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Full-Text Articles in Law

Law And Enchantment: The Place Of Belief, Joseph Vining Dec 1987

Law And Enchantment: The Place Of Belief, Joseph Vining

Articles

The question I wish to raise is whether one must believe what one says when one makes a statement of law. The language of belief that we know, and from which moral discourse and the moral never stray far: do judges, lawyers, law participate in it? Any such question is but an aspect of a larger question, indeed issue, of what we may call the objectivity of legal language. It is raised perhaps most acutely by the broad claims now being made for artificial intelligence and in particular for the computer programming of legal advice (as a species of what …


Proprietary Rights And The Norms Of Science In Biotechnology Research, Rebecca S. Eisenberg Dec 1987

Proprietary Rights And The Norms Of Science In Biotechnology Research, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

As basic research in biotechnology yields increasing commercial applications, scientists and their research sponsors have become more eager to protect the commercial value of research discoveries through intellectual property law. Some scientists fear that these commercial incentives will weaken or even undermine the norms that have traditionally governed scientific research. In this Article, Professor Eisenberg examines the interaction of proprietary rights in inventions with these traditional scientific norms. Trade secrecy, she argues, is an undesirable strategy for protection of basic research discoveries because it impedes dissemination of new knowledge to the scientific community. She finds that patent law is in …


'Comparative Reprehensibility' And The Fourth Amendment Exclusionary Rule, Yale Kamisar Oct 1987

'Comparative Reprehensibility' And The Fourth Amendment Exclusionary Rule, Yale Kamisar

Articles

It is not . . . easy to see what the shock-the-conscience test adds, or should be allowed to add, to the deterrent function of exclusionary rules. Where no deterrence of unconstitutional police behavior is possible, a decision to exclude probative evidence with the result that a criminal goes free to prey upon the public should shock the judicial conscience even more than admitting the evidence. So spoke Judge Robert H. Bork, concurring in a ruling that the fourth amendment exclusionary rule does not apply to foreign searches conducted exclusively by foreign officials. A short time thereafter, when an interviewer …


The Humane And Just Alternative For Canada, James C. Hathaway Sep 1987

The Humane And Just Alternative For Canada, James C. Hathaway

Articles

The essence of C-55 ignores the admonition of the Standing Committee that we must be "knowledgeable and sensitive to human rights issues rather than immigration issues. The determination decision is not an immigration matter but instead a decision as to who are Convention refugees in need of Canada's protection." In stark contrast, immigration authorities have spoken of the importance of refugee law reform as a means of "enabling us to continue our strategy of controlled growth in immigration to Canada." By speaking of refugees in the same breath as immigration policy, the department has effectively confused the privilege of immigration …


John W. Reed And The High Style, Theodore J. St. Antoine Jun 1987

John W. Reed And The High Style, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

John Reed is the Fred Astaire of the law school world. That doesn't mean John would win prizes for his waltzing and tangoing; the kinship runs much deeper. There is the same purity of line in gesture and speech, the same trimness of content and grace of expression, and the same ineffable talent for brightening up a scene just by entering it.


How To Argue About Health Care, Don Herzog Feb 1987

How To Argue About Health Care, Don Herzog

Articles

Despite the aggressive title of this article, my goals are modest. I begin by explaining briefly what should at any rate be obvious: that health care policies inescapably raise moral and political difficulties, difficulties that no technical fix could resolve. I move on to puzzle over the connections between some of the more abstract issues of moral and political theory and medical policy: here I urge that we develop a more sustained taste for exploring the moral conflicts embedded in our current practices. Finally, I suggest a strategy for making nitty-gritty facts-from the concrete world of third-party payment, expensive technology, …


The American Advantage: The Value Of Inefficient Litigation, Samuel R. Gross Feb 1987

The American Advantage: The Value Of Inefficient Litigation, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

In a recent article, The German Advantage in Civil Procedure,1 Professor John Langbein claims that the German system of civil litigation is superior to the American; in an earlier article he makes a parallel claim about German criminal procedure.2 Roughly, Professor Langbein argues that by comparison to the German process, American litigation is overly complex, expensive, slow, and unpredictable - in short, inefficient.3 Professor Langbein is not the first and will not be the last to criticize American legal institutions in these terms, but he expresses this criticism particularly well: he is concise and concrete, he describes American practice by …


Thinking About Our Language, James Boyd White Jan 1987

Thinking About Our Language, James Boyd White

Articles

Except for one meeting, which I will describe below, I knew Bob Cover only through his writings. This circumstance was of course a disappointment to me, for our interests were similar, and his death now makes the loss irreparable. But perhaps this is less of a limitation than would normally be the case, for as much as anyone in the law Bob was, and is, actively present in his writing, both as a person and as a mind.-But that dichotomy of person and mind gets it wrong, for what I would like to catch is a sense of fusion or …


Redesigning The Spouse's Forced Share, John H. Langbein, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jan 1987

Redesigning The Spouse's Forced Share, John H. Langbein, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

American forced-share law underwent a major round of reform in the 1960s. The main objective was to prevent the decedent from engaging in "fraud on the widow's share," that is, using nominal inter vivos transfers to evade the surviving spouse's forced-share entitlement. In jurisdictions that follow the Uniform Probate Code of 1969 (UPC), that mischief has been eradicated. The UPC, which is discussed in some detail below, extends the forced-share entitlement to property that has been the subject of inter vivos transfer. In the present article we develop the view that the time has come for a further round of …


Copyright, Compromise And Legislative History, Jessica D. Litman Jan 1987

Copyright, Compromise And Legislative History, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

Copyright law gives authors a "property right." But what kind of property right? Indeed, a property right in what? The answers to these questions should be apparent from a perusal of title seventeen of the United States Code-the statute that confers the "property" right.' Courts, however, have apparently found title seventeen an unhelpful guide. For the most part, they look elsewhere for answers, relying primarily on prior courts' constructions of an earlier and very different statute on the same subject. 2


Siamese Essays: (I) Cts Corp. V. Dynamics Corp. Of America And Dormant Commerce Clause Doctrine; (Ii) Extraterritorial State Legislation, Donald H. Regan Jan 1987

Siamese Essays: (I) Cts Corp. V. Dynamics Corp. Of America And Dormant Commerce Clause Doctrine; (Ii) Extraterritorial State Legislation, Donald H. Regan

Articles

What follows is two essays, related as Siamese twins. Both essays developed from a single conception. They are distinct, but they remain connected by a shared subtopic. The first essay is about CTS Corp. v. Dynamics Corp. of America1 as a contribution to dormant commerce clause doctrine. The second essay is about the constitutional principle that states may not legislate extraterritorially, which I shall refer to as the "extraterritoriality principle." The shared subtopic is the extraterritoriality problem in CTS. (There is an extraterritoriality problem in CTS, even though the Court does not discuss it in those terms.) I could have …


Taking From Farm Lenders And Farm Debtors: Chapter 12 Of The Bankruptcy Code, James J. White Jan 1987

Taking From Farm Lenders And Farm Debtors: Chapter 12 Of The Bankruptcy Code, James J. White

Articles

In passing Chapter 12 of the Bankruptcy Reform Act, Congress has effectively invalidated certain important provisions of existing farm mortgages. Equally significant, Congress has disabled farmers from granting binding mortgages on the full, value of their property. Although no court is likely to find the Chapter to violate the fifth amendment, the Chapter constitutes a substantial and retroactive alteration of the rights of existing mortgagees and a restriction on the powers of prospective mortgagors to grant valid mortgages. The thesis of this paper is that Congress was both wrong and shortsighted in its enactment of Chapter 12. Congress was wrong …


Edward L. Barrett, Jr.: The Critic With 'That Quality Of Judiciousness Demanded Of The Court Itself', Yale Kamisar Jan 1987

Edward L. Barrett, Jr.: The Critic With 'That Quality Of Judiciousness Demanded Of The Court Itself', Yale Kamisar

Articles

Barrett was as talented and as dedicated a law teacher as any of his distinguished (or soon-to-become-distinguished) contemporaries. But Barrett resisted the movement toward new rights in fields where none had existed before. At least, he was quite uneasy about the trend. To be sure, others in law teaching shared Barrett's concern that the clock was spinning too fast. Indeed, some others were quite vociferous about it.' But because his criticism was cerebral rather than emotional - because he fairly stated and fully explored the arguments urging the courts to increase their tempo in developing constitutional rights - Barrett was …


John W. Reed And The High Style, Theodore J. St. Antoine Jan 1987

John W. Reed And The High Style, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

John Reed is the Fred Astaire of the law school world. That doesn't mean John would win prizes for his waltzing and tangoing; the kinship runs much deeper. There is the same purity of line in gesture and speech, the same trimness of content and grace of expression, and the same ineffable talent for brightening up a scene just by entering it. John certainly brightened up the law school days for this former student, a generation or so ago. We jaded upperclass people actually looked forward to John's Evidence classes, and he seldom if ever let us down. The sessions …


Response To Roger Cramton's Article, James Boyd White Jan 1987

Response To Roger Cramton's Article, James Boyd White

Articles

I want to direct attention to only one of the many important issues raised by Professor Cramton's article, namely the peculiar division between academic and religious thought in our culture. In the academic world we tend to speak as though all participants in our conversations were purely rational actors engaged in rational debate; perhaps some people out there in the world are sufficiently benighted that they turn to religious beliefs or other superstitions, but that is not true of us or, if it is true, we hide it, and it ought not be true of them. Ours is a secular …


Wait-And-See: The New American Uniform Act On Perpetuities, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jan 1987

Wait-And-See: The New American Uniform Act On Perpetuities, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

The wait-and-see version of perpetuity reform has gained a new champion in the United States. The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws-the body responsible for promulgating uniform legislation, such as the Uniform Commercial Code, for recommended enactment by the federal states-recently approved a Uniform Statutory Rule Against Perpetuities. Shortly thereafter, the Uniform Act was endorsed by the House of Delegates of the American Bar Association, the Board of Regents of the American College of Probate Counsel, and the Board of Governors of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers.


Loss Of Innocence: Eyewitness Identification And Proof Of Guilt, Samuel R. Gross Jan 1987

Loss Of Innocence: Eyewitness Identification And Proof Of Guilt, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

It is no news that eyewitness identification in criminal cases is a problem; it is an old and famous problem. Judges and lawyers have long known that the identification of strangers is a chancy matter, and nearly a century of psychological research has confirmed this skeptical view. In 1967 the Supreme Court attempted to mitigate the problem by regulating the use of eyewitness identification evidence in criminal trials; since then it has retreated part way from that effort. Legal scholars have written a small library of books and articles on this problem, the courts' response to it, and various proposed …


The Abuses Of Social Science: A Response To Fineman And Opie., David L. Chambers Jan 1987

The Abuses Of Social Science: A Response To Fineman And Opie., David L. Chambers

Articles

Martha Fineman and Anne Opie have written an article on the misuses of social science research by those who are recommending policies for the placement of children after divorce.' The subject is important. When Professor Fineman told me that she and Opie were using an article I wrote about child custody2 as an example of some of the problems they discussed, I anticipated a useful exchange on the subject. Having read their article, I have decided against an exchange on the merits of the larger issues they raise. I have so decided because their article, which refers extensively to my …


Mass And Repetitive Litigation In The Federal Courts, Edward H. Cooper Jan 1987

Mass And Repetitive Litigation In The Federal Courts, Edward H. Cooper

Articles

The topic of "Mass and Repetitive Litigation in the Federal Courts" is even more vast and unwieldy than the complex litigations it brings to mind. The implicit assignment to address the topic by contemplating the events that may occur over the next century is still more daunting. One hundred years bring untellable changes to all of our social and political institutions, judicial and otherwise. Rather than attempt to meet the challenge by uttering bold prophecies of the circumstances that will confront our successors of the future, I will follow an easier course. This paper will select a few illustrations of …


The Twilight Of Employment At Will? An Update, Theodore J. St. Antoine Jan 1987

The Twilight Of Employment At Will? An Update, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

A 55-year-old white male, who has spent thirty years working his way up to a responsible middle-management position in his company, is asked for his resignation. No reason given. Even though the employee could demonstrate that he still is qualified to perform his duties, the employer's action in dismissing him would be quite unexceptionable under the conventional American common law doctrine of employment at will. The situation could be even more disturbing. If the employment-at-will principle were allowed its full scope, an employee would have no recourse even if he knew he was being discharged because he had refused to …


Intellectual Integration, James Boyd White Jan 1987

Intellectual Integration, James Boyd White

Articles

In this paper, I want to talk about the activity of intellectual integration itself: about what it can mean to integrate-to put together in a complex whole-aspects of our culture, or of the world, that seem to us disparate or unconnected; and what it can mean in so doing to integrate-to bring together in interactive life-aspects of our own minds and beings that we normally separate or divide from each other: I want to think of integration, that is-and of its opposite, disintegration-as taking place on two planes of existence at once, the cultural and the individual. For what is …


Economics And Law: Two Cultures In Tension, James Boyd White Jan 1987

Economics And Law: Two Cultures In Tension, James Boyd White

Articles

I want to preface my remarks by saying something about the kind of talk this is going to be. As my title says, I shall speak mainly about economics and law, which I shall examine as forms of thought and life, or what I shall call cultures. With law, about which in fact I shall speak rather briefly, I am naturally familiar by training and experience. But with economics I am familiar only as an observer­ as a general reader who reads the newspaper, as a lawyer who has followed a little of the law and economics literature, and as …