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Series

Boston University School of Law

Faculty Scholarship

1998

Articles 1 - 30 of 39

Full-Text Articles in Law

Punitive Damages And The Economic Theory Of Penalties, Keith N. Hylton Nov 1998

Punitive Damages And The Economic Theory Of Penalties, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

Deterrence has long been considered one of the most important goals of both tort law and criminal law. However, there are different notions of deterrence advanced in the literature in these areas. The traditional notion of deterrence in the criminal punishment literature is one of "complete deterrence," of stopping offenders from committing offensive acts. Generally, complete deterrence is accomplished by eliminating the prospect of gain on the part of the offender. The alternative, more recent notion of deterrence, largely observed in the torts literature, is that of "appropriate or optimal deterrence," which implies deterring offensive conduct only up to the …

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We The Unconventional American People, James E. Fleming Oct 1998

We The Unconventional American People, James E. Fleming

Faculty Scholarship

In his 1991 volume, We the People: Foundations, Bruce Ackerman urged us as Americans to declare our independence from European models of government and to “look inward” to rediscover our distinctive constitutional scheme--dualist democracy.1 In his new volume, We the People: Transformations, he exhorts us as dualist democrats to break up the monopoly that Article V of the Constitution has held on our vision of constitutional amendment. He urges us to move “beyond Article V” and to embrace a pluralist understanding of the sources of higher lawmaking (pp 15-17). Only by doing so, he argues, will we be able …

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The Lawlessness In Our Courts, Susan P. Koniak Oct 1998

The Lawlessness In Our Courts, Susan P. Koniak

Faculty Scholarship

Elsewhere I have argued that the word "law" is too important a resource to reserve exclusively for state acts and pronouncements.5 Here, however, my emphasis is somewhat different. Here, I want to concentrate on the importance of denying the label of "law" to some acts that the state calls "law," particularly the importance of lawyers denying the state's indiscriminate use of the word "law." The bar's rhetoric maintains that the profession's independence from the state is critically important because only an independent bar can serve as an appropriate check on tyranny, on state force masquerading as law.6 Well, …

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Lawyering Up, Jack M. Beermann, Susan Bandes Oct 1998

Lawyering Up, Jack M. Beermann, Susan Bandes

Faculty Scholarship

The widespread dissemination of knowledge about the Miranda protections is often referred to as one of the most successful efforts ever made to educate the American public about its constitutional rights. Studies confirm that a high percentage of the public is aware of Miranda, largely due to television and other mass media. This article asks the question: if television is educating the public about its Miranda rights, what exactly is it teaching us? As fans of the cop show NYPD Blue (a show in which the interrogation and confession are often the dramatic focus) we use that show to explore …

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The Continuing Relevance Of Section 8 (A) (2) To The Contemporary Workplace, Michael C. Harper Aug 1998

The Continuing Relevance Of Section 8 (A) (2) To The Contemporary Workplace, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

In this article I evaluate the claims of the critics of the current section 8(a)(2). I do so, as I believe would Professor St. Antoine, 14 with an eye toward the historical development of new production systems in America and the concomitant development of personnel policies to fit those systems. I consider the purposes for which firm managers seemed to establish and control employee advisory committees before passage of the NLRA and the purposes for which managers seem to establish and control such committees in today's economy. I conclude that these purposes have not substantially changed. Managers before passage of …

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Holmes's Good Man: A Comment On Levinson And Balkin, Jack M. Beermann Jun 1998

Holmes's Good Man: A Comment On Levinson And Balkin, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

Sanford Levinson and J.M. Balkin's paper ("L & B") is refreshing in the attention it pays to Holmes's oft-neglected "good [man], who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience."1 The good man provides a heuristic foil for Holmes's "bad man" whose conduct is motivated only by the potential material consequences, and thus L & B's analysis should help shed light on what is a puzzling metaphor in the folklore surrounding Holmes's The Path of the Law. L & B provide some interesting observations on the implications of …

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Comment On Frederick Schauer's Prediction And Particularity Comment, Gerald F. Leonard Jun 1998

Comment On Frederick Schauer's Prediction And Particularity Comment, Gerald F. Leonard

Faculty Scholarship

Ignorance of the law is generally no excuse. I say generally because the century since the publication of The Path of the Law has brought a small but increasing number of exceptions to the rule. In Oliver Wendell Holmes's day, however, exceptions to the rule were nearly nonexistent, much to Holmes's satisfaction.1 In The Common Law, Holmes said that the law requires persons "at their peril to know the teachings of common experience, just as it requires them to know the law." 2 He did not, of course, actually think that common experience was perfectly knowable or judicial interpretation perfectly …

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Memorial Tributes For Professor Elizabeth B. Clark In Memoriam, Pnina Lahav Apr 1998

Memorial Tributes For Professor Elizabeth B. Clark In Memoriam, Pnina Lahav

Faculty Scholarship

I leave to others to talk about Betsy's scholarship. Let me only say that she had a remarkable ability to interest others in her projects. When she gave papers or workshops, she spoke softly but with such enthusiasm and engagement that she drew others into her topics and interests effortlessly. Her listeners would lean forward and intently follow her sometimes complex and nuanced train of thought. I have often wondered at this gift-I think it has something to do with her approach to her audience, her ability to be respectful and inclusive rather than distanced and formal. Despite doing painstaking …

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Deliberative Democracy, Overlapping Consensus, And Same-Sex Marriage, Linda C. Mcclain Mar 1998

Deliberative Democracy, Overlapping Consensus, And Same-Sex Marriage, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

A pressing concern in political and constitutional theory is how to construct a model of justification in law and politics that offers methods for securing agreement and social cooperation in the face of moral pluralism. A common goal of this work is to elaborate the requirements of deliberative democracy, that is, a model of democratic self-government that "asks citizens and officials to justify public policy by giving reasons that can be accepted by those who are bound by it."' Two fundamental questions are: (1) are there any limits to the grounds to which citizens may appeal or the reasons that …

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Measuring Market Power When The Firm Has Power In The Input And Output Markets, Keith N. Hylton, Mark Lasser Mar 1998

Measuring Market Power When The Firm Has Power In The Input And Output Markets, Keith N. Hylton, Mark Lasser

Faculty Scholarship

We examine the problem of measuring market power when the firm has monopoly power in the output market and monopsony power in the input market - a case we refer to as 'dual-market' power. We show how the Lerner index, which measures the mark-up over the marginal cost, can be modified to reflect the firm's ability to set price above the competitive level.

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Discovery, Learning And Adoption Of New Techniques: Choosing Specialization To Optimize Technical Progress, James Bessen Mar 1998

Discovery, Learning And Adoption Of New Techniques: Choosing Specialization To Optimize Technical Progress, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Why is it that adopting new technologies takes so long and costs so much? Clearly, firms do not know all the details necessary to implement a complex technology efficiently; learning these details requires extensive search. However, this explanation has a problem: even limited search may be so costly that newly discovered techniques will not be tried. We find that specialization solves this problem. If a complex process is divided into many small components, each searched in parallel, then discoveries are readily tested. Moreover, specialized search can perform surprisingly well even for processes of indefinite complexity. We measure the returns to …

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Defining The Economic Relationship Appropriate For Collective Bargaining, Michael C. Harper Mar 1998

Defining The Economic Relationship Appropriate For Collective Bargaining, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

These are, of course, difficult times for those who share the goals of the framers of the original National Labor Relations Act (the "NLRA" or "Act") .' As union density in the private sector has continued to decline2 and as the NLRA has proven helpless against the economic developments that have generated continuing employer resistance to collective bargaining, the original vision of the Wagner Congress must seem myopic and shaded with an excessively optimistic tint. Observing these economic developments and the enhanced impediments to union organization that they have posed makes it clear that only a much different statute …

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Managing Legal Change: The Transformation Of Establishment Clause Law, Hugh Baxter Jan 1998

Managing Legal Change: The Transformation Of Establishment Clause Law, Hugh Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

One perspective on the Supreme Court is to see it as a manager of legal change. At a particular time, and with respect to a particular issue of federal law, a majority of Justices may coalesce around a law-transforming project. Because the Court enjoys nearly complete control over its docket, such a coalition of Justices may select carefully the cases most advantageous to the law -transforming project. And because the Court's pronouncements on matters of federal law are binding on all other interpreters, the Court may enforce its legal transformation by exercising its disciplinary powers of review. The Court's implementation …

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Archibald Cox: Teacher, David J. Seipp Jan 1998

Archibald Cox: Teacher, David J. Seipp

Faculty Scholarship

Archie Cox is a teacher. He taught generations of law students at Harvard Law School and, more recently, at Boston University School of Law. He left the classroom on three occasions, reluctantly, when first President Truman, then President Kennedy, then President Nixon's Attorney General called Professor Cox to Washington to play a part on the national stage. In his first weeks as Watergate Special Prosecutor, Cox carried with him a stack of blue books, Labor Law examinations he still had to grade (p. 263). In the public eye, his straight-backed demeanor, his familiar crew cut, half-glasses, bow tie, and tweeds …

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Toleration, Autonomy, And Governmental Promotion Of Good Lives: Beyond 'Empty' Toleration To Toleration As Respect, Linda C. Mcclain Jan 1998

Toleration, Autonomy, And Governmental Promotion Of Good Lives: Beyond 'Empty' Toleration To Toleration As Respect, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This Article considers discontent with liberal toleration as being both too empty, because it fails to secure respect and appreciation among citizens who tolerate each other, and too robust, because it precludes government from engaging in a formative project of helping citizens to live good, self-governing lives. To meet these criticisms, the Article advances a model of toleration as respect, as distinguished from a model of empty toleration, drawing on three rationales for toleration: the anti-compulsion rationale, the jurisdictional rationale, and the diversity rationale. It defends toleration as respect against some common criticisms-emanating from feminist, civic republican, and liberal perfectionist …

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The Shadowlands: Secrets, Lies, And Assisted Reproduction, George J. Annas Jan 1998

The Shadowlands: Secrets, Lies, And Assisted Reproduction, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Americans love babies and technology, and most Americans applaud the ability of the new assisted-reproduction techniques to help infertile couples have children. But these techniques have also given birth to a wide variety of new legal issues, including questions about the identity of the mother and father of the child, the enforcement of preconception contracts, the elements of informed consent, and the disposition of frozen embryos. After almost 20 years of experience and the growth of infertility clinics into a multibillion-dollar industry, it is time to consider establishing national standards and a federal regulatory scheme. Two recent court cases, one …

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Partial-Birth Abortion, Congress, And The Constitution, George J. Annas Jan 1998

Partial-Birth Abortion, Congress, And The Constitution, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The political debate over abortion during the past 25 years has shifted among various dichotomous views of the world: life versus choice, fetus versus woman, fetus versus baby, constitutional right versus states' rights, government versus physician, physician and patient versus state legislature. Hundreds of statutes and almost two dozen Supreme Court decisions on abortion later, the core aspects of Roe v. Wade, 1 the most controversial health-related decision by the Court ever, remain substantially the same as they were in 1973. Attempts to overturn Roe in both the courtroom and the legislature have failed. Pregnant women still have a constitutional …

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Fencing Cyberspace: Drawing Borders In A Virtual World, Maureen A. O'Rourke Jan 1998

Fencing Cyberspace: Drawing Borders In A Virtual World, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Faculty Scholarship

In the last few years, the Internet has increasingly become a source of information even for the historically computer illiterate. The growing popularity of the Internet has been driven in large part by the World Wide Web (web). The web is a system that facilitates use of the Internet by helping users sort through the great mass of information available on it. The web uses software that allows one document to link to and access another, and so on, despite the fact that the documents may reside on different machines in physically remote locations. The dispersion of data that is …

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Defining The Limits Of Free-Riding In Cyberspace: Trademark Liability For Metatagging, Maureen A. O'Rourke Jan 1998

Defining The Limits Of Free-Riding In Cyberspace: Trademark Liability For Metatagging, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Faculty Scholarship

The Internet has the potential to revolutionize global communication, offering a relatively low-cost means for information exchange. Since its inception as a research network, the Internet has developed into a "a vast library including millions of readily available and indexed publications and a sprawling mall offering goods and services."' The World Wide Web ("Web"), a tool which helps to organize the enormous amount of information available on the Internet, has been a catalyst in the Internet's emergence as a viable commercial marketplace.

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Defending The Middle Way: Intermediate Scrutiny As Judicial Minimalism, Jay D. Wexler Jan 1998

Defending The Middle Way: Intermediate Scrutiny As Judicial Minimalism, Jay D. Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

In the last few years, Court-watchers have been particularly busy critiquing the constitutional decisions of the splintered Rehnquist Court. Two of the recurring critiques have posited that the Justices are overly activist and that their opinions are needlessly confusing. American Lawyer's Stuart Taylor, for example, has decried both the "jurisprudential mess" of the Court's recent redistricting decisions' as well as the disturbing activism that Taylor believes marks each of the Equal Protection decisions of the 1995-96 Terman activism that has led him to wonder "whether there is any life at all left in the idea of judicial restraint."' Eva Rodriguez …

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Intellectual Property As Price Discrimination: Implications For Contract, Wendy J. Gordon Jan 1998

Intellectual Property As Price Discrimination: Implications For Contract, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

As people become enamored with the possible benefits of allowing price discrimination in contracts for intellectual goods, they should realize that traditional intellectual property law works by fostering price discrimination among customers. This simple fact has implications for federal pre-emption, and is a reminder of the complexity of the economic issues involved. Increasing a seller's ability to price discriminate will often involve increasing his monopoly power, with dubious welfare effects.

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Marriage Contracts And The Family Economy, Katharine B. Silbaugh Jan 1998

Marriage Contracts And The Family Economy, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

One simplified view of contract law is that the state enforces private bargains without looking into the substance of those bargains. From this contractual perspective marriage might look like a contract to exchange services and goods: love, money, the ability to have and raise children, housework, sex, emotional support, physical care in times of sickness, entertainment and so forth. But when the parties to a marriage put these terms in writing, courts only enforce the provisions governing money. This contract/family law rule of selective enforcement disproportionately benefits those who bring more money to a marriage, who are more likely to …

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Productivity Adjustments And Learning-By-Doing As Human Capital, James Bessen Jan 1998

Productivity Adjustments And Learning-By-Doing As Human Capital, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

This paper measures plant-level productivity gains associated with learning curves across the entire manufacturing sector. We measure these gains at plant startups and also after major employment changes. We find: 1) The gains are strongly associated with a variety of human capital measures implying that learning-by-doing is largely a firm-specific human capital investment. 2) This implicit investment is large; many plants invest as much in learning-by-doing as they invest in physical capital and much more than they invest in formal job training. 3) This investment differs persistently over industries and is higher with greater R&D. 4) Consistent with a learning-by-doing …

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Evaluating The Case For Social Security Reform: Elderly Poverty, Paternalism And Private Pensions, Maria O'Brien Jan 1998

Evaluating The Case For Social Security Reform: Elderly Poverty, Paternalism And Private Pensions, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

This Article considers the many arguments currently being made in favor of Social Security pension reform and evaluates each of them in terms of the principal Congressional goal of the program-the elimination of elderly poverty-as well as more recent goals that have been articulated by subsequent commentators such as a reduction in government paternalism and the maximization of retirement income. The Article begins with a short history of the public pension program in the United States and considers at length the details of the various reform proposals that currently enjoy support. In addition it examines the enormously regressive tax structure …

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Striking A Delicate Balance: Intellectual Property, Antitrust, Contract And Standardization In The Computer Industry, Maureen A. O'Rourke Jan 1998

Striking A Delicate Balance: Intellectual Property, Antitrust, Contract And Standardization In The Computer Industry, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Faculty Scholarship

Shortly before the Second Intermational Harvard Conference on Internet & Society, the Department of Justice ("DOJ") brought a widely publicized suit against the Microsoft Corporation. In its complaint, the DOJ charged Microsoft with engaging in a variety of antitrust wrongs connected with its alleged monopoly position in the market for personal computer ("PC") operating system software. The Conference panel on Antitrust and the Internet, which had planned to focus on how antitrust law affects standard-setting efforts and the implications for the Intermet, quickly abandoned that topic in favor of discussion of the Microsoft suit.

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Transgenic Agriculture: Biosafety And International Trade, Michael S. Baram, Calestuous Juma, Sheldon Krimsky, Rufus King Jan 1998

Transgenic Agriculture: Biosafety And International Trade, Michael S. Baram, Calestuous Juma, Sheldon Krimsky, Rufus King

Faculty Scholarship

We stand at the threshold of a new century that will bring novel methods of producing foods, industrial materials, pharmaceuticals, and other products important to society and industry.2 Today's session will, therefore, address a subject of great importance: the introduction of genetically modified crops, livestock, micro-organisms, and other substances into agriculture and related fields, made possible by American and foreign corporate biotechnology.

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Human Cloning: A Choice Or An Echo, George J. Annas Jan 1998

Human Cloning: A Choice Or An Echo, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The chant is "cloning, cloning, cloning"; but the echo is "choice, choice, choice." From all the hoopla about human cloning as a human choice it would seem that cloning must be the most important scientific issue of our age. My intent in this Commentary is not to join this chorus, but to take advantage of cloning's high visibility to explore the nature of the choice it offers. What is it that makes human cloning at once so appealing to a few and so repulsive to most? The answer, I think, can be found in Roman mythology: Cloning recalls Ovid's myth …

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A National Bill Of Patients' Rights, George J. Annas Jan 1998

A National Bill Of Patients' Rights, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In one of the most enthusiastically received proposals in his January State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton called on Congress to enact a national bill of rights in health care. The President said, “You have the right to know all your medical options, not just the cheapest. You have the right to choose the doctor you want for the care you need. You have the right to emergency room care, wherever and whenever you need it. You have the right to keep your medical records confidential.”

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Protecting Soldiers From Friendly Fire: The Consent Requirement For Using Investigational Drugs And Vaccines In Combat, George J. Annas Jan 1998

Protecting Soldiers From Friendly Fire: The Consent Requirement For Using Investigational Drugs And Vaccines In Combat, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In 1990, following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the Department of Defense (DOD) sought a waiver of the informed consent requirements of existing human experimentation regulations from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). With this waiver, DOD could authorize military use of investigational drugs and vaccines on soldiers involved in the Gulf War without their informed consent. The basis of the waiver request was military expediency. In DOD's words: "In all peace time applications, we believe strongly in informed consent and ethical foundations... but military combat is different." DOD's rationale was that informed consent under combat conditions was "not feasible" because …

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Human Rights And Maternal-Fetal Hiv Transmission Prevention Trials In Africa, George J. Annas Jan 1998

Human Rights And Maternal-Fetal Hiv Transmission Prevention Trials In Africa, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The human rights issues raised by the conduct of maternal-fetal human immunodeficiency virus transmission trials in Africa are not unique to either acquired immunodeficiency syndrome or Africa, but public discussion of these trials presents an opportunity for the United States and other wealthy nations to take the rights and welfare of impoverished populations seriously. The central issue at stake when developed countries perform research on subjects in developing countries is exploitation. The only way to prevent exploitation of a research population is to insist not only that informed consent be obtained but also that, should an intervention be proven beneficial, …

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