Law Commons^™

Law School News: Introducing Rwu Law's Sixth Dean 07-01-2020, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Transnational Environmental Law's Missing People, Natasha Affolder

All Faculty Publications

Legal scholars rely heavily on vocabularies of ‘actors’, ‘agents’, and ‘experts’ to account for the fact that law does not develop by itself. However, the identities, idiosyncrasies, and individual professional contributions of law’s people are rarely illuminated. This article suggests that the relative absence of people in transnational legal scholarship helps to explain some of its gaps. The task of bringing ‘human actors back on stage’ creates some new opportunities for transnational environmental law scholarship. It invites attention to both dominant and excluded voices. It offers a way of bridging the gap between the bureaucratic language of law and its …

Dezzani V. Kern & Assocs. Ltd., 134 Nev. Adv. Op. 9 (Mar. 1, 2018), Ronald Evans

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court determined that attorneys do not qualify as agents for the purposes of retaliatory action under NRS 116.31183 where the attorney is providing legal service for a homeowners’ association. The Court further held that an attorney litigating pro se or representing his or her law firm may not collect attorney fees but may collect attorney costs.

Suing Principals Alone For The Acts Of Agents, Jeffrey A. Parness, Alexander Yorko

College of Law Faculty Publications

This past August the Illinois Appellate Court, in Yarbrough v. Northwestern Memorial Hosp., suggested there was never a need to join, or to continue to join, an agent when pursuing a vicarious liability lawsuit against its principal. Herein, we review this statement in Yarbrough. We then counsel lawyers and judges regarding future suits against principals based on the acts of agents. When it reviews the apparent agent issue in Yarbrough, perhaps the Supreme Court will clarify when the joinder of principals and agents may be required.

Understanding Duties And Conflicts Of Interest--A Guide For The Honorable Agent, Linda S. Whitton

Law Faculty Publications

This article examines the importance of understanding agent duties and conflicts of interest, both for drafting a power of attorney that meets a principal’s objectives and for providing guidance to the agent who will act under its authority. Professor Whitton suggests that current custom and practice with respect to powers of attorney often overlooks the need to adjust agent duties to accommodate the principal’s expectations, thus resulting in inadvertent conflicts between the duty to do what the principal expects and default duties of loyalty. The article offers practical guidelines for identifying and reconciling these conflicts, as well as best practices …

Is It Time For A Rule 11 For The Patent Bar?, Ralph D. Clifford

Faculty Publications

The failure to require the patent bar to be completely candid in its dealings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“PTO”) is one of the reasons behind the patent quality problem in the United States. Although PTO regulations impose a duty of candor on both the patent applicant and his or he attorney, this duty of disclosure is limited to matters already known by the parties. The regulations impose no duty to become educated about the technology that underlies a claimed invention. Indeed, there are rational reasons why a patent applicant might seek an uneducated attorney and order him …

Migrant Workers As Political Agents—Analysis Of Migrant Labourers’ ‘Production Of Everyday Spaces’ In Japan, Hironori Onuki

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

While specifically focusing on the context of Japan (one of the major destinations of Asian as well as other migrant workers), my research investigates the concrete, contingent and situated practices of global labour migration. the primary research question of my project is: how far and in what ways are global labour migrations implicated in as well as resisting the neoliberal restructing of global political economy? The central hypothesis is that migrant worders, as political subjects, and their everyday social practices not only participate in and depend on but also contest and negotiate the neo-liberal re-configurations of labour-capital relation in the …

Brief Of Professors Francesco Berlingieri Et Al. A S Amici Curiae In Norfolk Southern Railway Co. V. James N. Kirby Pty . Ltd., John Paul Jones

Law Faculty Publications

From the Summary of Argument:

In the twelve major commercial maritime nations represented by amici, a transport intermediary acts either as an agent or as a principal--depending on the facts of the case--and no legal rule requires an intermediary to act as an agent when it has not agreed to do so. When an intermediary acts as an "agent" to contract on behalf of its customer, the customer is bound by the contract between the intermediary agent and a third-party carrier, but when the intermediary assumes for itself the carrier's role in a contract with its customer, the customer will …

Gewirth On Necessary Goods: What Is The Agent Committed To Valuing?, Donald H. Regan

Book Chapters

In this chapter I shall be concerned with stage I of Gewirth's argument, in which he argues that the agent must value her freedom and well-being as necessary goods. Stage I has attracted less criticism over the years than stages II and III, but even so, a good deal has been written about it. I do not claim to have found any brand new objection to Gewirth's argument. The core of my objection occurred to me during my first reading of Reason and Morality, and it obviously occurred to a number of other people as well. 3 But it is …

Defining The Terms Of Academic Freedom: A Reply To Professor Rabban, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

I suspect Professor Rabban is right in saying that we have more than a semantic dispute. But it is difficult to identify our areas of substantive disagreement with any precision because of a major difference in the meanings that each of us ascribes to certain key words and phrases. The essence of my argument is as follows: What I call "the traditional American conception of academic freedom" justifies professional autonomy for faculty members as a means of furthering certain academic values. But the mechanism of faculty autonomy fails to protect these traditional academic values in the contemporary context of externally …

Academic Freedom And Academic Values In Sponsored Research, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

In this Article I examine the traditional American conception of academic freedom and analyze its implications for universities formulating policies on the acceptance of sponsored research. I begin by reviewing the basic policy statements of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) on academic freedom to identify both the academic values implicit in those statements and the assumptions about institutional relationships and individual incentives underlying their prescriptions for advancing those values. I then evaluate the validity of those underlying assumptions in contemporary sponsored research and argue that academic freedom as traditionally conceived might no longer effectively advance academic values in …

Depositions Of Corporations: Problems And Solutions-Fed. R. Civ. P. 30(B)(6), M. Minnette Massey

Articles

No abstract provided.

Not At The Behest Of Nonlabor Groups: A Revised Prognosis For A Maturing Sports Industry, Phillip J. Closius

All Faculty Scholarship

For most of its history, professional athletics was governed by the unilateral decisions of team owners acting in a league format. In the last twelve years, however, a variety of sporting groups, through access to the judicial system and a changed perception of the legal status of sports, have forced the owners to share the power and wealth derived from the games. Players, unions, agents and rival leagues all now participate, in some form, in the decisions which will shape the future of sports. In the course of this growth, the sports industry has matured into a national business possessed …

Intracorporate Plurality In Criminal Conspiracy Law, Sarah N. Welling

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The concept of conspiracy currently plays a significant role in three areas of substantive law: antitrust, civil rights, and criminal law. Although the role of conspiracy in these substantive areas of law differs in many ways, all three require that the conspiracy consist of a plurality of actors. Determining what constitutes a plurality of actors when all the alleged conspirators are agents of a single corporation poses a continuing problem.

This problem raises two distinct questions. The first is whether, when one agent acts alone within the scope of corporate business, the agent and the corporation constitute a plurality. The …

Markets Overt, Voidable Titles, And Feckless Agents: Judges And Efficiency In The Antebellum Doctrine Of Good Faith Purchase, Harold R. Weinberg

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In considering American common law doctrines shaped during the nineteenth century, commentators have advanced differing theories on the primary judicial criteria employed by judges. Recent studies have argued that these doctrines reflect a criterion of economic efficiency. This work has been criticized for its failure to explain why there seems to be a correlation between efficiency and these decision rules or why judges might have preferred efficiency over other decisional criteria. Other studies have proposed that many judicial doctrines announced before the Civil War were intended to facilitate or ratify major shifts in the distribution of social wealth. This article …

Partnership Entity And Tenancy In Partnership: The Struggle For A Definition, Joseph H. Drake

Articles

PARTNERSHIP is a legal entity formed by the association of two or more persons. This definition of a partnership as a person or entity represents what may be characterized as a generally accepted theory among American jurists at the time of its publication in 1893. But a later definition says: "A partnership is an association of two more persons." "A partner is co-owner with his partners of specific partnership property holding as a tenant in partnership." The second definition shows that the Commissioners on Uniform State Laws have rejected the entity theory and coined a new term to describe partnership …