Law Commons^™

May 2, 2008: The Hatred Of Islam, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

The Hatred of Islam

Federalism And International Trade: The Intersection Of The World Trade Organization's Government Procurement Act And State "Buy Local" Legislation, Amol Mehra

Brigham Young University International Law & Management Review

No abstract provided.

Ensuring That Only Adults "Go Wild" On The Web: The Internet And Section 2257'S Age-Verification And Record-Keeping Requirements, M. Eric Christense

Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law

No abstract provided.

Coding Complexity: Bringing Law To The Empirical Analysis Of The Supreme Court, Carolyn Shapiro

All Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, the legal academy has experienced a surge of interest in quantitative empirical analysis. Unfortunately, this enthusiasm has not always been accompanied by careful analysis of what the tools and resources of quantitative analysis can tell us about law and legal doctrine. As this Article demonstrates, the findings of some studies therefore unwittingly reflect the limitations of those tools and resources rather than providing insight into the workings of courts.

Specifically, this Article provides a long-overdue critical analysis of the most influential source of data about the Supreme Court, the Original Supreme Court Database, created by political scientist …

Table Of Contents, Seventh Circuit Review

Seventh Circuit Review

No abstract provided.

Preface, Justin Nemunaitis

Seventh Circuit Review

No abstract provided.

Ding, Dong, Conley ’S Dead: Bell Atlantic Changes The Federal Pleading Standard, Brett A. Saltzman

Seventh Circuit Review

In EEOC v. Concentra Health Services and Airborne Beepers & Video, Inc. v. AT & T Mobility, LLC, the Seventh Circuit set out to interpret the new federal pleading standard espoused by the Supreme Court in the recent landmark case of Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly. In so doing, the Seventh Circuit sought to determine what Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(a)(2) requires a plaintiff to plead in order to withstand a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss in the federal court system. Although it could have imparted some meaning into Bell Atlantic’s otherwise ambiguous requirement of “plausibility” in …

The Death Knell Tolls For Reparations In In Re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation, Christina E. Lutz

Seventh Circuit Review

The Seventh Circuit, in its recent decision In Re Slave Descendants Litigation, dismissed the claims of plaintiffs seeking disgorgement of the profits earned by Northern companies as a result of their illegal involvement in slavery. It is the latest in a long line of reparations cases dismissed by courts for various reasons, including the statute of limitations. This Comment addresses the tolling doctrines the Seventh Circuit should have applied and questions the court’s reasoning with respect to the expiration of the statute of limitations. In doing so, it positions Slave Descendants within the history of reparations by recounting the …

Sweet Result In Savory: How The Seventh Circuit Took The Correct Approach To Post-Conviction Access To Dna Evidence In Savory V. Lyons, Jamie T. Newton

Seventh Circuit Review

Progress in the field of DNA testing over the last few decades has resulted in increasingly accurate results. Often this means that DNA evidence found to be inconclusive years ago may prove exculpatory to a prisoner if subjected to today’s more advanced testing. Prisoners may potentially gain access to this evidence through two methods: 1) a writ of habeas corpus; or 2) a § 1983 action. While both approaches can yield the same results, a writ of habeas corpus is subject to several procedural requirements which can delay a prisoner’s access to testing, making a § 1983 action a potentially …

The Seventh Circuit Steps Up On Clenaup Of Hazardous Waste, Esther Wu

Seventh Circuit Review

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (“CERCLA”) is Congress' vehicle for both encouraging timely cleanup of hazardous waste sites and placing the costs of cleanup on those responsible for creating or maintaining the hazardous condition. Most courts have utilized the “remedial canon” of statutory construction to broadly construe the former goal of CERCLA to the detriment of the latter. In contrast, the Seventh Circuit employs the “public interest” theory instead of the “remedial canon” of statutory interpretation, and strikes a perfect balance between the two competing goals of CERCLA.

Some courts apply “strict liability” in the context of …

Caution! Government Intrusion May Be Closer Than It Appears: The Seventh Circuit Considers Gps Devices Under The Fourth Amendment, Catherine A. Stephens

Seventh Circuit Review

The Fourth Amendment provides protection for individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, property, and effects. However, as technology advances and the need for security in this country increases, individuals’ Fourth Amendment rights are in danger. Global Positioning System (“GPS”) tracking devices can now be easily installed on anyone’s car. The GPS device can then track that person’s movement for an extended period of time through the use of sophisticated computer and satellite technology. Under the current state of the law, the police are able to place these GPS devices on cars or possessions without reasonable suspicion, probable …

Lost In Cyberspace: A Call For New Legislation To Fill The Black Hole In Information Privacy Law Following Pisciotta V. Old National Bancorp, Elena N. Vranas-Liveris

Seventh Circuit Review

This Note discusses Pisciotta v. Old National Bancorp, a case decided by the Seventh Circuit, which dealt with the following issue for the first time: whether the costs of credit monitoring spent by consumers whose personal information was wrongfully accessed through a database security breach but who were not victims of identity theft or fraud are compensable damages and thus recoverable under a negligence or breach of contract action against the database owner. The Seventh Circuit was rather definitive in its ruling that the plaintiffs had not suffered the requisite harm to place liability on the database owner, thus …

(Trade) Secrets, Secrets Are No Fun—Especially When Disclosed Through Foia Requests To Everyone, Daniel B. Goldman

Seventh Circuit Review

While the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) contains a provision exempting trade secrets from public information requests, FOIA was enacted to serve policies essentially antithetical to those of trade secrets—allowing individuals to access records collected by governmental agencies. The FOIA trade secret exemption is discretionary, allowing an agency, rather than a party submitting information to the government, to determine what constitutes a trade secret. Consequently, government agencies often disclose information through FOIA requests that are considered to be trade secrets by the information’s owners. One such instance arose in the Seventh Circuit in Patriot Homes, Inc. v. Forest River Housing, …

Active Learning For E-Rulemaking: Public Comment Categorization, Stephen Purpura, Claire Cardie, Jesse Simons

Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative Publications

We address the e-rulemaking problem of reducing the manual labor required to analyze public comment sets. In current and previous work, for example, text categorization techniques have been used to speed up the comment analysis phase of e-rulemaking - by classifying sentences automatically, according to the rule-specific issues [2] or general topics that they address [7, 8]. Manually annotated data, however, is still required to train the supervised inductive learning algorithms that perform the categorization. This paper, therefore, investigates the application of active learning methods for public comment categorization: we develop two new, general-purpose, active learning techniques to selectively sample …

Defense Of Self, Others, Habitations And Property In Georgia Law, David M. O'Dea

Law Library Student-Authored Works

No abstract provided.

An Analysis Of Trade Secrets Under The Utsa And State Law, Andrew S. Lovvorn

Law Library Student-Authored Works

No abstract provided.

Equitable Estoppel In Louisiana: A Common Law Remedy In Civil Law Jurisprudence, Holly Jo Harrington

Law Library Student-Authored Works

No abstract provided.

Georgia Real Estate Foreclosure, Sean D. Foster

Law Library Student-Authored Works

No abstract provided.

Slip And Fall Claims In Georgia, Elizabeth Bentley

Law Library Student-Authored Works

No abstract provided.

Medical Futility: Can A Physician Unilaterally Terminate Treatment For A Patient When He Believes Further Measures To Be Futile?, Drew Timmons

Law Library Student-Authored Works

No abstract provided.

A Study In Rule-Specific Issue Categorization For E-Rulemaking, Claire Cardie, Cynthia R. Farina, Adil Aijaz, Matt Rawding, Stephen Purpura

Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative Publications

We address the e-rulemaking problem of categorizing public comments according to the issues that they address. In contrast to previous text categorization research in e-rulemaking [5, 6], and in an attempt to more closely duplicate the comment analysis process in federal agencies, we employ a set of rule-specific categories, each of which corresponds to a significant issue raised in the comments. We describe the creation of a corpus to support this text categorization task and report interannotator agreement results for a group of six annotators. We outline those features of the task and of the e-rulemaking context that engender both …

Facilitating Issue Categorization & Analysis In Rulemaking, Thomas R. Bruce, Claire Cardie, Cynthia R. Farina, Stephen Purpura

Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative Publications

One task common to all notice-and-comment rulemaking is identifying substantive claims and arguments made in the comments by stakeholders and other members of the public. Extracting and summarizing this material may be helpful to internal decisionmaking; to produce the legally required public explanation of the final rule, it is essential. When comments are lengthy or numerous, natural language processing and machine learning techniques can help the rulewriter work more quickly and comprehensively. Even when a smaller volume of comment material is received, the ability to annotate relevant portions and store information about them in a way that permits retrieval and …

An Erulemaking Corpus: Identifying Substantive Issues In Public Comments, Claire Cardie, Cynthia R. Farina, Matt Rawding, Adil Aijaz

Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative Publications

We describe the creation of a corpus that supports a real-world hierarchical text categorization task in the domain of electronic rulemaking (eRulemaking). Features of the task and of the eRulemaking domain engender both a non-traditional text categorization corpus and a correspondingly difficult machine learning task. Interannotator agreement results are presented for a group of six annotators. We also briefly describe the results of experiments that apply standard and hierarchical text categorization techniques to the eRulemaking data sets. The corpus is the first in a series of related sentence-level text categorization corpora to be developed in the eRulemaking domain.

Much Ado About Twombly? A Study On The Impact Of Bell Atlantic Corp. V. Twombly On 12(B)(6) Motions, Kendall W. Hannon

Notre Dame Law Review

No abstract provided.

Arbitration And Article Iii, Peter B. Rutledge

Vanderbilt Law Review

Arbitration implicates serious constitutional concerns that have not received adequate attention in case law or commentary. Recent litigation in the D.C. Circuit over the constitutionality of the North American Free Trade Agreement ("NAFTA") represents the most recent, high-profile example. A centerpiece of NAFTA and its implementing legislation is an arbitration mechanism that divests Article III courts of virtually all jurisdiction over countervailing duty and anti-dumping claims and invests that authority in panels of Associate Professor of Law, Columbus School of Law, Catholic University of America. Arbitration implicates serious constitutional concerns that have not received adequate attention in case law or …

What's In A Song? Copyright's Unfair Treatment Of Record Producers And Side Musicians, Gabriel J. Fleet

Vanderbilt Law Review

As they say in the music business, "It all begins with a song."' This is true from a commercial perspective, as it would be difficult to record albums, film videos, license music for video games, sell sheet music, or promote concerts without the basic building block of the musical composition. It is also true on the metaphysical level, because the organization of sounds into compositional form creates the necessary order that distinguishes music from noise.

Yet despite the centrality of the song, for legal purposes it is difficult to answer the question, "What is a song?" Or, to use a …

The Lives Of Hourly Workers And Their Families, Maureen Perry-Jenkins Phd

Conferences, Panels, and Events

A presentation: Workplace Conditions and the Lives of Hourly Workers and their Families by Maureen Perry-Jenkins, PhD, University of Massachusetts Amherst on behalf of Workplace Flexibility 2010.

Letter Of Invitation, Workplace Flexibility 2010, Georgetown University Law Center

Conferences, Panels, and Events

A letter of invitation to the 2008 conference for grantees of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Workplace, Work Force, and Working Families Program hosted by Workplace Flexibility 2010.

The Economics Of Flexible Work Arrangements, Lonnie Golden Phd

Conferences, Panels, and Events

A presentation on the economics of Flexible Work Arrangements: OVERVIEW: FWA’s, Inflexibility and Salaried Workers and Effects on Work-Family by Lonnie Golden, PhD, Pennsylvania State University - Abington on behalf of Workplace Flexibility 2010.

Cees Newsletter, No. 6, May 2008, University Of Colorado Boulder. Center For Energy & Environmental Security

CEES: The Center for Energy & Environmental Security [Newsletter] (2008)

No abstract provided.