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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Half-Fairness Of Google's Plan To Make The World's Collection Of Books Searchable, Steven Hetcher Oct 2006

The Half-Fairness Of Google's Plan To Make The World's Collection Of Books Searchable, Steven Hetcher

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Google's major new initiative is to undertake the task of digitizing the world's collection of books so as to make them searchable. The very idea is audacious, but what is more so is that Google plans to copy without first seeking the permission of the owners of these works. Google Print would make available what is, by conventional measures at least, the highest grade of information--books produced by millions of the world's leading scholars. This is in stark contrast to the inconsistent quality spectrum one encounters through other online sources such as peer-to-peer networks and blogs, where there currently exists …


From The Wrong End Of The Telescope: A Response To Professor David Bernstein, Margaret A. Berger, Aaron D. Twerski Aug 2006

From The Wrong End Of The Telescope: A Response To Professor David Bernstein, Margaret A. Berger, Aaron D. Twerski

Michigan Law Review

On the pages of this law review, in an article entitled Uncertainty and Informed Choice: Unmasking Daubert, the authors argued for the recognition of a new product liability cause of action when drug companies fail to warn about uncertain risks attendant to the use of non-therapeutic drugs whose purpose is to enhance lifestyle. We noted that in the post-Daubert era, plaintiffs have faced increasing difficulty in proving that a given toxic agent was causally responsible for the injuries suffered after ingesting a drug. That plaintiffs cannot overcome the barriers to proving injury causation does not mean that defendants have met …


Learning The Wrong Lessons From "An American Tragedy": A Critique Of The Berger-Twerski Informed Choice Proposal, David E. Bernstein Aug 2006

Learning The Wrong Lessons From "An American Tragedy": A Critique Of The Berger-Twerski Informed Choice Proposal, David E. Bernstein

Michigan Law Review

Margaret Berger and Aaron Twerski are among the leading scholars in their respective fields of Evidence and Products Liability. I have benefited from their work on many occasions. Precisely because of the deserved respect and esteem in which Berger and Twerski are held-not to mention the prominence of their forum, the Michigan Law Review-their proposal to create a new "informed choice" cause of action in pharmaceutical litigation is likely to receive sympathetic attention. Because I believe that their proposal is ill-conceived and dangerous, I feel compelled (with some trepidation) to write this response. Berger and Twerski propose that courts recognize …


Documenting Discrimination In Voting: Judicial Findings Under Section 2 Of The Voting Rights Act Since 1982, Ellen D. Katz, Margaret Aisenbrey, Anna Baldwin, Emma Cheuse, Anna Weisbrodt Jan 2006

Documenting Discrimination In Voting: Judicial Findings Under Section 2 Of The Voting Rights Act Since 1982, Ellen D. Katz, Margaret Aisenbrey, Anna Baldwin, Emma Cheuse, Anna Weisbrodt

Other Publications

The Voting Rights Initiative ("VRI") at the University of Michigan Law School was created during the winter of 2005 to help inform [...] the debates that led to this latest congressional reauthorization and the legal challenge to it that is certain to follow. A cooperative research venture involving 100 students working under faculty direction set out to produce a detailed portrait of litigation brought since 1982 under Section 2. This Report evaluates the results of that survey. The comprehensive data set may be found in a searchable form at http://www.votingreport.org or http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/votingrights. The aim of this report and the accompanying …


The Tribal Sovereign As Citizen: Protecting Indian Country Health And Welfare Through Federal Environmental Citizen Suits, James M. Grijalva Jan 2006

The Tribal Sovereign As Citizen: Protecting Indian Country Health And Welfare Through Federal Environmental Citizen Suits, James M. Grijalva

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article suggests that federal environmental citizen suits can serve tribal sovereignty interests without presenting the legal risks tribes face when they attempt direct regulation of non-Indians. Section I briefly describes governmental regulatory roles tribes may play in the implementation of federal environmental law and policy. Section II overviews the conceptual and procedural framework for tribal claims as "citizens." Section III argues that in bringing environmental citizen suits, tribal governments exercise their inherent sovereign power and responsibility to protect the health and welfare of tribal citizens and the quality of the Indian country environment. Section IV concludes that, while suits …


Greed And Pride In International Bankruptcy: The Problems Of And Proposed Solutions To 'Local Interests', John A. E. Pottow Jan 2006

Greed And Pride In International Bankruptcy: The Problems Of And Proposed Solutions To 'Local Interests', John A. E. Pottow

Articles

The collapses of Yukos, Parmalat, and other international juggernauts have focused scholarly attention on the failure of multinational enterprises. Even what one might consider "American" companies, such as Chicago-based United Airlines, have made clear in their restructuring plans that their operations have profound effects on the dozens of nations around the globe where they transact business. Government and quasi-government reform efforts to regulate these cross-border insolvencies have abounded, including among others, the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency. UNCITRAL is also building on World Bank and INSOL efforts at promulgating a Legislative Guide for "best practices" bankruptcy codes. Scholars vary …


Using Court Records For Research, Teaching, And Policymaking: The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, Margo Schlanger, Denise Lieberman Jan 2006

Using Court Records For Research, Teaching, And Policymaking: The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, Margo Schlanger, Denise Lieberman

Articles

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is, wisely, planning the future of its enormous collection of relatively recent court records. The pertinent regulation, a “records disposition schedule” first issued in 1995 by the Judicial Conference of the United States in consultation with NARA, commits the Archives to keeping, permanently, all case files dated 1969 or earlier; all case files dated 1970 or later in which a trial was held, and “any civil case file which NARA has determined in consultation with court officials to have historical value.” Other files may be destroyed 20 years after they enter the federal …


What We Know, And What We Should Know About American Trial Trends, Margo Schlanger Jan 2006

What We Know, And What We Should Know About American Trial Trends, Margo Schlanger

Articles

More than a few people noticed that the American court system was seeing ever fewer trials before Marc Galanter named the phenomenon.' But until Galanter mobilized lawyers2 and scholars to look systematically at the issue, inquiry was both piecemeal and sparse. Over the past three years, in contrast, Galanter's research 3 and his idea entrepreneurship, crystallized in the "Vanishing Trial" label, has spawned if not a huge literature at least a substantial one. We have now gotten the benefit of sustained scholarly inquiry by researchers of many stripes. Their work has been largely, though not entirely, empirical, and so we …


Group Report: What Is The Role Of Heuristics In Litigation, Callia Piperides, Ronald J. Allen, Mandeep K. Dhami, Axel Flessner, Reid Hastie, Jonathan J. Koehler, Richard O. Lempert, Joachim Schulz, Gerhard Wagner Jan 2006

Group Report: What Is The Role Of Heuristics In Litigation, Callia Piperides, Ronald J. Allen, Mandeep K. Dhami, Axel Flessner, Reid Hastie, Jonathan J. Koehler, Richard O. Lempert, Joachim Schulz, Gerhard Wagner

Book Chapters

This chapter examines the role of heuristics in the Anglo-American and Continental litigation systems by considering two broad areas: heuristics that appear in legal rules and procedures, as well as heuristics used by various legal actors (e.g., judges, juries, lawyers). It begins with theoretical accounts of heuristics in psychology and law. Next, it explores the role that heuristics play in the litigation process from the selection and construction of cases to the appellate process. Although procedural rules are in place to ensure that legal decision processes are deliberative, the complexities and uncertainties inherent in legal judgments promote the use of …


Second Best Damage Action Deterrence, Margo Schlanger Jan 2006

Second Best Damage Action Deterrence, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Potential defendants faced with the prospect of tort or tort-like damage actions can reduce their liability exposure in a number of ways. Prior scholarship has dwelled primarily on the possibility that they may respond to the threat of liability by augmenting the amount of care they take.1 Defendants (I limit myself to defendants for simplicity) will increase their expenditures on care, so the theory goes, when those expenditures yield sufficient liability-reducing dividends; more care decreases liability exposure by simultaneously making it less likely that the actors will be found to have behaved tortiously in the event of an accident and …


Civil Rights Injunctions Over Time: A Case Study Of Jail And Prison Court Orders, Margo Schlanger Jan 2006

Civil Rights Injunctions Over Time: A Case Study Of Jail And Prison Court Orders, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Lawyers obtained the first federal court orders governing prison and jail conditions in the 1960s. This and other types of civil rights injunctive practice flourished in the 1970s and early 1980s. But a conventional wisdom has developed that such institutional reform litigation peaked long ago and is now moribund. This Article's longitudinal account of jail and prison court-order litigation establishes that, to the contrary, correctional court-order litigation did not decline in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Rather, there was essential continuity from the early 1980s until1996, when enactment of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) reduced both the stock …


A Comment On Nielsen's And Albiston's Sample Selection Methodology, And Implications For The 'Have-Nots', Laura Nyantung Beny Jan 2006

A Comment On Nielsen's And Albiston's Sample Selection Methodology, And Implications For The 'Have-Nots', Laura Nyantung Beny

Articles

Professors Nielsen and Albiston revisit the 1978 article, The Public Interest Law Industry, by Joel F. Handler, Betsy Ginsberg, and Arthur Snow, which presents an empirical study of the public interest law ("PIL") industry in the mid-1970s. At that time, there were only eighty-six PIL firms or public interest law organizations ("PILOs") in existence in the United States. Then, PILOs tended to be small, had relatively small operating budgets, received most of their funds from private sources, and tended to focus most of their effort in a single substantive area, among other characteristics noted by Professors Nielsen and Albiston. However, …


Improving Criminal Jury Decision Making After The Blakely Revolution, J. J. Prescott, Sonja B. Starr Jan 2006

Improving Criminal Jury Decision Making After The Blakely Revolution, J. J. Prescott, Sonja B. Starr

Articles

The shift in sentencing fact-finding responsibility triggered in many states by Blakely v. Washington may dramatically change the complexity and type of questions that juries will be required to answer. Among the most important challenges confronting legislatures now debating the future of their sentencing regimes is whether juries are prepared to handle this new responsibility effectively - and, if not, what can be done about it. Yet neither scholars addressing the impact of Blakely nor advocates of jury reform have seriously explored these questions. Nonetheless, a number of limitations on juror decision making seriously threaten the accuracy of verdicts in …


The Totality Of The Circumstances Of The Debtor's Financial Situation In A Post-Means Test World: Trying To Bridge The Wedoff/Culhane & White Divide, John A. E. Pottow Jan 2006

The Totality Of The Circumstances Of The Debtor's Financial Situation In A Post-Means Test World: Trying To Bridge The Wedoff/Culhane & White Divide, John A. E. Pottow

Articles

Bankruptcy Judge Eugene Wedoff and Creighton Law School professors Marianne Culhane and Michaela White engage in a spirited debate over a series of law review articles about the proper scope of motions to dismiss a debtor's petition under section 707(b) of the freshly revised Bankruptcy Code. It is an interesting and provocative dialogue, with both sides advancing their respective positions persuasively. As a result, I find myself in the unfortunate position of wanting to agree with both. Since that is impossible, however, this brief article is my attempt to find a middle ground between their two positions. It does so …