Law Commons^™

The Power Of Congress "Without Limitation": The Property Clause And Federal Regulation Of Private Property, Peter A. Appel

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Congress has overlooked a powerful tool for regulating within state jurisdictions: the Property Clause of the United States Constitution. The United States Government owns land in every state and approximately thirty percent of the total land in the United States. The federal government's authority to regulate its property within states derives from the Property Clause and has been described by the Supreme Court as "without limitation."

Professor Appel traces the historical development of the Constitution's Property Clause, from its pre-constitutional origins through modern Supreme Court decisions and academic conceptions. Professor Appel compares the narrow view of Property Clause scholarship - …

Race To The Stars: A Federalism Argument For Leaving The Right Of Publicity In The Hands Of The States, Usha Rodrigues

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This Note will argue that, given the variation in the right of publicity from state to state, and the relative newness of this property right, Congress should refrain from passing a law to federalize it. Although there are sound arguments for adopting this right, there are also reasons to hesitate. Given that only half of the states have adopted it, federalization seems premature. This Note will only obliquely address the main objection usually leveled at a robust right of publicity, namely that it stifles creativity and implicates First Amendment concerns. The focus instead will be on the right of individual …

Revisiting The Taxation Of Punitive Damages, Gregg D. Polsky, Dan Markel

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In our recent article, Taxing Punitive Damages, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1421879, we argued (1) that plaintiffs in punitive damages cases should be allowed to introduce to the jury evidence regarding the deductibility of those damages by defendants, and (2) that this jury tax-awareness approach is better than the Obama Administration’s suggested alternative of disallowing those deductions.

To our delight, Professor Larry Zelenak and Paul Mogin have each provided published comments to our piece on Virginia Law Review's In Brief companion website. Professor Zelenak’s thoughtful response focuses on our prescriptive claim that jury tax-awareness is better than nondeductibility, while Mr. Mogin disputes …

Were There Adequate State Grounds In Bush V. Gore?, Michael L. Wells

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Few Supreme Court decisions provoke the immediate and intensely negative verdict that law professors passed on Bush v. Gore. Some of the criticism is deserved. Others have questioned whether the ruling rests on any general principle at all, given the care the Court took to limit its reasoning to the extraordinary circumstances of the Florida presidential election.

It is all too easy to leap from this well-founded critique of the Court's reasoning to the conclusion that the majority – all of whom were appointed by Republican presidents – were bent on installing George W. Bush in the White House by …

Structural Review, Pseudo-Second-Look Decision Making, And The Risk Of Diluting Constitutional Liberty, Dan T. Coenen

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In this Essay, I will pause to note some reasons why the "sham decision" critique of structural review is, for me, unpersuasive. I also will offer a few comments on the proper relationship between structural and substantive review. I note, in particular, that an endorsement of "activist" structural review need not lead to a "nonactivist" approach to substantive review, far less to its total abandonment. I also suggest that a vigorous embrace of structural rules may well lead to more, rather than less, overall judicial protection of fundamental rights.

A Constitution Of Collaboration: Protecting Fundamental Values With Second-Look Rules Of Interbranch Dialogue, Dan T. Coenen

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Often the Supreme Court directly engages nonjudicial officials in a shared elaboration of constitutional rights. It does so through the use of doctrines that focus on whether nonjudicial actors have taken an appropriately close and sensitive look at policy judgments that threaten important constitutional values. In many of these cases, the Court in effect "remands" constitutionally controversial programs to the political branches--inviting a more studied consideration of the program than attended its initial adoption, and leaving open the possibility that the readopted program will be upheld against constitutional attack.

The Court's structural doctrines range from the familiar vagueness rule to …

Restitching The American Quilt: Untangling Marriage From The Nuclear Family, Lisa Milot

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Part I of this Note will trace the various threads of American marriage law, particularly the perception that marriage is unraveling today due to an unprecedented divorce crisis. Part II will disentangle the conflicting patterns of contract law and status regimes that variously govern marriage, focusing on the uneven enforcement of antenuptial contracts and the implications of such. Part III will argue that the true focus of regulation is the status of the nuclear family, not of marriage per se. Finally, Part IV will propose a bifurcation of the legal regimes governing marriage and the family, recognizing the ability of …

Section 1983, The First Amendment, And Public Employee Speech: Shaping The Right To Fit The Remedy (And Vice Versa), Michael Wells

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This Article is not about theories of free speech and how they bear on the public employment context, nor does it contribute to the academic debate over what the aims of public employee speech law ought to be. I take the Court at its word when it says that its aim is to give substantial weight to both the value of speech and the government's interest as an employer. Unlike Massaro and Ingber, I take it as a given that the government may insist on hierarchy and obedience to authority in the workplace. Unlike Rosenthal, I begin from the Court's …

Corrective Justice And Constitutional Torts, Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Michael L. Wells

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Tort liability in the private realm may be understood as "an instrument aimed...at deterrence...[and] a way of achieving corrective justice between the parties." Following the common law model, the Supreme Court has borrowed this normative framework for constitutional torts, ruling that the aims of liability for damages are to vindicate constitutional rights and to deter constitutional violations. A recent article by Daryl Levinson takes issue with this approach. Levinson argues that the superficial similarities between public torts and private torts conceal real differences, to which neither the Court nor scholars have paid adequate attention. The main point of his article, …

Foreword: Symposium Re-Examining First Principles: Deterrence And Corrective Justice In Constitutional Torts, Thomas A. Eaton

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This Symposium provides a forum for a careful and thoughtful consideration of whether constitutional tort law can deter wrongdoing and is consistent with principles of corrective justice.

Eldred V. Reno: An Example Of The Law Of Unintended Consequences, L. Ray Patterson

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In Eldred v. Reno the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which extends the copyright term for present and future works for twenty years, was a constitutional exercise of Congress's copyright power. The CTEA thus puts an end (at least for two decades) to a policy in effect for more than two centuries, since the Copyright Act of 1790, that the copyright of a work expires at the end of a stated term defined at the time the copyright was granted. Since works were copyrighted annually, the policy meant that …

Whose Motive Matters? Discrimination In Multi-Actor Employment Decision Making, Rebecca H. White, Linda Hamilton Krieger

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The search for a discriminatory motive in disparate treatment cases often is envisioned as an attempt to determine whether a supervisor, despite his denials, consciously acted out of bias, animus or on the basis of “inaccurate and stigmatizing stereotypes” in making an employment decision. Framing the search for discriminatory motive is this way, however, cannot prove fully effective in eliminating discrimination, as individuals may be unaware of their own biases or the influences those biases have had on their own decision making.

The reality of decision making in the employment area, moreover, is that multiple individuals are often involved in …

Capital Punishment: Corporate Criminal Liability For Gross Violations Of Human Rights, Diane Marie Amann

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These remarks were presented on February 24, 2001, in a panel concluding a conference entitled "Holding Multinational Corporations Responsible Under International Law" at Hastings College of the Law, San Francisco, California.

Good Faith: Balancing The Right To Manage With The Right To Represent, Suzanne Darrow-Kleinhaus

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No abstract provided.

Their Own Preposessions: The Establishment Clause 1999-2000, Leslie C. Griffin

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No abstract provided.

Procedural Uniformity And The Exagerated Role Of Rules, Thomas O. Main

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No abstract provided.

Mary S. Lawrence: Director Of Legal Research And Writing University Of Oregon 1978 - 2000, Linda H. Edwards

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No abstract provided.

Growing Up Dependent: Family Preservation In Early Twentieth-Century Chicago, David S. Tanenhaus

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Beginning in 1911 with Illinois’ passage of the Funds to Parents Act—the first statewide mothers’ pensions legislation—the Chicago Juvenile Court built a two-track system for dependency cases that used the gender of single parents to track their children. The first or “institutional” track followed a nineteenth century model of family preservation that poor families had relied upon since before the Civil War, in which parents had used institutions to provide short-term care for their children during hard times. The juvenile court also established a “home-based” track for dependency that reflected a new model of family preservation. Progressive child-savers denounced the …

Book Review, David S. Tanenhaus

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This ambitious book impressively chronicles forms of imprisonment in American history from Columbus’s crossing in 1492, with at least four convicts among his crew, to the rise of five hundred years later of a “prison-industrial complex,” which employs over half a million people and incarcerates more than one million others. According to Christianson, a former investigative reporter and gubernatorial aide who is now contributing editor of The Criminal Law Bulletin, director of the New York Death Penalty Documentation Project, and chairman of the Board of the Safer Society Foundation, With Liberty for Some “is a history of how we …

Presidential Ethics: Should A Law Degree Make A Difference?, Nancy B. Rapoport

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Two of the nation's most controversial presidents, Nixon and Clinton, were both lawyers, and both of them had ethics-related problems while in office. This essay reviews whether any model ethics rules force lawyer-presidents to behave at a higher standard than non-lawyer-presidents; then it discusses the implications for legal education if we really do want lawyers to go above and beyond the norm of behavior.

When Local Is Global: Using A Consortium Of Law Schools To Encourage Global Thinking, Nancy B. Rapoport

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Dean Rapoport will discuss students and faculty consortia focusing on the North American Consortium on Legal Education (NACLE), which, among other things, promotes student and faculty exchanges between and among three law schools in the U.S., three in Canada, and three in Mexico.

Doctors, Hmos, Erisa, And The Public Interest After Pegram V. Herdrich, Jeffrey W. Stempel, Nadia Von Magdenko

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The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 was enacted in the wake of highly publicized pension disasters in order to protect employee pension rights. Born as a piece of pro-worker legislation, it initially was criticized by business groups as a cause of bureaucratic arteriosclerosis that was worse than the disease of pension failures. Even worse, it prompted many employers to consider dispensing with pension plans altogether rather than struggle with the administrative and financial obligations of ERISA. Business, labor, and the public all complained about the law's complexity. It even became something of a national joke as regulators took …

An Inconsistently Sensitive Mind: Richard Posner's Celebration Of Insurance Law And Continuing Blind Spots Of Econominalism, Jeffrey W. Stempel

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Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner is well known for bringing economic analysis to bear on a host of issues, including infamously controversial notions such the market for baby sale. Not surprisingly, Posner's insurance law opinions reflect economics, but perhaps not to the degree one would expect. A review of Posner's 20 years of opinions relating to insurance issues reviews his pragmatic jurisprudence as well. Decisions frequently reflect not only economics but also situational context and considerations of business reality as well as a sophisticated grasp of basic insurance doctrine and contract law. As a general matter, Posner also displays considerably …

Coverage For Unfair Competition Torts Under General Liability Policies: Will The "Intellectual Property" Tail Wag The Coverage Dog?, Francis J. Mootz Iii

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The scope of "advertising injury" coverage in general liability policies has been shrinking in response to the proliferation of liabilities caused by the growth of the cyber-economy. In response to this shrinking coverage under general liability policies, insurers have been quick to develop new endorsements and specialized products to fill the gaps in coverage. The author argues that significant commercial risks relating to unfair competition claims have been eliminated from coverage under general liability policies, but that there also appears to be no corresponding development of specific endorsements or stand-alone products to deal with this gap in coverage. Specifically, claims …

Recent Case Developments, Jeffrey W. Stempel

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Recent case developments in Insurance Law in the years 2000 and 2001.

Introduction: Employment Discrimination And The Problems Of Proof, John Valery White, Gregory Vincent

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This is an introduction to articles presented at a symposium on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Reeves v. Sanderson Plumbing Prods. Co. sponsored by the Louisiana Law Review. Presenting papers were five of the leading scholars on employment discrimination law: Professor Catherine J. Lanctot of the Villanova University Law School, Professor Michael Selmi of the George Washington Law School, Professor Linda Hamilton Krieger, University of California at Berkely School of Law, Professor Rebecca Hanner White of the University of Georgia Law School, and Professor Michael Zimmer of the Seton Hall University School of Law. Respondents were the authors and …

A Plea For Rationality And Decency: The Disparate Treatment Of Legal Writing Faculties As A Violation Of Both Equal Protection And Professional Ethics, Peter Brandon Bayer

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This article builds on the work of others by demonstrating that as a matter of academic ethics, informed by cardinal legal standards of decency, the disparate treatment and adverse terms and conditions imposed on writing professors are not simply unfair but defy the ethical aspirations of American law schools. Specifically, as the construct for analysis, this article establishes and utilizes the proposition that the discordant status of legal writing professors fails to satisfy minimal professional ethics. As a model, this article shows that it is not even minimally rational under the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution, our …

Not Interaction But Melding - The "Russian Dressing" Theory Of Emotions: An Explanation Of The Phenomenology Of Emotions And Rationality With Suggested Related Maxims For Judges And Other Legal Decision Makers, Peter Brandon Bayer

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Even after centuries of contrary philosophy and psychology, many commentators, jurisprudes, and law makers insist that emotions have no legitimate place in most legal decision making. This recalcitrance, of course, is misplaced in light of the powerful body of theory explaining that without emotions, decisions, including matters of law and policy, simply cannot be made. Judges, along with all societal actors, must disabuse themselves of the fallacious belief that emotions obstruct or obscure reason in all endeavors, particularly morality, law, and justice.

The project of truly apprehending emotions, however, requires more than appreciating that they play a crucial role in …

Printz, The Unitary Executive, And The Fire In The Trash Can: Has Justice Scalia Picked The Court's Pocket?, Jay S. Bybee

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In Printz v. United States (1997), the Court held that certain sections of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act were unconstitutional. Until the Attorney General set up a national system, the Act required the chief local law enforcement official to make certain background checks. The Court held that Congress exceeded its authority by requiring local law enforcement officials to take this action. Writing for the majority, Justice Scalia “conclude[d] categorically . . . ‘The Federal Government may not compel the States to enact or administer a federal regulatory program.” ’ The Court offered two justifications. First, these commands to the …

Authorship, Dominance, And The Captive Collaborator: Preserving The Rights Of Joint Authors, Mary Lafrance

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For copyright purposes, determining whether a work has a single author or joint authors is important for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most significant legal consequence of joint authorship is joint ownership, under which the authors enjoy equal and undivided ownership of the copyright, allowing each to exploit the work freely, subject to a duty to account to the others for a ratable share of the exploitation profits. Absent an agreement to the contrary, each author of a joint work has an equal claim to those profits and an equal right to exploit the work, even if the authors' …