Law Commons^™

Eyes On A Climate Prize: Rewarding Energy Innovation To Achieve Climate Stabilization, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

Stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at double their pre-industrial levels (or lower) will require emission reductions far in excess of what can be achieved with current or projected levels of technology at a politically acceptable cost. Substantial technological innovation is required if the nations of the world are to come anywhere close to proposed emission reduction targets. Neither traditional federal support for research and development of new technologies nor traditional command-and-control regulations are likely to spur sufficient innovation. Technology inducement prizes, on the other hand, have the potential to incentivize and accelerate the rate of technological innovation in the …

Will Directed Evolution Destroy Humanity, And If So, What Can We Do About It?, Maxwell J. Mehlman

Faculty Publications

In contemplating the technologies emerging from the Human Genome Project, nothing scares people more than the prospect that we will attempt to use genetic engineering to control the human evolutionary process.

Prosecutors, Ethics, And Expert Witnesses, Paul C. Giannelli, Kevin C. Mcmunigal

Faculty Publications

Commentators who have examined the DNA exonerations have noted the disturbing role that prosecutors have played in these wrongful convictions. Another significant contributor to these miscarriages of justice is the misuse of expert testimony, a third of the cases according to some sources. This Article examines the intersection of these two factors - the prosecutor's role in using and presenting expert testimony.

Prosecutorial misconduct may occur during most stages of a trial, beginning with the selection of witnesses, including the improper "shopping" for experts. Additional abuses occur when prosecutors fail to abide by rules governing the pretrial disclosure of scientific …

Prosecutors And Corrupt Science, Kevin C. Mcmunigal

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Relative Access To Corrective Speech: A New Test For Requiring Actual Malice, Aaron K. Perzanowski

Faculty Publications

This Article reexamines the First Amendment protections provided by the public figure doctrine. It suggests that the doctrine is rooted in a set of out-dated assumptions regarding the media landscape and, as a result, has failed to adapt in a manner that accounts for our changing communications environment.

The public figure doctrine, which imposes the more rigorous actual malice standard of fault on defamation plaintiffs who enjoy greater access to mass media, was constructed in an era defined by one-to-many communications media. Newspapers, broadcasters, and traditional publishers exhausted the Court's understanding of the means of communicating with mass audiences. As …

Ake V. Oklahoma: The Right To Expert Assistance In A Post-Daubert, Post-Dna World, Paul C. Giannelli

Faculty Publications

Although securing the services of defense experts to examine evidence, to advise counsel, and to testify at trial is frequently critical in modern criminal litigation, it was not until 1985 that the United States Supreme Court in Ake v. Oklahoma, 470 U.S. 68 (1985), recognized, for the first time, a constitutional right to expert assistance. In a system in which an overwhelming majority of criminal defendants are indigent, Ake was a landmark case. Nevertheless, the Ake Court could not have anticipated how the advent of DNA evidence would revolutionize forensic science or how the Daubert trilogy would alter the judicial …

The Founders’ Privacy: The Fourth Amendment And The Power Of Technological Surveillance, Raymond Shih Ray Ku

Faculty Publications

Part I of this Article briefly discusses the history and origins of the Fourth Amendment and its relationship to the doc- trine of separation of powers. Part I argues that the central purpose of the amendment was not to define various aspects of life as private, but to guarantee that the people defined the limits of the executive's surveillance power. Part II then examines the Supreme Court's Fourth Amendment jurisprudence dealing with technology prior to Kyllo, and the problems associated with this jurisprudence. Part II argues that the Supreme Court's framing of the privacy question as whether a new search …

Irreconcilable Differences: Congressional Treatment Of Internet Service Providers As Speakers, Raymond Shih Ray Ku

Faculty Publications

This Article argues that under the CDA and OCILLA, Congress adopted facially inconsistent approaches towards ISP liability for expression. Nonetheless, despite the overt differences, it is possible to discern an underlying principle for determining when ISPs should be considered speakers that reconciles this inconsistency. Put simply, the CDA and OCILLA support an approach toward determining when ISPs are speakers that focuses on whether an ISP exercises editorial control over its network. This approach is evidenced by the fact that both statutes recognize that ISPs are able to exercise editorial control over any and all content on their networks, and both …

Are Prosecutorial Ethics Standards Different?, Kevin C. Mcmunigal

Faculty Publications

Once a prosecutor determines to employ an expert, a number of distinct decisions must be confronted-from choosing the expert, to complying with discovery obligations, to presenting the testimony at trial. Part I of this essay considers the selection of experts. Although improper selection of experts can be viewed as merely another aspect of presenting misleading testimony, we treat it separately in this essay because the literature typically ignores it. Part 1I examines the pretrial disclosure of scientific evidence. The issues that have arisen in this context include late disclosure, omitting information from laboratory reports, declining to have a report prepared, …

Health Care Cost Containment And Medical Technology: A Critique Of Waste Theory, Maxwell J. Mehlman

Faculty Publications

The high cost of health care has led to proposals to reduce wasteful medical technology under Medicare and other payment systems. Professor Mehlman warns that achieving this objective, while laudable in theory, is problematic because of the difficulties of defining, detecting and eliminating technology waste. A particular danger is that, in an effort to reduce waste, patients will be denied not only technologies that are wasteful from the patient's own perspective but technologies that yield net patient benefit. This risk is exacerbated by the Medicare prospective payment system, which rewards hospitals financially in inverse proportion to the amount of care …