Common Law Commons^™

Privacy-As-Property: A New Fundamental Approach To The Right To Privacy And The Impact This Will Have On The Law And Corporations, Sevion Dacosta

CMC Senior Theses

The most popular conception of the right to privacy stems from Warren and Brandeis’s description of privacy as “the right to be left alone.” This theory ultimately points to a more fundamental approach to the right to privacy rooted in property rights. This fundamental approach - which I call privacy-as-property - is what I establish in this paper. I argue that the Lockean concept of property that “every man has a property in his own person” provides the foundation for the right to privacy. Privacy-as-property begins with the fundamental right to control oneself. Because of this intrinsic right, your property …

Deodand, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Law is a funny thing. Nobody really knows what it is. And there’s so much of it! If you started reading the United States Code out loud today, you’d be hoarse before you got to Title 17. Even still, you’d barely be getting started. The Library of Babel has nothing on the mountain of laws we’ve already got or the avalanche we keep creating. No one could possibly read them all, let alone remember what they say. What a conundrum!

And yet, as a practical matter, we still seem to have a pretty good idea of what the law expects …

Assertion And Hearsay, Richard Lloret

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This article explores the characteristics and functions of assertion and considers how the term influences the definition of hearsay under Federal Rule of Evidence 801. Rule 801(a) defines hearsay by limiting it to words and conduct intended as an assertion, but the rule does not define the term assertion. Courts and legal scholars have focused relatively little attention on the nature and definition of assertion. That is unfortunate, because assertion is a robust concept that has been the subject of intense philosophic study over recent decades. Assertion is not a mere cypher standing in for whatever speech or conduct one …

The Common Law And Critical Theory, Charles L. Barzun

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

No, The Firing Squad Is Not Better Than Lethal Injection: A Response To Stephanie Moran’S A Modest Proposal, Michael Conklin

Seattle University Law Review

In the article A Modest Proposal: The Federal Government Should Use Firing Squads to Execute Federal Death Row Inmates, Stephanie Moran argues that the firing squad is the only execution method that meets the requirements of the Eighth Amendment. In order to make her case, Moran unjustifiably overstates the negative aspects of lethal injection while understating the negative aspects of firing squads. The entire piece is predicated upon assumptions that are not only unsupported by the evidence but often directly refuted by the evidence. This Essay critically analyzes Moran’s claims regarding the alleged advantages of the firing squad over …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Choice Of Law And The Preponderantly Multistate Rule: The Example Of Successor Corporation Products Liability, Diana Sclar

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Most state rules of substantive law, whether legislative or judicial, ordinarily adjust rights and obligations among local parties with respect to local events. Conventional choice of law methodologies for adjudicating disputes with multistate connections all start from an explicit or implicit assumption of a choice between such locally oriented substantive rules. This article reveals, for the first time, that some state rules of substantive law ordinarily adjust rights and obligations with respect to parties and events connected to more than one state and only occasionally apply to wholly local matters. For these rules I use the term “nominally domestic rules …

Free Speech In The Modern Age, [email protected]

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Tran V. Minnesota Life Insurance Co., Thomas Gawel

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Advisory Opinions And The Problem Of Legal Authority, Christian R. Burset

Journal Articles

The prohibition against advisory opinions is fundamental to our understanding of federal judicial power, but we’ve misunderstood its origins. Discussions of the doctrine begin not with a constitutional text or even a court case, but a letter in which the Jay Court rejected President Washington’s request for legal advice. Courts and scholars have offered a variety of explanations for the Jay Court’s behavior. But they all depict the earliest Justices as responding to uniquely American concerns about advisory opinions.

This Article offers a different explanation. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, it shows that judges throughout the anglophone world—not only …

Upgrading Unconscionability: A Common Law Ally For A Digital World, Babette E. Boliek

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Ordinary Authors Of The Bureau Of New Plays: Copyright And Reallocating Authority In The American Theatre (1936-1949), Brent Salter

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

This Article examines the brief history of the Bureau of New Plays, a nonprofit enterprise funded in 1936 by seven major Hollywood film studios and administered by the Theatre Guild's Theresa Helburn, to identify and develop talented young American playwrights. A study of the Bureau of New Plays provides a window into the authority that playwrights, and particularly younger writers, exercised over the work they created. In one respect, the establishment of the Bureau of New Plays complemented American copyright's general trajectory toward the expansion of the rights of the individual author, and in the context of the theatre the …

Inducing Acts In Rabbinic Law, Amy Birkan

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Shifting Contour Of Data Sharing In Financial Market And Regulatory Responses: The Uk And Australian Models, Han-Wei Liu

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Starting from Directive 2015/2366 on Payment Services in the Internal Market — known as PSD II in the European Union (EU) — countries across the world have or are contemplating a new framework to govern data sharing among different players in the financial market. “Open Banking,” as this trend is called, requires or encourages — depending on the regulatory models adopted in different jurisdictions — banks to share consumer-permissioned banking data with third parties securely, in a form that facilitates its use. The Open Banking initiatives have diffused from the EU, and the UK, to elsewhere. The current Open Banking …

Arthur Linton Corbin, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This chapter on Arthur Linton Corbin will appear in the forthcoming collection, Scholars of Contract Law. The chapter provides a brief summary of Corbin’s life, then discusses five topics: Corbin’s Socratic approach to the classroom and his introduction of the caselaw method at Yale; Corbin’s analytic approach, which was inspired by Hohfeld and is illustrated by Corbin’s definitions of “contract” and “consideration”; Corbin’s evolutionary theory of the common law, his understanding of the relationship between law and social mores, and his insistence that legal rules always be treated as mere “working rules”; Corbin’s occasional appeal, despite his general aversion …

Restatements Of Statutory Law: The Curious Case Of The Restatement Of Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Peter S. Menell

Faculty Scholarship

For nearly a century, the American Law Institute’s (ALI) Restatements of the Law have played an important role in the American legal system. And in all of this time, they refrained from restating areas of law dominated by a uniform statute despite the proliferation and growing importance of such statutes, especially at the federal level. This omission was deliberate and in recognition of the fundamentally different nature of the judicial role and of lawmaking in areas governed by detailed statutes compared to areas governed by the common law. Then in 2015, without much deliberation, the ALI embarked on the task …

Functional Statehood In Contemporary International Law, William Thomas Worster

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

The international community lacks a form of territorial-based, international legal personality distinct from statehood, and yet, non-state, territorial entities of varying degrees of autonomy or independence need to function within the international community in some form. Some of these entities cannot be recognized as states because their creation violates jus cogens norms, though others are not recognized based on an assessment that they may not fully qualify as a state or that there are political reasons to refuse recognition. However, existing states still need to engage with these territorial quasi-states through the only paradigm the international community has—statehood. For example, …

Directors’ Duty Of Care In Times Of Financial Distress Following The Global Epidemic Crisis, Leon Yehuda Anidjar

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

The global COVID-19 pandemic is causing the large-scale end of life and severe human suffering globally. This massive public health crisis created a significant economic crisis and is reflected in a recession of global production and the collapse of confidence in the functions of markets. Corporations and boards of directors around the world are required to design specific strategies to tackle the negative consequences of the crisis. This is especially true for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that suffered tremendous economic loss, and their continued existence as ongoing concern is under considerable risk. Given these uncertain financial times, this Article …

A History Of Consumer Class Actions In State Courts, Anne Fleming

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

Most historians date the “modern” class action to the 1966 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Yet, the class action or “representative suit” has a longer, unexplored history in the state courts. In the late 1930s and 1940s, a group of scrappy, first-generation lawyers tried to build their businesses by aggregating the small-sum claims of many consumers. The defendants in these cases were, for example, lenders who failed to comply with the technicalities of state disclosure mandates, and utility companies that charged consumers extra fees. Each consumer’s claim was small, but, as a group, the claims could yield …

An Analysis Of The Competing Views On The Interpretation Of The U.S. Constitution, Joseph Longo

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis will examine the competing interpretations of the United States Constitution and the different effects these interpretations would have on the American government and legal systems. By examining legal precedents and different philosophical views, the varying interpretations will be examined and put through real-world scenarios. The founding of America was over 200 years ago, but philosophical views throughout history shall be used in the understanding of the different interpretations and real-world consequences. The thesis will not claim that one interpretation is proper and the perfect one for the United States, rather it will challenge each view in an attempt …