Law Commons^™

Baring Inequality: Revisiting The Legalization Debate Through The Lens Of Strippers' Rights, Sheerine Alemzadeh

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The debate over legalization of prostitution has fractured the feminist legal community for over a quarter century. Pro-legalization advocates promote the benefits attending government regulation of prostitution, including the ability to better prosecute sex crimes, increase public health and educational resources for individuals in the commercial sex trade, and apply labor and safety regulations to the commercial sex industry in the same manner as they are applied to other businesses. Some anti-legalization advocates identify themselves as "new abolitionists," and argue that government recognition of prostitution reinforces gender inequality. Often, this debate is framed in the hypothetical: What would happen if …

Public Performance Rights In The Digital Age: Fixing The Licensing Problem, G. S. Hans

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Recent technological advances have allowed consumers to reinvent the mixtape. Instead of being confined to two sides of an audiocassette, people can now create playlists that stretch for hours and days on their computers, tablets, mobile devices, and MP3 players. This, in turn, has affected how people consume and listen to music, both in isolation and in groups. As individuals and business owners in the United States use devices to store, organize, and listen to music, they inevitably run up against the boundaries of U.S. copyright law. In general, these laws affect businesses more often than private individuals, who can …

Graffiti Museum: A First Amendment Argument For Protecting Uncommissioned Art On Private Property, Margaret L. Mettler

Michigan Law Review

Graffiti has long been a target of municipal legislation that aims to preserve property values, public safety, and aesthetic integrity in the community. Not only are graffitists at risk of criminal prosecution but property owners are subject to civil and criminal penalties for harboring graffiti on their land. Since the 1990s, most U.S. cities have promulgated graffiti abatement ordinances that require private property owners to remove graffiti from their land, often at their own expense. These ordinances define graffiti broadly to include essentially any surface marking applied without advance authorization from the property owner. Meanwhile, graffiti has risen in prominence …

Race, Markets, And Hollywood's Perpetual Antitrust Dilemma, Hosea H. Harvey

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article focuses on the oft-neglected intersection of racially skewed outcomes and anti-competitive markets. Through historical, contextual, and empirical analysis, the Article describes the state of Hollywood motion-picture distribution from its anticompetitive beginnings through the industry's role in creating an anti-competitive, racially divided market at the end of the last century. The Article's evidence suggests that race-based inefficiencies have plagued the film distribution process and such inefficiencies might likely be caused by the anti-competitive structure of the market itself, and not merely by overt or intentional racial-discrimination. After explaining why traditional anti-discrimination laws are ineffective remedies for such inefficiencies, the …

What's In A Name? A Brief Study Of Legal Aptonyms, Aaron Zelinsky

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Law and literature ranges wide. Scholars use Shakespeare to illuminate issues of justice, Dickens to understand trusts and estates, and J.K. Rowling to explain the law of nations. But an important subset of this field has been hitherto neglected: the study of the names of law's protagonists-law and onomastics. This Essay takes the first step into this promising arena by identifying a previously unexplored category of cases, which it dubs "legal aptonyms." Many are familiar with aptonyms but lack the vocabulary to describe them. Aptonyms—literally "apt names"—are those proper names that are "regarded as (humorously) appropriate to a person's profession …

The Great American Tax Novel, Lawrence Zelenak

Michigan Law Review

David Foster Wallace-author of the celebrated novel Infinite Jest and among the most acclaimed American fiction writers of his generation-killed himself in 2008 at the age of forty-six. He left in his office hundreds of pages of The Pale King, an unfinished novel set in the fictional Peoria, Illinois regional examination center ("REC") of the Internal Revenue Service ("IRS" or "the Service") in 1985. Although many chapters of the novel were seemingly complete, Wallace left no indication (other than what could be gleaned from the chapters themselves) of the order of the chapters (pp. vi-vii). Michael Pietsch, who had served …

Facades Of Justice, Norman W. Spaulding

Michigan Law Review

Representing Justice is a book of encyclopedic proportions on the iconography of justice and the organization of space in which adjudication occurs. Professors Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis have gathered a provocative array of images, ranging from the scales of the Babylonian god Shamash-"judge of heaven and earth"-on a 4,200-year-old seal (pp. 18- 19 & fig. 23), and a 600-year-old painting of Saint Michael weighing the souls at the Last Judgment with sword and scales in hand (p. 23 fig. 25) to the tiny Cook County Courthouse in Grand Marais, Minnesota, 110 miles north of Duluth (p. 372 fig. 226), …

Fighting The First Sale Doctrine: Strategies For A Struggling Film Industry, Sage Vanden Heuvel

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

The first sale doctrine, codified at 17 U.S.C. § 109, grants the owners of a copy of a copyrighted work the right to sell, rent, or lease that copy without permission from the copyright owner. This doctrine, first endorsed by the Supreme Court in Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, was established at a time when the owner of a good necessarily had to forego possession in order to sell or lease the item to another.[...] The changes in technology and industry over the past two decades threaten to upend this balance. In today's digital world, an owner of a copy of …

Antibiotic Resistance, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

Ten years ago, when I wrote War Stories,' copyright lawyers were fighting over the question whether unlicensed personal, noncommercial copying, performance or display would be deemed copyright infringement. I described three strategies that lawyers for book publishers, record labels, and movie studios had deployed to try to assure that the question was answered the way they wanted it to be. First, copyright owners were labeling all unlicensed uses as "piracy" on the ground that any unlicensed use might undermine copyright owners' control. That epithet helped to obscure the difference between unlicensed uses that invaded defined statutory exclusive rights and other …

Shutting The Black Door: Using American Needle To Cure The Problem Of Improper Product Definition, Daniel A. Schwartz

Michigan Law Review

Section 1 of the Sherman Act is designed to protect competition by making illegal any agreement that has the effect of limiting consumer choice. To make this determination, courts first define the product at issue and then consider the challenged restraint's impact on the market in which that product competes. When considering § 1 allegations against sports leagues, courts have tended to define products according to the structure of the leagues. The result of this tendency is that harm to competition between the leagues' teams is not properly accounted for in the courts' analyses. This, in turn, grants leagues a …

Using Public Disclosure As The Vesting Point For Moral Rights Under The Visual Artists Rights Act, Elizabeth M. Bock

Michigan Law Review

In 2010, the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit confronted the novel question of when moral rights protections vest under the Visual Artists Rights Act. In Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc. v. Bichel, the First Circuit determined that the protections of the Visual Artists Rights Act begin when a work is "created" under the Copyright Act. This Note argues that this decision harms moral rights conceptually and is likely to result in unpredictable and inconsistent decisions. This Note proposes instead that these statutory protections should vest when an artist determines that his work is complete and presents …

Profiting From Not For Profit: Toward Adequate Humanities Instruction In American K-12 Schools, Eli Savit

Michigan Law Review

Martha Nussbaum' describes Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities-her paean to a humanities-rich education-as a "manifesto, not an empirical study" (p. 121). Drawing on contemporary psychological research and classic pedagogical theories, Nussbaum convincingly argues that scholastic instruction in the humanities is a critical tool in shaping democratic citizens. Nussbaum shows how the study of subjects like literature, history, philosophy, and art helps students build essential democratic capacities like empathy and critical thought. Through myriad examples and anecdotes, Not For Profit sketches an appealing vision of what an ideal education should be in a democracy.

Readers' Copyright, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

My goal in this project is to reclaim copyright for readers (and listeners, viewers, and other members of the audience). I think, and will try to persuade you, that the gradual and relatively recent disappearance of readers’ interests from the core of copyright’s perceived goals has unbalanced the copyright system. It may have prompted, at least in part, the scholarly critique of copyright that has fueled copyright lawyers’ impression that “so many in academia side with the pirates.” It may also be responsible for much of the deterioration in public support for copyright. I argue here that copyright seems out …

Trespassory Art, Randall Bezanson, Andrew Finkelman

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The history of art is replete with examples of artists who have broken from existing conventions and genres, redefining the meaning of art and its function in society. Our interest is in emerging forms of art that trespass-occupy space, place, and time as part of their aesthetic identity. These new forms of art, which we call trespassory art, are creatures of a movement that seeks to appropriate cultural norms and cultural signals, reinterpreting them to create new meaning. Marcel DuChamp produced such a result when, in the early twentieth century, he took a urinal, signed it, titled it Fountain, and …

Everything In Its Right Place: Social Cooperation And Artist Compensation, Leah Belsky, Byron Kahr, Max Berkelhammer, Yochai Benkler

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

The music industry's crisis response to the Internet has been the primary driver of U.S. copyright policy for over a decade. The core institutional response has been to increase the scope of copyright and the use of litigation, prosecution, and technical control mechanisms for its enforcement. The assumption driving these efforts has been that without heavily-enforced copyright, artists will not be able to make a living from their art. Throughout this period artists have been experimenting with approaches that do not rely on technological or legal enforcement, but on constructing web-based business models that engage fans and rely on voluntary …

The Invention Of Common Law Play Right, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

This Article explores playwrights' common law "play right." Since this conference celebrates the 300th birthday of the Statute of Anne, I begin in England in the 17th Century. I find no trace of a common law playwright's performance right in either the law or the customary practices surrounding 17th and 18th century English theatre. I argue that the nature and degree of royal supervision of theatre companies and performance during the period presented no occasion (and, indeed, left no opportunity) for such a right to arise. I discuss the impetus for Parliament's enactment of a performance right statute in 1833, …

The Super Brawl: The History And Future Of The Sound Recording Performance Right, Brian Day

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

On February 4, 2009, Senator Patrick Leahy introduced the Performance Rights Act ("PRA") to the Senate, joined by Representative John Conyers in the House of Representatives. Thirty-eight years after sound recordings were first granted federal copyright protection against unauthorized reproduction and distribution--and more than ten years after gaining a limited digital performance right--legislation is pending that would once again expand the scope of sound recording copyright to encompass terrestrial radio broadcasts. Historically, such broadcasts have been exempt from sound recording performance royalties.[...] Instead of (or in addition to) seeking remuneration from terrestrial radio stations, this Note suggests that sound recording …

Student Gladiators And Sexual Assault: A New Analysis Of Liability For Injuries Inflicted By College Athletes, Ann Scales

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article will focus on an issue that was probably not on the minds of 19th century educators, nor primarily on the minds of the legions of present-day academic critics of intercollegiate sports. Namely, this Article explores the ways in which big-time athletics- particularly football-normalize and encourage harms to women, including educational and sexual harms. The author’s theses depend upon acknowledging certain open secrets about college football: that it is a celebration of male physical supremacy (measured by male standards); that it is something that society lets males do and have as their sport, for reasons both good and bad; …

Nonprofits And Narrative: Piers Plowman, Anthony Trollope, And Charities Law, Jill R. Horwitz

Articles

What are the narrative possibilities for understanding nonprofit law? Given the porous barriers between nonprofit law and the literature about it, there are many. Here I consider two. First, nonprofit law and nonprofit literature are each enriched and made fully explicable by reference to the other. Nonprofit law has grown in parallel with literature. It may even be that important legal texts, texts about doing and being good, were imported directly from literary sources into law. Second, in writings ranging from sensational journalism to high literature, nonprofit laws and the scandals involving their violations have captured the public imagination for …

Royalty Rate-Setting For Webcasters: A Royal(Ty) Mess, Amy Duvall

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

The Internet is a haven for free expression. Not only are content-based restrictions disfavored, but "[the internet] provides relatively unlimited, low-cost capacity for communication of all kinds." Almost half of all Americans have listened to music online, whether rebroadcasts of terrestrial radio or to find niche music that terrestrial radio simply does not play, and 13 percent tune in regularly. Webcasters provide a unique outlet for new artists; however, if royalty rates are set too high for all but the largest webcasters to stay in business, the variety of music available will be severely restricted. Musical diversity stimulates the generation …

Legal Fictions In Pierson V. Post, Andrea Mcdowell

Michigan Law Review

American courts and citizens generally take the importance of private property for granted. Scholars have sought to explain its primacy using numerous legal doctrines, including natural law, the Lockean principle of a right to the product of one's labor, Law & Economics theories about the incentives created by property ownership, and the importance of bright line rules. The leading case on the necessity of private property, Pierson v. Post, makes all four of these points. This Article argues that Pierson has been misunderstood. Pierson was in fact a defective torts case that the judges shoe-horned into a property mold …

The Use Of Drug Testing To Police Sex And Gender In The Olympic Games, Haley K. Olsen-Acre

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Part I of this Article discusses the history and development of sex testing and drug testing and argues that the two are both historically and ideologically linked. Part II examines the current Code in detail and argues that the Code's focus on hormone-based controls acts to police sex and gender in Olympic athletes, thereby extending historical sex testing practices to a new era. This Article ultimately concludes that without recognizing and addressing the need for further research into the role of "sex" hormones in the body and the interplay of social context and biological circumstances, the IOC cannot maintain an …

From Habermas To "Get Rich Or Die Tryin": Hip Hop, The Telecommunications Act Of 1996, And The Black Public Sphere, Akilah N. Folami

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article explores the manner in which gangsta rappers, who are primarily young urban Black men, navigate the mass media and rap's commercialization of the gangsta image to continue to provide seeds of political expression and resistance to that image. While other scholars have considered the political nature of rap in the context of the First Amendment, this Article's approach is unique in that it is the first to explore such concepts through the lenses of Habermas' ideal public sphere and those of his critics. While many have written gangsta rap off as being commercially co-opted or useless given its …

The Word And The Law, James Boyd White

Articles

In this Article I shall first give a brief account of Milner Ball's book, The Word and the Law, saying something about the interesting and important way in which it connects theology, literature, and law. I shall then give a little more content to what I say about this achievement by engaging in a kind of reading of two texts, one theological and one literary, connecting both to the law. I mean this reading simultaneously to be my own and to reflect something of what I have learned from Milner. Another way to put this is to say that …

Mickey, Can You Spare A Dime? Disneywar, Executive Compensation, Corporate Governance, And Business Law Pedagogy, Kenneth M. Rosen

Michigan Law Review

American business executives are under fire. Recent, notorious difficulties at companies such as the Enron Corporation brought attention to these individuals. Notwithstanding the conclusion of the trials of some of those top executives, skepticism remains about the inner workings of U.S. corporations and the quality of corporate governance. Drawing special scrutiny from some quarters is the compensation granted to corporate officers and directors. For instance, the timing of certain stock option grants, a key component of some compensation packages, raised ire because of those options' supposed backdating and fortuitous proximity to increases in share prices. Further, some questioned more generally …

Three Reactions To Mgm V. Grokster, Pamela Samuelson

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

It was prescient of the Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review to have organized a conference to discuss the Supreme Court's decision in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc. v. Grokster, Inc. As the articles in this issue reveal, commentators have had somewhat mixed reactions to the Grokster decision. Perhaps I am the most mixed (or mixed up) about Grokster among its commentators, for I have had not just one but three reactions to the Grokster decision. My first reaction was to question whether MGM and its co-plaintiffs really won the Grokster case, or at least won it in the way they had hoped. …

There's No "I" In "League": Professional Sports Leagues And The Single Entity Defense, Nathaniel Grow

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that outside of labor disputes, sports leagues should be presumed to be single entities. Part I argues that professional sports leagues are single entities in disputes regarding league-wide, non-labor policy. In particular, the focus of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence on economic reality rather than organizational form necessitates a finding that professional sports leagues are single entities in non-labor disputes. Part II argues that professional sports leagues are not single entities for purposes of labor disputes; sports leagues, on the whole, do not involve a unity of interest for labor matters. More importantly, existing precedent outside of the …

Rethinking Gender Opportunities: Nontraditional Sports Seasons And Local Preferences, Kristen Boike

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In Communities for Equity v. Michigan High School Athletic Association, the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed a district court decision, holding that the scheduling of high school girls' sports in "nontraditional" seasons in Michigan violated the Equal Protection Clause. The Supreme Court of the United States, granting certiorari, vacated and remanded this case back to the Sixth Circuit. This Note suggests reasons why the Sixth Circuit and/or the United States Supreme Court should protect the Michigan High School Athletic Association's (MHSAA) current scheduling of sports seasons. Specifically, using the model provided by Romer v. Evans and …

Take Us Back To The Ball Game: The Laws And Policy Of Professional Sports Ticket Prices, Nathan R. Scott

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The prices of professional sports tickets have skyrocketed in recent years, depriving many fans of the time-honored tradition of taking their families out to a ball game. This Article argues that legal reform and political action are appropriate responses to these soaring prices.

First, the Article rebuts the threshold objection that economics alone justify current ticket prices. Professional sports teams reap a windfall from the public through corporate welfare, special-interest legislation, and favorable antitrust and tax laws. This preferential legal treatment undercuts the argument that teams are simply charging, or should charge, what the market will bear. In addition, teams …

Hands Off Policy: Equal Protection And The Contact Sports Exemption Of Title Ix, Jamal Greene

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The disparity between what the Constitution permits of public schools and what Title IX permits of private ones is unquestionably stark. This Article calls this disparity into question. First, it asks under what circumstances, if any, allowance for sex discrimination in athletics may be justified under constitutional standards. Then, it considers the practical relevance of the disparity between how a school may lawfully discriminate under Title IX and how it may do so under the Equal Protection Clause. Finally, it offers a prescription for bringing into balance the gender equity messages sent by Title IX and the Constitution.