Law Commons^™

Beyond The Privacy Principle, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

In Bowers v. Hardwick, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to ad-dress the constitutionality of a Georgia criminal statute prohibiting certain private sexual practices by consenting adults. The Georgia citizens who brought the suit sought a judgment regarding the constitutionality of the statute on its face, but the Court resolutely avoided consideration of that issue. The Court took the view that the only federal question properly before it was the constitutional validity of the law as applied to private, sexual activity by consenting adults of the same gender, or what it called "homosexual sodomy." Having thus limited the scope …

Voting Rights, Home Rule, And Metropolitan Governance: The Secession Of Staten Island As A Case Study In The Dilemmas Of Local Self-Determination, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

On January 1, 1898, amid fanfare and celebration, the city of Greater New York – "the greatest experiment in municipal government the world has ever known" – was born. The consolidation of the cities, counties, and towns on the New York State side of New York Harbor into one great metropolis was a capstone to one century of rapid economic and population growth and a fitting harbinger of a new century of urban greatness for the region and, indeed, the nation. Now, with another century mark approaching, there is a distinct possibility that the City of New York, already beset …

No "Sweat"? Copyright And Other Protection Of Works Of Information After Feist V. Rural Telephone, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court's unanimous decision last Term in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. proscribed copyright protection for works of information that fail to manifest a modicum of creative originality in selection or arrangement. Discarding a long – if lately uneasy – tradition of U.S. copyright coverage of informational works that display far greater industriousness than imagination, the Court ruled that copyright does not secure the "sweat of the brow" or the investment of resources in the compilation of a work of information. The Court thus stripped away or sharply reduced the copyright protection afforded a variety …

Apocalypse Next Time?: The Anachronistic Attack On Habeas Corpus/Direct Review Parity, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Today, a district court's habeas corpus review of the constitutionality of a state criminal conviction and the Supreme Court's direct review of the same question are nearly identical. Last Term, in Wright v. West, an otherwise mundane criminal procedure case, the Supreme Court rewrote the question presented to ask whether the parity between federal habeas corpus and direct appellate review should be destroyed. The Court proposed abandoning in habeas corpus an important trait shared by the two modes of review – de novo consideration of legal and mixed legal-factual questions.

To those who value meaningful habeas corpus review, the …