Law Commons^™

Pov: Scotus Should Not Permit “Boycott Of Same-Sex Marriage”, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

On December 5, 2017, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which baker (self-described cake artist) Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, asked the court to decide “whether applying Colorado’s public accommodations law to compel artists to create expression that violates their sincerely held religious beliefs about marriage violates the Free Speech or Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment.”

Comment On Brewer: Form And Content In Legal Proof (Or Why Everybody Wins - Or At Least Gets A Participation Trophy), Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

In 1980, I was in a Contracts class taught by the incomparable Arthur Leff. It became very clear very quickly that one student in that class was (apart from Professor Leff) the smartest and most interesting person in the room. That person was Scott Brewer. More than three and a half decades later, when I thought about who I would most like to invite to comment on my book Evidence of the Law: Proving Legal Claims, one name immediately shot into my mind: Scott Brewer. He was, as the saying goes, at the very top of my draft board. He …

A Vatcoin Proposal Following On The 2017 Eu Vat Proposals - Mtic, Vatcoin, And Blockchain, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Musaad Alwohaibi, Michael Cheetham, Camille Tirand

Faculty Scholarship

The following proposal for an EU VATCoin was presented at the Digital Tax Transformations Conference, December 18 & 19, 2017 in Vienna, Austria at WU Global Tax Policy Center (WU GTPC) at the Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law of Vienna University of Business and Economics.

The EU Commission has proposed “far-reaching reforms” to solve some of the fraud in the EU VAT. It hopes to capture €50 billion lost annually to MTIC fraud in goods. It hopes to do this without addressing tradable services, a MTIC mutation which by all accounts is running strong.

Fortunately, the Commission is …

Exploring The Meaning Of Experiential Deaning, Peggy Maisel, Margaret Martin Barry, Robert Dinerstein, Phyllis Goldfarb, Linda Morton

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the position of associate dean of experiential education in law schools across the country and the central role associate deans play in the changing landscape of legal education. Experiential deans have broad responsibility for overseeing law schools’ experiential education programs. Additional responsibilities differ between institutions, but range from leading efforts to comply with new ABA standards to overseeing the integration of experiential education into the broader curriculum. Analyzing survey data collected from associate experiential deans across the country, the authors find the structure, content, and authority of the position is under-developed. The authors make recommendations on how …

Ai And Jobs: The Role Of Demand, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

In manufacturing, technology has sharply reduced jobs in recent decades. But before that, for over a century, employment grew, even in industries experiencing rapid technological change. What changed? Demand was highly elastic at first and then became inelastic. The effect of artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs will similarly depend critically on the nature of demand. This paper presents a simple model of demand that accurately predicts the rise and fall of employment in the textile, steel, and automotive industries. This model provides a useful framework for exploring how AI is likely to affect jobs over the next 10 or 20 …

Equality, Sovereignty, And The Family In Morales-Santana, Kristin Collins

Faculty Scholarship

In Sessions v. Morales-Santana, ³ the Supreme Court encountered a body of citizenship law that has long relied on family membership in the construction of the nation’s borders and the composition of the polity.⁴ The particular statute at issue in the case regulates the transmission of citizenship from American parents to their foreign-born children at birth, a form of citizenship known today as derivative citizenship.⁵ When those children are born outside marriage, the derivative citizenship statute makes it more difficult for American fathers, as compared with American mothers, to transmit citizenship to their foreign-born children.⁶ Over …

Decomposing The “Tacit Knowledge Problem:” Codification Of Knowledge And Access In Crispr Gene-Editing, Neil Thompson, Samantha Zyontz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Restating International Torts: Problems Of Process And Substance In The Ali's Third Restatement Of Torts, Nancy J. Moore

Faculty Scholarship

The American Law Institute’s Third Restatement of Torts was initially conceived as a series of separate projects, each with its own reporters. From 1998 through 2010, the ALI completed and published three different segments: Products Liability, Apportionment of Liability, and Liability for Physical and Emotional Harm. Initially, the ALI did not intend to restate the intentional torts, believing that the Second Restatement’s treatment of these torts was clear and largely authoritative. It was ultimately persuaded that there were numerous unresolved issues that needed to be addressed. As a result, it authorized a new project on Intentional Torts---a project that is …

The Technology Requirements Of The First Electronic Monitoring Agreement In Us For Zappers, Phantomware, And Other Sales Suppression Devices, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Robert Chicoine

Faculty Scholarship

On August 30, 2017, a plea was entered in the case of case of State of Washington v. Wong, Wash. Super. Ct., No. 16-1-00179-0, and as a result the first electronic monitoring agreement of sales transactions in the US (the “Monitoring Agreement”) was legislatively imposed on a retail business.

The Monitoring Agreement was negotiated between the State of Washington Department of Revenue (the “WA DOR”) and the taxpayer over a period of several months and is comprised of two parts: the basic agreement, which covered the obligations and rights of the parties, and an appendix, which defines the scope of …

Three Strikes For Copyright, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

How should copyright law change to take account of the internet? Should copyright expand to plug the internet’s leakiness and protect content that the internet would otherwise make more freely available? Or, should copyright relax its strict liability regime given diverse and productive reuses in the internet age and the benefits networked diffusion provides users and second-generation creators? Answering these questions depends on what we think copyright is for and how it is used and confronted by creators and audiences. In a new article studying these questions in the very focused setting of Wikipedia articles about baseball and baseball players …

Optimal Remedies For Patent Infringement, Keith N. Hylton, Mengxi Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

This paper derives optimal remedies for patent infringement, examining damages awards and injunctions. The fundamental optimality condition that applies to both awards and injunctions equates the marginal static cost of intellectual property protection with the marginal “dynamic” benefit from the innovation thereby induced. When the social value of the patent is sufficiently high, the optimal award induces socially efficient investment by giving the innovator the entire social value of her investment.

Citizen Scientists, Data Transparency, And The Mining Industry, Madison Condon

Faculty Scholarship

What happens when a community feels that the standards imposed by state and federal laws are insufficient to protect its health and environment? Or when the responsible government agencies lack the funding, competency, or political will for full enforcement of the law? One of the greatest hurdles facing citizen environmental advocates in these situations is a lack of access to environmental monitoring data. All routes available for policing industry—whether it be rallying community support for protest, petitioning a government agency for enforcement action, or bringing a citizen suit—require, as a first step, an understanding of whether and what pollution has …

Confronting Crawford: Justice Scalia, The Judicial Method, And The Limits(?) Of Originalism, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Crawford v. Washington, which revamped (and even revolutionized) interpretation and application of the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause, just might be Justice Scalia’s most important majority opinion, for three reasons. First, its impact on the criminal justice system has been immense, and even if the case is overruled in the near future, as seems quite possible, that effect will still likely exceed the concrete impact of any other opinion that he wrote. Second, and more importantly, Crawford emphasizes the trite but crucial point that methodology matters. Crawford has generally been a boon to criminal defendants and a bane to prosecutors. When …

Understanding The Failure Of Health-Care Exceptionalism In The Supreme Court's Obamacare Decision, Abigail Moncrieff

Faculty Scholarship

On June 28, 2012, a mere century after the first presidential proposal for national health insurance, the Supreme Court issued a resounding victory for President Obama and for health-care reform generally, upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act against a serious constitutional challenge. Nevertheless, the Court also struck a potential blow to future health-care reform efforts. A majority of the Court refused to accept the Solicitor General’s argument that health care is a unique market with unique regulatory needs that justify special constitutional treatment. The failure of health-care exceptionalism in the Court’s opinion might render future reform efforts more …

Data Collection And The Regulatory State, Ahmed Ghappour

Faculty Scholarship

The following remarks were given on January 27, 2017 during the Connecticut Law Review’s symposium, “Privacy, Security & Power: The State of Digital Surveillance.” Hillary Greene, the Zephaniah Swift Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law, offered introductory remarks and moderated the panel. The panel included Dr. Cooper, Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Program on Economics & Privacy at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, Professor Ghappour, Visiting Assistant Professor at UC Hastings College of the Law, Attorney Lieber, Senior Privacy Policy Counsel at Google, and Dr. Wu, Professor of Law …

Do Economic Conditions Drive Dip Lending?: Evidence From The Financial Crisis, Frederick Tung

Faculty Scholarship

When contemplating Chapter 11, the first step for many firms is to seek financing for their continuing operations in bankruptcy. Because such financing would otherwise be hard to find, the Bankruptcy Code authorizes debtors to offer sweeteners to debtor-in-possession (DIP) lenders. These inducements can be highly effective in attracting financing. But because these sweeteners are thought to come at the expense of other stakeholders, the Code permits these inducements only if the judge determines that no less generous a package would have been sufficient to obtain the loan.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the use of certain controversial inducements—I focus on …

Representative/Senator Trump?, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

The American presidency is a much more powerful office in 2017 than was contemplated by the Constitution of 1788. In large measure, that is because Congress has unconstitutionally subdelegated many of its legislative powers to the President. The President thus effectively functions as the Congress to a significant degree, which not only perverts the constitutional structure but also significantly raises the stakes of presidential elections. There is no good reason to expect Congress or the courts to stem the tide of subdelegation. Presidents, however, have a number of tools available to resist, and even reverse, that tide. While there is …

Arbitration And Fine Dining: Two Faces Of Efficiency, William W. Park

Faculty Scholarship

A restaurant meal might turn into disappointment either when good food arrives late, or when prompt service delivers bad food. The chef cannot become preoccupied with any one aspect of fine dining to the exclusion of others. Likewise, arbitral proceedings implicate proportionality and balance among a multitude of factors which can make the experience good or bad. Several elements play key roles in evaluating any arbitration, namely: accuracy, fairness, cost, speed, and award enforceability. An inevitable tension exists among these goals. Decisions reached quickly and cheaply will do few favors if the award gets it wrong on the substantive merits. …

Anti-Bullying Policies And Disparities In Bullying: A State-Level Analysis, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Mark Hatzenbuehler, Javier Flores, Joesph Cavanaugh

Faculty Scholarship

Recent research suggests that anti-bullying laws may be effective in reducing risk of bullying victimization among youth, but no research has determined whether these laws are also effective in reducing disparities in bullying. The aim of this paper was to evaluate the effectiveness of anti-bullying legislation in reducing disparities in sex- and weight-based bullying and cyberbullying victimization.

(Public) Health And Human Rights: Of Bridges And Matrixes, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Responding to President Trump's anti-Muslim executive order restricting immigration, the American Public Health Association (APHA) issued a press release recommitting the organization to human rights, noting that "health and human rights are inextricably linked." The organization underlined the basic human rights norm of nondiscrimination, noting that "all people should be valued equally, no matter their race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, immigration status, income or geographic region" and that whenever any groups of people are prevented from "experiencing basic human rights, all of our communities suffer" (APHA 2017). Human rights, especially the right to health, have also been at the core …

Soft Law And Transnational Standards In Arbitration: The Challenge Of Res Judicata, William W. Park

Faculty Scholarship

In international proceedings, a transnational “soft law” often finds expression in rules, guidelines and canons of professional associations which serve to supplement the “hard law” of national statutes and court decisions. Memorializing the experience of those who sit as arbitrators or serve as counsel, such standards contain a degree of circularity, in that relevant norms both derive from and apply to cross-border arbitration. Neither the nature nor the limits of “soft law” always present themselves with clarity. Often the litigants’ agreement fails to provide standards on controverted questions whose answers fall beyond common practice. In such instances, the integrity of …

Take The Fifth... Please!: The Original Insignificance Of The Fifth Amendment's Due Process Of Law Clause, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

The Fifth Amendment’s Due Process of Law Clause adds nothing to the Constitution’s original meaning. Every principle for limiting federal executive, judicial, and even legislative powers that can plausibly be attributed to the idea of “due process of law” – from the principle of legality forbidding executive or judicial action in the absence of law to the requirement of notice before valid judicial judgments to a limitation on arbitrary governmental action that today goes under the heading of “substantive due process” – is already contained in the text and structure of the Constitution of 1788. The Fifth Amendment Due Process …

The Promise Of Lutie A. Lytle: An Introduction To The Tenth Annual Commemorative Lutie A. Lytle Black Women Law Faculty Workshop Iowa Law Review Issue, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

It is with great pleasure and pride that I offer this introduction and welcome to this special Iowa Law Review issue in celebration of the Tenth Annual Commemorative Lutie A. Lytle Black Women Law Faculty Workshop. Named after Lutie A. Lytle, an African American woman who became the first female law professor in the nation (and, likely, in the world) in 1897, the Workshop has afforded diverse law faculty an unparalleled opportunity to prepare for the job market; to develop teaching and leadership skills; to hone scholarly agendas; and to workshop articles, book proposals, and "ideas-inprogress" since its founding at …

The Agency Problems Of Institutional Investors, Scott Hirst, Lucian A. Bebchuk, Alma Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

We analyze how the rise of institutional investors has transformed the governance landscape. While corporate ownership is now concentrated in the hands of institutional investors that can exercise stewardship of those corporations that would be impossible for dispersed shareholders, the investment managers of these institutional investors have agency problems vis-à-vis their own investors. We develop an analytical framework for examining these agency problems and apply it to study several key types of investment managers.

We analyze how the investment managers of mutual funds - both index funds and actively managed funds - have incentives to under-spend on stewardship and to …

The Internet Will Not Break: Denying Bad Samaritans Section 230 Immunity, Danielle K. Citron, Benjamin Wittes

Faculty Scholarship

What do a revenge pornographer, gossip-site curator, and platform pairing predators with young people in one-on-one chats have in common? Blanket immunity from liability, thanks to lower courts’ interpretation of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) beyond what the text, context, and purpose support. The CDA was part of a campaign — rather ironically in retrospect — to restrict access to sexually explicit material online. Lawmakers thought they were devising a safe harbor for online providers engaged in self-regulation. The CDA’s origins in the censorship of “offensive” material are inconsistent with outlandishly broad interpretations that have served to …

The Second Amendment & Private Law, Cody Jacobs

Faculty Scholarship

The Second Amendment, like other federal constitutional rights, is a restriction on government power. But what role does the Second Amendment have to play—if any—when a private party seeks to limit the exercise of Second Amendment rights by invoking private law causes of action? Private law—specifically, the law of torts, contracts, and property—has often been impacted by constitutional considerations, though in seemingly inconsistent ways. The First Amendment places limitations on defamation actions and other related torts, and also prevents courts from entering injunctions that could be classified as prior restraints. On the other hand, the First Amendment plays almost no …

The First Real-Time Blockchain Vat - Gcc Solves Mtic Fraud, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Musaad Alwohaibi

Faculty Scholarship

Following years of study the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) appears ready to adopt the recommendations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and put in place a tax system that will stabilize revenue. A value added tax (VAT) and corporate income tax (CIT) are considered. A VAT Framework Agreement, that functions like the VAT Directive in the EU, has been agreed.

Although new, the GCC VAT is very worthy of attention. From a tax policy perspective, it is making notable improvements to EU VAT design. The GCC VAT is (potentially) the world’s first real-time, blockchain-secured, multi-jurisdictional VAT. This is a remarkable …

Law, Social Welfare, And Net Neutrality, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

Net neutrality generates wealth transfers from one type of internet content provider to another. In theory, these transfers might be socially desirable, and could be justified on the basis of informational externalities similar to those cited to justify fair use in copyright law. In practice, however, the conditions that justify fair use do not hold where net neutrality operates. Moreover, the internal subsidization required by net neutrality generates a regressive transfer. The welfare gains that might come from controlling anticompetitive abuse or government coercion through implementation of net neutrality can be achieved by alternative policies with less harmful consequences.

Copyright Owners' Putative Interests In Privacy, Reputation, And Control: A Reply To Goold, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

My own view is that Goold overstates the explanatory role of tort law. But even were that not the case, the courts need to reach some kind of “settled” understanding on these various interests before a cause of action is created or definitively rejected, and that no such consensus on the three matters mentioned yet exists, whether they are viewed as forms of tort or otherwise. Goold’s work may nevertheless be an important step toward reaching closure on these and other open questions in copyright law.

Interpretation Catalysts In Cyberspace, Rebecca Ingber

Faculty Scholarship

The cybersphere offers a rich space from which to explore the development of international law in a compressed time frame. This piece examines the soft law process over the last decade of the two Tallinn Manuals – handbooks on the international law of cyber warfare and cyber operations – as a valuable lens through which to witness the effects of “interpretation catalysts” on the evolution of international law. In prior work, I identified the concept of interpretation catalysts – discrete triggers for legal interpretation – and their influence on the path that legal evolution takes, including by compelling a decision-making …