Law Commons^™

Law Of The Intermediated Information Exchange, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Florida Law Review

When Wikipedia, Google, and other online service providers staged a "blackout protest" against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in January 2012, their actions inadvertently emphasized a fundamental truth that is often missed about the nature of cyberlaw. In attempts to address what is unique about the field, commentators have failed to appreciate that the field could—and should—be reconceptualized as a law of the global intermediated information exchange. Such a conception would provide a set of organizing principles that are lacking in existing scholarship. Nothing happens online that does not involve one or more intermediaries—the service providers who facilitate all …

Election Law Behind A Veil Of Ignorance, Chad Flanders

Florida Law Review

Election law struggles with the question of neutrality, not only with its possibility—can election rules truly be neutral between parties?—but also with its definition. What does it mean for election laws to be “neutral”? This Article examines one form of election law neutrality, found in what it terms “veil of ignorance rules.” Such rules are formed in circumstances where neither party knows which rule will benefit its candidates in future elections.

This Article considers the existence of veil of ignorance rules in two recent election law controversies: the rule that write-in ballots must be spelled correctly (in the Lisa Murkowski …

The Gold Clause Cases And Constitutional Necessity, Gerard N. Magliocca

Florida Law Review

This Article presents a case study of how constitutional actors respond when the rule of law and necessity are sharply at odds and provides some background on Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In 1935, the Supreme Court heard constitutional challenges to the abrogation of “gold clauses” in contracts and Treasury bonds. Gold clauses guaranteed that creditors would receive payment in gold dollars as valued at the time a contract was made. Due to the deflation that followed the Great Depression, this meant that debtors were being forced to pay back much more than they owed originally. To stop a …

America’S First Patents, Michael Risch

Florida Law Review

Courts and commentators vigorously debate early American patent history because of a spotty documentary record. To fill these gaps, scholars have examined the adoption of the Intellectual Property Clause of the Constitution, correspondence, dictionaries, and British and colonial case law. But there is one largely ignored body of information—the content of early patents themselves. While many debate what the founders thought, no one asks what early inventors thought—and those thoughts are telling. This Article is the first comprehensive examination of how early inventors and their patents should inform our current thoughts about the patent system.

To better understand our early …

Triangulating Judicial Responsiveness: Automated Content Analysis, Judicial Opinions, And The Methodology Of Legal Scholarship, Chad M. Oldfather, Joseph P. Bockhorst, Brian P. Dimmer

Florida Law Review

The increasing availability of digital versions of court documents, coupled with increases in the power and sophistication of computational methods of textual analysis, promises to enable both the creation of new avenues of scholarly inquiry and the refinement of old ones. This Article advances that project in three respects. First, it examines the potential for automated content analysis to mitigate one of the methodological problems that afflicts both content analysis and traditional legal scholarship—their acceptance on faith of the proposition that judicial opinions accurately report information about the cases they resolve and courts‘ decisional processes. Because automated methods can quickly …

Just What The Doctor Ordered? How The Patient Safety And Quality Improvement Act May Cure Florida’S Patients’ Right To Know About Adverse Medical Incidents (Amendment 7), Kelly G. Dunberg

Florida Law Review

This Note addresses the impact of Florida’s Patients’ Right to Know About Adverse Medical Incidents (commonly known as Amendment 7) on the peer review process and the quality of healthcare in Florida. Enacted in 2004 as an amendment to the Florida Constitution, Amendment 7 provides citizens access to records and reports of past adverse medical incidents involving doctors, hospitals, and healthcare providers. Critics of Amendment 7 argue that peer review privilege protections are necessary to maintain high-quality healthcare in Florida, pointing to the need to encourage candid and vigorous evaluations by physicians of their colleagues. In contrast, Amendment 7 supporters …

Popular Originalism? The Tea Party Movement And Constitutional Theory, Rebecca E. Zietlow

Florida Law Review

The U.S. Constitution is currently the subject of a heated political debate. Tea Party activists have invoked the Constitution as the foundation of their conservative political philosophy. These activists are engaged in “popular originalism,” using popular constitutionalism—constitutional interpretation outside of the courts—to invoke originalism as interpretive method. The Tea Party movement thus provides an excellent heuristic to explore the relationship between originalism and popular constitutionalism, two prominent trends in constitutional theory. Both originalists and popular constitutionalists study legal history to illuminate constitutional meaning, but the two schools of thought draw diverging lessons from that history. Originalists look to history to …

Toward A Specific Intent Requirement In White Collar Crime Statutes: How The Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act Of 2010 Sheds Light On The “General Intent Revolution”, Elizabeth R. Sheyn

Florida Law Review

The recent passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, as amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (collectively, ACA), has altered the landscape of health care and health insurance. However, it has also served to highlight the revolution in the intent requirement for white collar crimes. In particular, the ACA lowers the intent requirement for several health care fraud statutes from “specific intent to defraud” to “general intent to deceive,” which is consistent with federal courts’ recent trend of not requiring proof of the defendant’s knowledge of the law before finding a …

The Model Penal Code’S Wrong Turn: Renunciation As A Defense To Criminal Conspiracy, R. Michael Cassidy, Gregory I. Massing

Florida Law Review

While the Model Penal Code was certainly one of the most influential developments in criminal law in the past century, the American Law Institute (ALI) took a seriously wrong turn by recognizing “renunciation” as a defense to the crime of conspiracy. Under the Model Penal Code formulation, a member of a conspiracy who later disavows the agreement and thwarts its objective (for example, by notifying authorities of the planned crime in order to prevent its completion) is afforded a complete defense to conspiracy liability. This defense has enormous implications for crimes involving national security and terrorism, which are typically planned …

Nineteenth Century Personal Jurisdiction Doctrine In A Twenty-First Century World, Charles W. "Rockey" Rhodes

Florida Law Review

The initial twenty-first century personal jurisdiction decisions from the Supreme Court reveal that personal jurisdiction doctrine has not changed much since the nineteenth century. The nomenclature has changed, realism has replaced formalism, some fictions purportedly have been discarded, and the adjudicatory reach of courts has somewhat expanded, but the doctrine retains the same conceptual core-the social contract philosophical tradition limiting the scope of governmental authority to those establishing the requisite relationship with the sovereign.

I first overview jurisdictional doctrine from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This revisionist account illustrates that International Shoe—especially considered in light of its progeny—is not …

The Open Road And The Traffic Stop: Narratives And Counter-Narratives Of The American Dream, Nancy Leong

Florida Law Review

American culture is steeped in the mythology of the open road. In our collective imagination, the road represents freedom, escape, friendship, romance, and above all, the possibility for a better life. But our shared dream of the open road comes to a halt in the mundane reality of the traffic stop—a judicially authorized policing procedure in which an officer may pull over a vehicle if she has cause to believe the driver has committed even the most minor traffic violation. I examine the cultural texts—books, movies, songs—celebrating the open road and juxtapose them against those documenting the traffic stop. The …

Preserving Legal Avenues For Climate Justice In Florida Post-American Electric Power, Allison Fishman

Florida Law Review

No abstract provided.

Adapting Laws For A Changing World: A Systemic Approach To Climate Change Adaptation, Victor B. Flatt

Florida Law Review

This Essay suggests that policy responses in climate change adaptation must be addressed and that focusing on adapting laws may be a good way to undertake this work. Following a review of existing scholarship and normative theories concerning law generally, environmental law, climate change, and adaptation, this Essay then proposes a template for approaching the adaptation of laws. This template would (1) examine where climate change puts pressure on the operation of laws; (2) seek to alter the implementation of that law or to alter the law itself to hew closely to the law’s original purposes; and (3) make these …

Critical Habitat And The Challenge Of Regulating Small Harms, Dave Owen

Florida Law Review

This Article investigates how the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the courts are implementing the Endangered Species Act’s prohibition on “adverse modification” of “critical habitat.” That prohibition appears to be one of environmental law’s most ambitious mandates, but its actual meaning and effect are contested. Using a database of over 4,000 “biological opinions,” interviews with agency staff, and a review of judicial decisions considering the adverse modification prohibition, this Article assesses the extent to which the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the courts are relying on the adverse modification …

Planetarian Identity Formation And The Relocalization Of Environmental Law, Sarah Krakoff

Florida Law Review

Local food, local work, local energy production-all are hallmarks of a resurgence of localism throughout contemporary environmental thought and action. The renaissance of localism might be seen as a retreat from the world’s global environmental problems. This Article maintains, however, that some forms of localism are actually expressions, appropriate ones, of a planetary environmental consciousness. This Article’s centerpiece is an in-depth evaluation of local climate action initiatives, including interviews with participants, as well as other data and observations about their ethics, attitudes, behaviors, and motivations. The values and identities being forged in these initiatives form the basis for timely conceptions …

Balancing Compassion And Risk In Climate Adaptation: U.S. Water, Drought, And Agricultural Law, Robert W. Adler

Florida Law Review

It is inevitable that the world will experience a significant amount of global warming before efforts to mitigate the buildup of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere can even begin to succeed. Therefore, adaptation to climate change impacts, as well as mitigation, will be necessary to deal with climate disruption. In designing climate change adaptation efforts, a looming issue is how to balance the need and compassionate impulse to provide financial and other relief to victims of climate disruption impacts with the equally compelling need to reduce the overall risk of those impacts. U.S. water, drought, and agricultural law and …

An Empirical Assessment Of Climate Change In The Courts: A New Jurisprudence Or Business As Usual?, David Markell, J. B. Ruhl

Florida Law Review

With the demise of climate legislation in Congress, and the Supreme Court’s rejection of climate-related lawsuits brought under federal common law, rapt attention has turned to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) efforts to bring greenhouse gases into the regulatory fold. Certainly, as the works in this special issue of the Florida Law Review demonstrate, EPA is not the only important player in the climate arena; indeed, as I will reluctantly suggest, the Agency’s efforts here appear to be waning rather than waxing. Even so, before turning to other aspects of the problem of climate change, discussed in other works in …

Introduction: Climate Change At Epa, Lisa Heinzerling

Florida Law Review

With the demise of climate legislation in Congress, and the Supreme Court’s rejection of climate-related lawsuits brought under federal common law, rapt attention has turned to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) efforts to bring greenhouse gases into the regulatory fold. Certainly, as the works in this special issue of the Florida Law Review demonstrate, EPA is not the only important player in the climate arena; indeed, as I will reluctantly suggest, the Agency’s efforts here appear to be waning rather than waxing. Even so, before turning to other aspects of the problem of climate change, discussed in other works in …

Ndls Update 10/17/2012, Notre Dame Law School

NDLS Update

No abstract provided.

Scope Of Liability Under The Alien Tort Statute: The Relevance Of Choice Of Law Doctrine In The Aftermath Of Kiobel V. Royal Dutch Petroleum, Jon E. Crain

Pace Law Review

Recently Judge José A. Cabranes, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, issued a decision that drastically undermined the efficacy of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). Writing for the majority in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., 621 F.3d 111 (2d Cir. 2010), Judge Cabranes ruled that corporate entities cannot be held liable under the ATS. This Comment will examine the choice-of-law aspect of that decision, and argue that Judge Cabranes erred in interpreting the ATS to mandate application of customary international law (CIL).

Reading Between The Lines: Charging Instruments At The Ictr And The Icc, Claire Knittel

Pace Law Review

International criminal procedure, including the principle of notice, has grown exponentially from the Nuremburg Trials conducted after WWII, but the tribunals of today still face many sticky procedural issues. This Article will focus on two problems that the ICTR and the International Criminal Court (ICC), respectively, have faced with regard to notice. Part I reviews the jurisprudence of the ICTR and ICC, focusing particularly on requirements of notice and the requirements of the charging instruments in each tribunal. Part II discusses in detail a problem that each tribunal is facing: vagueness in the indictment at the ICTR and informal changes …

Identity Crisis: Class Certification, Aggregate Proof, And How Rule 23 May Be Self-Defeating The Policy For Which It Was Established, J. Britton Whitbeck

Pace Law Review

Class actions suits developed in the United States as a form of “group litigation,” an alternative to the impracticability or inequities of separate, individual actions of a similarly situated class of plaintiffs and, eventually, defendants. Congressional passage of the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (CAFA) provided the federal courts with expounded diversity jurisdiction for the purpose of “assur[ing] fairer outcomes for class members and defendants.” However, recent circuit splits regarding class certification under Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and the use of aggregate proof in certifying classes have, in an ironic twist of legal …

What One Hand Giveth, The Other Taketh Away: How Future Dangerousness Corrupts Guilt Verdicts And Produces Premature Punishment Decisions In Capital Cases, Elizabeth S. Vartkessian

Pace Law Review

No abstract provided.

Travel Abroad, Sue At Home 2012: Forum Non Conveniens & The Enforcement Of Forum Selection And Mandatory Arbitration Clauses, Thomas A. Dickerson

Pace Law Review

A common litigation strategy is to sue in the U.S. in federal or state court against a solvent defendant subject to long-arm jurisdiction and the application of U.S. common law or statutory law. Such cases raise a variety of complex liability and procedural issues including liability shifting, jurisdiction, forum non conveniens, and choice of law. This Article will identify various types of travel accidents abroad, and discuss the doctrine of forum non conveniens and the enforceability of forum selection and mandatory arbitration clauses in travel consumer contracts.

Admissions: What They Are And How They Can Impact Litigation, William J. Giacomo

Pace Law Review

Since everything said or submitted to court is on some level an admission, an attorney must know what he or she is admitting and how it may affect his or her case. This Article will examine two cases that present common situations during litigation where an admission may occur. In doing so, it will examine the background of admissions under the Federal Rules of Evidence, the various modes in which admissions are presented, and whether the effect of an admission in the litigation is formal (binding) or informal (rebuttable). Armed with that information, this Article will then suggest answers to …

Effective Keyword Selection Requires A Mastery Of Storage Technology And The Law, Daniel B. Garrie

Pace Law Review

Selecting keywords for searching large volumes of electronically stored information (“ESI”) is an unavoidable, but necessary step in the process of electronic discovery. The parties to a case, or the court, may choose the terms for the search. However, an efficient alternative to both options involves a mediator, neutral, or special master with a thorough understanding of the legal elements of the case and the technology systems that will be subject to keyword search. This alternative can benefit both parties, as well as the court, because a “technology-aware” mediator can expedite an agreement that allows both parties to maintain oversight …

Social Construction Of False Necessities And The Material Basis Of Socio-Legal Power: A Reply To Irrationalism In Critical Legal Studies Critiques Identifying Latent Social Violence As A Potential New Material Foundation For Systematic Socio-Legal Theory, Samantha Godwin

Pace Law Review

This Article is deliberately unconventional and exploratory. It begins by raising many conceptually problematic questions which cannot be answered simply or definitively. The point is not to provide any one right answer for these questions but to raise possible directions for new lines of inquiry rather than accepting the theoretical dead end that is irrationalism. I do not necessarily hope to offer a new systemizing theory that can withstand rigorous critique, but rather to show that such attempts remain possible and worthwhile even after the influence of post-modernism and the deconstruction of the most significant social theories.

Trial Bench Views: Iaals Report On Findings From A National Survey On Civil Procedure, Corina Gerety

Pace Law Review

In the spring of 2010, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (“IAALS”) collected survey data on the American civil justice system from state and federal judges throughout the United States, as part of a joint effort with Northwestern University School of Law’s Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth (“Searle Center”). This report sets forth the collective opinions of respondent judges, as they bear on civil reform proposals developed by IAALS and the American College of Trial Lawyers Task Force on Discovery and Civil Litigation (“ACTL Task Force”).

Social Media And Ediscovery: Emerging Issues, Adam Cohen

Pace Law Review

Courts, as well as private sector and government policymakers, have only just begun to address the practical litigation issues raised by the proliferation of social media channels and content. This Article comments on some of those issues as they relate to electronic discovery (“eDiscovery”) and examines how they have been approached in emerging case law. It does not address proposed legislation on a domestic and international level that may impact social media’s use in litigation, nor does it purport to be in any way comprehensive in its coverage of developments and potential developments in the legal implications of social media.

Inconsistent Responsiveness Determination In Document Review: Difference Of Opinion Or Human Error?, Maura R. Grossman, Gordon V. Cormack

Pace Law Review

This Article analyzes the inconsistency between different document review efforts on the same document collection to determine whether that inconsistency is due primarily to ambiguity in applying the definition of responsiveness to particular documents, or due primarily to human error. By examining documents from the TREC 2009 Legal Track, the Authors show that inconsistent assessments regarding the same documents are due in large part to human error. Therefore, the quality of a review effort is not simply a matter of opinion; it is possible to show objectively that some reviews, and some review methods, are better than others.