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Long Live The Common Law Of Copyright!: Georgia V. Public.Resource.Org., Inc. And The Debate Over Judicial Role In Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Long Live The Common Law Of Copyright!: Georgia V. Public.Resource.Org., Inc. And The Debate Over Judicial Role In Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Faculty Scholarship
In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., the Supreme Court resurrected a nineteenth-century copyright doctrine – the government edicts doctrine – and applied it to statutory annotations prepared by a legislative agency. While the substance of the decision has serious implications for due process and the rule of law, the Court’s treatment of the doctrine recognized an invigorated role for courts in the development of copyright law through the use of principled reasoning. In expounding the doctrine, the Court announced a vision for the judicial role in copyright adjudication that is at odds with the dominant approach under the Copyright …
Anti-Modalities, David E. Pozen, Adam Samaha
Anti-Modalities, David E. Pozen, Adam Samaha
Faculty Scholarship
Constitutional argument runs on the rails of “modalities.” These are the accepted categories of reasoning used to make claims about the content of supreme law. Some of the modalities, such as ethical and prudential arguments, seem strikingly open ended at first sight. Their contours come into clearer view, however, when we attend to the kinds of claims that are not made by constitutional interpreters – the analytical and rhetorical moves that are familiar in debates over public policy and political morality but are considered out of bounds in debates over constitutional meaning. In this Article, we seek to identify the …
Restatements Of Statutory Law: The Curious Case Of The Restatement Of Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Peter S. Menell
Restatements Of Statutory Law: The Curious Case Of The Restatement Of Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Peter S. Menell
Faculty Scholarship
For nearly a century, the American Law Institute’s (ALI) Restatements of the Law have played an important role in the American legal system. And in all of this time, they refrained from restating areas of law dominated by a uniform statute despite the proliferation and growing importance of such statutes, especially at the federal level. This omission was deliberate and in recognition of the fundamentally different nature of the judicial role and of lawmaking in areas governed by detailed statutes compared to areas governed by the common law. Then in 2015, without much deliberation, the ALI embarked on the task …
Law's Halo And The Moral Machine, Bert I. Huang
Law's Halo And The Moral Machine, Bert I. Huang
Faculty Scholarship
How will we assess the morality of decisions made by artificial intelligence – and will our judgments be swayed by what the law says? Focusing on a moral dilemma in which a driverless car chooses to sacrifice its passenger to save more people, this study offers evidence that our moral intuitions can be influenced by the presence of the law.
Price And Prejudice: An Empirical Test Of Financial Incentives, Altruism, And Racial Bias, Kristen Underhill
Price And Prejudice: An Empirical Test Of Financial Incentives, Altruism, And Racial Bias, Kristen Underhill
Faculty Scholarship
Many argue that paying people for good behavior can crowd out beneficial motivations like altruism. But little is known about how financial incentives interact with harmful motivations like racial bias. Two randomized vignette studies test how financial incentives affect bias. The first experiment varies the race of a hypothetical patient in need of a kidney transplant (black or white), an incentive ($18,500 or none), and addition of a message appealing to altruism. Incentives encouraged donation but introduced a significant bias favoring white patients. The second experiment assesses willingness to donate to a patient (black or white) without an incentive and …
Private Law Statutory Interpretation, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Private Law Statutory Interpretation, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Faculty Scholarship
While scholars routinely question the normative significance of the distinction between public law and private law, few – if any – question its conceptual basis. Put in simple terms, private law refers to bodies of legal doctrine that govern the horizontal interaction between actors, be they individuals, corporate entities, or on occasion the state acting in its private capacity. Public law on the other hand refers to doctrinal areas that deal with vertical interaction between the state and non-state actors, wherein the state exerts a direct and overbearing influence on the shape and course of the law. The latter is …
Divergence And Convergence At The Intersection Of Property And Contract, Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci, Carmine Guerriero
Divergence And Convergence At The Intersection Of Property And Contract, Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci, Carmine Guerriero
Faculty Scholarship
In this Article, we study rules that solve the conflict between the original owner and an innocent buyer of a stolen or embezzled good. These rules balance the protection of the original owner’s property and the buyer’s reliance on contractual exchange, thereby addressing a fundamental legal and economic trade-off. Our analysis is based on a unique, hand-collected dataset on the rules in force in 126 countries. Using this data, we document and explain two conflicting trends. There is a large amount of first-order divergence: both rules that apply to stolen goods and those that apply to embezzled goods vary widely …
When Extrinsic Incentives Displace Intrinsic Motivation: Designing Legal Carrots And Sticks To Confront The Challenge Of Motivational Crowding-Out, Kristen Underhill
When Extrinsic Incentives Displace Intrinsic Motivation: Designing Legal Carrots And Sticks To Confront The Challenge Of Motivational Crowding-Out, Kristen Underhill
Faculty Scholarship
The rise of “nudges” has inspired countless efforts to encourage individual choices that maximize personal and collective welfare, with a preference for less restrictive tools such as setting default options or reordering choice sets. As part of this trend, there has been renewed interest in the behavioral impacts of incentives – namely, rewards or penalties for shaping individual choices, including but not limited to financial incentives. Explicit incentives are pervasive in the law, including carrots offered by governments (for example, tax deductions for charitable contributions, rebates for recycling, sentence reductions for prisoners who complete drug rehabilitation programs, and incentives for …
Judicial Auditing, Matthew L. Spitzer, Eric L. Talley
Judicial Auditing, Matthew L. Spitzer, Eric L. Talley
Faculty Scholarship
This paper presents a simple framework for analyzing a hierarchical system of judicial auditing. We concentrate on (what we perceive to be) the two principal reasons that courts and/or legislatures tend to scrutinize the decisions of lower echelon actors: imprecision and ideological bias. In comparing these two reasons, we illustrate how each may yield systematically distinct auditing and reversal behaviors. While auditing for imprecision tends to bring about evenhanded review/reversal, auditing for political bias tends to be contingent on the first mover's chosen action. Examples of these tendencies can be found in a number of legal applications, including administrative law, …