Law Commons^™

Market Definition, Jonathan Baker, Lawrence White, Eduardo Perez Motta, Joseph Simons

Presentations

The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) solicited public comments and held joint public workshops to explore the possibility of updating the Horizontal Merger Guidelines that are used by both agencies to evaluate the potential competitive effects of mergers and acquistions. The goal of the workshops was to determine whether the Horizontal Merger Guidelines accurately reflect the current practice of merger review at the Department and the FTC as well as to take into account legal and economic developments that have occurred since the last significant Guidelines revision in 1992.

Untold Stories In South Africa: Creative Consequences Of The Rights-Clearing Culture For Documentary Filmmakers, Peter Jaszi, Sean Flynn

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

This report summarizes research on the perceptions of South African documentary filmmakers about copyright clearance requirements and the effect of such requirements on their work. This work was performed in the context of a larger project exploring how lessons learned from “best practices” projects with documentary filmmakers in the U.S. can help their counterparts in other countries identify and overcome barriers to effective filmmaking posed by escalating
copyright clearance requirements.

Testimony Before The D.C. Council On Marriage Equality & Domestic Partnerships, Nancy Polikoff

Congressional and Other Testimony

An expert on family law issues affecting gay and lesbian couples, parents and their children, the author provides testimony in support of deleting a provision from pending legislation that would eliminate the legal status of domestic partnerships in Washington, DC. Legal status of domestic partnerships recognizes committed familial relationships other than marriage and is important to family stability and to allocate rights and responsibilities of gay and lesbian couples.

Reconciliation Financing: An Innovative Approach To Poverty, Inequality, And Social Conflict, Daniel D. Bradlow

Working Papers

This paper focuses on the problem of addressing historical injustices and raising finance for small scale revenue generating projects that benefit those victims of these past injustices who still lack access to jobs, services and opportunities. These projects always experience funding problems. They are considered both "too rich" for grant funding because they generate a stream of revenues but "too poor" for commercial funding because either they are too small or they generate an insufficient income stream to be attractive to commercial funders. In proposing a debt-based solution to these funding problems, the paper proposes 3 principles of "reconciliation financing".

Brief Of Eleven Law Professors And Aarp As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondent, Bilski V. Kappos, 130 S. Ct. 3218 (2010) (No. 08-964), Joshua Sarnoff, Lori Andrews, Andrew Chin, Ralph Clifford, Christine Farley, Sean Flynn, Debra Greenfield, Peter Jaszi, Charles Mcmanis, Lateef Mtima, Malla Pollack

Amicus Briefs

This is the brief filed by Joshua Sarnoff and Barbara Jones on behalf of various law professors and AARP in the Bilski v. Kappos case, discussing constitutional limits to the Patent power.

Protecting The Family Pet: The New Face Of Maryland: Domestic Violence Protective Orders, Gary C. Norman

Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Domestic violence is on the rise, and pets are increasingly becoming the victims of marital disputes. There is a demonstrated link between acts and offenses of domestic violence and animal abuse. Domestic abusers often do not think twice about beating or otherwise harming pets that have bonded with the other spouse in order to control, coerce, intimidate, or cause emotional harm to that spouse.

There is an emerging awareness that animals are more than just property. Several states have recognized, through the enactment of legislation fortifying their family law systems, that animals play an integral role in the lives of …

One Size Does Not Fit All: A Framework For Tailoring Intellectual Property Rights, Michael W. Carroll

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The United States and its trading partners have adopted cultural and innovation policies under which the government grants one-size-fits-all patents and copyrights to inventors and authors. On a global basis, the reasons for doing so vary, but in the United States granting intellectual property rights has been justified as the principal means of promoting innovation and cultural progress. Until recently, however, few have questioned the wisdom of using such blunt policy instruments to promote progress in a wide range of industries in which the economics of innovation varies considerably.

Provisionally accepting the assumptions of the traditional economic case for intellectual …

Langston Hughes: The Ethics Of Melancholy Citizenship, Robert L. Tsai

Working Papers

As a body of work, the poetry of Langston Hughes presents a vision of how members of a political community ought to comport themselves, particularly when politics yield few tangible solutions to their problems. Confronted with human degradation and bitter disappointment, the best course of action may be to abide by the ethics of melancholy citizenship. A mournful disposition is associated with four democratic virtues: candor, pensiveness, fortitude, and self-abnegation. Together, these four characteristics lead us away from democratic heartbreak and toward political renewal. Hughes’s war-themed poems offer a richly layered example of melancholy ethics in action. They reveal how …

Modes Of Discretion In The Criminal Justice System, Roger Fairfax

Presentations

No abstract provided.

How The American Recovery And Reinvestment Act Of 2009 Changed Hipaa’S Privacy Requirements, Corrine Parver

Newsletters & Other Publications

The 2009 economic stimulus bill, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), significantly affects the health care industry by imposing more stringent and expansive requirements under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) privacy and security provisions, most especially on key players in the the health care industry while simultaneously strengthening the enforcement of such provisions. Title XIII of Division A and Title IV of Division of ARRA collectively are known as the "HITECH Act." Because the majority of ARRA's changes to HIPAA appear in Subtitle D of Title XIII of ARRA, entitled, "Privacy," Subtitle …

Review Of The Constitution’S Text In Foreign Affairs, Daniel Marcus

Book Reviews

American constitutional historians and jurists have debated for decades what to make of the Constitution's relative silence about foreign affairs. The framers said a good deal about one aspect of foreign affairs—war powers. However, there are only a few provisions dealing with diplomacy and foreign affairs more generally, empowering the President to make treaties and name ambassadors, but only with the advice and consent of the Senate. Nonetheless, the lesson of American history and constitutional law, at least since the early twentieth century, is that the President has the preeminent if not exclusive role in shaping and conducting U.S. foreign …

Alternative Software Protection In View Of In Re Bilski, Charles Duan, Lauren Katzenellenbogen, James Skelley

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's (CAFC) en banc decision, In re Bilski, redefined the standard for patenting processes including business methods and computer software. In Bilski, the Federal Circuit departed from the "useful, concrete, and tangible result" test it had established in State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. SignatureFinancialGroup,Inc., which had been the standard for the past ten years. The Federal Circuit returned to a test articulated nearly 40 years ago by the Supreme Court in Gottschalk v. Benson, and clarified that State Street was "never intended to supplant the Supreme Court's test.", Under …

Boumediene’S Quiet Theory: Access To Courts And The Separation Of Powers., Stephen I. Vladeck

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

At the core of Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in Boumediene v. Bush are his repeated suggestions that habeas corpus is an integral aspect of the separation of powers, and that, as such, the writ remains relevant even when the individual rights of those who would seek its protections are unclear. And whereas some might view these passages as little more than rhetorical flourishes, it is difficult to understand the crux of Kennedy's analysis - of why the review available to the Guantanamo detainees failed to provide an adequate alternative to habeas corpus - without understanding the significance of his separation-of-powers …

Memorial To Barbara Ringer, Peter Jaszi

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The story goes that in 439 BC the retired consul Cincinnatus was summoned from the plow by the Senate and people of Rome. One more time, he saw the Republic through a time of particular peril, resigning office immediately afterwards to return to his rural retirement - to be transmuted into a timeless emblem of selfless probity. Episodes of this kind are even rarer in the annals of the U.S. civil service than in the Roman history. But I had the good fortune to be a witness to one such - Barbara Ringer's return to the Library of Congress in …

Sexual Politics And Social Change, Darren L. Hutchinson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The Article examines the impact of social movement activity upon the advancement of GLBT rights. It analyzes the state and local strategy that GLBT social movements utilized to alter the legal status of sexual orientation and sexuality following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick. Successful advocacy before state and local courts, human rights commissions, and legislatures fundamentally shifted public opinion and laws regarding sexual orientation and sexuality between Bowers and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas. This altered landscape created the “political opportunity” for the Lawrence ruling and made the opinion relatively “safe.”

Currently, GLBT rights …

Managing The Unmanageable: A Brief Accounting Of A Special Master’S Thirty Years Of Experience In Complex Litigation, Paul Rice

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Managing an efficient, but fair, pretrial process in a large and complex case has always been a challenge. With the advent of electronic communications and the corresponding explosion of privilege claims, this challenge has become significantly more difficult. Indeed, it is not uncommon for corporate parties to assert tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of privilege claims. Furthermore, the resolution of these privilege questions is often compounded by difficult choice of law questions that can have the result of different substantive principles being applied to identical discovery demands originating in different jurisdictions. Additionally, before addressing the increasingly voluminous …

'From Savigny Through Sir Henry Maine': Roscoe Pound’S Flawed Portrait Of James Coolidge Carter’S Historical Jurisprudence, Lewis A. Grossman

Working Papers

In Roscoe Pound's scathing 1909 review of Law: Its Origin, Growth and Function, American jurist James Coolidge Carter's magnum opus, Pound asserted that Carter's conception of law "comes from Savigny through Sir Henry Maine." Frederich Karl von Savigny and Sir Henry Maine were the most prominent representatives of the German and English historical schools of jurisprudence, respectively. For his part, Carter was the leading representative of historical jurisprudence in the United States.

Other scholars, following Pound, have similarly linked Carter to Savigny and Maine, especially to the former. Moreover, various authors have noted the great effect these European jurists had …

Targeted Killing In U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy And Law, Kenneth Anderson

Working Papers

Targeted killing, particularly through the use of missiles fired from Predator drone aircraft, has become an important, and internationally controversial, part of the US war against al Qaeda in Pakistan and other places. The Obama administration, both during the campaign and in its first months in office, has publicly embraced the strategy as a form of counterterrorism. This paper argues, however, that unless the Obama administration takes careful and assertive legal steps to protect it, targeted killing using remote platforms such as drone aircraft will take on greater strategic salience precisely as the Obama administration allows the legal space for …

Reforming The Global Financial Architecture: Is Real Change Coming?, Daniel Bradlow

Working Papers

This article evaluates the prospects for meaningful reform of the global financial architecture. It begins by looking at the most significant problems with the current architecture. Thereafter it classifies the current reform efforts into three areas -- reforms that in fact have been implemented, reforms that have been proposed but not yet implemented, and reforms that are only under discussion. The paper then evaluates the adequacy of these reform efforts and makes some brief proposals for future reform efforts.

No Reason To Wait: Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions Through The Clean Air Act, William Snape

Newsletters & Other Publications

In the United States, the legal and policy response to global warming has always lagged far behind the urgency of the problem as articulated by scientists and borne out in the real world. In the past five years, this mismatch has reached frightening proportions, with Arctic sea ice and glaciers rapidly retreating, rising and acidifying seas, stronger storms, more frequent and intense droughts and heat waves, looming species extinction and the climate related-deaths of 300,000 people each year. Leading scientists warn that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have likely already exceeded safe levels and must therefore be reduced in the next …

Development And Outcomes Of Investment Treaty Arbitration, Susan Franck

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The legitimacy of investment treaty arbitration is a matter of heated debate. Asserting that arbitration is unfairly tilted toward the developed world, some countries have withdrawn from World Bank dispute resolution bodies or are taking steps to eliminate arbitration. In order to assess whether investment arbitration is the equivalent of tossing a two-headed coin to resolve investment disputes, this article explores the role of development status in arbitration outcome. It first presents descriptive, quantitative research about the developmental background of the presiding arbitrators who exert particular control over the arbitration process. The article then assesses how (1) the development status …

Financial Crisis Containment, Anna Gelpern

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article maps financial crisis containment - extraordinary measures to stop the spread of financial distress - as a category of legal and policy choice. I make three claims.

First, containment is distinct from financial regulation, crisis prevention and resolution. Containment is brief; it targets the immediate term. It involves claims of emergency, rule-breaking, time inconsistency and moral hazard. In contrast, regulation, prevention and resolution seek to establish sound incentives for the long term. Second, containment decisions deviate from non-crisis norms in predictable ways, and are consistent across diverse countries and crises. Containment invariably entails three kinds of choices: choices …

Comments Of 71 Concerned Economists: Using Procurement Auctions To Allocate Broadband Stimulus Grants, Jonathan Baker, William Baumol, Kenneth Arrow, Susan Athey, Coleman Bazelon, Timothy Brennan, Timothy Bresnahan, Jeremy Bulow, Yeon-Koo Che, Peter Cramton, Daniel Ackerberg, James Alleman, Gregory Crawford, Peter Demarzo, Gerald Faulhaber, Jeremy Fox, Ian Gale, Jacob Goeree, Brent Goldfarb, Shane Greenstein, Robert Hahn, Robert Hall, Ward Hanson, Barry Harris, Robert Harris, Janice Hauge, Jerry Hausman, Thomas Hazlett, Kenneth Hendricks, Heather Hudson, Mark Jamison, John Kagel, Alfred Kahn, Ilan Kremer, Vijay Krishna, William Lehr, Thomas Lenard, Jonathan Levin, Yuanchuan Lien, John Mayo, David Mcadams, Paul Milgrom, Roger Noll, Bruce Owen, Charles Plott, Robert Porter, Philip Reny, Michael Riordan, David Salant, Scott Savage, William Samuelson, Richard Schmalensee, Marius Schwartz, Andrzej Skrzypacz, Vernon Smith, Daniel Vincent, Joel Waldfogel, Scott Wallsten, Robert Weber, Bradley Wimmer, Glenn Woroch, Lixin Ye, John Hayes, Gregory Rosston

Congressional and Other Testimony

The signatories to this document are economists who have studied telecommunications, auctions, and competition policy. While we may disagree about the stimulus package, we believe that it is important to implement mechanisms that make stimulus spending as efficient as possible. To that end, we have come together to encourage the National Telecommunications Information Agency (NTIA) and Rural Utilities Service (RUS) to adopt auction mechanisms to allocate broadband stimulus grants.The broadband stimulus NOI asks which mechanisms NTIA and RUS should use to distribute grants and how those mechanisms address shortcomings in traditional grant and loan programs. In this note we explain …

Breathing New Life Into Old Technological Infrastructure: Broadband Internet As A Means Of Jump-Starting The Economy And Connecting The Country, Elizabeth Chernow

Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This paper examines the current structure of universal service and the FCC’s Universal Service Fund, recent pushes to expand the definition of and funding for universal service to include broadband access, and how broadband internet can contribute to saving the ailing economy. The paper concludes by calling for the inclusion of broadband internet in the Universal Service Fund.

Current financial support for the Universal Service Fund is problematic in that only telecommunications carriers providing interstate services are required to contribute to the fund. The author maintains that the contribution base should be expanded to include companies providing broadband internet access. …

Reforming The State Secrets Privilege, Amanda Frost

Newsletters & Other Publications

Since September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush’s Administration has repeatedly asserted the state secrets privilege as grounds for the dismissal of civil cases challenging the legality of its conduct in the war on terror. Specifically, the Administration has sought dismissal of all cases challenging two different government practices: (1) its use of “extraordinary rendition,” under which the Executive removes suspected terrorists to foreign countries for interrogation; and (2) the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) warrantless wiretapping of electronic communications. The government argues that the plaintiffs’ claims in these cases can neither be proven nor defended against without disclosure of information …

Aedpa, Saucier, And The Stronger Case For Rights-First Constitutional Adjudication, Stephen I. Vladeck

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

As part of a symposium on new affirmative visions of the judicial role, this essay takes on the Supreme Court's increasing unwillingness to resolve constitutional questions in post-conviction habeas cases under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), as seen in decisions such as Wright v. Van Patten, 128 S. Ct. 743 (2008). In most cases in which AEDPA applies, a petitioner is only eligible for relief if a state court's constitutional error was unreasonable based on prior Supreme Court decisions (and not dicta). As a result, the Court has repeatedly concluded that a state court did …

The Rise Of International Criminal Law: Intended And Unintended Consequences, Kenneth Anderson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The rise of international criminal law has been one of the remarkable features of international law since 1990. One of the less-explored questions of international criminal law is its social effects, within the international community and the community of public international law, in other parts and activities of international law. In particular, what are the effects of the rise of international criminal law and its emerging system of tribunals on the rest of the laws of armed conflict? What are the effects upon apparently unrelated aspects of humanitarian and human rights law? What are the effects upon other large systems …

Understanding The Federal Tort Claims Act: A Different Metaphor, Paul F. Figley

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

When it enacted the Federal Tort Claims Act Congress waived the United States’ sovereign immunity for certain torts of the federal government. That waiver is subject to exclusions, exceptions, and limitations that may seem puzzling or counterintuitive. This essay explains the structure and operation of the Federal Tort Claims Act by comparing it to “a traversable bridge across the moat of sovereign immunity” (a metaphor used by Judge Max Rosenn in a slightly different context). The essay examines why Congress enacted the FTCA, the jurisdictional grant that allows some tort claims but not others, the pre-requisites to bringing suit, the …

The G20 And Sustainable Imf Reform, Daniel D. Bradlow

Working Papers

This article explores the problems with the current arrangements for international financial governance and the prospects for the IMF being sufficiently reformed to play an effective role in future arrangements for international financial governance. It proposes that the G20 initiate a multi-step process of reform.

The Long War, The Federal Courts, And The Necessity / Legality Paradox, Stephen I. Vladeck

Book Reviews

This paper is a solicited review of Ben Wittes's book "Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror," which rightly suggests that there would be far less legal uncertainty today vis-a-vis the conduct of the war on terrorism had the Bush Administration sought - and had Congress provided - framework legislation governing issues ranging from the detention of "enemy combatants" to surveillance and even interrogation.

Nevertheless, the review takes issue with Wittes's critique of the role of the courts thus far, especially his contention that the Supreme Court's decisions to date may be seen …