Law Commons^™

From Coolidge To Christie: Historical Antecedents Of Current Government Officials Dealing With Public Sector Labor Unions, Bryan J. Soukup

Law Student Publications

One might ask: what do Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan, Scott Walker and Chris Christie have in common? The most obvious answer is that they all are (or were) Republican Governors, but these four men have something much deeper in common. All four have faced-off against powerful public sector labor unions and won. This paper will address and examine the similarities between the anti-union actions taken by these men— Coolidge and the Boston Police Strike of 1919, Reagan and the Professional Air Traffic Controllers (“PATCO”) Strike of 1981, and Walker and Christie’s recent dealings with public employee unions. In the end, …

Regulating The Behavior Of Lawyers In Mass Individual Representations: A Call For Reform., Richard Zitrin

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Cases in which lawyers represent large numbers of individual plaintiffs are increasingly common. While these cases have some of the indicia of class actions, they are not class actions, usually because there are no common damages, but rather individual representations on a mass scale. Current ethics rules do not provide adequate guidance for even the most ethical lawyers. The absence of sufficiently flexible, practical ethical rules has become an open invitation for less-ethical attorneys to abuse, often severely, the mass-representation problem. It is necessary to reform the current rules, but only with a solution that is both practical and attainable, …

The Litigation Privilege In Texas., Sam Johnson

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Certain Texas cases have arisen where one party in litigation sues the attorney representing an opposing party. In response to such cases, Texas courts promulgated a judicial doctrine generally referred to as the litigation privilege or qualified immunity in order to protect litigants’ right to zealous representation from their attorney. The general rule is that one party to a lawsuit cannot sue the other party’s attorney. However, exceptions to this doctrine exist. This article explores the contours of the litigation privilege in Texas by analyzing the primary Texas cases where one party’s claim against the opposing party’s attorney was dismissed …

Introduction, Kathryn A. Stephens

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Introduction

Guilt By Association: How “Standby Co-Counsel” Exposes Attorneys To Malicious Prosecution Liability., Colleen V. Lisowski

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Attorneys should not assume that lending their name to a case is a risk-free practice. The California appellate decision, Cole v. Patricia A. Meyer & Associates, answered the question of whether non-participating, standby co-counsel could be held liable for malicious prosecution by merely being listed as counsel of record. Cole established the clear message behind being aware of “co-counsel” risks. According to the court, co-counsel cannot escape liability if they failed to know enough about the case. By rejecting the “passive counsel” defense, Cole held that associated attorneys still have a duty to research the validity of a case even …

Evidentiary Standards In The Legal Malpractice Trial-Within-A-Trial., F. Parks Brown

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Like malpractice actions in general, the standards of proof required for each element of a legal malpractice claim evolved as legal malpractice claims became increasingly common. State and federal courts consequently produced a diverse range of opinions as jurisdictions continually adjust to evolving standards. The courts often seek to balance these standards of proof against their own precedent and the need to serve their particular notions of equity and justice. Perhaps the most contentious of these evolving standards of proof is the current state of the causation element, which is a critical test that must be satisfied to prevail in …

The U.S. Proposal For An Intellectual Property Chapter In The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, Margot Kaminski, Sean M. Flynn, Brook Baker, Jimmy Koo

Publications

No abstract provided.

Benefit Corporations: A Challenge In Corporate Governance, Mark J. Loewenstein

Publications

Benefit corporations are a new form of business entity that is rapidly being adopted around the country. Though the legislation varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, most statutes are based on a model proposed and promoted by B Lab, itself a nonprofit corporation. The essence of these statutes is that, in making business judgments, the directors of a benefit corporation must consider the impact of their decisions on the environment and society. The model legislation, though, may create serious governance issues for the directors of benefit corporations that operate under these laws. This article analyzes the model legislation and identifies its …

Crowdfunding Securities, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

A new federal statute authorizes the online "crowdfunding" of securities, a new idea based on the concept of "reward" crowdfunding practiced on Kickstarter and other websites. This method of selling securities had previously been banned by federal securities law but the new CROWDFUND Act overturns that prohibition.

This Article introduces the CROWDFUND Act and explains that it can be expected to have two primary effects on securities law and capital markets. First, it will liberate startup companies to use peer networks and the Internet to obtain modest amounts of capital at low cost. Second, it will help democratize the market …

Technological Cost As Law In Intellectual Property, Harry Surden

Publications

Changes in the scope of IP legal rights are generally thought to be linked to changes in positive law. This Article argues that shifts in the scope of IP laws are often driven by changes in technological feasibility and not by changes in positive law. Diminishing technological constraint is an under-acknowledged factor driving changes in substantive IP law.

More specifically, there are certain activities that are core to IP law. Such activities include, for example, the copying of creative works in copyright (e.g. duplicating books or music), or the manufacturing of products in patent law. Traditionally, IP legal theory has …

Tribal Rights, Human Rights, Kristen A. Carpenter, Angela R. Riley

Publications

No abstract provided.

Foreword: Public Constitutional Literacy; A Conversation, Melissa Hart

Publications

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Peter H. Huang

Publications

This review of Leo Katz's book, Why the Law is So Perverse, addresses three questions. First, does Katz draw the appropriate normative conclusions about legal perversities based on their connections to social choice theory? In other words, what are the legal ethics and professionalism implications of his book? Second, how does each of the legal perversities in the book follow from a particular social choice theory result? In other words, what is the precise theoretical connection between each of the legal perversities discussed and an impossibility theorem in social choice theory? Third, can we reinterpret our understanding of the …

Drafting Model Laws On Indoor Pollution For Developing And Developed Nations Workshop, July 12-13, 2012, Boulder, Colorado: Introduction, Lakshman Guruswamy

Publications

No abstract provided.

Experiments To Measure The Effects Of Timber Harvesting Equipment On Surface Lithic Scatters, Douglas J. Baughman

All Master's Theses

The importance of cultural resource preservation cannot be overstated; however local economies are at least as important. Due to conservative archaeological site protection practices in Region 5 of the United States Forest Service, the economy of Northeastern California is being adversely affected. In an attempt to help the Forest Service make more informed management decisions and improve the Northeastern California economy, I undertook experiments on the effects of timber harvesting on lithic scatters on Modoc National Forest. The experiments involved placement of 225 glass tiles (proxy lithics) in each of three plots subject to vehicle traffic and log dragging by …

The Death Of Punishment: Searching For Justice Among The Worst Of The Worst, Robert I. Blecker

Books

For twelve years Robert Blecker, a criminal law professor at New York Law School, wandered freely inside Lorton Central Prison, armed only with cigarettes and a tape recorder.The Death of Punishment tests legal philosophy against the reality and wisdom of street criminals and their guards. Some killers' poignant circumstances should lead us to mercy; others show clearly why they should die. After thousands of hours over twenty-five years inside maximum security prisons and on death rows in seven states, Professor Blecker exposes the perversity of justice: Inside prison, ironically, it's nobody's job to punish. Thus the worst criminals often …

Private Standards Organizations And Public Law, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Simplified, universal access to law is one of the important transformations worked by the digital age. With the replacement of physical by digital copies, citizens ordinarily need travel only to the nearest computer to find and read the texts that bind them. Lagging behind this development, however, has been computer access to standards developed by private standards development organizations, often under the umbrella of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and then converted by agency actions incorporating them by reference into legal obligations. To discover what colors the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires for use in work-place caution …

Agora: The South China Sea – Editors' Introduction, Lori Fisler Damrosch, Bernard H. Oxman

Faculty Scholarship

The disagreements among states bordering the South China Sea pose extraordinarily complex legal issues. Sovereignty over small islands that lie at some distance from the continental and insular coasts that surround the sea is contested. So are the maritime entitlements generated by these features. Notably, rocks that cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own generate no entitlement to an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and continental shelf beyond a twelve-mile territorial sea, which may be the case for many of the disputed islands. Yet another series of questions relates to the delimitation of overlapping maritime entitlements, including the …

The State Of Democracy In North Dakota, David Schultz

North Dakota Law Review

No abstract provided.

Vertical Boilerplate, James Gibson

Washington and Lee Law Review

Despite what we learn in law school about the “meeting of the minds,” most contracts are merely boilerplate—take-it-or-leave-it propositions. Negotiation is nonexistent; we rely on our collective market power as consumers to regulate contracts’ content. But boilerplate imposes certain information costs because it often arrives late in the transaction and is hard to understand. If those costs get too high, then the market mechanism fails. So how high are boilerplate’s information costs? A few studies have attempted to measure them, but they all use a “horizontal” approach—i.e., they sample a single stratum of boilerplate and assume that it represents the …

Review: Is Hedge Fund Registration Necessary? , J. W. Verret

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Coercion, Consent, Compassion, John D. King

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Tribute To Professor Calvin William Sharpe, Robert N. Strassfeld

Faculty Publications

The editors of the Case Western Reserve Law Review respectfully dedicate this issue to Professor Calvin William Sharpe.

One can only stand in awe when reflecting on the extraordinary professional accomplishments of Professor Calvin William Sharpe. It is rare in the legal academy to find a professor whose academic range is so broad and whose level of quality is so consistently high. That range and quality are evident regardless of whether one looks at Professor Sharpe's teaching, scholarship, or professional service.

United They Rise Divided They Fail—Blending Antitrust, False Advertising And Trademark Law Into A Hybrid Standard Resolves Problems Of Prudential Standing Under Section 43(A) Of The Lanham Act, Marc Samuel Borden

Student Works

No abstract provided.

News In Cyberspace: The Creation Of The New Ignorance, Ronald Charles Griffin

Journal Publications

Computers are dummying us down. Book learning has given way to computer speak. Modern technology overwhelms us. Users are enthralled with gadgets to the point where they have lost themselves in them. We have abandoned, perhaps mislaid, our sense for ignorance; what it means to be illiterate in the 21st century; and working definitions for truth. In this environment a dab of education (enough to make somebody lethal), a sprinkle of bigotry, and fear produce people with ideas that are bad for us. This essay cautions against trucking with those folk; it marks what they do in the media that …

Moncrieffe: Lessons In Crimmigration Law, Maritza I. Reyes

Journal Publications

No abstract provided.

Perspectives: From The Chair Of The Aba Law Practice Management Section, January/February 2013, Joan R. Bullock

Journal Publications

In this era of the "new normal," lawyers and law firms are seeking ways to create efficiencies and realize new capabilities.

Commonality Among Unique Indigenous Communities: An Introduction To Climate Change And Its Impacts On Indigenous Peoples, Randall S. Abate

Journal Publications

This special Issue of the Tulane Environmental Law Journal explores how climate change affects the rights of indigenous peoples. Climate change is a global environmental problem caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Indigenous peoples generally contribute very limited quantities of greenhouse gases to the global atmosphere. Although the causes of climate change are global, the adverse impacts of this problem are disproportionately burdening indigenous peoples.

In recognition of the growing global problem of climate change, legal strategies to address climate change through mitigation and adaptation have been undertaken. This Issue recognizes that indigenous peoples are particularly vulnerable to climate change, both …

Domestic Drones: Technical And Policy Issues, University Of Washington Technology And Public Policy Clinic

Technology Law and Public Policy Clinic

No abstract provided.

Some Guidance About Federal Agencies And Guidance, Mary Whisner

Librarians' Articles

The federal administrative system is complex and contains ambiguities about what counts as an “agency,” and there is an amorphous border between regulations and guidance. The body of guidance documents (or nonlegislative rules) is growing, both in volume and in importance, and legal researchers should be aware of this important source of authority, as well as its unclear status.