Law Commons^™

Book Review: Casting Off The Canon: Family Law Reimagined, Laurie S. Kohn

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Jill Hasday's book, Family Law Reimagined, offers a clear-eyed vision of what family law is, what it is not, and where it might be headed. Hasday considers family law's canon-the set of principles by which we have come to characterize family law-and then debunks the canon by methodically setting forth each notion and illustrating its inaccuracies or limitations. In doing so, Hasday urges the reader to clear the noise of the canon and to see the law in all its messy inconsistencies and shortcomings.

Applying Patent-Eligible Subject Matter Restrictions, Jonas Anderson

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The US Supreme Court’s difficulty in promulgating a standard for patent-eligibility has not gone unnoticed in the academy. Hundreds of academic conferences, including this one, have been devoted to the topic. The goal of this Article is not to solve the seemingly intractable problem of patent-eligibility doctrine. The goal of this Article is rather more modest. Instead of normatively assessing patent-eligible subject matter doctrine, this Article seeks to identify which foundational theories of patent-eligible subject matter can most readily be applied by courts and the US Patent and Trademark Office via Section 101. In doing so, this Article categorizes the …

A Description Analysis Of Disciplinary Cases Of Law Enforcement Officers In The State Of Florida Over A Ten-Year Period, Brian V. Frank

Graduate Student Dissertations, Theses, Capstones, and Portfolios

A distrust of government is as old as the country itself. Police officers hold a great deal of power, as they have the ability to take the one thing the American people hold sacred: freedom. Ethical violations by police officers enrage the public and cause great concern for law enforcement administrators. Past research has focused on the individual aspects within law enforcement along with criminological and sociological theories. The most recent research in law enforcement ethics shows fragmentation and a lack of standardization within the areas of screening, training, and managing for integrity. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, …

Understanding State Constitutions: Locke And Key, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Steve Calabresi and Sofia Vickery have done a great service by uncovering the pre-Fourteenth Amendment case law in state courts interpreting and applying state constitutional provisions which contain "Lockean" language guaranteeing rights to life, liberty, property, safety, happiness, or some combination of those rights.' These cases are manifestly one of the keys to understanding the legal world in which the Fourteenth Amendment was crafted and ratified. It is instructive and fascinating to see the development and application of these Lockean provisions, whose influence 2 seems to have spread beyond this country. It is a pleasure and honor to be asked …

The Substance Of Self-Government, James E. Fleming

Faculty Scholarship

In Democratic Rights: The Substance of Self-Government, Corey Brettschneider develops an attractive and powerful conception of self-government - the value theory of democracy - that encompasses both substantive rights like privacy and procedural rights. Although he argues, following Habermas and Rawls, that substantive rights and procedural rights are "co-original," the structure of his theory may lead him to reduce the former into the latter and not fully to account for personal self-government in his conception of democratic self-government. The wages of his democratic justifications for substantive rights may be a surprising anxiety or unwarranted tension concerning judicial review protecting such …

Surveillance As Loss Of Obscurity, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger

Faculty Scholarship

Everyone seems concerned about government surveillance, yet we have a hard time agreeing when and why it is a problem and what we should do about it. When is surveillance in public unjustified? Does metadata raise privacy concerns? Should encrypted devices have a backdoor for law enforcement officials? Despite increased attention, surveillance jurisprudence and theory still struggle for coherence. A common thread for modern surveillance problems has been difficult to find.

In this article we argue that the concept of ‘obscurity,’ which deals with the transaction costs involved in finding or understanding information, is the key to understanding and uniting …

Marbury Moments, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

Every court has its Marbury moment. To support this argument, this Article reviews seminal cases from three types of courts: U.S. federal, regional, and international. This Article concludes that Marbury moments provide novel insights about both Marbury v. Madison itself and the nature of domestic and international courts.

Medical Evidence And Expertise In Abortion Jurisprudence, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

Medical literature on abortion largely supports pro-choice legal claims. In turn, progressive lawyers often call for “evidence-based approaches” to lawmaking on the assumption that it will produce pro-choice legal and regulatory outcomes. This article argues that the evidence-based approach is no longer a reliable or stable strategy for pro-choice lawyering given transformations in judicial treatment of medical knowledge and a shifting evidentiary base.

Drawing on landmark cases from 1973 to 2012, this article demonstrates how the Supreme Court and lower courts selectively utilize medical expertise and evidence to liberalize or constrain abortion access. With Roe v. Wade, 4 the Supreme …

Alice Corp. V. Cls Bank Int'l, Jordana Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

Congress has the power "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."' Patent law subject matter eligibility under 35 U.S.C. section 101 creates a balance between incentivizing inventors to publicly disclose their knowledge and protecting the public from monopolies on ideas. Allowing inventors to monopolize the basic tools of scientific and technological work might "tend to impede innovation more than it would tend to promote it."² "Laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas" constitute unpatentable subject matter under section 101.³ The section 101 inquiry serves as a threshold test to determine if the subject matter of …

The Anti-Innovators: How Special Interests Undermine Entrepreneurship, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

For much of the last century, the United States led the world in technological innovation-a position it owed in part to well-designed procurement programs at the Defense Department and NASA. During the 1940s, for example, the Pentagon funded the construction of the first general-purpose computer, designed initially to calculate artillery-firing tables for the U.S. Army. Two decades later, it developed the data communications network known as the ARPANET, a precursor to the Internet. Yet not since the 1980s have government contracts helped generate any major new technologies, despite large increases in funding for defense-related R & D. One major culprit …

The Legitimacy Of Administrative Law, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

"How does an alien imposition attain legitimacy?" asks Nicholas Parrillo in Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780-1940.' Parrillo and three other historians address this question in a group of outstanding new books on the rise of American administrative law. Each book reflects the various ways in which American administrative law has been an alien imposition: filling a "hole" in the text of the Constitution that did not address administrative powers;2 changing the traditional separation of powers of legislative rule-making and judicial adjudication with individualized due process; imposing centralized bureaucracy over local self-rule; imposing the …

Caperton's Next Generation: Beyond The Bank, Jed Handelsman Shugerman, Debra Lyn Bassett, Gregory S. Parks, Dmitry Bam, Rex R. Perschbacher

Faculty Scholarship

Part of NYU Journal of Legislation & Public Policy Fall 2014 symposium: "Courts, Campaigns, and Corruption: Judicial Recusal Five Years after Caperton". The panels can be watched here.

Dreptul Arbitral, Explicat, William W. Park

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Expanding The Array Of Accountable Actors: Human Rights And Corporate Social Responsibility, Erika George

Faculty Scholarship

Additional actors are being asked to assume responsibility for protecting human rights and preventing violations. I argue that it is appropriate and important to expand the human rights paradigm into other arenas, including corporate social responsibility. Expanding the array of actors understood to have a responsibility to respect human rights could serve to aid an under-resourced and overburdened human rights system to advance the rights protections that it was created to promote. While human rights activists have traditionally turned to intergovernmental institutions and state governments to protect rights and to remedy violations, the recent trend is to expand our understanding …

Incorporating Rights: Making The Most Of The Meantime, Erika George

Faculty Scholarship

In June 2014 the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted a resolution establishing an open‐ended intergovernmental working group to commence deliberations and draft an international legally binding instrument on transnational corporations. The Council also agreed to extend the mandate of the U.N. Working Group on Business and Human Rights, the entity created to promote the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The Guiding Principles are a non‐legally binding set of standards created consistent with an earlier Council mandate to “operationalize” the “Protect, Respect and Remedy Framework.”

The Council’s action advancing treaty talks could be seen as calling into question …

Comments On The Oecd's "Due Diligence Guidance For Meaningful Stakeholder Engagement In The Extractives Sector", Lisa J. Laplante, Erika George

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Lisa Laplante of New England Law | Boston’s Center for International Law and Policy (CILP) and Professor Erika George of the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law’s Center for Global Justice respectfully submitted this collaborative commentary in response to the OECD’s Draft Due Diligence Guidance for Meaningful Stakeholder Engagement in the Extractives Sector which build off of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises which offer comprehensive recommendations to promote responsible business conduct. The 2011 revisions to the OECD MNE Guidelines introduced an important new provision on stakeholder engagement. Pursuant to the provision, multinational enterprises should: “engage with …

King, Chevron, And The Age Of Textualism, Abigail Moncrieff

Faculty Scholarship

In the King v. Burwell oral arguments, Chief Justice John Roberts—usually one of the more active members of the Court—asked only one substantive question, addressed to the Solicitor General: “If you’re right about Chevron [deference applying to this case], that would indicate that a subsequent administration could change [your] interpretation?” As it turns out, that question was crucial to Roberts’s thinking and to the 6-3 opinion he authored, but almost all commentators either undervalued or misunderstood the question’s import (myself included). The result of Roberts’s actual thinking was an unfortunate outcome for Chevron—and potentially for the rule of law—despite …

Agency And Partnership Law [2014], Pearlie M. C. Koh, Stephen Noel Henry Bull

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

China's Ip Protection Minefield: Separating Fact From Fiction, David Llewelyn, Peter J. Williamson

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

China is the key emerging market for international technology companies. Smart, well-informed IP and business strategies are required if companies are to make the most of what the country has to offer.

Singapore Law Ready To Influence The Development Of Law Elsewhere, Yihan Goh, Paul Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Change is here. If this was not evident from the speech of Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon at his welcome ceremony three years ago, it is now. In three short years, Singapore is leading Asia - possibly the world - in the provision of not only legal services but also intellectual capital and resources. The speed of these developments should not be surprising. As Attorney-General V.K. Rajah observed at the Opening of the Legal Year this month, Singapore's law and legal system has come a long way in a short time. The story of the Singapore legal system thus far can …

The Future Of International Mediated Settlement Agreements: Of Conventions, Challenges And Choices, Eunice Chua

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In 2002, UNCITRAL developed the Model Law on International Commercial Conciliation.1 Although at that stage there was a strong effort to develop a uniform enforcement mechanism, the ultimate conclusion was that because of the great variance in the technicalities of domestic procedural laws, harmonisation by way of uniform legislation was not feasible (UNCITRAL 2004: 55). Eventually, Article 15 merely provided that: If the parties reach and sign an agreement settling a dispute, that settlement agreement is binding and enforceable … [the enacting State inserts a description of the method of enforcing settlements agreements or refers to provisions governing such enforcement].

Landlord’S Liability For Tenant’S Nuisance: Uksc Clarifies The Law In Lawrence V Fen Tigers (No. 2), Kee Yang Low

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Where an occupier of premises creates or causes a nuisance and affects his neighbour’s enjoyment of land, the neighbour may sue him under the tort of nuisance. Where the occupier is a tenant, the neighbour may also have recourse to the landlord. This area of law, however, has not been the subject of rigorous judicial analysis and appears to be still lacking in clarity, precision and sophistication. The position prior to the UKSC decision in Lawrence and another v Fen Tigers Ltd and others (No. 2),1 (“Lawrence”) as discerned by the authors of Markesinis & Deakin’s Tort Law2 is that, …

Interview With The Honourable Justice Chang-Fa Lo (Justice, Constitutional Court, Taiwan; National University College Of Law) And Dr Winnie Jo-Mei Ma, (Honorary Associate Professor, Bond University Faculty Of Law, Australia) On The Draft Convention On Cross-Border Enforcement Of International Mediated Settlement Agreements, Nadja Alexander

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

A Problem Not Yet Manifest: Gaps In Insurance Coverage Of Medical Interventions After Genetic Testing, Sarah Malanga, Ryan Sprissler, Christopher Robertson, Keith Joiner

Faculty Scholarship

In the past decade, the field of genomics has rapidly changed and expanded.1 With these advancements also come new applications of genomics and genetics to clinical medicine. The information gathered from genetic testing and genome sequencing can reveal a great deal about not only an individual's current health, but his/her future health as well.2 This rapid expansion of scientific and medical capacity is accompanied by rapid changes for law and policy making thoughtful regulation essential. The human genome includes many variations, most of which have no known significance. However, some variants can be the cause of important medical conditions, and …

Scaling And Splitting, New Approaches To Health Insurance, Christopher Robertson, Keith A. Joiner

Faculty Scholarship

In the United States, cost-sharing in health insurance coverage has become the primary mechanism for reducing insurance expenditures and, by extension, maintaining affordable coverage. Cost-sharing involves patients making various out-of-pocket (OOP) payments for their own health care aside from whatever the insurer pays. As a patient’s spending on health care grows month by month in any given year of coverage, she moves through three different “zones” of insurance, from no insurance, to partial insurance, and finally to full insurance.

Enforcing Takings Clauses In China, Jie Cheng

All Faculty Publications

Property rights are considered fundamental in constitutional jurisprudence and essential for economic development. However, China’s economic growth over the past 30 years has posed a special paradox to many theorists: for some, it is a mysterious phenomenon that China could continue rapid growth for a few decades without proper contract law until 1999 and without constitutional private property rights until after 2004. For others, the lack of property rights explains the social unrests arising from land-taking and the potential risk of non-sustainability of further development. This does not mean that there is no property protection in China; both the Constitution …

Taxation Of State Owned Enterprises: A Review Of Empirical Evidence From China, Wei Cui

All Faculty Publications

This chapter reviews empirical evidence from China that bears on the general theory of the income taxation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Prior theoretical literature has offered three conflicting views of SOE taxation. The first is that SOE taxation is superfluous, because the government shareholder can simply demand profit distributions. The second is that SOE taxation is necessary to put state-owned and private firms on an equal competitive footing. The third view holds that the significance of SOE taxation lies in the fact that SOE managers, like managers of private firms, may be dividend averse; in the absence of other effective …

Reactive To Proactive: Title Ix's Unrealized Capacity To Prevent Campus Sexual Assault, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the efforts to use Title IX to address the problem of sexual assaults on college campuses. It seeks to explain an odd phenomenon: universities seem to put more resources into addressing assaults that have already occurred than they do into preventing sexual assaults from occurring. To better understand how universities implicitly frame their options for addressing sexual assault, I’m going to posit that there are two particularly prevalent analytic approaches to sexual assault prevention. I’m going to call one the law enforcement approach and the other the public health approach. I’m going to link the law enforcement …

Dissolving Condominium, Private Takings, And The Nature Of Property, Douglas C. Harris, Nicole Gilewicz

All Faculty Publications

Condominium enables the subdivision of buildings into multiple private titles. It does so by combining individual titles with an undivided share of common property, a right to participate in governing the property, and an obligation to contribute to its maintenance. The dissolution of condominium breaks apart this package of rights and responsibilities, and results in the termination of the individual titles. Some common law jurisdictions require the unanimous consent of title holders to dissolve condominium, others permit it with a supermajority vote. All jurisdictions allow for non-consensual dissolution, and thus the termination of titles without consent, with a court order. …

Sixty Years Since The Kol Ha'am Decision: What More Is There To Say, Pnina Lahav

Faculty Scholarship

Is there anything more to say about Kol Ha'am? This is essentially a philosophical question. Is it possible to exhaust the variety of possible interpretations of a historical event, of a judicial opinion? Most researchers would agree that history, the history of the law included, cannot be exhausted. This is not merely a question of the availabiltiy of new materials, but of the writer's point of view. My point of departure is that there has to be something more to say, if only because we have before us a text that was created in a historical context. In discussing Kol …