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Articles 1 - 9 of 9

Full-Text Articles in Law

Practice Makes Perfect? An Empirical Study Of Claim Construction Reversal Rates In Patent Cases, David L. Schwartz Nov 2008

Practice Makes Perfect? An Empirical Study Of Claim Construction Reversal Rates In Patent Cases, David L. Schwartz

Michigan Law Review

This Article examines whether U.S. district court judges improve their skills at patent claim construction with experience, including the experience of having their own cases reviewed by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In theory, higher courts teach doctrine to lower courts via judicial decisions, and lower courts learn from these decisions. This Article tests the teaching-and-learning premise on the issue of claim construction in the realities of patent litigation. While others have shown that the Federal Circuit reverses a large percentage of lower court claim constructions, no one has analyzed whether judges with more claim construction appeal …


Categorizing Categories: Property Of The Estate And Fraudulent Transfers In Bankruptcy, Michael R. Cedillos May 2008

Categorizing Categories: Property Of The Estate And Fraudulent Transfers In Bankruptcy, Michael R. Cedillos

Michigan Law Review

11 U.S.C. § 541 defines "property of the estate" in bankruptcy, but courts have not interpreted that section uniformly. The Fifth Circuit has read the term broadly to include both interests in property that the trustee recovers under § 541(a)(3) and legal or equitable interests under § 541(a)(1) that have purportedly been fraudulently transferred but which the trustee has not yet recovered. The Second Circuit, however, has taken a more restrained approach, holding that fraudulently transferred property that the trustee has not yet recovered does not constitute property of the estate. This Note argues that courts should adopt the Second …


Deconstructing International Criminal Law, Kevin Jon Heller Apr 2008

Deconstructing International Criminal Law, Kevin Jon Heller

Michigan Law Review

After nearly fifty years of post-Nuremberg hibernation, international criminal tribunals have returned to the world stage with a vengeance. The Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ("ICTY") in 1993 and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda ("ICTR") in 1994. Hybrid domestic-international tribunals have been established in Sierra Leone (2000), East Timor (2000), Kosovo (2000), Cambodia (2003), Bosnia (2005), and Lebanon (2007). And, of course, the international community's dream of a permanent tribunal was finally realized in 2002, when the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court ("ICC") entered into force. This unprecedented proliferation of international …


War Tales And War Trials, Patricia M. Wald Apr 2008

War Tales And War Trials, Patricia M. Wald

Michigan Law Review

In this foreword, I will compare my experiences as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and the work of war crimes tribunals generally, with a few of the recurrent themes in epic tales of war. Books and trials strive to educate and to persuade their audiences of the barbarity of war and its antipathy to the most fundamental norms of a humane society.3 War crimes tribunals began with Nuremberg and have proliferated in the past fifteen years. These tribunals were established to try and to punish individuals for violations of international humanitarian law ("IHL")-the so-called …


Patients As Consumers: Courts, Cotnracts, And The New Medical Marketplace, Mark A. Hall, Carl E. Schneider Jan 2008

Patients As Consumers: Courts, Cotnracts, And The New Medical Marketplace, Mark A. Hall, Carl E. Schneider

Michigan Law Review

The persistent riddle of health-care policy is how to control the costs while improving the quality of care. The riddle's oncepromising answer-managed care-has been politically ravaged, and consumerist solutions are now winning favor This Article examines the legal condition of the patient-as-consumer in today's health-care market. It finds that insurers bargain with some success for rates for the people they insure. The uninsured, however, must contract to pay whatever a provider charges and then are regularly charged prices that are several times insurers'pricesa nd providers' actual costs. Perhaps because they do not understand the healthcare market, courts generally enforce these …


Scrutiny Land, Randy E. Barnett Jan 2008

Scrutiny Land, Randy E. Barnett

Michigan Law Review

Scrutiny Land is the place where government needs to justify to a court its restrictions on the liberties of the people. In the 1930s, the Supreme Court began limiting access to Scrutiny Land. While the New Deal Court merely shifted the burden to those challenging a law to show that a restriction of liberty is irrational, the Warren Court made the presumption of constitutionality effectively irrebuttable. After this, only one road to Scrutiny Land remained: showing that the liberty being restricted was a fundamental right. The Glucksberg Two-Step, however, limited the doctrine of fundamental rights to those (1) narrowly defined …


Death, Dying, And Domination, Marc Spindelman Jan 2008

Death, Dying, And Domination, Marc Spindelman

Michigan Law Review

This Article critiques conventional liberal arguments for the right to die on liberal grounds. It contends that these arguments do not go far enough to recognize and address private, and in particular structural, forms of domination. It presents an alternative that does, which is thus more respectful of true freedom in the context of death and dying, and also more consistent with liberalism. After discussing obstacles to the achievement of a right to die that encompasses freedom from both public and private domination, the Article closes with a significant reform project within bioethics that might help bring it about.


Judicial Compensation And The Definition Of Judicial Power In The Early Republic, James E. Pfander Jan 2008

Judicial Compensation And The Definition Of Judicial Power In The Early Republic, James E. Pfander

Michigan Law Review

Article III's provision for the compensation of federal judges has been much celebrated for the no-diminution provision that forecloses judicial pay cuts. But other features of Article Ill's compensation provision have largely escaped notice. In particular, little attention has been paid to the framers' apparent expectation that Congress would compensate federal judges with salaries alone, payable from the treasury at stated times. Article III's presumption in favor of salary-based compensation may rule out fee-based compensation, which was a common form of judicial compensation in England and the colonies but had grown controversial by the time of the framing. Among other …


A Call For The End Of The Doctrine Of Realignment, Jacob S. Sherkow Jan 2008

A Call For The End Of The Doctrine Of Realignment, Jacob S. Sherkow

Michigan Law Review

In Indianapolis v. Chase National Bank, 1941, the Supreme Court established the doctrine of realignment, requiring federal courts to examine the issues in dispute and realign each party as plaintiff or defendant if necessary. Due to the complete diversity requirement, realignment gave the federal courts the ability to both create and destroy diversity jurisdiction. Since 1941, the federal courts have struggled to interpret the central holding in Indianapolis, and have created several competing "tests" for realignment. This confusion has made the doctrine of realignment unworkable. Realignment along with each of the present tests-encourages jurisdictional abuses by forcing the federal …