Law Commons^™

Personalizing Prices To Redistribute Wealth In Antitrust And Public Utility Rate Regulation, Ramsi A. Woodcock

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The information age is enabling firms with even small amounts of market power to personalize the prices they charge to each consumer in the market. Left to their own devices, firms will use this new power to increase profits by charging prices personalized to the maximum that each consumer is willing to pay. But government can also use the new power to personalize prices to equalize wealth—by insisting that firms personalize high prices to the rich and low prices to the poor—and most of the legal rules needed to do so are already in place. Both the antitrust laws and …

How To Sell Nfts Without Really Trying, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Something is happening and we don’t know what it is. Suddenly last summer, the internet went nuts for “non-fungible tokens” or “NFTs.” In a matter of months, NFT sales swelled from a sleepy slough of the blockchain to a thundering cataract that shows no sign of slaking. Special NFTs sell for millions of dollars, and some are even securitized. It’s a big business that’s only getting bigger.

But no one seems to know why. Objectively, NFTs are useless, meaningless, and worthless. So why are people willing to pay millions of dollars for them, even begging for the opportunity? Maybe it …

Toxic Public Goods, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Everybody loves public goods. After all, they are a perpetual utility machine. Obviously, we want as many of them as possible. But what if the consumption of a public good actually decreases net social welfare? I refer to this kind of public good as a "toxic public good." In this essay, I discuss three kinds of potential toxic public goods: trolling, pornography, and ideology, and I reflect on how we might make the production of toxic public goods more efficient.

The Costs Of The Punishment Clause, Cortney E. Lollar

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Criminal punishment pursuant to a facially valid conviction in a court of law is an uncontested exception to the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition on slavery and involuntary servitude. After all, the Constitutional text reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” And yet, beginning almost immediately after the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, states regularly employed criminal statutes to limit the movement and behaviors of those previously enslaved and subject them to slavery-type labor camps in conditions that closely mirrored slavery. Because neither the …

State Constitutions And Youth Voting Rights, Joshua A. Douglas

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Young voters suffer the lowest turnout rates in American elections. One study shows that younger voters face numerous barriers when attempting to cast a ballot, such as work responsibilities, not receiving an absentee ballot in time, inability to find or access their polling place, voter ID problems, or other issues. Many state election laws are a labyrinth of rules and regulations that make it more difficult to vote, especially for younger people. As one report notes, “many young voters are new voters who need to register for the first time and who may be unfamiliar with the process. Young people …

A New Methodology For The Analysis Of Visuals In Legal Works, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The goal of this Article is to introduce a comprehensive methodology for the analysis of visuals used for communication in legal works, by which I mean transactional and litigation documents, legal instruments, primary and secondary sources of law, and legal informational materials. To date, the scholarship on visuals in legal communications has been heavily descriptive, with some forays into the ethical and practical considerations of the use of “visualized” legal works. No one has yet devised a comprehensive analytical methodology that draws upon the disciplines of visual literacy, visual cultural studies, visual rhetoric, and mise en scène analysis to evaluate …

The Ties That Bind: The Relationship Between Law Firm Growth And Law Firm Survival, Alan J. Kluegel

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

For the better part of the twentieth century, law firms hired, trained, and grew through a stable and predictable pattern: hire new law school graduates, monitor and evaluate their work, and pick promising attorneys from among their ranks and elevate them to partner. Rinse, lather, repeat. A combination of professional norms and organizational inertia made this approach the dominant method of growth among large corporate law firms until changes in legal market broke down these customary practices, ushering in a new era of lawyer mobility. Now, it has become commonplace for lawyers to leave for greener pastures as more law …

The Multi-Level Marketing Pandemic, Christopher G. Bradley, Hannah E. Oates

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Among the societal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a sharp rise in the activities of multi-level marketing companies (MLMs). MLMs are business enterprises in which participants seek not only to sell products to friends, family, and social media contacts, but also to recruit them as MLM participants, with the promise of "building their own business from home."

False promises often pervade MLM sales pitches. Evidence shows that few participants see even a dollar of profit from their MLM work; the vast majority of recruits quickly abandon their MLM dreams and lose their investments. Yet the pitch has become …

Are Cryptopunks Copyrightable?, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Larva Labs’s CryptoPunks NFTs are iconic. Created in 2017, they were among the first NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. Four years later, they are among the most valuable, selling for anywhere from $200,000 to millions of dollars.

The CryptoPunks collection consists of 10,000 NFTs, each of which is associated with a unique CryptoPunks image. Everyone knows who owns each CryptoPunks NFT. The Ethereum blockchain provides indelible proof. But people disagree about who owns - and who should own - the copyright in the CryptoPunks images. Most CryptoPunks NFT owners believe they should own the copyright in the image associated with …

After Copyright: Pwning Nfts In A Clout Economy, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Copyright is a means to an end, not an end in itself. We created copyright because we wanted to encourage the creation and distribution of works of authorship, not because we wanted to enable copyright owners to control the use of the works they own. We stuck with copyright because it was the best tool we had, despite its flaws. Was copyright ever efficient? No. But marginal improvements matter.

Technology has changed the copyright calculus. Distribution of works of authorship gradually got cheaper and cheaper. And then the Internet made it free. But creation remained costly, even though technology helped …

Cross-Cultural Communication In A Crisis: The Universality Of Visual Narrative In The Covid-19 Pandemic, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A primary goal of twenty-first century legal works is to communicate the law effectively to diverse audiences. Many of the most needful and most vulnerable audiences for legal information have members who lack basic literacy skills and suffer linguistic and cultural confusion from verbal textual media—namely, the printed word. Yet for centuries, legal rules and government restrictions have been communicated nearly exclusively through the printed word. Recent scholarship in visual legal rhetoric, visual literacy studies, and visual cultural studies is informed by cognitive psychology and neuroscience that all points to a solution: visual communication of the law. Visual communication is …