Law Commons^™

The End Of The (Virtual) World, Joshua A.T. Fairfield

Scholarly Articles

Virtual worlds have been the next big thing for some time now. In 2008, more than 100 public virtual worlds received venture capital funding - a significant increase over previous years. Yet virtual worlds have been going bankrupt faster than ever, including several high-profile firms and worlds. Every technology goes through a shakedown phase, and for virtual worlds the current recession has served as a catalyst for a downturn that, although not unexpected, is nevertheless startling in both numbers and rapidity.

This article examines the intimate relationship between how a virtual world begins life and how it ends. The amount …

Health Insurance Exchanges: Legal Issues, Timothy Stoltzfus Jost

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

A Cautionary Tale: The Obama Coalition, Anti-Subordination Principles And Proposition 8, Jennifer Holladay, Catherine Smith

Scholarly Articles

In his journey to the White House, Barack Obama demonstrated that he could be, in the words of Dr. King, not merely "a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus," creating a coalition that called us to "look after not only ourselves but each other."

To be sure, Obama's coalition is an imperfect one. Proposition 8's passage reminds us that we still fall too readily into the categories of "us and them"--categories in which subjugated groups fight against each other, rather than alongside each other.

Still, Obama has set us on a new path in America's long journey toward …

Criminal Justice And The Public Imagination, Erik Luna

Scholarly Articles

As this symposium demonstrates, criminology has much to offer criminal law and procedure. But there are limits to this endeavor, such as when public policy is distorted by powerful emotions that ignore the lessons of legal doctrine and social science. This article presents one possible response in such circumstances: expanding the interdisciplinary relationship to include literary and cultural materials usually associated with the humanities. These works can inspire the public imagination in ways that law and criminology cannot, at times offering an alternative narrative to counter emotion-driven claims of necessity, for instance, and raising the exact type of questions that …

On Discounted Partnership Interests And Adequate Consideration, Brant J. Hellwig

Scholarly Articles

Early cases involving the government's invocation of section 2036(a) to combat the use of family limited partnerships to intentionally suppress the value of a decedent's gross estate focused on whether the decedent retained the beneficial enjoyment of the partnership property under section 2036(a)(1) or, perhaps, the right to control such beneficial enjoyment under section 2036(a)(2). In recent years, however, the focus of the section 2036(a) inquiry in the family limited partnership context has shifted almost exclusively to the issue of whether the decedent's contribution of property to the entity satisfies the statute's parenthetical exception for a "bona fide sale for …

Counter-Narrative In Corporate Law: Saints And Sinners, Apostles And Epistles, Lyman P.Q. Johnson

Scholarly Articles

Corporate law is bi-vocal. On the one hand, liberating and amoral statutes permit a master narrative of business persons eagerly pursuing the good life as they see it. The mixture of such lax law and human frailty frequently leads to the unleashing of boundless ambition, vanity, avarice, duplicity, and much mischief. On the other hand, another voice in corporate law occasionally moves into the foreground to interrupt and tell its own story – a counter-narrative demanding a measure of self-restraint – when those who direct or manage company affairs press self-gain (or sloth) to the point of intolerable excess. The …

International Criminal Law: Taking Stock Of A Busy Decade, Mark Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Melbourne Journal of International Law, the Editors have asked for a reflection on major developments in international criminal law over the past decade and the challenges it faces for the future. I begin by setting out four such developments and then identify four challenges. The four major developments that I identify are: institution-building; judicial and jurisprudential output; trendsetting and epistemic communities; and political management.

Reconceptualizing Competence: An Appeal, Mae C. Quinn

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Comment On Untangling The Safety Net: Protecting Federal Benefits From Freezes, Fees, And Garnishment, By Allen C. Myers, Phillip T. Lacy

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Kenneth S. Gallant, The Principle Of Legality In International And Comparative Criminal Law (2009), Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

Not available.

Wrongs Committed During A Marriage: The Child That No Area Of The Law Wants To Adoptt, Michelle L. Evans

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Untangling The Safety Net: Protecting Federal Benefits From Freezes, Fees, And Garnishmentt, Allen C. Myers

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Toward A Model Law Of Estates And Future Interests, D. Benjamin Barros

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Signaling And Plea Bargaining's Innocence Problem, Russell D. Covey

Washington and Lee Law Review

The dominant theoretical model ofplea bargainingp redicts that, under conditions of full information and rational choice, criminal cases should uniformly be settled through plea bargaining. That prediction holds for innocent and guilty defendants alike. Because it is perfectly rational for innocent defendants to plead guilty, plea bargaining might be said to have an "innocence problem. " Plea bargaining's innocence problem is, at bottom, the result of a signaling defect. Innocent defendants lacking verifiable innocence claims are pooled together with guilty defendants who falsely proclaim innocence. As a result, both groups of defendants are treated similarly at trial and in plea …

Altruism And Intermediation In The Market For Babies, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Washington and Lee Law Review

Central to every legal system is the principle that certain items are offlimits to commercial exchange. In theory, babies are one such sacred object. This supposed ban on baby selling has been lamented by those who view commercial markets as the most efficient means of allocating resources, and defended by those who contend that commercial markets in parental rights commodify human beings, compromise individual dignity, or jeopardize fundamental values. However, the supposed and much-discussed baby selling ban does not, and is not intended to, eliminate commercial transactions in children. Instead, it is an asymmetric legal restriction that limits the ability …

Personal Liability As Administrative Law, David Zaring

Washington and Lee Law Review

Administrative Law has almost exclusively concerned itself with Lawsuits against agencies as collective entities, under the auspices of the Administrative Procedure Act. In light of the growing number and prominence ofsuits by war on terror plaintiffs against senior government officials, this Article considers the use ofpersonal liability to discipline government officials and assesses it as an alternative to traditional administrative Law. It compares the civil suits to criminal prosecutions of these officials and compares both of them to lessobviously Law related scandal campaigns. Personal sanctions--of which Bivens complaints are a principal example-are worth more attention. These mechanisms, and the constitutional …

Whose Safety Net? Reflections On "Untangling", Henry L. Woodward

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Bounds Of Decency: Why Fault Continues To Matter To (Some) Wronged Spouses, Robin Fretwell Wilson

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Comment On Wrongs Committed During A Marriage: The Child That No Area Of The Law Wants To Adopt, By Michelle L. Evans, Robert E. Shepherd

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Tom Farer, Confronting Global Terrorism And American Neoconservatism: The Framework Of A Liberal Grand Strategy (2009), Russell A. Miller

Scholarly Articles

None available.

Is The Family A Federal Question?, Meredith Johnson Harbach

Washington and Lee Law Review

There has long been conflict over the relationship between the states and the federal system vis-i-vis the family. The traditional account of domestic relations describes family Law as the exclusive domain of the states, andfederal courts have credited this account in the "domestic relations exception." Although scholars have analyzed and critiqued the exception's applicability to diversity jurisdiction, the intersection offederal question jurisdiction and this exception remains largely unexplored. This Article describes and critiques, on both instrumental and deeper normative terms, federal courts' willingness to expand the "domestic relations exception" to include federal question cases. The Article proceeds in three parts. …

Matters Of Conscience: Lessons For Same-Sex Marriage From The Healthcase Context, Robin Fretwell Wilson

Scholarly Articles

None available.

Inferring A Right To Permanent Family Care From The United Nations Convention On The Rights Of The Child, The Hague Convention On Intercountry Adoption, And Selected Scientific Literature, Laura Matney Shapiro

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Decline Of Linguistic Plurality: Bottom-Up Solutions To Protect Languages In The United States, Erica R. Shamblin Knott

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Designing Transparency: The 9/11 Commission And Institutional Form, Mark Fenster

Washington and Lee Law Review

Surpassing the low expectations established by previous investigatory commissions and overcoming the political and legal obstacles created by the Bush administration's opposition to its creation, the 9/11 Commission accomplished what appeared to be the impossible: an authoritative investigation, a widely-read final report, and direct influence on significant legislation. This Article argues that the 9/11 Commission represents an important institutional model for encouraging orforcing the Executive Branch to disclose information about an especially significant and controversial past event or future decision. It suggests that Congress or the President consider establishing such commissions when information held by the Executive Branch can help …

Tax Fairness, Brian Galle

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article argues that, contrary to the consensus of economists and many legal scholars, the norm of "horizontal equity" in taxation has independent meaning as a default rule in favor of existing arrangements. Although it has long been said, and widely thought, that tax should be fair in its dealings with individuals who are situated similarly to one another, no one has been able to say convincingly just what that fairness comprises. As a result, the learned referees in the last major dispute over the significance of horizontal equity judged that fairness's critic had decidedly won the day. Since then, …

Interjurisdictional Competition In Enforcing Noncompetition Agreements: Regulatory Risk Management And The Race To The Bottom, Timothy P. Glynn

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Celebrity In Cyberspace: A Personality Rights Paradigm For Personal Domain Name Disputes, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Washington and Lee Law Review

When the Oscar-winning actress Julia Roberts fought for control of the domain name, what was her aim? Did she want to reap economic benefits from the name? Probably not, as she has not used the name since it was transferred to her. Or did she want to prevent others from using it on either an unjust enrichment or a privacy basis? Was she, in fact, protecting a trademark interest in her name? Personal domain name disputes, particularly those in the space, implicate unique aspects of an individual's persona in cyberspace. Nevertheless, most of the legal rules developedfor these disputes are …

The Unintended Tax Advantages Of Gay Marriage, Theodore P. Seto

Washington and Lee Law Review

The Internal Revenue Code (the Code) contains numerous special rules applicable to the income taxation of persons related by marriage, birth, adoption, or ownership. This Article suggests a new approach to their analysis. Many basic tax rules assume that taxpayers are self-interested and unaffiliated. Where this assumption is incorrect, the Code makes adjustments to its otherwise applicable rules. Most of the resulting related-party antiavoidance rules apply only in the context of specified formal relationships-marriage, parent/child, or owner/business. The Article tests this thesis by comparing the income tax treatment of heterosexual married couples with that of gay couples in committed long-term …

Filtering Through A Mess: A Proposal To Reduce The Confusion Surrounding The Requirements For Standing In False Advertising Claims Brought Under Section 43(A) Of The Lanham Act, Peter S. Massaro, Iii

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.