storytelling and resistance are powerful tools of both lawyering and individual identity, as I argue in this brief essay published in Narrative as part of a dialogue on disability, narrative, and law with Rosemarie Garland-Thompson and Ellen Barton. Garland-Thompson's work shows us the life-affirming potential of storytelling, its role in shaping disability identity, and its role in communicating that identity to the outside world. By contrast, Barton powerfully shows how those same life-affirming narratives can force a certain kind of storytelling, can create a mandate to tell one story and not another. In short, Barton reminds us of the need …

Reconfiguring Industrial Policy: A Framework With An Application To South Africa, Ricardo Hausmann, Dani Rodrik, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

The main purpose of industrial policy is to speed up the process of structural change towards higher productivity activities. This paper builds on our earlier writings to present an overall design for the conduct of industrial policy in a low- to middle-income country. It is stimulated by the specific problems faced by South Africa and by our discussions with business and government officials in that country. We present specific recommendations for the South African government in the penultimate section of the paper.

Software Patents, Incumbents, And Entry, John R. Allison, Abe Dunn, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

Software patents have been controversial since the days when "software" referred to the crude programs that came free with an IBM mainframe. Different perspectives have been presented in judicial, legislative, and administrative fora over the years, and the press has paid as much attention to this issue as it has to any other intellectual property topic during this time. Meanwhile, a software industry developed and has grown to a remarkable size, whether measured by revenues or profitability, number of firms or employees, or research expenditures. The scope of software innovation has become even broader, as an increasing number of devices …

The Disputed Quality Of Software Patents, John R. Allison, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

We analyze the characteristics of the patents held by firms in the software industry. Unlike prior researchers, we rely on the examination of individual patents to determine which patents involve software inventions. This method of identifying the relevant patents is more laborious than the methods that previous scholars have used, but it produces a data set from which we can learn more about the role of patents in the software industry. In general, we find that patents the computer technology firms obtain on software inventions have more prior art references, claims, and forward citations than the patents that the same …

Changing Name Changing: Framing Rules And The Future Of Marital Names, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

What laws should govern spouses' names at marriage? If a man and a woman marry, should the woman's name change automatically? Or should the woman's name remain the same unless she goes through more or less complicated steps to change it? Contrary to convention, should the man's name change to the woman's? Should both their names be hyphenated? Many variations could be imagined.

The law of marital names has undergone a significant transformation over the past forty years. For about a hundred years of U.S. history, states required married women to take their husbands' names in order to engage in …

Hoffman V. Red Owl Stores And The Myth Of Precontractual Reliance, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

For decades there has been substantial uncertainty regarding when the law will impose precontractual liability. The confusion is partly attributable to the unfortunate case of Hoffman v. Red Owl Stores and to the unusual degree of scholarly attention that it has attracted. A careful examination of the record of the Hoffman case reveals facts that are much different from conventional understanding. The disagreement between Joseph Hoffman and Red Owl Stores resulted from a fundamental misunderstanding between the parties regarding the terms of Hoffnan's capital contribution to the franchise. The misunderstanding was largely a product of Hoffnan's penchant for moving assets …

Slow Dancing With Death: The Supreme Court And Capital Punishment, 1963-2006, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

This Article addresses four questions:

Why hasn't the Court left capital punishment unregulated, as it has other areas of substantive criminal law? The Court is compelled to decide the death penalty's constitutionality by the peculiar responsibility it bears for this form of state violence.

Why didn't the Court abolish the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia after finding every capital statute and verdict unconstitutional? The Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause was too opaque to reveal whether the death penalty was unlawful for some or all crimes and, if not, whether there were law-bound ways to administer it. So the Court …

In Memoriam: Clark Byse, Stephen G. Breyer, Elena Kagan, Andrew L. Kaufman, Todd D. Rakoff, Peter L. Strauss, Richard K. Willard

Faculty Scholarship

The editors of the Harvard Law Review respectfully dedicate this issue to Professor Clark Byse.

Two-Dimensional Doctrine And Three-Dimensional Law: A Response To Professor Weinstein, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Weinstein examines how the IRB laws would fare under Supreme Court doctrine, and whereas it is my view that these laws should be considered unconstitutional, he reaches largely the opposite conclusion. His article therefore offers a valuable opportunity for further exploration of the constitutional questions, and although there is not sufficient space here to discuss all of his analysis, it seems important at least to draw attention to the major points on which we take different perspectives.

Getting Permission, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Institutional Review Boards ("IRBs") are the instruments of a system of licensing – a system under which scholars, students, and other researchers must get permission to do research on human subjects. Although the system was established as a means of regulating research, it regulates research by licensing speech and the press. It is, in fact, so sweeping a system of licensing speech and the press that it is reminiscent of the seventeenth century, when Galileo Galilei had to submit to licensing and John Milton protested against it. Accordingly, it is necessary to examine the constitutionality of IRB licensing and, more …

Article Iii And Supranational Judicial Review, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

With the rise of supranational legislative bodies, the use of supranational adjudicatory bodies has also increased. These adjudicatory bodies have even been allowed to review the domestic law decisions offederal administrative agencies, and their decisions are insulated from any review by Article III courts. These developments have been met by intense opposition. This Article addresses the question whether, as claimed by several writers, the emerging supranational adjudicatory order impermissibly contravenes the "essential attributes of the judicial power established by Article III." Examining two case studies, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Supreme Court's recent decisions regarding Article …

Congress, Article Iv, And Interstate Relations, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

Article IV imposes prohibitions on interstate discrimination that are central to our status as a single nation, yet the Constitution also grants Congress broad power over interstate relations. This raises questions with respect to the scope of Congress's power over interstate relations, what is sometimes referred to as the horizontal dimension of federalism. In particular, does Congress have the power to authorize states to engage in conduct that otherwise would violate Article IV? These questions are of growing practical relevance, given recently enacted or proposed measures – the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) being the most prominent example – in …

Bankruptcy Reform And The "Sweat Box" Of Credit Card Debt, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

Those that backed the 2005 bankruptcy reform law argued that it would protect creditors from consumer abuse and lack of financial responsibility. The substantial increase in the number of bankruptcies over the last decade combined with the perception of systemwide abuse apparently convinced legislators from both political parties that the backers had a point. Thus, Congress enacted amendments to the Bankruptcy Code that – if effective – would fundamentally change the core policies underlying the consumer bankruptcy system in this country. The rhetoric surrounding the reform debates pressed the idea that if borrowers had to repay more of their debts, …

Wireless Carterfone, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Over the next decade, regulators will spend increasing time on conflicts between the private interests of the wireless industry and the public’s interest in the best uses of its spectrum. This report examines the practices of the wireless industry with an eye toward understanding their influence on innovation and consumer welfare.

In many respects, the mobile wireless market is and remains a wonder. Thanks to both policy and technological innovations, devices that were science fiction 30 years ago are now widely available. Over the last decade, wireless mobile has been an “infant industry,” attempting to achieve economies of scale. That …

An Answer To The Question: "What Is Poststructuralism?", Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

What is poststructuralism? It has always struck me as odd that so many critical theorists are reluctant to offer an answer to this question. In this essay, I unpack the term and provide a synoptic answer. Poststructuralism, I suggest, is a style of critical reasoning that focuses on the moment of ambiguity in our systems of meaning, as a way to identify the ethical choices that we make when we overcome the ambiguity and move from indeterminacy to certainty of belief in our efforts to understand, interpret, and shape our environment. Post-structuralism concentrates on the moment when we impose meaning …

Abortion, Equality, And Administrative Regulation, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

Abortion and equality are a common pairing; courts as well as legal scholars have noted the importance of abortion and a woman's ability to control whether and when she has children to her ability to participate fully and equally in society. Abortion and administrative regulation, on the other hand, are a more unusual combination. Most restrictions on abortion are legislatively imposed, while guarantees of reproductive freedom are constitutionally derived, so administrative law does not frequently figure in debates about access to abortion.

Precontractual Liability And Preliminary Agreements, Alan Schwartz, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

For decades, there has been substantial uncertainty regarding when the law will impose precontractual liability. The confusion is partly due to scholars' failure to recover the law in action governing precontractual liability issues. In this Article, Professors Schwartz and Scott show first that no liability attaches for representations made during preliminary negotiations. Courts have divided, however, over the question of liability when parties make reliance investments following a "preliminary agreement." A number of modern courts impose a duty to bargain in good faith on the party wishing to exit such an agreement. Substantial uncertainty remains, however, regarding when this duty …

Law And Capitalism: What Corporate Crises Reveal About Legal Systems And Economic Development Around The World, Curtis J. Milhaupt, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

This book explores the relationship between legal systems and economic development by examining, through a methodology we call the institutional autopsy, a series of high profile corporate governance crises around the world over the past six years. We begin by exposing hidden assumptions in the prevailing view on the relationship between law and markets, and provide a new analytical framework for understanding this question. Our framework moves away from the canonical distinction between common law and civil law regimes. It emphasizes the constant, iterative, rolling relationship between law and markets, and suggests that how a given country's legal system rolls …

When Did Lawyers For Children Stop Reading Goldstein, Freud And Solnit? Lessons From The Twentieth Century On Best Interests And The Role Of The Child Advocate, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

Between 1973 and 1986, Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud, and Albert Solnit published three influential but controversial books on the best interests of the child that had an enormous impact on state decisions to intervene in family life and direct the placement of children. During the same period, children in child welfare proceedings were increasingly represented by lawyers or guardians ad litem whose advocacy included understanding and interpreting the meaning of best interests. This article begins by tracing a conversation of sorts that occurs between the authors and other scholars and practitioners as their ideas begin to influence decision-making in child …

The Law Of War And Its Pathologies, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

War is with us more than ever. This is true despite the efforts of the United Nations Charter to ban the concept of war from the vocabulary of its member states. The preferred term is armed conflict. True, the Charter does refer to the Second World War, but apart from this concession to historically entrenched labels, the W word appears only once-when the Charter refers to ridding the world of the scourge of war. The Geneva Conventions, adopted a few years later, follow the same pattern. George Orwell could not be more amused. We change the vocabulary and think we …

Why Not A Miranda For Searches?, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

I am delighted to be here today.

I am delighted to be at The Ohio State University, which has not only built a truly extraordinary criminal law and procedure faculty, including Professor Joshua Dressler, Alan Michaels, Sharon Davies, and Douglas Berman, but has also accumulated a large number of alumni of my home institution, Columbia Law School, including my former students, Professor Edward Foley and the aforesaid Professors Davies and Michaels, as well as Professor Deborah Jones Merritt, who is quite literally a daughter of Columbia, where her father is a distinguished emeritus member of the faculty, my esteemed senior …

New Frameworks For Racial Equality In The Criminal Law, Jeffery Fagan, Mukul Bakhshi

Faculty Scholarship

This Symposium, " Pursuing Racial Fairness in the Administration of Justice: Twenty Years After McClesky v. Kemp," was conceived and inspired by Theodore Shaw, Director-Counsel and President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Ted Shaw and his staff worked with Columbia Law School Professor Jeffrey Fagan to recruit an outstanding group of scholars and activists who met on March 2-3, 2007 to hear and comment on the articles appearing in this Symposium. In addition to the authors whose work appears in this issue, many others made important contributions to the Symposium through their commentaries and presentations. These …

Regime Theory, Anu Bradford

Faculty Scholarship

Regime theory is an approach within international relations theory, a sub-discipline of political science, which seeks to explain the occurrence of co-operation among States by focusing on the role that regimes play in mitigating international anarchy and overcoming various collective action problems among States (International Relations, Principal Theories; State; see also Co-operation, International Law of). Different schools of thought within international relations have emerged, and various analytical approaches exist within the regime theory itself (see Sec. F.3 below). However, typically regime theory is associated with neoliberal institutionalism that builds on a premise that regimes are central in facilitating international co-operation …

To Condone Or Condemn? Regional Enforcement Actions In The Absence Of Security Council Authorization, Monica Hakimi

Faculty Scholarship

The U.N. Charter establishes that regional arrangements may not take enforcement actions without authorization from the Security Council. Yet the international community does not always enforce this Charter rule. Major international actors repeatedly tolerate deviations from it even as they assert that it allows no exceptions. This Article examines that practice, arguing that two different legal systems govern enforcement actions taken by regional arrangements. One system is reflected in the Charter text and publicly endorsed by major international actors. The second, more nebulous system is based on expectations and demands in the absence of Security Council authorization. Under this second …

Establishment Clause Limits On Free Exercise Accommodations, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Among the most vexing questions in the law of the religion clauses is when a legal measure that might otherwise be justified as an accommodation to free exercise is instead a forbidden establishment of religion. In a book about free exercise, I have provided some idea just how complex this question can be. I now tackle it head on. Scholars have fairly observed that the Supreme Court has given us no theory, or no tenable theory, for drawing the line between permissible accommodation and impermissible establishment. We will look at what the Court has said and done, as well as …

Some Reflections About Three Decades Of Working With Incarcerated Mothers, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

Almost thirty years ago I was a second-year student in a law school clinic. I was making my first legal visit to a prison. My client, whom I will call "Dina," was meeting me to talk about some visitation issues with her young son. When she came into the visiting room she was poised and professional in demeanor. She began to explain that her son was being cared for by his paternal grandmother. The grandmother was unwilling to bring him to the prison to see her. As a result Dina had not seen her son for several months. Suddenly, and …

The Race To The Center And Other Lessons Of Globalization, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

An Interview with Kenta Tsuda, New York, NY, 1 June 2006.

]agdish Bhagwati is a professor of economics and law at Columbia University and senior fellow in international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. His publications include The Economics of Underdeveloped Countries and In Defense of Globalization. He is the founder of the Journal of International Economics and Economics & Politics.

Ensuring Effective Representation Of Parents In Dependency And Neglect Cases, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Since 2005, the Colorado Supreme Court Respondent Parents' Counsel Task Force has been working to ensure the effective representation of parents in dependency and neglect proceedings. This article describes the work of the Task Force.

Mutual Dependency In Child Welfare, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

The child welfare system is in need of fundamental reform. To the great detriment of parents and children, in the current system the state waits for a crisis in a family and then intervenes in a heavy-handed fashion. The state pays scant attention to the prevention of child abuse and neglect. This Article argues that the principal conceptual barrier to the adoption of a prevention-oriented approach to child welfare is the dominant conception of family autonomy, which venerates freedom from state control. This Article proposes a novel reconception of family autonomy that encourages engagement with the state, rather than simply …