Law Commons^™

Digital Technology And Analog Law: Cellular Location Data, The Third-Party Doctrine, And The Law's Need To Evolve, Justin Hill

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Why Flexibility Matters: Inequality And Contract Pluralism, Jeremiah A. Ho

Faculty Publications

In the decade since the Great Recession, various contract scholars have observed that one reason the financial crisis was so “great” was due in part to contract law—or, more precisely, the failures of contract law for not curbing the risky lending practices in the American housing market. However, there is another reason why contracts made that recession so great: contracts furthered inequality. In recent years, when economic inequality has become a dominant national conversation topic, we can see development of that inequality in the Great Recession. And indeed, contract law was complicit. While contractual flexibility and innovation were available to …

The Equal Protection Component Of Legislative Generality, Evan C. Zoldan

University of Richmond Law Review

This article advances the broad project outlined above by recognizing

the equal protection component of legislative generality.

Exploring the relationship between the Equal Protection Clause

and the value of legislative generality both enhances an understanding

of the proper bounds of the Equal Protection Clause and

helps define the ultimate parameters of a value of legislative generality.

Part I of this article defines and provides paradigmatic

examples of special legislation. Part II identifies the most widely

held conceptions of equality that can be enforced through the

Equal Protection Clause and describes how special legislation offends

these conceptions. Part III describes how …

The Real Doctrine & Covenants, Chad J. Pomeroy

Faculty Articles

Developers have recently begun creating, and attaching to the property they sell to consumers, what is known as a "recovery fee." These recovery fees are "new" in that most lawyers are not familiar with them and in that they seem to operate in a novel manner and are bottomed on novel claims. In essence, they create and levy a fee on subsequent owners each time the property is transferred, which fee purports to reimburse developers for infrastructure and other development costs. Because they seem new, and because they involve transfers from relatively small and unsophisticated parties to relatively large and …

The Uneasy Case For The Retirement Of Douglas Kahn, Jeffrey H. Kahn

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

In the fall semester of 1964, a young Douglas Kahn joined the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School. During the spring semester of 2016, he will teach his final course as a full-time faculty member. For the interim fifty two years, he has been a fixture of the Michigan law school community. As a tax professor, former student, and his son, I am pleased and honored to write this introduction for an edition of the Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review honoring Professor Kahn’s tenure at the University of Michigan.

Lost In Translation: How Practical Considerations In Kirtsaeng Demand International Exhaustion In Patent Law, Dustin M. Knight

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

What Is Criminal Law About?, Guyora Binder, Robert Weisberg

Michigan Law Review

In “The Changing Market for Criminal Casebooks,” Jens David Ohlin offers an appreciative, but nevertheless critical review of established criminal law casebooks. He then introduces his own offering by describing “a vision for a new casebook” that will better serve the needs and wants of contemporary students. Ohlin begins with the arresting claim that criminal law professors are passionate about their subject because they are fascinated by human depravity. Then, throughout his essay, he stresses efficient, consumer-focused delivery of doctrinal instruction as the defining task of a successful casebook. Moreover, he argues, casebooks should devote less attention to academic theories …

The Problem Of Appropriations Riders: The Bipartisan Budget Bill Of 2013 As A Case Study, Irene Scharf

Faculty Publications

This article tells the story of the enactment of the bill containing Section 2013. It also provides context for Congress's widespread practice of inserting substantive provisions into appropriations bills, and argues that this practice is inappropriate and counterproductive. Enacted in haste, at the end of a lengthy and historically contentious legislative session plagued by threats of an unfunded government, Section 203 was slipped into a bill about a wholly different topic - "keeping the government open and functioning" - without input from key legislators or stakeholders. Hence, its difficulties were foreseeable.

Part II of this piece offers background about the …

Location Savings And Segmented Factor Input Markets: In Search Of A Tax Treaty Solution, Mitchell A. Kane

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

This article analyzes the proper bounds of source-based taxation of profits generated when firms outsource factor inputs, such as labor, to achieve cost savings. The article advances arguments grounded in efficiency, treaty text, and international distribution to justify greater source-based taxation than has historically been the case. To implement such expanded taxation, the article proposes a modification to transfer-pricing rules in instances where factor inputs are acquired from affiliates and a modification to the tax treaty rules regarding permanent establishments where factor inputs are acquired from unrelated parties. Finally, the article deals with a range of complications, particularly relating to …

Constitutional Avoidance As Interpretation And As Remedy, Eric S. Fish

Michigan Law Review

In a number of recent landmark decisions, the Supreme Court has used the canon of constitutional avoidance to essentially rewrite laws. Formally, the avoidance canon is understood as a method for resolving interpretive ambiguities: if there are two equally plausible readings of a statute, and one of them raises constitutional concerns, judges are instructed to choose the other one. Yet in challenges to the Affordable Care Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Chemical Weapons Convention, and other major statutes, the Supreme Court has used this canon to adopt interpretations that are not plausible. Jurists, scholars, and legal commentators have criticized …

Slowly Returning The "Special Needs" Doctrine To Its Roots, Steven R. Probst

Steven Probst

No abstract provided.

Dualism And Doctrine, Dov Fox, Alex Stein

Indiana Law Journal

What kinds of harm among those that tortfeasors inflict are worthy of compensation? Which forms of self-incriminating evidence are privileged against government compulsion? What sorts of facts constitute a criminal defendant’s intent? Existing doctrine pins the answer to all of these questions on whether the injury, facts, or evidence at stake are “mental” or “physical.” The assumption that operations of the mind are meaningfully distinct from those of the body animates fundamental rules in our law.

A tort victim cannot recover for mental harm on its own because the law presumes that he is able to unfeel any suffering arising …

Out Of Balance: Wrong Turns In Public Employee Speech Law, Michael Toth

University of Massachusetts Law Review

Although scholars offer a variety of explanations for the modern Supreme Court’s public employee speech jurisprudence, they share a common presumption. According to the standard account, the modern era of public employee free speech law began in 1968, with the Court’s adoption of a balancing test in Pickering v. Board of Education. Contrary to this view, this Article argues that Pickering balancing is better characterized as a relic from a bygone era rather than the start of a new one. Balancing was once the Court’s standard method of judging First Amendment claims. When Pickering was decided, however, balancing was under …

Andy Warhol’S Pantry, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This Article examines Andy Warhol’s use of food and food products as a metaphor for commerce and consumption. It observes that Warhol’s use of images and marks was often inconsistent with copyright and trademark doctrine, and suggests that the fair use doctrine should in-corporate a “Warhol test.”

The Responsibility To Protect: Emerging Norm Or Failed Doctrine?, Camila Pupparo

Global Tides

This paper seeks to investigate the current shift from the non-intervention norm towards the “Responsibility to Protect,” commonly abbreviated as “RtoP,” which actually mandates intervention in cases of humanitarian intervention disasters. I will look at the May 2011 application of the R2P doctrine to the humanitarian crisis in Libya and assess whether it was a success or a failure. Many critics of the “Responsibility to Protect” norm consider it to be yet another imperial tool used by the West to pursue national interests, so this paper analyzes this argument in detail, referring to case study examples, particularly in the Middle …

Empirical Doctrine, Jessie Allen

Articles

We can observe and measure how legal decision makers use formal legal authorities, but there is no way to empirically test the determinative capacity of legal doctrine itself. Yet, discussions of empirical studies of judicial behavior sometimes conflate judges’ attention to legal rules with legal rules determining outcomes. Doctrinal determinacy is not the same thing as legal predictability. The extent to which legal outcomes are predictable in given contexts is surely testable empirically. But the idea that doctrine’s capacity to produce or limit those outcomes can be measured empirically is fundamentally misguided. The problem is that to measure doctrinal determinacy, …

Bait And Switch: Why United States V. Morrison Is Wrong About Section Five, Kermit Roosevelt Iii

All Faculty Scholarship

As the title suggests, the article examines Morrison’s creation of the rule that the Section Five power cannot be used to regulate private individuals. This is one of the most meaningful and, thus far, durable constraints that the Court has placed on federal power. It is the more surprising, then, that it turns out to be based on essentially nothing at all. The Morrison Court asserted that its rule was derived by—indeed, “controlled by”—precedent, but a closer reading of the Reconstruction-era decisions it cites shows that this is simply not the case. An independent evaluation of the rule against regulation …

The Scope Of The Economic Loss Doctrine In Tennessee, Kasey Washburn

Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy

In Lincoln General Insurance Co. v. Detroit Diesel Corp., the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that Tennessee law does not allow recovery in tort for a defective product that causes damage only to itself, regardless of the manner in which the damage occurs. The United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee brought this issue before the Tennessee Supreme Court through a certified question of law. The district court sought to establish the scope of the economic loss doctrine under Tennessee law, focusing specifically on cases where the damage to the defective product resulted from a sudden, calamitous event.

Understanding The Relationship Between The Doctrine Of Patent Exhaustion And Self-Replicating Technologies After Bowman V. Monsanto Co., Amy S. Berg

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Anti-Anti-Evasion In Constitutional Law, Brannon P. Denning, Michael B. Kent Jr.

Brannon P. Denning

In a previous paper, we identified “anti-evasion doctrines” (AEDs) that the U.S. Supreme Court develops in various areas of constitutional law to prevent the circumvention of constitutional principles the Court has sought to enforce. Typically, the Court employs an AED – crafted as an ex post standard – to bolster or backstop a previously-designed decision rule – crafted as an ex ante rule – so as to prevent government officials from complying with the form of the prior rule while evading the constitutional substance the rule was designed to implement. Although AEDs present benefits and tradeoffs in constitutional doctrine, their …

The Purpose Of The Fourth Amendment And Crafting Rules To Implement That Purpose, Thomas K. Clancy

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Copyright/Patent Boundary, Viva R. Moffat

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Vast Image Out Of Spiritus Mundi: The Existential Crisis Of Law Schools (Book Review), Jeremiah A. Ho

Jeremiah A. Ho

Review of Teaching Law: Justice, Politics, and the Demands of Professionalism. By Robin L. West. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2014. Pp. 246. Cloth, $90; paper, $32.99.

Dominant Search Engines: An Essential Cultural & Political Facility, Frank Pasquale

Frank A. Pasquale

When American lawyers talk about "essential facilities," they are usually referring to antitrust doctrine that has required certain platforms to provide access on fair and nondiscriminatory terms to all comers. Some have recently characterized Google as an essential facility. Antitrust law may shape the search engine industry in positive ways. However, scholars and activists must move beyond the crabbed vocabulary of competition policy to develop a richer normative critique of search engine dominance. In this chapter, I sketch a new concept of "essential cultural and political facility," which can help policymakers recognize and address situations where a bottleneck has become …

Advancing An Adaptive Standard Of Strict Scrutiny For Content-Based Commercial Speech Regulation, Nat Stern, Mark Joseph Stern

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Life Sciences Dual Use Research Of Concern, Public Health And Safety, And The Doctrine Of Unconstitutional Conditions, Vickie J. Williams

Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

The Dialectic Of Stare Decisis Doctrine, Colin Starger

All Faculty Scholarship

In the United States Supreme Court, the concept of stare decisis operates as both metadoctrine and doctrine. On the one hand, stare decisis functions as a generally applicable presumption in favor of adherence to precedent. This presumption is metadoctrinal because it provides a generic argument against overruling that applies independently of the substantive context of any given case. On the other hand, when the Court considers overruling a particularly controversial precedent, it usually weighs the constraining force of stare decisis by invoking factors and tests announced in its own prior caselaw. In other words, the Court has precedent about when …

Myriad In View Of The Preexisting Products Doctrine: Adopting A Structural Approach, Jonathan Pollmann

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

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 …

Exile On Main Street: Competing Traditions And Due Process Dissent, Colin Starger

All Faculty Scholarship

Everybody loves great dissents. Professors teach them, students learn from them, and journalists quote them. Yet legal scholars have long puzzled over how dissents actually impact the development of doctrine. Recent work by notable empirical scholars proposes to measure the influence of dissents by reference to their subsequent citation in case law. This Article challenges the theoretical basis for this empirical approach and argues that it fails to account for the profound influence that uncited dissents have exerted in law. To overcome this gap in the empirical approach, this Article proposes an alternative method that permits analysis of contextual and …