Law Commons^™

[Un]Happy Together: Why The Supremacy Clause Preempts State Law Digital Performance Rights In Radio-Like Streaming Of Pre-1972 Sound Recordings, Julie L. Ross

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Lovers of the music of Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Etta James, and hundreds of other recording artists whose records were made before February 15, 1972, may soon have a hard time hearing these great artists on any satellite or Internet radio service. Recently, two federal district courts have found that state laws were violated when satellite radio broadcaster Sirius XM Radio included pre-1972 sound recordings in its broadcasts without the owners’ permission, but these courts did not consider-–and the parties did not argue-–how the Supremacy Clause applies to those state law claims. This article argues that state laws purporting to …

Antitrust, Competition Policy, And Inequality, Jonathan B. Baker, Steven C. Salop

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Economic inequality recently has entered the political discourse in a highly visible way. This political impact is not a surprise. As the U.S. economy has begun to recover from the Great Recession since mid-2009, economic growth has effectively been appropriated by those already well off, leaving the median household less well off. The serious economic, political and moral issues raised by inequality can be addressed through a panoply of public policies including competition policy, the focus of this article. The article describes the channels through which market power contributes to inequality, and sets forth a range of possible antitrust policy …

Ex Post Modernism: How The First Amendment Framed Nonrepresentational Art, Sonya G. Bonneau

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Nonrepresentational art repeatedly surfaces in legal discourse as an example of highly valued First Amendment speech. It is also systematically described in constitutionally valueless terms: nonlinguistic, noncognitive, and apolitical. Why does law talk about nonrepresentational art at all, much less treat it as a constitutional precept? What are the implications for conceptualizing artistic expression as free speech?

This article contends that the source of nonrepresentational art’s presumptive First Amendment value is the same source of its utter lack thereof: modernism. Specifically, a symbolic alliance between abstraction and freedom of expression was forged in the mid-twentieth century, informed by social and …

The Romantic Author And The Romance Writer: Resisting Gendered Concepts Of Creativity, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Dominant narratives of creativity regularly expect female-associated forms of creativity to be provisioned naturally without need for the economic incentives provided by exclusive rights, just like housework and childcare. Even as the concept of Romantic authorship has come under sustained analytic assault, its challengers often look elsewhere–to the kinds of creativity in which men are more likely to participate–to find models of situated, always-influenced authorship. In this chapter, I examine one variant of the problem, in which certain arguments about copyright discount the value of forms that are predominantly produced and enjoyed by women. But creative works in these oft-denigrated …