Law Commons^™

A Formulaic Recitation Will Not Do: Why The Federal Rules Demand More Detail In Criminal Pleading, Charles Eric Hintz

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When a plaintiff files a civil lawsuit in federal court, her complaint must satisfy certain minimum standards. Specifically, under the prevailing understanding of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(a), a complaint must plead sufficient factual matter to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face, rather than mere conclusory statements. Given the significantly higher stakes involved in criminal cases, one might think that an even more robust requirement would exist in that context. But in fact a weaker pleading standard reigns. Under the governing interpretation of Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 7(c), indictments that simply parrot the …

The Genius Of Common Law Intellectual Property, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

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Among Richard Epstein’s influential contributions to legal scholarship over the years is his writing on common law intellectual property. In it, we see Epstein’s attempt to meld the innate logic of the common law’s conceptual structure with the realities of the modern information economy. Common law intellectual property refers to different judge made causes of action that create forms of exclusive rights and privileges in intangibles, interferences with which are then rendered enforceable through private liability. In this Essay, I examine Epstein’s writing on two such doctrines: “hot news misappropriation” and “cyber-trespass”, which embraces several important ideas that modern discussions …

Copyright As Market Prospect, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

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For many decades now, copyright jurisprudence and scholarship have looked to the common law of torts—principally trespass and negligence—in order to understand copyright’s structure of entitlement and liability. This focus on property- and harm-based torts has altogether ignored an area of tort law with significant import for our understanding of copyright law: tortious interference with a prospective economic advantage. This Article develops an understanding of copyright law using tortious interference with a prospect as a homology. Tortious interference with a prospect allows a plaintiff to recover when a defendant's volitional actions interfere with a potential economic benefit that was likely …

In Defense Of The Restatement Of Liability Insurance Law, Tom Baker, Kyle D. Logue

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For most non-contractual legal claims for damages that are brought against individuals or firms, there is some form of liability insurance coverage. The Restatement of the Law Liability Insurance is the American Law Institute’s first effort to “restate” the common law governing such liability insurance policies, and we are the reporters. In a recent essay funded by the insurance industry, Yale Law Professor George Priest launched a strident critique of the Restatement project, arguing that the rules adopted in the Restatement:

(a) are radically contrary to existing case law,

(b) have a naïve “pro-policyholder” bias that ignores basic economic insights …

Copyright And Good Faith Purchasers, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

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Good faith purchasers for value — individuals who unknowingly and in good faith purchase property from a seller whose own actions in obtaining the property are of questionable legality — have long obtained special protection under the common law. Despite the seller’s own actions being tainted, such purchasers obtain valid title themselves and are allowed to freely alienate the property without any restriction. Modern copyright law, however, does just the opposite. Individuals who unknowingly and in good faith purchase property embodying an unauthorized copy of a protected work are altogether precluded from subsequently alienating such property, or risk running afoul …

A Government Of Laws Not Of Precedents 1776-1876: The Google Challenge To Common Law Myth, James Maxeiner

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The United States, it is said, is a common law country. The genius of American common law, according to American jurists, is its flexibility in adapting to change and in developing new causes of action. Courts make law even as they apply it. This permits them better to do justice and effectuate public policy in individual cases, say American jurists.

Not all Americans are convinced of the virtues of this American common law method. Many in the public protest, we want judges that apply and do not make law. American jurists discount these protests as criticisms of naive laymen. They …

Fractured Markets And Legal Institutions, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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This article considers how we can improve legal outcomes of conflicts that occur in very small arenas. The conflicts can be of many kinds, including a nuisance dispute between neighbors, an impending collision between two moving vehicles, a joint decision between spouses about whether or on what terms to continue their marriage, or a disagreement between managers and shareholders within a firm.

The prevailing literature typically refers to these small environments as “markets.” Thinking of them as markets, however, averts our attention from larger environments that should be considered but that often do not function well as private markets. For …

Private Enforcement Of Statutory And Administrative Law In The United States (And Other Common Law Countries), Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang, Herbert M. Kritzer

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Our aim in this paper, which was prepared for an international conference on comparative procedural law to be held in July 2011, is to advance understanding of private enforcement of statutory and administrative law in the United States, and, to the extent supported by the information that colleagues abroad have provided, of comparable phenomena in other common law countries. Seeking to raise questions that will be useful to those who are concerned with regulatory design, we briefly discuss aspects of American culture, history, and political institutions that reasonably can be thought to have contributed to the growth and subsequent development …

Private Enforcement, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang, Herbert Kritzer

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Our aim in this Article is to advance understanding of private enforcement of statutory and administrative law in the United States and to raise questions that will be useful to those who are concerned with regulatory design in other countries. To that end, we briefly discuss aspects of American culture, history, and political institutions that reasonably can be thought to have contributed to the growth and subsequent development of private enforcement. We also set forth key elements of the general legal landscape in which decisions about private enforcement are made, aspects of which should be central to the choice of …

Copyright, Custom, And Lessons From The Common Law, Jennifer E. Rothman

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In this essay prepared for the University of Pennsylvania’s conference on Intellectual Property and the Common Law, I build upon my work on custom and intellectual property. I focus here on one important facet of the subject — how longstanding common law principles should inform our understanding of custom. The common law provides a number of lessons on how to appropriately limit the consideration of custom in intellectual property law and elsewhere. The essay begins by considering the traditional role of custom in the common law. Part II then examines several of the ways that courts have incorporated custom into …

Natural Law, Slavery, And The Right To Privacy Tort, Anita L. Allen

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In 1905 the Supreme Court of Georgia became the first state high court to recognize a freestanding “right to privacy” tort in the common law. The landmark case was Pavesich v. New England Life Insurance Co. Must it be a cause for deep jurisprudential concern that the common law right to privacy in wide currency today originated in Pavesich’s explicit judicial interpretation of the requirements of natural law? Must it be an additional worry that the court which originated the common law privacy right asserted that a free white man whose photograph is published without his consent in …

Overcoming Under-Compensation And Under-Deterrence In Intentional Tort Cases: Are Statutory Multiple Damages The Best Remedy?, Stephen J. Shapiro

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This Article advocates that states' statutes make greater and more systematic use of multiple damages by extending them to a much broader range of intentional, wrongful conduct. Part II of this Article will explain why extra-compensatory relief is called for when tortious conduct is intentional or malicious. Part III will compare punitive damages, attorney fees, and treble or other multiple damages as possible sources of additional relief. Part IV will focus on multiple damages. The Article will examine the range of existing state statutes and discuss why and how those statutes might be extended to a broader range of wrongful …

The New Common Law Courts, Culture, And The Localization Of The Model Penal Code, Anders Walker

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Few tropes in American law teaching are more firmly entrenched than the criminal law division between Model Penal Code and common law states. Yet, even a cursory look at current state codes indicates that this bifurcation is outmoded. No state continues to cling to ancient English common law, nor does any state adhere fully to the Model Penal Code. In fact, those states that adopted portions of the Code have since produced a substantial body of case law – what this article terms “new common law” – transforming it. Taking the controversial position that criminal law pedagogy is antiquated, this …

The Pragmatic Incrementalism Of Common Law Intellectual Property, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

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‘Common law intellectual property’ refers to a set of judge-made legal regimes that create exclusionary entitlements in different kinds of intangibles. Principally the creation of courts, many of these regimes are older than their statutory counterparts and continue to co-exist with them. Surprisingly though, intellectual property scholarship has paid scant attention to the nuanced law-making mechanisms and techniques that these regimes employ to navigate through several of intellectual property law’s substantive and structural problems. Common law intellectual property regimes employ a process of rule development that this Article calls ‘pragmatic incrementalism’. It involves the use of pragmatic and minimalist techniques …

The Accidental Promise: Remaking The Law Of Misrepresented Intent, Aditi Bagchi

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Insincere Promises advances an economic theory of promissory fraud. Ayres and Klass argue that the doctrine of promissory fraud helps to induce efficient reliance from promisees by penalizing promisors who misrepresent the objective probability of their performance. The authors propose a revised doctrine aimed at inducing optimal reliance with minimal transaction costs. I show that Ayres and Klass have all but abandoned the role of intent in the common law of misrepresented intent. Ayres and Klass are concerned only with making available to promisees accurate information about the probability of performance by promisors. I suggest that whatever the merits of …

Adjudication As Representation, Christopher J. Peters

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This Article sets forth an interpretive theory of adjudicative lawmaking according to which, under certain conditions, such lawmaking ensures constructive participation through interest representation and thus is not inherently nondemocratic. The author contends that the idea of ‘judicial activism,‘ courts deciding issues better left to political processes or substituting the personal ‘values‘ of judges for law, is based on the incorrect assumptions that courts are unconstrained and nonrepresentative. Instead, when adjudication operates in an archetypal way, it produces law in a manner similar to the parliamentary legislation process. Courts making law are constrained by the process of participatory decisionmaking--the production …