Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 6 of 6

Full-Text Articles in Law

Navigating The Identity Thicket: Trademark's Lost Theory Of Personality, The Right Of Publicity, And Preemption, Jennifer E. Rothman Jan 2022

Navigating The Identity Thicket: Trademark's Lost Theory Of Personality, The Right Of Publicity, And Preemption, Jennifer E. Rothman

All Faculty Scholarship

Both trademark and unfair competition laws and state right of publicity laws protect against unauthorized uses of a person’s identity. Increasingly, however, these rights are working at odds with one another, and can point in different directions with regard to who controls a person’s name, likeness, and broader indicia of identity. This creates what I call an "identity thicket" of overlapping and conflicting rights over a person’s identity. Current jurisprudence provides little to no guidance on the most basic questions surrounding this thicket, such as what right to use a person’s identity, if any, flows from the transfer of marks …


The Right Of Publicity's Intellectual Property Turn, Jennifer E. Rothman Apr 2019

The Right Of Publicity's Intellectual Property Turn, Jennifer E. Rothman

All Faculty Scholarship

The Article is adapted from a keynote lecture about my book, THE RIGHT OF PUBLICITY: PRIVACY REIMAGINED FOR A PUBLIC WORLD (Harvard Univ. Press 2018), delivered at Columbia Law School for its symposium, “Owning Personality: The Expanding Right of Publicity.” The book challenges the conventional historical and theoretical understanding of the right of publicity. By uncovering the history of the right of publicity’s development, the book reveals solutions to current clashes with free speech, individual liberty, and copyright law, as well as some opportunities for better protecting privacy in the digital age.

The lecture (as adapted for this Article) explores …


The Right Of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined For New York?, Jennifer E. Rothman Jan 2018

The Right Of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined For New York?, Jennifer E. Rothman

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay is based on a featured lecture that I gave as part of the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal’s 2 symposium on a proposed right of publicity law in New York. The essay draws from my recent book, The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World, published by Harvard University Press. Insights from the book suggest that New York should not upend more than one hundred years of established privacy law in the state, nor jeopardize its citizens’ ownership over their own names, likenesses, and voices by replacing these privacy laws with a new and independent …


The Inalienable Right Of Publicity, Jennifer E. Rothman Nov 2012

The Inalienable Right Of Publicity, Jennifer E. Rothman

All Faculty Scholarship

This article challenges the conventional wisdom that the right of publicity is universally and uncontroversially alienable. Courts and scholars have routinely described the right as a freely transferable property right, akin to patents or copyrights. Despite such broad claims of unfettered alienability, courts have limited the transferability of publicity rights in a variety of instances. No one has developed a robust account of why such limits should exist or what their contours should be. This article remedies this omission and concludes that the right of publicity must have significantly limited alienability to protect the rights of individuals to control the …


Taking Compensation Private, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky Feb 2007

Taking Compensation Private, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

In light of the expansive interpretation of the ""public use"" requirement, the payment of ""just compensation"" remains the only meaningful limit on the government's eminent domain power and, correspondingly, the only safeguard of private property owners' rights against abusive takings. Yet, the current compensation regime is suboptimal. While both efficiency and fairness require paying full compensation for seizures by eminent domain, current law limits the compensation to market value. Despite the virtual consensus about the inadequacy of market compensation, courts adhere to it for a purely practical reason: there is no way to measure the true subjective value of property …


Bargaining For Takings Compensation, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky Sep 2005

Bargaining For Takings Compensation, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

Efficiency and fairness require paying full compensation to property owners when their property is taken by eminent domain. Yet, to date, the evidentiary challenge of proving subjective value has proved insurmountable, and current law requires condemnees to settle for fair market value. This Article proposes a self-assessment mechanism that can make full compensation at subjective value practical. Under our proposal, property owners must be given the opportunity to state the value of the property designated for condemnation. Once property owners name their price, the government can take the property only at that price. However, if the government chooses not to …