Mar 15, 2017 Benjamin C. ZipurskyTorts
Patrick R. Goold,
Unbundling the “Tort” of Copyright Infringement 102
Va. L. Rev. 1833 (2016), available at
SSRNPatrick Goold’s Unbundling the “Tort” of Copyright Infringement (“Unbundling”) is an ambitious and remarkably illuminating article. Its central thesis is that “copyright infringement” is best understood as a cover term for five different “copytorts” related to the plaintiff’s being a copyright owner. By way of comparison, “trespass” and “nuisance” in tort law are pleaded and articulated with different names even though they both pertain to wrongs related to a plaintiff’s ownership of realty; this is because they are, conceptually and practically, quite different wrongs. Copyright law has never separated out its five different legal wrongs, either through statute or through judicial elaboration, either formally or informally. It has used the one phrase “copyright infringement” indiscriminately for all. It turns out, Goold argues, that much of the confusion and conflict within copyright case law can be traced back to the failure to draw distinctions among the five copytorts. The task of the article is to outline the distinctions, thereby beginning the process of solving a number of doctrinal problems.
The three doctrinal problems Goold presents pertain to audience, harm, and analogy. As to “audience,” the question concerns the observer, or arbiter, or audience that courts should employ to determine whether allegedly infringing material is sufficiently similar to the copyrighted material: must it be such as to cause confusion to a reasonable person, an ordinary consumer, or an expert? As to “harm” (which arises in connection with a fair use defense) the question concerns “‘the effect of the [copyist’s] use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.’” (P. 1848 (quoting 17 U.S.C § 107 (2012)).) Courts have construed this factor to turn on “whether the copying caused the owner cognizable harm” (Id.); some courts in turn focus upon demand diversion, others on lost fees, and others on reputational, privacy, or other nonfinancial injuries. Finally, as to “analogy,” the question is how copyright infringement ought to be modeled as a legal wrong: is it like trespass, like conversion, like an economic tort or unfair competition, or like unjust enrichment? Continue reading "Tort Theory in Copyright Law: Thinking about Patrick Goold’s Unbundling the “Tort” of Copyright Infringement"
Mar 14, 2017 Browne LewisTrusts & Estates
A will speaks at death. Therefore, the testator is free to change his or her will until the day he or she dies. Giving a person the opportunity to change his or her will makes sense because testamentary dispositions are influenced by lifetime events. For example, after a will is executed, a beneficiary may die or the testator may lose ownership of some of the property mentioned in the will. Currently, persons are permitted to create irrevocable trusts. Although there is no prohibition against irrevocable wills, modern statutes do not provide for the use of such devises. Therefore, a method does not exist for a testator to make an irrevocable will. Nevertheless, in his timely and thought-provoking article, Is It Time For Irrevocable Wills?, Professor Alex M. Johnson, Jr. makes the case that the legal recognition of irrevocable wills would not negatively impact testamentary freedom. The availability of irrevocable wills may protect the testator who becomes incompetent after executing his or her will.
In attempt to support his assertion that irrevocable wills have a place in the testamentary process, Professor Johnson begins his article by briefly discussing the historical evolution of wills. During the Middle Ages, the law expressly deemed wills to be irrevocable. At that time, the property owner was permitted to use, a post obit transfer, an inter vivos conveyance, to make an irrevocable testamentary transfer of his property. The post-obit gift consisted of a contractual promise that the donor’s property would be delivered to the beneficiary after the donor died. Usually, the instrument creating the post-obit gift included a provision stating that the gift was irrevocable if the donor did not retain the right to revoke it. Once the Statute of Wills was enacted in 1540, wills were treated as if they were irrevocable. Professor Johnson asserts that no justification was given for making wills revocable instruments. He opines that lawmakers never intended to prohibit irrevocable wills. According to Professor Johnson, the issue of the irrevocability of wills was never fully discussed. Consequently, there is no historical reason for not legally recognizing irrevocable wills. Continue reading "Ending the Cycle of “Ever-Changing” Wills"
Mar 13, 2017 Kerry AbramsFamily Law
Should the definition of “marriage” be federal? What about the definitions of “parent” and “child”? Courtney Joslin’s carefully written article, Federalism and Family Status, traces the history of how the law has treated family status determinations and sets forth a framework, grounded in the federalism literature, on when family status should be determined on a state-by-state basis or as a federal matter.
Joslin’s article was written before two major events that have changed the family law landscape—the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges and the presidential election of 2016. In Obergefell, the Supreme Court struck down state bans on same-sex marriage, thus essentially federalizing the definition of marriage in one important respect. In the election, Donald J. Trump prevailed, and with him came fears that he will to appoint conservative justices who might overturn Obergefell. At this particular historical moment, Joslin’s article is worth rereading with an eye to applying her theory to this drastically changed landscape. Continue reading "Flirting with Federal Family Law"
Mar 10, 2017 Susan MorseTax Law
Auer/Seminole Rock or “ASR” deference is a hot topic right now in administrative law. ASR gives agencies deference when agencies interpret their own regulations, such as in litigation briefs or in guidance. If you want to know how ASR deference works in the tax context, and in particular in the Tax Court, read Steve Johnson’s work. This includes his 2013 article and his entry in the Yale Journal of Regulation’s recent online symposium on ASR deference.
The Chevron doctrine often serves as the starting point for deference to agency action. Chevron offers judicial deference to agency interpretations in final regulations and other actions with the “force of law” articulated in Mead. When the Supreme Court confirmed in its 2011 Mayo decision that Chevron applies to tax regulations, it helped to usher in a growing awareness of administrative law doctrine in tax cases. Continue reading "The Tax Court: “Insubordinate” or “Prescient” on Auer/Seminole Rock Deference?"
Mar 9, 2017 Ezra RosserProperty
Jessica A. Shoemaker,
Complexity’s Shadow: American Indian Property, Sovereignty, and the Future,
Mich. L. Rev. (forthcoming), available at
SSRN.
This is both a good and a bad moment to be working at the intersection of property law and Indian law. Positively, there are a number of scholars exploring this intersection, showing how the rights of Indians should influence our understanding of property and how property law impacts tribes.
Professors Kristen Carpenter, Sonia Katyal, and Angela Riley have done important work on the significance of Indians’ collective rights and identity when it comes to intellectual property. Professor Elizabeth Kronk Warner has become her own publishing house when it comes to climate change and tribal land. And Professor Alex Skibine has argued that federal control over Indian land must be diminished. Most law students begin their study of property with Indian law, and several states now even include Indian law on their bar exams.
But it is also a bad moment: many reservations continue to be mired in poverty, marked by underdevelopment that can be traced in part to problems in how reservation land is governed. The self-determination era has reached maturity, yet an “Indian problem” remains when it comes to economic growth. As popular and political awareness of the association between reservation poverty and trust land grows, tribes face the prospect that reactionary thinking will once again threaten the tribal land base.
Jessica Shoemaker’s recent article, Complexity’s Shadow: American Indian Property, Sovereignty, and the Future, does a great job detailing and explaining the web of rules and overlapping governance structures that contribute to the underdevelopment of Indian land. Although Complexity’s Shadow draws upon property theory and the work of scholars interested in legal complexity, the real strength of the piece is just how grounded it is in reservation land restrictions. Continue reading "Land Tenure Complications and Development Challenges on Indian Reservations"
Mar 8, 2017 Jaya Ramji-NogalesLexImmigration
As immigrant communities and immigrants’ rights advocates stare down the barrel of the Trump administration, anti-trafficking appears to be the sole immigration-related issue that might gain bipartisan traction. As has historically been the case with refugees and asylum seekers, Democrats and Republicans may find common ground in concern over the situation of trafficked individuals, especially those subject to sexual trafficking. Refugee advocates and scholars have long raised concerns about the impact of collaborations with strange bedfellows on law and policy-making. Janie Chuang’s article, Giving as Governance? Philanthrocapitalism and Modern-Day Slavery Abolitionism, raises a similar set of worries around the anti-trafficking agenda, introducing a new character to the cast: the philanthrocapitalist. This piece presents a comprehensive and thoughtful set of concerns about the outsized and largely unaccountable role of a new generation of hyperengaged donors in shaping the anti-trafficking policy agenda.
In Prof. Chuang’s words, philanthrocapitalism is a “relatively new form of philanthropy, born of a new generation of the ultra-rich who aspire to use their business skills to fix the world’s social problems.” She explains that these donors play a much more direct role in shaping responses to societal issues than philanthropists in previous eras, who gave money to support third parties’ efforts to effect social change. This is a sound analysis, though it then raises the question of whether these are differences of degree or of kind. Philanthropists have always had some control over policymaking agendas through their selection of projects and varying levels of control through reporting and funding mechanisms. What is different about these new philanthrocapitalists? Continue reading "Who Should Set the Anti-Trafficking Agenda?"
Mar 7, 2017 Suzette M. MalveauxCourts Law
The Supreme Court’s decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes set off a groundswell of concern among many scholars, lawyers, and legal commentators about its potential impact on employees’ capacity to collectively pursue relief, particularly for systemic intentional discrimination claims. As one of those concerned parties, I enjoyed reading the five-year retrospective by Michael Selmi and Sylvia Tsakos, which seems to suggest that Wal-Mart’s impact on such claims has been more of a wave than a tsunami. Selmi and Tsakos recognize the ways in which the Court’s ruling has taken its toll, but they highlight how much Wal-Mart’s impact is a matter of degree rather than kind. Pre-Wal-Mart, the class action landscape was characterized by skepticism toward nationwide class actions, greater merits-focused class certification, and jurisdiction-dependent class treatment. Post-Wal-Mart, those trends have expanded to the detriment of civil rights claims. While this expansion is normatively problematic, this article makes an important contribution to the literature by situating Wal-Mart historically and putting it into a broader perspective. In addition, Selmi and Tsakos identify a forward trend of class certification jurisprudence involving certain kinds of subjective employment practices, which have been found to satisfy Rule 23’s commonality requirement even under current class action jurisprudence.
The authors’ sobering observation that employment discrimination class actions alleging subjective practices have been struggling, combined with their positive observation that some of these class actions remain viable post-Wal-Mart, lead the authors to conclude that Wal-Mart’s effect thus far has been modest. Continue reading "The Impact of Wal-Mart v. Dukes on Employment Discrimination Class Actions Five Years Out: A Forecast That Suggests More a Wave Than a Tsunami"
Mar 6, 2017 Christopher SchmidtLegal History
In The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics, Jefferson Cowie has written a slim, brisk work of historical synthesis in which he seeks to reframe how we understand twentieth-century American political history. In this essay, I describe Cowie’s insightful and provocative revisionist account of the New Deal and its place in American history. At the end of the essay, I consider some questions the book raises for legal historians.
Cowie’s target in The Great Exception is the idea that the New Deal was a definitive turning point in American political history. Most historical accounts describe the New Deal as the period when, after decades of struggle, liberals pushed back laissez-faire ideology, installed the American version of the social welfare state, and transformed the nation’s political culture along more egalitarian and pluralistic lines. Today liberals praise the New Deal, conservatives criticize it, but all sides generally agree it marked a significant and lasting shift in the relationship between the American people and their government. Continue reading "Exceptions and Baselines in American Political and Legal History"
Mar 3, 2017 Robin WestJurisprudence
Paul Gowder’s article Equal Law in an Unequal World is an exceptionally fine piece of scholarship, and a terrific addition to the growing philosophical and jurisprudential literature on the Rule of Law. It sets out to accomplish several tasks—and largely succeeds. The first and major goal of the piece is to introduce a novel conception of the Rule of Law that is grounded in the widely accepted norm that law must be general. This is a familiar understanding of the meaning of the “Rule of Law,” but Gowder gives it distinctively unfamiliar—but ultimately quite compelling—content. Any law, Gowder argues, drawing on an emergent moral-philosophical literature elucidating related concepts, to be “general” and therefore compatible with the Rule of Law, must be backed by public reasons that can be rationally understood by all citizens, but most important, by all citizens it directly targets. Those reasons, in turn, must be consistent with each such citizen’s basic equal worth and equality (among other requirements as well: the law must also be justified by reasons that are aimed at a sound public policy, and third, by reasons that reflect loosely the community’s self-conception and values). A law justified by reasons that can be understood by the law’s presumed targets only by first accepting the claim that they are inferior to others—such as a law requiring black citizens to sit in the rear of buses, or a vagrancy law forbidding both rich and poor from sleeping under bridges (etc.) in the face of widespread homelessness, or theft laws that forbid the theft of food, given the existence of severe poverty—therefore, violate the Rule of Law. These laws can only be understood by those whom they target as resting on or justified by reasons that in turn presuppose affective commitments of the lawgiver and of the community to the inferiority, or unacceptability, or indeed the contemptibility of black people, or the homeless, or the poor. Particularly for those who have no choice but to commit the prohibited act—such as homeless people who must after all sleep somewhere, or poor people who are hungry and must eat to survive—the laws prohibiting these acts cannot be understood in any way other than as resting on a claim that their very existence is offensive, or at best that their status is lower. This claim is in turn inconsistent with the generality required by the Rule of Law, when that generality is properly understood as requiring not any formal or linguistic property, but rather, a commitment to the general equal worth of all citizens. Therefore, Jim Crow laws, and literacy requirements for voting, but also quite ordinary laws prohibiting theft or vagrancy, are violations of the Rule of Law because in each case, they are premised on reasons that in turn rest on affective attitudes that presuppose the inferiority of the groups they target—and, thus, their lack of “generality.”
This is, Gowder shows, a far more ambitious and robust understanding of the “generality” required by the Rule of Law than the “formal” interpretation one more commonly finds at the heart of dominant interpretations of the Rule of Law and the Equal Protection Clause both—interpretations that typically require (at least in the legal literature) only that “likes be treated alike,” with no substantive reference to either substantive equality, or the equality of citizens. An interpretation of the Rule of Law that requires the latter, Gowder argues, rather than the former, is both more consistent with the history of the ideal itself (drawn from English legal history) and more consistent with the politically and morally ambitious goal of a substantively equal and fair society—a goal that is least arguably at the heart of this country’s reconstruction amendments, as well as our history of progressive politics. Continue reading "Property and the Rule of Law"
Mar 2, 2017 Pam SamuelsonIntellectual Property Law
Sarah R. Wasserman Rajec,
The Intellectual Property Hostage in Trade Retaliation, 76
Md. L. Rev. 169 (2016), available at
SSRN.
Twenty-some years ago, there was much speculation about how well the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute resolution process would work, and in particular, whether developed countries would be more likely to comply with their WTO obligations in respect of developing nations because the latter would have the right, subject to approval by the relevant WTO Dispute Settlement Body (DSB), to retaliate against violations of WTO obligations by suspending enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPRs) affecting the violator’s industries.
A central premise of creating the right to retaliate against IPRs was that developed countries’ interests in ensuring respect for its nationals’ IPRs would create a more powerful inducement to treaty compliance than the opportunity to retaliate only against similar types of goods (e.g., bananas or cotton).
So here we are in 2016. After more than two decades of experience with dispute settlements under the WTO agreements, there is a tale to be told about IPR cross-retaliation, and Rajec tells that tale very well. The WTO agreements established a dispute resolution procedure under which nations can formally complain about another nation’s claimed violations to a DSB that will then adjudicate the dispute. If the complaint has merit, the DSB will consider what remedial measures the complainant should be able to take against the violator if it does not respond by coming into compliance. Rajec reports that in a substantial majority of cases, nations decide to comply with their treaty obligations once the DSB has ruled that a violation has occurred, although in about nine percent of cases, violators have remained “unabashed[ly]” noncompliant. Continue reading "Are Intellectual Property Retaliations Against Violators of WTO Agreements Ineffective?"
