Law Commons^™

Copyright As Legal Process: The Transformation Of American Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

American copyright law has undergone an unappreciated conceptual transformation over the course of the last century. Originally conceived of as a form of private law – focusing on horizontal rights, privileges and private liability – copyright law is today understood principally through its public-regarding goals and institutional apparatus, in effect as a form of public law. This transformation is the result of changes in the ideas of law and law-making that occurred in American legal thinking following World War II, manifested in the deeply influential philosophy of the Legal Process School of jurisprudence which shaped the modern American copyright landscape. …

Private Law Statutory Interpretation, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

While scholars routinely question the normative significance of the distinction between public law and private law, few – if any – question its conceptual basis. Put in simple terms, private law refers to bodies of legal doctrine that govern the horizontal interaction between actors, be they individuals, corporate entities, or on occasion the state acting in its private capacity. Public law on the other hand refers to doctrinal areas that deal with vertical interaction between the state and non-state actors, wherein the state exerts a direct and overbearing influence on the shape and course of the law. The latter is …

Working Themselves Impure: A Life Cycle Theory Of Legal Theories, Jeremy K. Kessler, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Prescriptive legal theories have a tendency to cannibalize themselves. As they develop into schools of thought, they become not only increasingly complicated but also increasingly compromised, by their own normative lights. Maturation breeds adulteration. The theories work themselves impure.

This Article identifies and diagnoses this evolutionary phenomenon. We develop a stylized model to explain the life cycle of certain particularly influential legal theories. We illustrate this life cycle through case studies of originalism, textualism, popular constitutionalism, and cost-benefit analysis, as well as a comparison with leading accounts of organizational and theoretical change in politics and science. And we argue that …

Decisional Dignity: Teenage Abortion, Bypass Hearings, And The Misuse Of Law, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

How might we think about reforming abortion regulation in a world in which the basic legality of abortion may, as a matter of constitutional law, at last be relatively secure? I have in mind the era just upon us in which the overturn of Roe v. Wadeno longer looms so threateningly over the reproductive rights community in the United States and is no longer necessarily its central concern. There is now a general and seemingly well-founded optimism that under the Obama administration, those who support and rely on reproductive rights will not have to pray nightly for the health …

Variations On Some Themes Of A Disporting Gazelle And His Friend: Statutory Interpretation As Seen By Jerome Frank And Felix Frankfurter, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In 1947, this Review published two lectures on statutory interpretation by Jerome Frank and Felix Frankfurter. Both jurists were concerned with a basic question: How constrained are judges when they interpret legislation? The answers each gives, while similar in some respects, differ strikingly. In arguing that interpretation necessarily involves a creative element, Frank analogizes the role of a judge in interpreting legislation to that of a performer in interpreting a musical composition. Although he argues that judicial creativity is constrained, Frank views statutory interpretation as "a kind of legislation." For Frankfurter, by contrast, in construing a statute, a judge is …

Some Unwise Reflections About Discretion, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

In listening to discussions about discretion in the criminal process, one has the sense of sharply cut distinctions slipping toward a black hole in our language. All decisions by police, prosecutors, judges and jury are routinely called discretionary. This usage pervades respectable, basically sound papers. In a recent article in the Yale Law Journal, Goldstein and Marcus seek to demonstrate that discretion pervades the decisions of French, German and Italian prosecutors. They write: "Claims that prosecutorial discretion has been eliminated, or is supervised closely, are exaggerated. Discretion is exercised in each of the systems [French, German and Italian] for …