Law Commons^™

Reflections On Arlington Heights: Fifty Years Of Exclusionary Zoning Litigation And Beyond, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Fifty years ago, when I was two years out of law school, I began work on a case—Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. v. Village of Arlington Heights—that was destined to take on epic proportions in the housing discrimination field. The case started with a complaint filed in 1972, shortly before I joined the plaintiffs’ legal team, and was not finally resolved until 1980, after I’d left that team to become a law professor. During the seven years that I worked on the Arlington Heights case, it produced a major Supreme Court decision on standing and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause3 …

State Constitutions And Youth Voting Rights, Joshua A. Douglas

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Young voters suffer the lowest turnout rates in American elections. One study shows that younger voters face numerous barriers when attempting to cast a ballot, such as work responsibilities, not receiving an absentee ballot in time, inability to find or access their polling place, voter ID problems, or other issues. Many state election laws are a labyrinth of rules and regulations that make it more difficult to vote, especially for younger people. As one report notes, “many young voters are new voters who need to register for the first time and who may be unfamiliar with the process. Young people …

Cross-Cultural Communication In A Crisis: The Universality Of Visual Narrative In The Covid-19 Pandemic, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A primary goal of twenty-first century legal works is to communicate the law effectively to diverse audiences. Many of the most needful and most vulnerable audiences for legal information have members who lack basic literacy skills and suffer linguistic and cultural confusion from verbal textual media—namely, the printed word. Yet for centuries, legal rules and government restrictions have been communicated nearly exclusively through the printed word. Recent scholarship in visual legal rhetoric, visual literacy studies, and visual cultural studies is informed by cognitive psychology and neuroscience that all points to a solution: visual communication of the law. Visual communication is …

Are Cryptopunks Copyrightable?, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Larva Labs’s CryptoPunks NFTs are iconic. Created in 2017, they were among the first NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. Four years later, they are among the most valuable, selling for anywhere from $200,000 to millions of dollars.

The CryptoPunks collection consists of 10,000 NFTs, each of which is associated with a unique CryptoPunks image. Everyone knows who owns each CryptoPunks NFT. The Ethereum blockchain provides indelible proof. But people disagree about who owns - and who should own - the copyright in the CryptoPunks images. Most CryptoPunks NFT owners believe they should own the copyright in the image associated with …

Personalizing Prices To Redistribute Wealth In Antitrust And Public Utility Rate Regulation, Ramsi A. Woodcock

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The information age is enabling firms with even small amounts of market power to personalize the prices they charge to each consumer in the market. Left to their own devices, firms will use this new power to increase profits by charging prices personalized to the maximum that each consumer is willing to pay. But government can also use the new power to personalize prices to equalize wealth—by insisting that firms personalize high prices to the rich and low prices to the poor—and most of the legal rules needed to do so are already in place. Both the antitrust laws and …

After Copyright: Pwning Nfts In A Clout Economy, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Copyright is a means to an end, not an end in itself. We created copyright because we wanted to encourage the creation and distribution of works of authorship, not because we wanted to enable copyright owners to control the use of the works they own. We stuck with copyright because it was the best tool we had, despite its flaws. Was copyright ever efficient? No. But marginal improvements matter.

Technology has changed the copyright calculus. Distribution of works of authorship gradually got cheaper and cheaper. And then the Internet made it free. But creation remained costly, even though technology helped …

The Costs Of The Punishment Clause, Cortney E. Lollar

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Criminal punishment pursuant to a facially valid conviction in a court of law is an uncontested exception to the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition on slavery and involuntary servitude. After all, the Constitutional text reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” And yet, beginning almost immediately after the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, states regularly employed criminal statutes to limit the movement and behaviors of those previously enslaved and subject them to slavery-type labor camps in conditions that closely mirrored slavery. Because neither the …

The Ties That Bind: The Relationship Between Law Firm Growth And Law Firm Survival, Alan J. Kluegel

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

For the better part of the twentieth century, law firms hired, trained, and grew through a stable and predictable pattern: hire new law school graduates, monitor and evaluate their work, and pick promising attorneys from among their ranks and elevate them to partner. Rinse, lather, repeat. A combination of professional norms and organizational inertia made this approach the dominant method of growth among large corporate law firms until changes in legal market broke down these customary practices, ushering in a new era of lawyer mobility. Now, it has become commonplace for lawyers to leave for greener pastures as more law …

A New Methodology For The Analysis Of Visuals In Legal Works, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The goal of this Article is to introduce a comprehensive methodology for the analysis of visuals used for communication in legal works, by which I mean transactional and litigation documents, legal instruments, primary and secondary sources of law, and legal informational materials. To date, the scholarship on visuals in legal communications has been heavily descriptive, with some forays into the ethical and practical considerations of the use of “visualized” legal works. No one has yet devised a comprehensive analytical methodology that draws upon the disciplines of visual literacy, visual cultural studies, visual rhetoric, and mise en scène analysis to evaluate …

Toxic Public Goods, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Everybody loves public goods. After all, they are a perpetual utility machine. Obviously, we want as many of them as possible. But what if the consumption of a public good actually decreases net social welfare? I refer to this kind of public good as a "toxic public good." In this essay, I discuss three kinds of potential toxic public goods: trolling, pornography, and ideology, and I reflect on how we might make the production of toxic public goods more efficient.

The Multi-Level Marketing Pandemic, Christopher G. Bradley, Hannah E. Oates

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Among the societal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a sharp rise in the activities of multi-level marketing companies (MLMs). MLMs are business enterprises in which participants seek not only to sell products to friends, family, and social media contacts, but also to recruit them as MLM participants, with the promise of "building their own business from home."

False promises often pervade MLM sales pitches. Evidence shows that few participants see even a dollar of profit from their MLM work; the vast majority of recruits quickly abandon their MLM dreams and lose their investments. Yet the pitch has become …

How To Sell Nfts Without Really Trying, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Something is happening and we don’t know what it is. Suddenly last summer, the internet went nuts for “non-fungible tokens” or “NFTs.” In a matter of months, NFT sales swelled from a sleepy slough of the blockchain to a thundering cataract that shows no sign of slaking. Special NFTs sell for millions of dollars, and some are even securitized. It’s a big business that’s only getting bigger.

But no one seems to know why. Objectively, NFTs are useless, meaningless, and worthless. So why are people willing to pay millions of dollars for them, even begging for the opportunity? Maybe it …

Invoking Criminal Equity's Roots, Cortney Lollar

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Equitable remedies have begun to play a critical role in addressing

some of the systemic issues in criminal cases. Invoked when other

solutions are inadequate to the fair and just resolution of the case,

equitable remedies, such as injunctions and specific performance,

operate as an unappreciated and underutilized safety valve that

protects against the procedural strictures and dehumanization that are

hallmarks of our criminal legal system. Less familiar equitable-like

legal remedies, such as writs of mandamus, writs of coram nobis, and

writs of audita querela, likewise serve to alleviate fundamental errors

in the criminal process. Several barriers contribute to the …

Conceptual Copyright, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Conceptual art is art that consists of ideas, not their realization. It tests the

boundaries of art, by eliminating the art object entirely. Legal scholars should be

interested in conceptual art because it can help them test the boundaries of legal

doctrines and their justifications. I created a work of conceptual art that reflects

on both the securities laws and copyright doctrine. Among other things, I asked

the SEC and the Copyright Office to opine on that work, with limited success. I

use my experience to reflect on how conceptual art can illuminate our

understanding of the law.

Question #1: Is There A Gender Gap In Performance On Multiple Choice Exams? A. Always B. Never C. Most Of The Time, Jane Bloom Grisé

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The correct answer to Question #1 is C. Most of the time, women score lower than men on multiple-choice exams. Question #2: How did you become interested in this topic?

A. The author likes to create multiple-choice tests.

B. The author does well on multiple-choice tests.

C. The author unexpectedly discovered this disparity.

The correct answer is C. I discovered this disparity unexpectedly and was surprised to find that women scored lower than men on multiple-choice exams and that multiple-choice exams underpredicted women's academic performance.

While educators might assume that different types of assessments such as multiple-choice and essays are …

Diagrammatics And The Proactive Visualization Of Legal Information, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article performs an analysis of one mode of visual legal communication:

diagrammatics and the visualization of legal data and other information

in legal instruments and communications.

The Proactive Law movement and the Legal Design movement each

seek to transform legal instruments and documents to improve access to and

comprehension of the communication of law to all persons. “All persons”

includes both law-trained and non-law-trained persons and extends from the

literate and educated all the way to disadvantaged, illiterate, and less-thanfully

literate persons. The overall goal of the Proactive Law movement and a

primary goal of Legal Design is to …

Cartoon Contracts And The Proactive Visualization Of Law, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Contracts have always relied on text first, foremost, and usually exclusively. Yet, this approach leaves many users of contracts in the dark as to the actual meaning of the transactional documents and instruments they enter into. The average contract routinely uses language that only lawyers, law-trained readers, and highly literate persons can truly understand.

There is a movement in the law in the United States and many other nations called the visualization of law movement that attempts to bridge these gaps in contractual communication by using highly visual instruments. In appropriate circumstances, even cartoons and comic book forms of sequential …

Court Packing Is A Chimera, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The dream of the 1930s is alive in Washington. Democrats see

Republicans hemorrhaging voters as Trump struggles with the

economy and the pandemic and are salivating at the prospect of

retaking not only the White House, but also the Senate. Of course, you

should never sell a bearskin until you've caught the bear. But even a

blowout victory can't get Democrats the prize they really want, a

Supreme Court majority. So, in back-to-the-future fashion, many

progressives are pushing the idea of court packing. After all, in politics,

rules are made to be broken.

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Gouging (But Were Afraid To Ask): A Response To Ramsi Woodcock, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Good scholarship makes you change your mind, but great scholarship

makes you think differently. As usual, Ramsi Woodcock's article "The Efficient

Queue and the Case Against Dynamic Pricing", is great, because it made me

think differently about price regulation. Woodcock observes that prices not

only communicate information, but also redistribute resources. Sometimes,

producers change prices in response to competition or changes in the cost of

production. But other times, they change prices just because they can.

When prices reflect the marginal cost of production, consumers benefit

from market efficiencies. But when prices reflect a surge in demand, they

simply transfer …

A Textualist Interpretation Of The Visual Artists Rights Act Of 1990, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

For numberless generations, jurisprudes waged total war in the

conflict among textualism, intentionalism, and purposivism.

Textualists insisted that courts must interpret statutes based on the

meaning of their text, intentionalists insisted on the intention of the

legislature, and purposivists insisted on the purpose of the statute.

Eventually, textualism prevailed. Courts universally recognize

that they are obligated to interpret statutes in light of their text, or

at least pretend that the text of the statute determined their

interpretation. And the few remaining heretics are swiftly identified

and corrected by their superiors. As Justice Kagan famously

observed, “We’re all textualists now.” Whether …

The Right Of Reattribution, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Usually, authors love their works as their children: fiercely and unconditionally. Indeed, many authors refer to their works as their “children,” and some show far more solicitude for their aesthetic children than their actual ones. Of course, authors can also be cruel to their works. As William Faulkner famously observed, “In writing you must kill all your darlings.” But even such merciless culling doesn’t prevent authors from loving what survives. If anything, their love only deepens with each sacrifice.

But even the filial bond can be broken. Many disappointed parents have disowned their prodigal children. Sometimes the relationship can be …

Limits Of The Rule Of Law: Negotiating Afghan “Traditional” Law In The International Civil Trials In The Czech Republic, Tomas Ledvinka, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Drawing on ethnographic research of judicial cases in the Czech Republic which involve the law in migrants' countries of origin, this Article outlines how multiple strategies handle encounters with the legal-cultural differences of Afghanistan in order to neutralize what may be called the “alterity” of law. The Article suggests that far from being analytical tools, concepts such as “context,” “culture,” and “customary” are strategically used by courts to neutralize unsettling aspects of foreign Afghan legalities. Further, it applies Leopold Pospíšil´s ethnological concept of legal authority as a vehicle for reinterpreting the contextual differentiation of Afghan “traditional” law as an alternative …

These Are A Few Of My Least Favorite Things, Richard C. Ausness

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The Uniform Probate Code ("UPC") can trace its origins back to a Model Probate Code promulgated by the American Bar Association ("ABA")'s section on Real Property, Probate, and Trust Law in 1946. In 1962, the Section on Real Property, Probate, and Trust Law, along with National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws began work on what was to become the original UPC. The National Conferences and the ABA's House of Delegates approved the UPC in 1969.

The 1969 UPC was an attempt to modernize some of the traditional rules and provide a degree of uniformity for the American law …

Sec No-Action Letter Request, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Fair Housing And The Causation Standard After Comcast, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The Supreme Court last term held in the Comcast case that “but-for” causation must be shown by plaintiffs under the 1866 Civil Rights Act’s § 1981 and also announced that this standard is the default position presumed to govern all other federal civil rights statutes. This Article deals with how Comcast’s but-for presumption applies to fair housing cases.

The answer is complicated, because these cases are often brought under multiple laws. For example, a Black applicant who is rejected by an apartment complex ostensibly for having inadequate income, but who believes this decision was racially motivated because the complex …

Hidden Rules Of A Modest Antitrust, Ramsi Woodcock

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Reforming antitust’s rule of reason by shifting burdens of proof to defendants will not solve antitrust’s enforcement drought. For the drought is due in part to the cost to enforcers of identifying rule of reason cases to bring and not just to the cost of winning the cases that enforcers do bring. Enforcement costs matter because enforcers’ budgets are limited—they have failed for a long time to keep up with GDP—and the rule of reason’s emphasis on case-specific effects makes it costly for enforcers to identify good cases to bring. The Supreme Court’s adoption of the rule of reason approach …

Corporate Misconduct In The Pharmaceutical Industry, Richard C. Ausness

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Sadly, many pharmaceutical companies have engaged in unethical or illegal behavior. The current opioid crisis is the most recent example of misconduct by pharmaceutical companies. Moreover, this pattern of conduct is neither rare, nor recent. Instead, it is long-standing and pervasive in nature. Furthermore, unlike wrongdoing by other businesses that cause primarily economic or environmental harm, wrongdoing by pharmaceutical companies, like that of asbestos or tobacco companies, may cause personal injuries and death on a large scale.

Keeping It In The Family: The Pitfalls Of Naming A Family Member As A Trustee, Richard C. Ausness

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article is concerned with trusts in which either the settlor, trustee, or beneficiaries are members of the same family. For example, the settlors may be the parents, grandparents, or other relatives of the trust beneficiaries. Trustees may be settlors, parents of the beneficiaries, children of the settlor, and other family members, while beneficiaries may include either the settlor, the settlor's spouse, children, grandchildren, or other relatives of the settlor. These persons will be referred to as "family members."

Virtually all family members have disagreements with other family members and sometimes these disagreements can destroy relationships and even lead to …

Plagiarism Pedagogy: Why Teaching Plagiarism Should Be A Fundamental Part Of Legal Education, Brian L. Frye, Megan E. Boyd

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

As a practicing lawyer, if you aren’t plagiarizing, you’re committing malpractice. Litigators copy forms and arguments from winning briefs rather than bill their clients for reinventing the wheel. Transactional lawyers copy enforceable agreements to ensure their agreements are enforceable too. Partners routinely present documents prepared by associates (and sometimes even paralegals) as their own work. And judges are the most prolific plagiarists of all, copying briefs, opinions, treatises, and legal and nonlegal scholarship, adopting arguments from lawyers and holdings from other judges as their own and claiming authorship of opinions written primarily by their clerks or the parties to the …

A License To Plagiarize, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Since time immemorial, authors have wanted to own various kinds of

exclusive rights in the works they create. Curiously, the rights authors want

to own at any particular point in time tend to reflect the nature of the market

for the works they create. The first exclusive right authors wanted was attribution.

In classical Greece, philosophers accused each other of copying

ideas without attribution. The Roman poet Martial coined the term plagiarius

to criticize other poets for passing off his poems as their own. Even

medieval Irish poets observed plagiarism norms that prohibited copying

without attribution. In all of these …