Yearly Archives: 2015
Apr 22, 2015 Pam SamuelsonIntellectual Property Law
Michael C. Donaldson,
Refuge From The Storm: A Fair Use Safe Harbor For Non-Fiction Works, 59
J. Copyright Soc’y U.S.A. 477 (2012), available at
SSRN.
So much has been written on the fair use case law in the U.S. that it would seem nigh impossible to find something new to say about it. But new things are indeed possible. Michael Donaldson, who practices entertainment law in Los Angeles and has represented many clients in copyright disputes in the film industry, has made four significant contributions to the fair use literature in his article “Refuge From the Storm: A Fair Use Safe Harbor for Non-Fiction Works,” which was published in the Journal of the Copyright Society in 2012.
One contribution is the concept of fair use safe harbors. Copyright professionals are used to speaking of safe harbors when it comes to the statutory limits on liability of Internet service providers for the infringing acts of others. Some of us also use that term when discussing the judge-made limit on secondary liability for developers of technologies having substantial non-infringing uses. But we have shied away from the safe harbor concept in fair use cases, perhaps because the Supreme Court was unwilling to endorse presumptions of fairness for parodies in its Campbell v. Acuff-Rose decision. Donaldson’s article makes a persuasive argument that a fair use safe harbor does exist for certain uses of pre-existing materials in non-fiction works, and it opened my mind to the possibility that other fair use safe harbors might also exist. Continue reading "Fair Use Safe Harbors?"
Apr 21, 2015 Niva Elkin-KorenTechnology Law
One of the greatest challenges faced by cyber scholars and policymakers is how to predict the undesired social consequences of technological developments and to design the best policies to address them. Digital technology makes this challenge even harder: change is swift and getting swifter, and is often formulated in technical terms.
This is where legal scholarship and policymaking could benefit from a novel. The Circle by Dave Eggers is a dystopian novel about the digital era. Many legal scholars have written over the past decade on the surveillance society, big data, contextual privacy, the right to privacy, the right to be forgotten, transparency and accountability. However, the analysis of these issues in the legal literature remains abstract. The Circle offers a mirror image of our daily digital experiences, helping us to imagine what it would be like to live in a society of total transparency, and to experience the gradual loss of autonomy. The Circle tells a story about the human condition in the info era, the ideology of the digital culture, and the political structure which serves it. It could help us see in real time the social implications of digital technology, identify the forces that come into play, and design more concrete strategies to address them. Continue reading "An Intimate Look at the Rise of Data Totalitarianism"
Apr 20, 2015 Kerry AbramsFamily Law
Why does our current family law system so frequently fail children, and how can we fix it? These are the central questions asked by many family law scholars. Often, the proposed solution is a substantive one. Many scholars, for instance, have advocated altering the “best interests” standard, changing the rules for establishing parentage, or expanding marriage to include same-sex couples so that their children can enjoy greater stability.
In her book, Failure to Flourish: How Law Undermines Family Relationships, Professor Clare Huntington offers a different perspective. For Huntington, family law’s failure is less a matter of substance and more a matter of structure. The law is structured in ways that actively undermine family flourishing. Some of these structural features have obvious impacts on family law. Marriage laws that exclude LGBT couples, for example, are structural impediments to long-term stability for these couples and their children. But many of the structures Huntington identifies are ones that we may not realize undergird family law. Access to public transportation, the existence of sidewalks, playgrounds, and community spaces, and zoning laws that permit multi-generational dwellings, for example, all influence the daily lives of families, encouraging or discouraging families to become embedded in their communities and to be able to balance work, school, and leisure, all of which are factors that lead to long-term stability and flourishing. Many of these structures are designed without consideration for their effect on families. Continue reading "Restructuring Family Law"
Apr 17, 2015 Ann TweedyEquality
In The Fourth Trimester, Saru Matambanadzo braids personal narratives of her own pregnancy and birthing experience with legal analysis and with concepts and research from nursing and midwifery to craft a rich and courageous critique of current employment law’s application to pregnant women and new mothers. Matambanadzo’s thesis is that the law erroneously treats pregnancy as a discrete nine-month timeframe when in fact the physical and emotional effects of pregnancy linger, extending “into the first three months after delivery, and sometimes beyond.” (P. 124). She also addresses the shortcomings of laws that protect against pregnancy discrimination more generally. The Fourth Trimester concretely illuminates the ways in which the limitations of the current framework of federal law disadvantage workers who become pregnant and give birth by, for example, failing to adequately support breastfeeding and to provide the time needed after birth for the mother-infant dyad to become less interdependent.
Matambanadzo’s compelling arguments add a new dimension to legal scholarship on pregnancy in that they challenge not only the treatment of pregnant workers but also the firmly ingrained notion of pregnancy itself. Indeed the dichotomy between pregnant and not pregnant is paradigmatic in American culture—so much so that it exemplifies other black and white dichotomies, as illustrated by the expression that one cannot be “almost pregnant.” Matambanadzo successfully convinces the reader to rethink the notion of pregnancy itself. Continue reading "Moving Beyond the Pregnant/Non-Pregnant Dichotomy in Pregnancy Discrimination Law Based on the Lived Experiences of New Mothers"
Apr 15, 2015 Christopher SloboginCriminal Law
One of the last articles written by the late Andrew Taslitz (known as Taz to his friends) was entitled The Criminal Republic: Democratic Breakdown as a Cause of Mass Incarceration. The piece is quintessentially Tazian. It brings together Taz’s concern for racial minorities and criminal defendants, his belief in the reformist potency of democracy, and his fascination with social scientific findings (including research on “happiness”!), in a provocative effort to tackle the single biggest problem in our criminal justice system today: mass incarceration. His prescriptions in the article—in particular his assertion that “populist, deliberative democracy” can be a way of softening the harshness of American criminal justice—are worth taking seriously.
As Taz described it, populist, deliberative democracy (or PDD) is not regular old democracy. Rather, in the criminal justice context it involves all “social groups,” including convicted offenders, in deliberations that take place in multiple venues, with the expectation that “compromise rather than domination” will occur. He contrasts this type of democracy with “raw populism” that is not deliberative and that tends to be based on less information about competing interests. Although Taz did not think PDD would by itself result in less reliance on incarceration, he does marshal some strong evidence that it could move the country in that direction. Continue reading "Democracy as a Cause of and a Solution for Hyper-Incarceration"
Apr 14, 2015 Sergio J. CamposCourts Law
Seth Davis,
Standing Doctrine’s State Action Problem, 91
Notre Dame L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2015),
available at SSRN.
Eugene Diamond, a pediatrician, took it upon himself to protect and uphold the constitutionality of Illinois’s Abortion Law of 1975, which, among other things, imposed criminal liability on doctors who performed certain abortions. Diamond himself was not affected by the law, as he did not perform abortions. Indeed, he wanted to prevent them.
In 1983, when the Northern District of Illinois enjoined enforcement of parts of the law as unconstitutional, the State of Illinois declined to defend the law any further, leaving only Diamond to defend the law on appeal. After losing the appeal, Diamond petitioned the Supreme Court to let him defend the constitutionality of the law, asserting his right to defend as “a doctor, a father, and a protector of the unborn.” But in Diamond v. Charles, the Supreme Court concluded that Diamond had no such right to defend, calling Diamond’s actions “simply an effort to compel the State to enact a code in accord with Diamond’s interests.”
In his excellent article, Standing Doctrine’s State Action Problem, Seth Davis addresses when a party such as Diamond can assert a state’s interest in a lawsuit under Article III of the Constitution, which limits lawsuits to “Cases” or “Controversies” between parties who meet requirements such as standing, ripeness and lack of mootness. The question of who can assert the state’s interests arose again recently in Hollingsworth v. Perry, which involved an amendment to the California Constitution, voted on by citizens of California directly through the state’s referendum system, banning same-sex marriage. As in Diamond, the proponents of the amendment sought to defend its constitutionality on appeal when the State of California declined to do so. The Supreme Court concluded that the proponents lacked standing. Relying upon principles of agency, the Court concluded that the proponents cannot stand in for the state because the state could not exercise control over the proponents’ actions. In dissent, Justice Kennedy noted the irony of insisting on state control of the proponents when the whole point of the California referendum system is to allow citizens to bypass state control of the legislative process and to propose laws directly to the people. Continue reading "Standing (in) for the Government"
Apr 13, 2015 Robert RosenCorporate Law
How many different law review articles cite work by Kahneman and Tversky, progenitors of law and behavioral economics? At least two thousand, two hundred and seventy-three (2,273). And this does not include articles like Professor Baer’s which do not cite Kahneman and Tversky, but cite law review articles which do. Law and behavioral economics is a law professor industry. And, why not? It doesn’t require math and who doesn’t like Brain Games?
How many different law review articles cite work by Oliver Williamson, progenitor of the new institutional economics? At least one thousand, two hundred and fifty-four (1,254). Although smaller, this also reflects an industry which incorporates ideas of agency cost or of just opportunism, which Baer says is, “according to Oliver Wiliamson’s famous definition, a form of self-interest seeking with guile” (P. 99.)
What is the overlap between these 3,527 articles? That is, how many articles cite both Kahneman and Tversky and Williamson? At most 82 (2.3%). Of course, one might also ask what percentage of the smaller number of Williamson-citing papers cite Kahneman and Tversky, yielding a larger but still small number (6.5%). By and large, these appear to be two different lines of scholarship; two different industries.
Miriam H. Baer argues that both lines need to be considered concurrently. Why? The methods and structures of organizational compliance need to deter both deviance originating in individual departures from rationality (the law and behavioral economics line) and individuals whose rationality departs from that of the organization as an entity (the new institutional economics line). To complicate matters, in ways Professor Baer doesn’t highlight, such deterrence also sometimes cut against each other. Call it “the lure of the taboo.” Creating a culture that enshrines non-opportunistic values creates psychological pressures to evade. Sociologists talk about the normality of deviance, but you can just think of the attractiveness of shrimp to those raised in an Orthodox Jewish culture. (And let’s agree to not discuss other taboos). Continue reading "Deterring Both Spur-of-the-Moment and Carefully Planned Corporate Crimes"
Apr 10, 2015 Jessica Bulman-PozenConstitutional Law
Alison L. LaCroix,
Continuity in Secession: The Case of the Confederate Constitution (forthcoming), available at
SSRN.
Secession has been back in the news of late. Hundreds of thousands of individuals across the country signed petitions seeking permission for their states to leave the United States after President Obama’s reelection; Governor Perry riffed on Texas’s departure from the Union “if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people”; and members of the Second Vermont Republic insist the Green Mountain State would be better off alone. Overseas, a bid for Scottish independence from the United Kingdom nearly prevailed last fall.
A curious feature of many contemporary secessionist movements is their claim to represent the real nation-state from which they seek to depart. The paradigmatic secession case involves a self-consciously distinct national group trying to throw off the yoke of the state encompassing it. But many of today’s movements instead embrace the nation-state they would leave behind, insisting they are truer to its founding principles than the current regime. Alison LaCroix’s provocative and illuminating essay, Continuity in Secession: The Case of the Confederate Constitution, not only sheds light on the most important secessionist movement in American history, but also offers new purchase on this feature of contemporary law and politics. Continue reading "Secession, Then and Now"
Apr 9, 2015 Mark SeidenfeldAdministrative Law
Those of us who write in administrative law often get stuck in the ruts created by the categories set out in the Administrative Procedures Act—especially rulemaking, adjudication and judicial review. Therefore, it is refreshing and often path breaking when an article appears that delves into an important aspect of administrative action that cuts across those ruts rather than following them. That is all the more true when the article is as well executed as The Permit Power Revisited: The Theory and Practice of Regulatory Permits in the Administrative State by Eric Biber and J.B. Ruhl.
Nominally, The Permit Power Revisited is a response to a piece Richard Epstein wrote, almost twenty years ago, lambasting administrative permitting as a “racket” rife with agency abuse. But the article does not so much respond to that piece; rather it lays out what the permit power encompasses and how agencies use it to fill gaps that otherwise would exist in regulatory schemes. In doing so, The Permit Power Revisited categorizes permits along a continuum and demonstrates how judicious choice of permitting along that continuum can contribute to effective and responsive regulation. Continue reading "The Place of Permits in the Quiver of Administrative Action"
Apr 8, 2015 Kerri StoneWork Law
In “Beyond Title VII: Rethinking Race, Ex-offender Status, and Employment Discrimination in the Information Age,” Professor Kimani Paul-Emile sets forth a compelling analysis of the harm and prejudice engendered toward minority populations by employers’ use of criminal background inquiries. She then proposes a novel regulatory scheme whereby employers would evaluate job applicants for employment fitness prior to factoring in any type of criminal background.
Whether or not one ultimately comes down on the side of regulating employer criminal background inquiries and subsequent actions taken on the basis of those inquiries, there is undeniable appeal in at least considering this scheme, which Professor Paul-Emile calls the Health Law Framework. Her framework is interesting because it transcends the traditional realm of regulation in this area—Title VII and the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA)—and borrows from the arena of health law, specifically the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), to forge a thoughtful, integrated proposed mechanism for regulating employer use of criminal background inquiries. Continue reading "Reaching Outside the Box to Ensure Equal Opportunity"
