Law Commons^™

Yahoo! Cyber-Collision Of Cultures: Who Regulates?, Horatia Muir Watt

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Article furthers this comparison of cyberconflicts and the real world, attempting to ascertain what lessons, if any, can be drawn from it. Part I of the Article explores the interests at stake in cyberconflicts and the relationship between technology and the law. Part II uses the French Yahoo! court's decision to show that real-world conceptions of prescriptive jurisdiction retain their legitimacy in cyberspace. Finally, Part III notes that the prospect of near perfect compliance offered by Internet technology provides the opportunity to engineer mature, well-calibrated solutions to international regulatory conflicts, which might then even serve as a model in …

Enforcement Of Foreign Judgements, The First Amendment, And Internet Speech: Notes For The Next Yahoo! V. Licra, Molly S. Van Houweling

Michigan Journal of International Law

The Article begins with a review of the relevant rules governing enforcement of foreign judgments in the United States. Part II explains how courts have unpersuasively applied these rules when refusing to enforce foreign libel judgments. Part III then explains how the Yahoo! court adopted much of this faulty reasoning. Finally, Part IV explains the considerations that better justify judicial refusal to enforce speech-restrictive foreign judgments, especially those triggered by Internet speech. The Article concludes that the prospect that U.S. Internet speakers will choose to speak only to a U.S. audience-even when their speech would be legal everywhere-is the most …

A Solution To The Yahoo! Problem? The Ec E-Commerce Directive As A Model For International Cooperation On Internet Choice Of Law, Mark F. Kightlinger

Michigan Journal of International Law

Instead of attacking or defending the French or the U.S. courts, this Article proposes to focus on the Yahoo! case from a different perspective. As is argued in Section III.D below, disputes like the Yahoo! case over which country's laws apply to a website and its operator seem likely to proliferate as Internet usage expands, demanding significant enforcement resources from countries and posing important compliance challenges for companies and other organizations operating on the Internet. Thus, it may be useful to consider developing an international agreement that would address, and in many instances resolve, such disputes about "jurisdiction to prescribe” …

Freedom And Religious Tolerance In Europe, Peter Juviler

Michigan Journal of International Law

Review of Protecting the Human Rights of Religious Minorities in Eastern Europe (Peter Danchin & Elizabeth Cole eds.)

Blending Criminal Procedure At The Ad Hoc Tribunals, William A. Schabas

Michigan Journal of International Law

Review of International Criminal Evidence by Richard May & Marieke Wierda

Should Congress Repeal Securities Class Action Reform?, Adam C. Pritchard

Other Publications

The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 was designed to curtail class action lawsuits by the plaintiffs’ bar. In particular, the high-technology industry, accountants, and investment bankers thought that they had been unjustly victimized by class action lawsuits based on little more than declines in a company’s stock price. Prior to 1995, the plaintiffs’ bar had free rein to use the discovery process to troll for evidence to support its claims. Moreover, the high costs of litigation were a powerful weapon with which to coerce companies to settle claims. The plaintiffs’ bar and its allies in Congress have called …

Bayh-Dole Reform And The Progress Of Biomedicine, Arti K. Rai, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

Allowing universities to patent the results of government-sponsored research sometimes works against the public interest.

Strangers And Brothers: A Homily On Transracial Adoption, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

The common law speaks to us in parables. Ours is Drummond v. Fulton County Department of Family and Children's Services. Just before Christmas 1973, a boy named Timmy was born to a white mother and a black father. A month later, his mother was declared unfit, and the Department of Family and Children Services placed Timmy with white foster parents - Robert and Mildred Drummond. The Drummonds were "excellent" and "loving" parents, and Timmy grew into "an extremely bright, highly verbal, outgoing 15-month baby boy." Then the Drummonds asked to adopt Timmy. The Department's reviews of the Drummonds' devotion …

Confrontation As A Hot Topic: The Virtues Of Going Back To Square One, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

I have been working so obsessively on the accused's right to confront the witnesses against him 1 that I am gratified that the organizers of this conference have designated confrontation as one of the "hot topics" of Evidence law. I am not so egotistical as to think that my work has made confrontation into a hot topic; I am just glad to know that I am working where a good deal of action is, and that other scholars recognize that confrontation is an important area in which dramatic changes may be occurring.

The Rise Of The Perpetual Trust, Jesse Dukeminier, James E. Krier

Articles

For more than two centuries, the Rule against Perpetuities has served as the chief means of limiting a transferor's power to tie up property by way of successive contingent interests. But recently, at least seventeen jurisdictions in the United States have enacted statutes abolishing the Rule in the case of perpetual (or near-perpetual) trusts. The prime mover behind this important development has been the federal Generation-Skipping Transfer Tax. This Article traces the gradual decline of the common law Rule against Perpetuities, considers the dynamics behind the recent wave of state legislation, examines the problems that might result from the rise …

A Taxing Settlement, Hanoch Dagan, James J. White

Articles

The following essay is based on the talk "Government, Citizens, and Injurious Industries: A Case Study of the Tobacco Litigation," delivered by Hanoch Dagan last May to the Detroit Chapter of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, and on the article "Governments, Citizens, and Injurious Industries," by Dagan and James J. White, '62, which appeared in 75.2 New York University Law Review 254-428 (May 2000). The authors hold conflicting view on the underlying issue of this topic: tobacco company product liability. Professor Dagan holds the position that tobacco companies are liable for harm done by their products; Professor …

Gentleman, Scholar, Visionary- A Living Tribute To Harold K. Jacobson, Detlef F. Sprinz

Michigan Journal of International Law

Tribute to Harold Jacobson.

Internationalization Of Labor Disputes: Can Adr Mechanisms Help?, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

My task is to assess the ways in which ADR procedures may be adapted to deal with international labor disputes. ADR refers to various methods by which neutral third parties assist persons engaged in a conflict to settle their differences without invoking the decision-making power of the state or another sanction-imposing body. Both mediation and arbitration are included among such methods. In mediation, the neutral aims for the parties to agree on a mutually acceptable solution. In arbitration, the neutral imposes a solution after presentations by the contending parties. A third term - conciliation - is sometimes used and generally …

The Least Of The Sentient Beings' And The Question Of Reduction, Refinement, And Replacement, Joseph Vining

Other Publications

The subject I was asked to think about with you today is raised by a very large change in the focus of biomedical research. In raw percentage terms, the animals involved in experimentation are now overwhelmingly rats and mice, and, perhaps because they are rats and mice, they are used in large numbers, numbers in thousands and tens of thousands at some institutions. Legal, ethical, and practical accommodation to this fact on the ground presents a host of questions. There are questions of the cost of care. There are questions of the training of veterinarians, principal investigators, and laboratory personnel. …

Honors Convocation, University Of Michigan Law School

Commencement and Honors Materials

Program for the May 2, 2003 University of Michigan Law School Honors Convocation.

Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. And The Counterrevolution In The Federal Securities Laws, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

The confirmation of Lewis F. Powell, Jr., to the Supreme Court coincided with a dramatic shift in the Court's approach to securities law. This Article documents Powell's influence in changing the Court's direction in securities law. Powell's influence was the product of his extensive experience with the securities laws as a corporate lawyer, which gave him much greater familiarity with that body of law than his fellow Justices had. That experience also made him skeptical of civil liability, particularly class and derivative actions. Powell's skepticism led him to interpret the securities law in a consistently narrow fashion to reduce liability …

Further Thoughts On The Role Of Regulatory Purpose Under Article Iii Of The General Agreement On Tariffs And Trade: A Tribute To Bob Hudec, Donald H. Regan

Articles

My topic in this article is the role of regulatory purpose under Article III of the GATT, and I regard Bob [Hudec] as the patron saint of efforts to establish the relevance of purpose. His famous "Requiem for an 'Aims and Effects' Test" may have been called a requiem, but it was reluctant and sceptical. Bob thought dispute settlement tribunals ought to consider the regulator's purpose, and he thought they would do so, whatever they said. As decisions on Article III accumulate, we are in the process of learning that he was right on both counts.

Front Matter

Michigan Law Review

No abstract provided.

Tax Stories And Tax Histories: Is There A Role For History In Shaping Tax Law?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Reviews

The teaching of law is usually rather ahistorical. Teachers commonly focus on current doctrine and policy debates, discarding on the "garbage pile of history" any law that has been repealed or superseded. And yet, much of law teaching is still based on reading cases. And cases are by definition historical artifacts - they arise from a specific time and place, and reflect a frequently long-gone historical context. Thus, it is hard to imagine a modern law course completely devoid of history, even if the history gets short shrift. A constitutional law course, for example, will likely include some discussion of …

Internal Protection/Relocation/Flight Alternative As An Aspect Of Refugee Status Determination, James C. Hathaway, Michelle Foster

Book Chapters

In many jurisdictions around the world, the possibility of an ‘internal flight alternative’(IFA) (often referred to as ‘internal relocation alternative’) is invoked to deny refugee status to persons at risk of being persecuted for a Convention reason in part, but not all, of their country of origin. In this, as in so many areas of refugee lawand policy, the viability of a universal commitment to protection is challenged by divergence in State practice. The goals of this paper are therefore, first, briefly to review the origins and development of the practice of considering IFA as an aspect of the refugee …

The Death Penalty And Adversarial Justice In The United States, Samuel R. Gross

Book Chapters

In a volume devoted to comparing adversarial and inquisitorial procedures in Western countries, the subject of the death penalty is an anomaly. Any system of adjudication must address several basic tasks: how to obtain information from parties and witnesses, how to evaluate that information, how to utilize expert knowledge, how to act in the face of uncertainty, how to review and reconsider decisions. By comparing how competing systems deal with these tasks we can hope to learn something about the strengths and weaknesses of alternative approaches to common problems. The death penalty, however, is not an essential function of a …

Too Busy To Mind The Business? Monitoring By Directors With Multiple Board Appointments, Stephen P. Ferris, Murali Jagannathan, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

We examine the number of external appointments held by corporate directors. Directors who serve larger firms and sit on larger boards are more likely to attract directorships. Consistent with Fama and Jensen (1983), we find that firm performance has a positive effect on the number of appointments held by a director. We find no evidence that multiple directors shirk their responsibilities to serve on board committees. We do not find that multiple directors are associated with a greater likelihood of securities fraud litigation. We conclude that the evidence does not support calls for limits on directorships held by an individual.

Inmate Litigation, Margo Schlanger

Articles

In 1995, prison and jail inmates brought about 40,000 new lawsuits in federal court nearly a fifth of the federal civil docket. Court records evidence a success rate for inmate plaintiffs under fifteen percent. These statistics highlight two qualities long associated with the inmate docket: its volume and the low rate of plaintiffs' success. Then, in 1996, Congress enacted the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), which dramatically altered the litigation landscape, restricting inmates' access to federal court in a variety of ways. This Article examines inmate litigation before and after the PLRA. Looking first at the litigation process itself, it …

Insuring Against Terrorism -- And Crime, Saul Levmore, Kyle D. Logue

Articles

The attacks of September 11th produced staggering losses of life and property. They also brought forth substantial private-insurance payouts, as well as federal relief for the City of New York and for the families of individuals who perished on that day. The losses suffered during and after the attacks, and the structure of the relief effort, have raised questions about the availability of insurance against terrorism, the role of government in providing for, subsidizing, or ensuring the presence of such insurance, as well as the interaction between relief and the incentives for taking precautions against similar losses in the future. …

Se Battre Our Ses Droits Écritures, Litiges Et Discrimination Raciale En Louisiane (1888-1899), Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

Title in English: Fighting for public rights: writing, lawsuits and racial segregation in Louisiana (1888-1889).

This article explores the links between the fight against compulsory racial segregation and the day–to–day operation of the law in nineteenth century Louisiana. Using the figure of Louis A. Martinet, one of the organizers of the test case that yielded the U.S. Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, the essay argues that Martinet’s role as notary reflects the central importance to the community of color of questions of public standing and written records. The article also identifies the concepts of "public rights" and "public liberties" …

The Reliability Of The Administrative Office Of The U.S. Courts Database: An Initial Empirical Analysis, Theodore Eisenberg, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Researchers have long used federal court data assembled by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AO) and the Federal Judicial Center (FJC). The data include information about every case filed in federal district court and every appeal filed in the twelve nonspecialized federal appellate courts. Much research using the AO data spans subject matter areas, and includes articles on appeals, caseloads and case-processing times, case outcomes, the relation between demographics and case outcomes, class actions, diversity jurisdiction, and litigation generally. Other research using the AO data covers particular subject matter areas, such as inmate cases, contract cases, corporate litigation, …

Marriage Law: Obsolete Or Cutting Edge?, Michigan Journal Of Gender & Law

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Over the past hundred years, social and cultural expectations surrounding various forms of committed relationships have changed dramatically, and contemporary legal systems have struggled to adapt. The result has been an extraordinary opportunity to test fundamental assumptions about law, about the cultural understandings that are enforced through state power, and about the mechanisms that drive law's evolution. The Michigan Journal of Gender & Law has drawn together an exceptional group of panelists who will discuss these questions throughout the day.

Lawyers And Domestic Violence: Raising The Standard Of Practice, John M. Burman

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Lawyers and judges should be the vanguard of those working to end domestic violence and mitigate its effects, yet they are not. This article is an attempt to change that. It strives to shed some light on the profound effect domestic violence has on law and law practice, as well as the profound effect lawyers and the legal system can have on domestic violence. Part II of this article demonstrates the extent and pervasiveness of domestic violence. Part III describes how domestic violence will affect a lawyer's practice. Part IV provides guidance on what a lawyer should do to determine …

In The Supreme Court Of The United States Barbara Grutter, Petitioner, V. Lee Bollinger, Et Al., Respondents. On Writ Of Certiorari To The United States Court Of Appeals For The Sixth Circuit, Jerome S. Hirsch, Joseph N. Sacca, Scott D. Musoff, Mark Lebovitch, Linda M. Wayner

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Brief of the University of Michigan Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, the University of Michigan Black Law Students' Alliance, the University of Michigan Latino Law Students Association, and the University of Michigan Native American Law Students Association as Amici Curiae in Support of Respondents

Front Matter

Michigan Law Review

No abstract provided.