Law Commons^™

Complexity And Copyright In Contradiction, Michael J. Madison

Articles

The title of the article is a deliberate play on architect Robert Venturi's classic of post-modern architectural theory, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. The article analyzes metaphorical 'architectures' of copyright and cyberspace using architectural and land use theories developed for the physical world. It applies this analysis to copyright law through the lens of the First Amendment. I argue that the 'simplicity' of digital engineering is undermining desirable 'complexity' in legal and physical structures that regulate expressive works.

Becoming Visible: The Ada's Impact On Healthcare For Persons With Disabilities, Mary Crossley

Articles

This Article will adopt the perspective of individuals with disabilities in their encounters with the health care finance and delivery system in the United States, and will pose the question of what the past decade has shown the ADA to mean (or not mean) for those individuals' ability to seek, receive, and pay for effective health care services. To that end, this Article will provide an overview of three broad areas on which the ADA has had varying degrees of impact.

Part II of the Article will examine how the ADA has affected the rights of an individual with a …

Designing Electronic Casebooks That Talk Back: The Cato Program, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

Electronic casebooks offer important benefits of flexibility in control of presentation, connectivity, and interactivity. These additional degrees of freedom, however, also threaten to overwhelm students. If casebook authors and instructors are to achieve their pedagogical goals, they will need new methods for guiding students. This paper presents three such methods developed in an intelligent tutoring environment for engaging students in legal role-playing, making abstract concepts explicit and manipulable, and supporting pedagogical dialogues. This environment is built around a program known as CATO, which employs artificial intelligence techniques to teach first-year law students how to make basic legal arguments with cases. …

Benign Hegemony? Kosovo And Article 2(4) Of The U.N. Charter, Jules Lobel

Articles

The 1999 U.S.-led, NATO-assisted air strike against Yugoslavia has been extolled by some as leading to the creation of a new rule of international law permitting nations to undertake forceful humanitarian intervention where the Security Council cannot act. This view posits the United States as a benevolent hegemon militarily intervening in certain circumstances in defense of such universal values as the protection of human rights. This article challenges that view. NATO's Kosovo intervention does not represent a benign hegemony introducing a new rule of international law. Rather, the United States, freed from Cold War competition with a rival superpower, is …

Recognizing Opportunistic Bias Crimes, Lu-In Wang

Articles

The federal approach to punishing bias-motivated crimes is more limited than the state approach. Though the federal and state methods overlap in some respects, two features of the federal approach restrict its range of application. First, federal law prohibits a narrower range of conduct than do most state bias crimes laws. In order to be punishable under federal law, bias-motivated conduct must either constitute a federal crime or interfere with a federally protected right or activity-requirements that exclude racially motivated assault, property damage and many other common violent or destructive bias offenses. In most states, however, hate crimes encompass a …

Dueling Class Actions, Rhonda Wasserman

Articles

When multiple class action suits are filed on behalf of the same class members, numerous problems ensue. Dueling class actions are confusing to class members, wasteful of judicial resources, conducive to unfair settlements, and laden with complex preclusion problems. The article creates a typology of different kinds of dueling class actions; explores the problems that plague each type; considers the effect the Supreme Court's decision in Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. v. Epstein, 516 U.S. 367 (1996), has had on these problems; evaluates the efficacy of existing judicial tools to curb them; and proposes an array of possible solutions. The more …

Getting It Right: Panel Error And The En Banc Process In The Ninth Circuit Court Of Appeals, Arthur D. Hellman

Articles

"Why are judges [who are] so good making so many errors?"

That question, posed at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 1999, nicely captures one of the principal arguments made in the Final Report of the Commission on Structural Alternatives for the Federal Courts of Appeals. The Commission, chaired by retired Supreme Court Justice Byron White, recommended that Congress divide the existing Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals into three "adjudicative divisions," each of which would operate almost as an independent appellate court. Restructuring is necessary, the Commission said, because "the law-declaring function of appellate courts requires groups …

Critical Hermeneutics: The Intertwining Of Explanation And Understanding As Exemplified In Legal Analysis, George H. Taylor

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One of the most vexing questions in hermeneutics is whether it can be critical-whether it can engage in critique. In Part I of this Article, I show how within legal hermeneutics the element of critique is present even within those forms of legal interpretation most adherent to stances of "understanding." Here I concentrate on the work of Robert Bork and Justice Antonin Scalia and demonstrate how distance, separation, critique is present within their theories. In Part II, I reverse emphases and show how elements of "understanding" persist within legal theories most avowedly reliant on forms of "explanation." My exemplar here …

Clinical Legal Education: Energy And Transformation, David J. Herring

Articles

The clinical movement has had a dramatic impact on the nation's law schools. Administrators and faculty members cannot successfully ignore it or wish it away. Instead, they must address it and seek ways to harness its energy. My perspective on this subject stems from my entry into academia as a clinician. I was a faculty member in the University of Michigan's Child Advocacy Law Clinic for three years before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in 1990 with the charge to create and implement an in-house clinic program. Over the past ten years, I have assisted in the …