Law Commons^™

Private Rights For The Public Good?, J. Janewa Oseitutu

Faculty Publications

The counterfeit medicines discussion is an example of how the use of a turbid rationale for greater intellectual property protections serves sophisticated private interests while potentially harming the public interest. The risk of harm created by counterfeit medicines provides a compelling counter-narrative to the access to medicines critique of intellectual property rights.

Intellectual property advocates and the pharmaceutical industry have portrayed poor global enforcement of intellectual property rights as contributing to the proliferation of dangerous counterfeit medications. Yet, the deliberate linkage in the literature between weak intellectual property rights and the harms caused by counterfeit medicines provides a justification for …

Harmonizing Distributed Energy And The Endangered Species Act, J. B. Ruhl

San Diego Journal of Climate & Energy Law

This Article explores ways of harmonizing distributed energy and the ESA, a goal consistent with the national policy for renewable energy conservation. Several legal practitioners and scholars have identified the ESA as a potentially significant constraint on the siting and operation of wind power facilities. The ESA has also been identified as a potential barrier to renewable energy in general, as solar power, biomass, and ocean tide and wave facilities could have their own sets of impacts triggering ESA regulation. But most of this attention has been devoted to utility-scale renewable energy, with distributed energy largely ignored or perhaps assumed …

Expedited Approval Of Energy Projects: Toward Assessing The Forms Of Procedural Relief, Michael B. Gerrard

San Diego Journal of Climate & Energy Law

This research is heading toward two further sets of questions, which may or may not be reached in the current phase of the work.

First, if certain permits or reviews can be dispensed with for certain projects, and there are few negative collateral consequences, do we need these permits and reviews at all? Every proposed project is important to someone, and arguments can almost always be mounted that a given kind of project warrants special treatment. The present inquiry may help identify some requirements that are obsolete and should not apply to anyone, and it may also help identify others …

The Emergence Of Natural Gas And The Need For Cooperative Federalism To Address A Big "Fracking" Problem., Joshua P. Dennis

San Diego Journal of Climate & Energy Law

This Comment explores the recent emergence of natural gas production, the hydraulic fracturing process and briefly touches on the current regulatory system that oversees its operation. I then explain why the current regulatory system is insufficient to protect individuals and the environment from hydraulic fracturing. And lastly, I argue that a form of cooperative federalism is the best approach to regulate hydraulic fracturing.

Legal, Technical, And Economic Challenges In Integrating Renewable Power Generation Into The Electricity Grid, Timothy P. Duane, Kiran H. Griffith

San Diego Journal of Climate & Energy Law

This Article addresses the legal, technical, and economic challenges of integrating high levels of renewable power generation into electrical grid system operation. Part II shows that the primary integration challenge is reducing the total costs of integration and allocating the costs of integration in a hybrid regulatory structure, which presents different institutional impediments than traditional cost-of-service ratemaking or rate-of-return regulation. We demonstrate that the primary impediment to improved integration is a failure to make the critical policy choice about how such costs will be allocated. Part III describes and analyzes the BPA-wind dispute in order to evaluate the adequacy of …

The Charter's Influence Around The World, Mark Tushnet

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Over the past several decades, the influence of the United States Constitution and Supreme Court around the world has waned while that of the Canadian Charter and Supreme Court has increased. This article examines several reasons for these changes, including: the relative ages of the constitutions; the US Supreme Court’s recent conservatism; the Canadian Supreme Court’s role in developing the doctrine of proportionality; the US Supreme Court’s interest in originalism; differing structures of constitutional review and judicial supremacy; and the two Courts’ relative openness to transnational influences.

Closing Wall Street’S Commodity And Swaps Betting Parlors: Legal Remedies To Combat Needlessly Gambling Up The Price Of Crude Oil Beyond What Market Fundamentals Dictate, Michael Greenberger

Faculty Scholarship

The price of crude oil in the futures markets has oscillated wildly during the past five years. Although these price swings may partly be a result of insufficient supply meeting large demand for oil, economic data demonstrate that market fundamentals have in fact remained in equilibrium. An overwhelming number of market participants, financial analysts, and academics have instead shown that unregulated excessive speculation in the oil futures markets is to blame. Such excessive speculation is a result of the financialization of commodities, which has exacerbated price swings in oil because the speculative upward betting causes artificially high prices that do …

Human Rights And The Evolution Of Global Environmental Law, Robert V. Percival

Faculty Scholarship

Environmental problems that jeopardize the health of humans increasingly implicate concerns that have played an important role in the development of international human rights. While some have questioned the wisdom or effectiveness of focusing human rights concerns on environmental problems, it seems an inevitable response to the failure of many countries to protect their citizens adequately from harm caused by environmental degradation. This paper reviews efforts to apply human rights concerns to environmental problems. It describes how these developments illustrate the growth of a kind of “global environmental law” that blurs traditional distinctions between domestic and international law and public …

Why Environmental Law Clinics?, Adam Babich, Jane F. Barrett

Faculty Scholarship

The law clinic has become an increasingly important part of legal education, giving students the opportunity to learn practical skills as well as to internalize core legal values. Pedagogical concerns preclude clinics from letting fear of criticism drive decisions about how they represent clients. The legal profession's idealistic aspirations pose challenges, and political attacks have answered clinicians' efforts to live up to these aspirations. An error underlies such attacks, however: holding lawyers responsible for their clients' legal positions despite the profession's duty to ensure that such positions get a fair hearing.

Collaborating To Nowhere: The Imperative Of Government Accountability For Restoring The Chesapeake Bay, Rena I. Steinzor, Shana Jones

Faculty Scholarship

This Article opens with an analysis of why the Chesapeake Bay Program will repeat its past failures unless a reliable mechanism for ensuring accountability is created. It then explains how the independent evaluator should be constructed to make possible the overall success of Bay restoration. Finally, it closes with a rebuttal of the arguments in favor of self--auditing and against independent review.

A More Realistic Approach To Directors' Duties, Michelle M. Harner

Faculty Scholarship

Expectations for what fiduciary duties can achieve in the corporate context are unrealistic. This segment of the law—and the alleged deficiencies therein—are blamed for corporate scandals, securities fraud, failed business plans, and even a company's insolvency. Risk is, however, inherent in business, and human beings are flawed. Fiduciary duty law cannot change these basic facts. To the extent we think it can, we will continue to be disappointed and frustrated. This essay considers recasting (and to a greater extent codifying) directors’ duties in a positive frame to help foster better director oversight. It does not suggest that codifying greater clarity …

Diversifying Clearinghouse Ownership In Order To Safeguard Free And Open Access To The Derivatives Clearing Market, Michael Greenberger

Faculty Scholarship

Implementing the rigorous governance and ownership standards established in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act3 for derivatives clearing organizations (DCOs) will promote free and open access to clearing and reduce systemic risk within what is now the $700 trillion notional value derivatives market. Such standards are central to and advance the key regulatory tenants of Dodd-Frank: i.e., to restore transparency, capital adequacy, and accountability to what was the unregulated over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market by ensuring that swaps are cleared through financially sound DCOs. Also, these rules will promote competition by curtailing large swap dealers‘ (SDs) control …

What's On First?: Organizing The Casebook And Molding The Mind, Donald G. Gifford, Joseph L. Kroart Iii, Brian Jones, Cheryl Cortemeglia

Faculty Scholarship

This study empirically tests the proposition that law students adopt different conceptions of the judge’s role in adjudication based on whether they first study intentional torts, negligence, or strict liability. The authors conducted an anonymous survey of more than 450 students enrolled in eight law schools at the beginning, mid-point, and end of the first semester of law school. The students were prompted to indicate to what extent they believed the judge’s role to be one of rule application and, conversely, to what extent it was one of considering social, economic, and ideological factors. The survey found that while all …

Fighting Cybercrime After United States V. Jones, David C. Gray, Danielle Keats Citron, Liz Clark Rinehart

Faculty Scholarship

In a landmark non-decision last term, five Justices of the United States Supreme Court would have held that citizens possess a Fourth Amendment right to expect that certain quantities of information about them will remain private, even if they have no such expectations with respect to any of the information or data constituting that whole. This quantitative approach to evaluating and protecting Fourth Amendment rights is certainly novel and raises serious conceptual, doctrinal, and practical challenges. In other works, we have met these challenges by engaging in a careful analysis of this “mosaic theory” and by proposing that courts focus …

Looking Backward, Looking Forward: The Next 40 Years Of Environmental Law, Robert V. Percival

Faculty Scholarship

The only certainty concerning predictions for the future of the environment is that most of them are likely to be wrong. This is illustrated by the fate of past predictions, such as those contained in Paul Ehrlich's Populations Bomb, Gregg Easterbrook's A Moment on the Earth, and Bjørn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist. While it is difficult to guess at the future of the environment, predictions concerning environmental law are even more hazardous because they turn in large part on the future of politics. After reviewing current political gridlock over environmental concerns, this Article considers contemporary forecasts of the fate of …

The Riai Standard Form Of Contract 2012 Edition: A Review, Tony Cunningham

Other Resources

The RIAI ‘yellow’ and ‘blue’ Forms of Contracts have been recently amended and published as the 2012 edition. The yellow form where quantities form part of the contract is identical to the 2011 edition and has been republished as the 2012 edition. The 2011 version superseded the 2002 version. This paper reviews and synopsises the provisions of the 2012 RIAI ‘yellow’ form of contract and identifies the principle changes to the 2002 edition.

The Law Of The Body, Meredith M. Render

Articles

This Article posits that a "law of the body" is overdue. In the absence of clarity about the legal status of the human body, courts have constructed a collection of circumstantially defined categories for resolving the question of human body ownership and use. This patchwork approach is awkward, unwieldy, incoherent, and, by many lights, ultimately unjust. Many able minds have been applied to critiquing the distributive consequences of a regime in which we cannot-at any point in our lives- "own" our own bodies (or its constituent parts), but other people can and do. But what has been missing from these …

Deconstructing Deem And Pass: A Constitutional Analysis Of The Enactment Of Bills By Implication, Ronald J. Krotoszynski Jr.

Articles

Since 1933, the U.S. House of Representatives has maintained a procedure, the self-executing rule, that permits a single floor vote to pass multiple independent bills. Using this procedure, the House can pass a bill and, at the same time, "deem passed" entirely separate bills via a single floor vote. Some legal scholars have argued that this procedure is constitutionally unobjectionable, provided that members of the House clearly understand the legislative effects, whether singular or plural, of a particular vote. Others, however, have argued that the device violates the Constitution because the House and Senate do not vote on the same …

Asking The First Question: Reframing Bivens After Minneci, Alexander A. Reinert, Lumen N. Mulligan

Articles

In Minneci v. Pollard, decided in January 2012, the Supreme Court refused to recognize a Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents suit against employees of a privately run federal prison because state tort law provided an alternative remedy, thereby adding a federalism twist to what had been strictly a separation-of-powers debate. In this Article, we show why this new state-law focus is misguided. We first trace the Court’s prior alternative-remedies-to-Bivens holdings, illustrating that this history is one narrowly focused on separation of powers at the federal level. Minneci’s break with this tradition raises several concerns. On a …

Climate Change Geoengineering: Philosophical Perspectives, Legal Issues, And Governance Frameworks, William C. G. Burns, Andrew L. Strauss

School of Law Faculty Publications

The international community is not taking the action necessary to avert dangerous increases in greenhouse gases. Facing a potentially bleak future, the question that confronts humanity is whether the best of bad alternatives may be to counter global warming through human-engineered climate interventions. In this book, eleven prominent authorities on climate change consider the legal, policy, and philosophical issues presented by geoengineering. The book asks: When, if ever, are decisions to embark on potentially risky climate modification projects justified? If such decisions can be justified, in a world without a central governing authority, who should authorize such projects and by …

Front Matter, Volume 38, Number 2, University Of Dayton

University of Dayton Law Review

Cover, table of contents, administrative information

Comparison Of United States Aia First-Inventor-To-File With Chinese First-To-File, Jing Wang, Weidong Liu, Lei Zhang, Lei Han, Ningling Wang, Stacy Lewis, Christina N. Gervasi, Tom Irving

University of Dayton Law Review

No abstract provided.

Discrimination Based On National Origin And Ancestry: How The Goals Of Equality Have Failed To Address The Pervasive Stereotyping Of The Appalachian Tradition, Matthew H. Walker

University of Dayton Law Review

No abstract provided.

Proximate Cause, Joint And Several Liability, And Child Pornography Possession: Determining And Calculating Restitution Awards Under 18 U.S.C.§ 2259, Dianne Weiskittle

University of Dayton Law Review

No abstract provided.

United States Of America: The Burden Of Proof In Tax Matters, Henry Ordower

All Faculty Scholarship

This United States report responds to a questionnaire that the general reporters prepared for the 2011 meeting of the European Association of Tax Law Professors in Uppsala, Sweden, June 3-5, 2011. The report describes and analyzes the U.S. law on burden of proof and burden of production in tax matters in the context of tax law procedure, including the settlement function of appeals and information reporting, uncertain tax positions (Form UTP) and foreign accounts of U.S. taxpayers. This report also addresses the interplay of burden of proof and the anti-abuse provisions, including the “economic substance” clarification in section 7701(o) and …

The Impact Of Gender On Negotiation Performance, Charles B. Craver

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Individuals occasionally assume that women cannot negotiate as effectively as men, and when persons in positions of authority have such thoughts, it may induce them to discriminate against women when making employment decisions. In this article we explore the way in which men and women interact with others and the possible impact of behaviorial differences on negotiation performance. I describe how my Legal Negotiation course is taught, and compare the results achieved by men and women on the negotiation exercises assigned in my course. Over the past sixteen years, I have not had a single year in which there has …

Deferred Prosecutions And Corporate Governance: An Integrated Approach To Investigation And Reform, Lawrence A. Cunningham

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

When evaluating how to proceed against a corporate investigative target, law enforcement authorities often ignore the target’s governance arrangements, while subsequently negotiating or imposing governance requirements, especially in deferred prosecution agreements. Ignoring governance structures and processes amid investigation can be hazardous and implementing improvised reforms afterwards may have severe unintended consequences—particularly when prescribing standardized governance devices. Drawing, in part, on new lessons from three prominent cases—Arthur Andersen, AIG and Bristol-Myers Squibb—this Article criticizes prevailing discord and urges prosecutors to contemplate corporate governance at the outset and to articulate rationales for prescribed changes. Integrating the role of corporate governance into prosecutions …

General Law In Federal Court, Bradford R. Clark, Anthony J. Bellia Jr.

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Conventional wisdom maintains that the Supreme Court banished general law from federal courts in 1938 in Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins when the Court overruled Swift v. Tyson. The narrative asserts that Swift viewed the common law as a “brooding omnipresence,” and authorized federal courts to disregard state common law in favor of general common law of their own choosing. The narrative continues that Erie constrained such judicial lawmaking by banishing general law from federal courts. Contrary to this account, Swift and Erie represent compatible conceptions of federal judicial power when each decision is understood in historical context. At the …

Competition Agencies With Complex Policy Portfolios: Divide Or Conquer?, William E. Kovacic, David A. Hyman

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Antitrust law has been adopted by 120 jurisdictions worldwide. In more than half of these jurisdictions, the agency charged with enforcing antitrust law also has other responsibilities. The assignment of multiple regulatory tasks can affect the performance of a competition agency in complex and subtle ways. We present a framework for analyzing the consequences of creating public bodies with complex policy portfolios. Using examples from across the administrative state, we analyze the forces that shape the content of an agency’s policy duties, and how the portfolio of assigned duties affects the way an agency approaches its assigned tasks, and its …

The Expulsion Of Aliens And Other Topics: The Sixty-Fourth Session Of The International Law Commission, Sean D. Murphy

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This essay analyzes the work of the International Law Commission during its sixty-fourth session in Geneva from May 7 to June 1, and from July 2 to August 3, 2012. The session marked the first year of a new quinquennium (2012-2016), with the Commission having completed its work during the prior quinquennium on four major topics: transboundary aquifers; reservations to treaties; responsibility of international organizations; and effects of armed conflict on treaties. The central topic under discussion during the sixty-fourth session concerned the expulsion of aliens, which led to the adoption on first reading of thirty-two articles, together with commentaries, …