Law | Open Access Articles | Digital Commons Network™

Censorship By Proxy: The First Amendment, Internet Intermediaries, And The Problem Of The Weakest Link, Seth F. Kreimer Nov 2006

Censorship By Proxy: The First Amendment, Internet Intermediaries, And The Problem Of The Weakest Link, Seth F. Kreimer

All Faculty Scholarship

The rise of the Internet has changed the First Amendment drama, for governments confront technical and political obstacles to sanctioning either speakers or listeners in cyberspace. Faced with these challenges, regulators have fallen back on alternatives, predicated on the fact that, in contrast to the usual free expression scenario, the Internet is not dyadic. The Internet's resistance to direct regulation of speakers and listeners rests on a complex chain of connections, and emerging regulatory mechanisms have begun to focus on the weak links in that chain. Rather than attacking speakers or listeners directly, governments have sought to enlist private actors …

Go to article

Common Law Property Metaphors On The Internet: The Real Problem With The Doctrine Of Cybertrespass, Shyamkrishna Balganesh Apr 2006

Common Law Property Metaphors On The Internet: The Real Problem With The Doctrine Of Cybertrespass, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

All Faculty Scholarship

The doctrine of cybertrespass represents one of the most recent attempts by courts to apply concepts and principles from the real world to the virtual world of the Internet. A creation of state common law, the doctrine essentially involved extending the tort of trespass to chattels to the electronic world. Consequently, unauthorized electronic interferences are deemed trespassory intrusions and rendered actionable. The present paper aims to undertake a conceptual study of the evolution of the doctrine, examining the doctrinal modifications courts were required to make to mould the doctrine to meet the specificities of cyberspace. It then uses cybertrespass to …

Go to article

Citizen Participation In Rulemaking: Past, Present, And Future, Cary Coglianese Jan 2006

Citizen Participation In Rulemaking: Past, Present, And Future, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Administrative law scholars and governmental reformers argue that advances in information technology will greatly expand public participation in regulatory policy making. They claim that e-rulemaking, or the application of new technology to administrative rulemaking, promises to transform a previously insulated process into one in which ordinary citizens regularly provide input. With the federal government having implemented several e-rulemaking initiatives in recent years, we can now begin to assess whether such a transformation is in the works—or even on the horizon. This paper compares empirical observations on citizen participation in the past, before e-rulemaking, with more recent data on citizen participation …

Go to article

The Best Puffery Article Ever, David A. Hoffman Jan 2006

The Best Puffery Article Ever, David A. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides the first extensive legal treatment of an important defense in the law of fraud and contracts: puffery. Legal authorities commonly say they make decisions about whether defendants should be able to utter exaggerated, optimistic, lies based on assumptions about buyer behavior, concluding that consumers do not rely on such speech. However, as the Article shows, such analyses are proxies for a deeper analytical question: does the speech encourage or discourage a type of consumption activity that the court deems welfare maximizing? The Article presents a novel constitutional analysis of puffery doctrine that focuses on the meaning of …

Go to article

Constitutional Decision Rules For Juries, Catherine T. Struve Jan 2006

Constitutional Decision Rules For Juries, Catherine T. Struve

All Faculty Scholarship

Recent scholarship on constitutional decision rules distinguishes courts from other constitutional decision makers, but has not explored distinctions - within the judicial institution - between judges and juries. Correlatively, social science literature on jury comprehension has proposed methods for improving jury instructions, but that literature has not considered in any detail the doctrinal complexities of constitutional law. This Article, drawing upon both fields, presents an agenda for crafting constitutional decision rules specifically for juries. Implementing this agenda will enhance the adjudication of constitutional tort claims, and could also render constitutional doctrine more accessible to non-lawyers.

Go to article

Rhetoric Of Disputes In The Courts, The Media, And The Legislature, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr. Jan 2006