Law Commons^™

Special International Zones In Practice And Theory, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

Special Economic Zones In The United States: From Colonial Charters, To Foreign-Trade Zones, Toward Ussezs, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

Copyrights, Privacy, And The Blockchain, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

Unconstitutional Quartering, Governmental Immunity, And Van Halen's Brown M&M Test, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

The jurisprudence of the Third Amendment, which limits the quartering of troops in private homes, effectively consists of just one case: Engblom v. Carey. But what a case! In addition to showcasing an unjustly neglected corner of our constitutional heritage, Engblom demonstrates the troubling effects of a dubious legal doctrine: governmental immunity. Though the court of appeals had held New York officials potentially liable for violating the Third Amendment when they had quartered National Guard troops in the dormitory rooms of striking prison guards, the lower court on remand in Engblom denied the plaintiffs a remedy. Why? Because throughout the …

What Can Corporations Teach Governments About Democratic Equality?, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

Democracies place great faith in the principle of one-person/one-vote. Business corporations and other private entities, in contrast, typically operate under the one-share/one-vote rule, allocating control in proportion to ownership. Why the difference? In times past, we might have cited the differing ends of public and private institutions. Whereas public democracies aim at promoting the general welfare of an entire political community, private entities aim at more specific goals, such as generating profits or managing a cooperative residence. As business entities have grown in size and in the range of services they provide, however, the distinction between public and private governance …

Copyright Porn Trolls, Wasting Taxi Medallions, And The Propriety Of ‘Property’, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

What happens when the government creates privileges that have powers rivaling those that the common law accords to property? Recent events in two seemingly unrelated areas suggest a troubling answer to that question. First, in copyright, porn trolls have sued thousands of John Does for allegedly participating in illegal file sharing. These suits evidently seek not judicial vindication but merely the defendants' identities, which the plaintiffs then use to reap settlement payments from guilty and innocent alike. Second, taxi drivers in cities across the world have launched legal, political, and physical attacks against Uber and other networked transportation services, accusing …

Intellectual Privilege, Tom Bell

Tom W. Bell

No abstract provided.

The Constitution As If Consent Mattered, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

Libertarians do not fit into the left-right spectrum very comfortably; by their own account, they transcend it. This brief paper, written for a Chapman Law Review symposium on libertarian legal theory, argues that libertarians should likewise transcend the dichotomy currently dividing constitutional theory. The Left tends to regard the Constitution as adaptable to current needs and defined by judicial authority; the Right tends to search the historical record for the Constitution’s original meaning. Each of those conventional approaches has its own virtues and vices. Combining the best of both — the responsiveness of living constitutionalism and the textual fidelity of …

Principles Of Contracts For Governing Service, Tom Bell

Tom W. Bell

No abstract provided.

Five Reforms For Copyright, Tom Bell

Tom W. Bell

No abstract provided.

Principles Of Contracts For Governing Services, Tom Bell

Tom W. Bell

The state provides governance services within a specified territory, demanding payment in the form of taxes, regulations, and compulsory service. Some citizens expressly consent to that bargain, as when the President of the United States swears to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. With regard to many of its subjects, however, the state can claim no more than hypothetical consent, leaving its use of force only weakly justified. Governing services provided under contract, founded in express consent, enjoy a more justified relationship with their citizen-customers. Private institutions already provide the same legal services as the state, offering rules, dispute resolution, …

'Property' In The Constitution: The View From The Third Amendment, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

During World War II, after Japan attacked the Aleutian Islands off Alaska’s coast, the United States forcibly evacuated the islands’ natives and quartered soldiers in private homes. That hitherto unremarked violation of the Third Amendment gives us a fresh perspective on what “Property” means in the U.S. Constitution. As a general legal matter, property includes not just real estate - land, fixtures attached thereto, and related rights - but also various kinds of personal property, ranging from tangibles such as books to intangibles such as causes of action. That knowledge would, if we interpreted the Constitution as we do other …

Pirates In The Family Room: How Performances From Abroad, To U.S. Consumers, Might Evade Copyright Law, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

What will international copyright law look like in ten years? It will doubtless offer many different facets and will, as at present, elude any comprehensive portrait. This brief paper thus focuses on just one plausible and interesting scenario: Parties overseas will come to offer unauthorized performances of copyrighted works to consumers in the United States, a practice that will rouse the ire of copyright holders but that the Copyright Act will do little to stop. Depending on where the transmitted performances take place, legally speaking, they might not qualify as infringing under the Act. Even if they do qualify as …

Graduated Consent In Contract And Tort Law: Toward A Theory Of Justification, Tom Bell

Tom W. Bell

We often speak of consent in binary terms, boiling it down to 'yes' or 'no.' In truth, however, consent varies by degrees. We tend to afford expressly consensual transactions more respect than transactions backed by only implied consent, for instance, which we in turn regard as more meaningful than transactions justified by merely hypothetical consent. A mirror of that ordinal ranking appears in our judgments about unconsensual transactions, too. Those gradations of consent mark a deep structure of our social world, one especially evident in the contours of contract and tort law. This article draws on those and other sources …

Government Prediction Markets: Why, Who, And How, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

This paper describes how prediction markets can make governments smarter, cheaper, and more responsive to changing conditions. A prediction market resembles a stock exchange where traders buy and sell not shares of companies, but claims about future events. Academic and commercial use of prediction markets suggests that they offer a useful tool for encouraging, collecting, and quantifying widely scattered expertise. Government administrators have begun experimenting with prediction markets, too. Many questions remain, however, about the proper way to implement government prediction markets. This paper opens with a brief survey of the costs and benefits of government prediction markets. It then …

Copyright, The First Amendment, And Unoriginal Speech, Tom Bell

Tom W. Bell

No abstract provided.

Commentary On Predicting Crime, Tom Bell

Tom W. Bell

The market mechanisms proposed in Predicting Crime offer many virtues. The authors describe several of these—unbiased information collection; incentives that encourage disclosure; opinions weighted by conviction; information aggregation; instantaneous and continuous feedback—and convincingly argue that these structural features stand to help prediction markets outperform alternative institutions in forecasting the interplay of crime rates and crime polices. In that, Predicting Crime adopts an economic point of view and speaks in terms of practical experience. After all, similar structural features have already appeared in other successful prediction markets, such as those offering trading in claims about the weather, flu outbreaks, or box …

The Scale Of Consent, Tom Bell

Tom W. Bell

We often speak of consent in binary terms, boiling it down to "yes" or "no." In practice, however, consent varies by degrees. We tend to afford expressly consensual transactions more respect than transactions backed by only implied consent, for instance, which we in turn regard as more meaningful than transactions justified by merely hypothetical consent. A mirror of that ordinal ranking appears in our judgments about unconsensual transactions. This working paper reviews how legal and other authorities regard consent, revealing that they treat consent as a matter of degree and a measure of justification. The scale described here plays a …

Joint Comment On Cftc Concept Release On The Appropriate Regulatory Treatment Of Event Contracts,, Tom Bell

Tom W. Bell

No abstract provided.

Graduated Consent Theory, Explained And Applied, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

We often speak of consent in binary terms, boiling it down to "yes" or "no." In practice, however, consent varies by degrees. We tend to afford expressly consensual transactions more respect than transactions backed by only implied consent, for instance, which we in turn regard as more meaningful than transactions justified by merely hypothetical consent. A mirror of that ordinal ranking appears in our judgments about unconsensual transactions. This article reviews how a wide range of authorities regard consent, discovering that they treat consent as a matter of degree and a measure of justification. By abstracting from that evidence, we …

Private Prediction Markets And The Law, Tom Bell

Tom W. Bell

This paper analyses the legality of private prediction markets under U.S. law, describing both the legal risks they raise and how to manage those risks. As the label "private" suggests, such markets offer trading not to the public but rather only to members of a particular firm. The use of private prediction markets has grown in recent years because they can efficiently collect and quantify information that firms find useful in making management decisions. Along with that considerable benefit, however, comes a particularly worrisome cost: the risk that running a private prediction market might violate U.S. state or federal laws. …

The Specter Of Copyism V. Blockheaded Authors: How User-Generated Content Affects Copyright Policy, Tom Bell

Tom W. Bell

Technological advances, because they have radically lowered the costs of creating and distributing expressive works, have shaken the foundations of copyright policy. Once, those who held copyrights in sound recordings, movies, television shows, magazines, and the like could safely assume that the public would do little more than passively consume. Now, though, the masses have seized (peacefully acquired, really) the means of reproducing copyright works, making infringement cheap, easy, and, notwithstanding the law's dictates, widespread. Copyright holders thus understandably fear that their customers have begun to treat expressive works like common property, free for all to use. That, the specter …

Outgrowing Copyright: The Effect Of Market Size On Copyright Policy, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

Does copyright protection offer the best means of stimulating the production of expressive works? Perhaps, at the moment, it does. If so, however, copyright protection will probably become inefficiently over-protective as the market for expressive works grows. With such growth, copyright holders will find it increasingly remunerative to focus on customers willing to pay a premium for particular expressive works. In a larger, more finely segmented market, copyright holders will find that their statutory rights generate larger monopoly rents. Yet copyright holders will suffer no corresponding increase in production or distribution costs; thanks to technological advances, we can expect those …

Codifying Copyright's Misuse Defense, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

Although courts have found a misuse defense to copyright infringement, lawmakers have not yet codified it. To clarify the doctrine, and to bring the Copyright Act up-to-date with the law, this paper proposes adding a new § 107(b): "It constitutes copyright misuse to contractually limit any use of a copyrighted work if that use would qualify as noninfringing under § 107(a). No party misusing a work has rights to it under § 106 or § 106A during that misuse. A court may, however, remedy breach of any contract the limitations of which constitute copyright misuse under this section." The present …

Copyright As Intellectual Property Privilege, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

We often call copyright a species of intellectual property, abbreviating it, "IP." This brief paper suggests that we consider copyright as another sort of IP: an intellectual privilege. Though copyright doubtless has some property-like attributes, it more closely resembles a special statutory benefit than it does a right, general in nature and grounded in common law, deserving the title of property. To call copyright a privilege accurately reflects legal and popular usage, past and present. It moreover offers salutary policy results, protecting property's good name and rebalancing the public choice pressures that drive copyright policy. We face a choice between …

The Impact Of Blogging On The Practice Of Law: Hit The Snooze Button, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

To forecast how blogging will impact the practice of law, we need to consider how some similar, equally revolutionary technology has impacted attorneys. I nominate the clock radio. Given that example, you might suppose that I don't think blogging will radically change the practice of law. Correct. Blogging has many virtues. It offers a largely harmless outlet for extroverted cranks and cheap entertainment for procrastinating office workers. Blogging even stands to do some very real good. I have nothing against blogging; I blog, myself. I simply don't think it will change the practice of law very much. Why not? First, …

Prediction Markets For Promoting The Progress Of Science And The Useful Arts, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

Copyrights and patents promote only superficial progress in the sciences and useful arts. Copyright law primarily encourages entertaining works, whereas patent law mainly inspires marginal improvements in mature technologies. Neither form of intellectual property does much to encourage basic research and development. Essential progress suffers.

Prediction markets offer another way to promote the sciences and useful arts. In general, prediction markets support transactions in claims about unresolved questions of fact. A prediction market specifically designed to promote progress in the sciences and useful arts - call it a scientific prediction exchange or SPEx - would support transactions in a variety …

Misunderestimating Dastar: How The Supreme Court Unwittingly Revolutionized Copyright Preemption, Tom Bell

Tom W. Bell

No abstract provided.

Treason, Technology, And Freedom Of Expression, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

The power to punish treason against the U.S. conflicts with the First Amendment freedoms of speech and of the press. Far from a question of mere theory, that conflict threatens to chill public dissent to the War on Terrorism. The government has already demonstrated its willingness to punish treasonous expression. After World War II, the United States won several prosecutions against citizens who had engaged in propaganda on behalf of the Axis powers. Today, critics of the War on Terrorism likewise face accusations of treason. Under the law of treasonous expression developed following World War II, those accusations could credibly …

Free Speech, Strict Scrutiny, And Self-Help: How Technology Upgrades Constitutional Jurisprudence, Tom Bell

Tom W. Bell

Self-help plays a nearly unnoticed but increasingly important role in free speech jurisprudence. Under both the compelling interest and least restrictive means prongs of strict scrutiny, courts have determined the constitutionality of content-based restrictions on speech by comparing the efficacy of state action to that of alternative, self-help remedies. Courts and commentators, however, have yet to explore and justify how self-help does and should influence First Amendment law. Thanks largely to the obscuring effect of the captive audience doctrine, courts have invoked self-help in compelling interest inquiries in a consistent, but only implicit, manner. In contrast, although the Supreme Court …