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Articles 1 - 30 of 323
Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Our Administered Constitution: Administrative Constitutionalism From The Founding To The Present, Sophia Z. Lee Jun 2019
Our Administered Constitution: Administrative Constitutionalism From The Founding To The Present, Sophia Z. Lee
This article argues that administrative agencies have been primary interpreters and implementers of the federal Constitution throughout the history of the United States, although the scale and scope of this "administrative constitutionalism" has changed significantly over time as the balance of opportunities and constraints has shifted. Courts have nonetheless cast an increasingly long shadow over the administered Constitution. In part, this is because of the well-known expansion of judicial review in the 20th century. But the shift has as much to do with changes in the legal profession, legal theory, and lawyers' roles in agency administration. The result is that ...
Censorial Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh Feb 2019
Censorial Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Censorial copyright claims are infringement actions brought by authors for the unauthorized public dissemination of works that are private, unpublished, and revelatory of the author's personal identity. Driven by considerations of authorial autonomy, dignity, and personality rather than monetary value, these claims are almost as old as Anglo-American copyright law itself. Yet, modern thinking has attempted to undermine their place within copyright law, and sought to move them into the domain of privacy law. This Article challenges the dominant view and argues that censorial copyright claims form a legitimate part of the copyright landscape. It shows how censorial copyright ...
Reconsidering Judicial Independence: Forty-Five Years In The Trenches And In The Tower, Stephen B. Burbank Jan 2019
Reconsidering Judicial Independence: Forty-Five Years In The Trenches And In The Tower, Stephen B. Burbank
Trusting in the integrity of our institutions when they are not under stress, we focus attention on them both when they are under stress or when we need them to protect us against other institutions. In the case of the federal judiciary, the two conditions often coincide. In this essay, I use personal experience to provide practical context for some of the important lessons about judicial independence to be learned from the periods of stress for the federal judiciary I have observed as a lawyer and concerned citizen, and to provide theoretical context for lessons I have deemed significant as ...
The Operational And Administrative Militaries, Mark P. Nevitt Aug 2018
The Operational And Administrative Militaries, Mark P. Nevitt
This Article offers a new way of thinking about the military. The U.S. military's existing legal architecture arose from tragedy: in response to operational military failures in Vietnam, the 1980 failed Iranian hostage rescue attempt and other military misadventures, Congress revamped the Department of Defense (DoD)'s organization. The resulting law, the Goldwater-Nichols Act, formed two militaries within the DoD that endure to this day. These two militaries – the operational military and the administrative military – were once opaque to the outside observer but have emerged from the shadows in light of recent conflicts. The operational military remains the ...
James Wilson As The Architect Of The American Presidency, Christopher S. Yoo Jul 2018
James Wilson As The Architect Of The American Presidency, Christopher S. Yoo
For decades, James Wilson has been something of a "forgotten founder." The area where commentators generally recognize Wilson's influence at the Convention is with respect to Article II, which establishes the executive and defines its powers. Most scholars characterize him as a resolute advocate of an independent, energetic, and unitary presidency, and a particularly successful one at that. In this regard, some scholars have generally characterized Wilson's thinking as overly rigid. Yet a close examination of the Convention reveals Wilson to be more flexible than sometimes characterized. With respect to many aspects of the presidency, including the appointment ...
Copyright As Legal Process: The Transformation Of American Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh Jun 2018
Copyright As Legal Process: The Transformation Of American Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
American copyright law has undergone an unappreciated conceptual transformation over the course of the last century. Originally conceived of as a form of private law—focusing on horizontal rights, privileges and private liability—copyright law is today understood principally through its public-regarding goals and institutional apparatus, in effect as a form of public law. This transformation is the result of changes in the ideas of law and law-making that occurred in American legal thinking following World War II, manifested in the deeply influential philosophy of the Legal Process School of jurisprudence which shaped the modern American copyright landscape. In the ...
The Loving Story: Using A Documentary To Reconsider The Status Of An Iconic Interracial Married Couple, Regina Austin Jan 2018
The Loving Story: Using A Documentary To Reconsider The Status Of An Iconic Interracial Married Couple, Regina Austin
The Loving Story (Augusta Films 2011), directed by Nancy Buirski, tells the backstory of the groundbreaking U.S. Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, that overturned state laws barring interracial marriage. The article looks to the documentary to explain why the Lovings should be considered icons of racial and ethnic civil rights, however much they might be associated with marriage equality today. The film shows the Lovings to be ordinary people who took their nearly decade long struggle against white supremacy to the nation's highest court out of a genuine commitment to each other and a determination to live ...
Progressive Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Jan 2018
Progressive Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Several American political candidates and administrations have both run and served under the "progressive" banner for more than a century, right through the 2016 election season. For the most part these have pursued interventionist antitrust policies, reflecting a belief that markets are fragile and in need of repair, that certain interest groups require greater protection, or in some cases that antitrust policy is an extended arm of regulation. This paper argues that most of this progressive antitrust policy was misconceived, including that reflected in the 2016 antitrust plank of the Democratic Party. The progressive state is best served by a ...
Reasonable Patent Exhaustion, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Jan 2018
Reasonable Patent Exhaustion, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
A lengthy tug of war between the Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals may have ended when the Supreme Court held that the sale of a patented article exhausts the patentee seller's rights to enforce restrictions on that article through patent infringement suits. Further, reversing the Federal Circuit, the parties cannot bargain around this rule through the seller's specification of conditions stated at the time of sale, no matter how clear. No inquiry need be made into the patentee's market power, anticompetitive effects, or other types of harms, whether enforcement of the condition is ...
The Empty Idea Of "Equality Of Creditors", David A. Skeel Jr. Jan 2018
The Empty Idea Of "Equality Of Creditors", David A. Skeel Jr.
For two hundred years, the equality of creditors norm—the idea that similarly situated creditors should be treated similarly—has been widely viewed as the most important principle in American bankruptcy law, rivaled only by our commitment to a fresh start for honest but unfortunate debtors. I argue in this Article that the accolades are misplaced. Although the equality norm once was a rough proxy for legitimate concerns, such as curbing self-dealing, it no longer plays this role. Nor does it serve any other beneficial purpose.
Part I of this Article traces the historical emergence and evolution of the equality ...
Foreword: Bankruptcy'S New And Old Frontiers, William W. Bratton, David A. Skeel Jr. Jan 2018
Foreword: Bankruptcy'S New And Old Frontiers, William W. Bratton, David A. Skeel Jr.
This Symposium marks the fortieth anniversary of the enactment of the 1978 Bankruptcy Code (the "1978 Code" or the "Code") with an extended look at seismic changes that currently are reshaping Chapter 11 reorganization. Today's typical Chapter 11 case looks radically different than did the typical case in the Code's early years. In those days, Chapter 11 afforded debtors a cozy haven. Most everything that mattered occurred within the context of the formal proceeding, where the debtor enjoyed agenda control, a leisurely timetable, and judicial solicitude. The safe haven steadily disappeared over time, displaced by a range of ...
Constructive Ambiguity And Judicial Development Of Insider Trading, Jill E. Fisch Jan 2018
Constructive Ambiguity And Judicial Development Of Insider Trading, Jill E. Fisch
The Texas Gulf Sulphur decision began what has become a fifty-year project of developing U.S. insider trading regulation through judicial lawmaking. During the course of that project, the courts developed a complex, fraud-based approach to determining the scope of liability. The approach has led, in many cases, to doctrinal uncertainty, a result that is reflected in the recent decisions in Newman, Salman, and Martoma.
n the face of this uncertainty, many commentators have called for a legislative solution. This article argues, however, that the true challenge of insider trading regulation is a lack of consensus about the appropriate scope ...
Crimes That Changed Our World: Tragedy, Outrage, And Reform: Chapter One: 1911 Triangle Factory Fire: Building Safety Codes, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson Jan 2018
Crimes That Changed Our World: Tragedy, Outrage, And Reform: Chapter One: 1911 Triangle Factory Fire: Building Safety Codes, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson
This first chapter of the recently published book Crimes That Changed Our World: Tragedy, Outrage, and Reform, examines the process by which the tragic 1911 Triangle Factory Fire provoked enormous outrage that in turn created a local then national movement for workplace and building safety that ultimately became the foundation for today's building safety codes. What is particularly interesting, however, is that the Triangle Fire was not the worst such tragedy in its day. Why should it be the one that ultimately triggers social progress?
The book has 21 chapters, each of which traces the tragedy-outrage-reform dynamic in a ...
Reforming The Pentagon: Reflections On How Everything Became War And The Military Became Everything, Mark P. Nevitt Jan 2018
Reforming The Pentagon: Reflections On How Everything Became War And The Military Became Everything, Mark P. Nevitt
What best explains how "Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything?"— the provocative title of a recent book by Professor Rosa Brooks of Georgetown Law. In this Essay, I turn to the Department of Defense's (DoD) unique agency design as the vehicle to address this question. Specifically, I first describe and analyze the role that the 1947 National Security Act and 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act play in incentivizing organizational behavior within the DoD. These two Acts have broad implications for national security governance. Relatedly, I address the consequences of these two core national security laws, focusing on the rise ...
The Rule Of Reason, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Jan 2018
The Rule Of Reason, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Antitrust's rule of reason was born out of a thirty-year (1897-1927) division among Supreme Court Justices about the proper way to assess multi-firm restraints on competition. By the late 1920s the basic contours of the rule for restraints among competitors was roughly established. Antitrust policy toward vertical restraints remained much more unstable, however, largely because their effects were so poorly understood.
This article provides a litigation field guide for antitrust claims under the rule of reason – or more precisely, for situations when application of the rule of reason is likely. At the time pleadings are drafted and even up ...
Petitioning And The Making Of The Administrative State, Maggie Blackhawk Jan 2018
Petitioning And The Making Of The Administrative State, Maggie Blackhawk
The administrative state is suffering from a crisis of legitimacy. Many have questioned the legality of the myriad commissions, boards, and agencies through which much of our modern governance occurs. Scholars such as Jerry Mashaw, Theda Skocpol, and Michele Dauber, among others, have provided compelling institutional histories, illustrating that administrative lawmaking has roots in the early American republic. Others have attempted to assuage concerns through interpretive theory, arguing that the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 implicitly amended our Constitution. Solutions offered thus far, however, have yet to provide a deeper understanding of the meaning and function of the administrative state ...
An Unsung Success Story: A Forty-Year Retrospective On U.S. Communications Policy, Christopher S. Yoo Nov 2017
An Unsung Success Story: A Forty-Year Retrospective On U.S. Communications Policy, Christopher S. Yoo
Looking backwards on the occasion of Telecommunications Policy's fortieth anniversary reveals just how far U.S. communications policy has come. All of the major challenges of 1976, such as promoting competition in customer premises equipment, long distance, and television networking, have largely been overcome. Moreover, new issues that emerged later, such as competition in local telephone service and multichannel video program distribution, have also largely been solved. More often than not, the solution has been the result of structural changes that enhanced facilities-based competition rather than agency-imposed behavioral requirements. Moreover, close inspection reveals that in most cases, prodding by ...
The Progressives: Racism And Public Law, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Nov 2017
The Progressives: Racism And Public Law, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
American Progressivism inaugurated the beginning of the end of American scientific racism. Its critics have been vocal, however. Progressives have been charged with promotion of eugenics, and thus with mainstreaming practices such as compulsory housing segregation, sterilization of those deemed unfit, and exclusion of immigrants on racial grounds. But if the Progressives were such racists, why is it that since the 1930s Afro-Americans and other people of color have consistently supported self-proclaimed progressive political candidates, and typically by very wide margins?
When examining the Progressives on race, it is critical to distinguish the views that they inherited from those that ...
Tragedy, Outrage & Reform: Crimes That Changed Our World: 1983 – Thurman Beating - Domestic Violence, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson Aug 2017
Tragedy, Outrage & Reform: Crimes That Changed Our World: 1983 – Thurman Beating - Domestic Violence, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson
Can a crime make our world better? Crimes are the worst of humanity's wrongs but, oddly, they sometimes do more than anything else to improve our lives. As it turns out, it is often the outrageousness itself that does the work. Ordinary crimes are accepted as the background noise of our everyday existence but some crimes make people stop and take notice – because they are so outrageous, or so curious, or so heart-wrenching. These "trigger crimes" are the cases that this book is about.
They offer some incredible stories about how people, good and bad, change the world around ...
Trigger Crimes & Social Progress: The Tragedy-Outrage-Reform Dynamic In America, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson Aug 2017
Trigger Crimes & Social Progress: The Tragedy-Outrage-Reform Dynamic In America, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson
Can a crime make our world better? Crimes are the worst of humanity's wrongs but, oddly, they sometimes do more than anything else to improve our lives. It is often the outrageousness itself that does the work. Ordinary crimes are accepted as the background noise of everyday existence but some crimes make people stop and take notice – because they are so outrageous or so heart-wrenching.
This brief essay explores the dynamic of tragedy, outrage, and reform, illustrating how certain kinds of crimes can trigger real social progress. Several dozen such "trigger crimes" are identified but four in particular are ...
The Separation Of Corporate Law And Social Welfare, William W. Bratton Jan 2017
The Separation Of Corporate Law And Social Welfare, William W. Bratton
A half century ago, corporate legal theory pursued an institutional vision in which corporations and the law that creates them protect people from the ravages of volatile free markets. That vision was challenged on the ground during the 1980s, when corporate legal institutions and market forces came to blows over questions concerning hostile takeovers. By 1990, it seemed like the institutions had won. But a different picture has emerged as the years have gone by. It is now clear that the market side really won the battle of the 1980s, succeeding in entering a wedge between corporate law and social ...
Choice Of Law And Jurisdictional Policy In The Federal Courts, Tobias Barrington Wolff Jan 2017
Choice Of Law And Jurisdictional Policy In The Federal Courts, Tobias Barrington Wolff
For seventy-five years, Klaxon v. Stentor Electric Manufacturing has provided a one-line answer to choice-of-law questions in federal diversity cases: Erie requires the federal court to employ the same law that a court of the state would select. The simplicity of the proposition likely accounts for the unqualified breadth with which federal courts now apply it. Choice of law doctrine is difficult, consensus in hard cases is elusive, and the anxiety that Erie produces over the demands of federalism tends to stifle any reexamination of core assumptions. The attraction of a simple answer is obvious. But Klaxon cannot bear the ...
Class Actions And The Counterrevolution Against Federal Litigation, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang Jan 2017
Class Actions And The Counterrevolution Against Federal Litigation, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang
In this article we situate consideration of class actions in a framework, and fortify it with data, that we have developed as part of a larger project, the goal of which is to assess the counterrevolution against private enforcement of federal law from an institutional perspective. In a series of articles emerging from the project, we have documented how the Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court (wielding both judicial power under Article III of the Constitution and delegated legislative power under the Rules Enabling Act) fared in efforts to reverse or dull the effects of statutory and other incentives for ...
Appraising The Progressive State, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Jan 2017
Appraising The Progressive State, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Since it origins in the late nineteenth century, the most salient characteristics of the progressive state have been marginalism in economics, greatly increased use of scientific theory and data in policy making, a commitment to broad participation in both economic and political markets, and a belief that resources are best moved through society by many institutions in addition to traditional markets.. These values have served to make progressive policy less stable than classical and other more laissez faire alternatives. However, the progressive state has also performed better than alternatives by every economic measure. One of the progressive state's biggest ...
From The History To The Theory Of Administrative Constitutionalism, Sophia Z. Lee Jan 2017
From The History To The Theory Of Administrative Constitutionalism, Sophia Z. Lee
Legal scholars and historians have shown growing interest in how agencies interpret and implement the Constitution, what is called "administrative constitutionalism." The points of contact between the history and theory of administrative constitutionalism are sufficiently extensive to merit systematic analysis. This chapter focuses on what history can offer the theory of administrative constitutionalism. It argues that historical accounts of administrative constitutionalism invite a more robust normative defense of the practice than theorists have thus far provided. There is much to the transparent, participatory versions of administrative constitutionalism that its defenders have primarily focused on thus far. This chapter is a ...
Intersectionality And The Constitution Of Family Status, Serena Mayeri Jan 2017
Intersectionality And The Constitution Of Family Status, Serena Mayeri
Marital supremacy—the legal privileging of marriage—is, and always has been, deeply intertwined with inequalities of race, class, gender, and region. Many if not most of the plaintiffs who challenged legal discrimination based on family status in the 1960s and 1970s were impoverished women, men, and children of color who made constitutional equality claims. Yet the constitutional law of the family is largely silent about the status-based impact of laws that prefer marriage and disadvantage non-marital families. While some lower courts engaged with race-, sex-, and wealth-based discrimination arguments in family status cases, the Supreme Court largely avoided recognizing ...
Tragedy, Outrage & Reform Crimes That Changed Our World: 1911 – Triangle Factory Fire – Building Safety Codes, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson Dec 2016
Tragedy, Outrage & Reform Crimes That Changed Our World: 1911 – Triangle Factory Fire – Building Safety Codes, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson
Justice Scalia'S Originalism And Formalism: The Rule Of Criminal Law As A Law Of Rules, Stephanos Bibas Aug 2016
Justice Scalia'S Originalism And Formalism: The Rule Of Criminal Law As A Law Of Rules, Stephanos Bibas
Far too many reporters and pundits collapse law into politics, assuming that the left–right divide between Democratic and Republican appointees neatly explains politically liberal versus politically conservative outcomes at the Supreme Court. The late Justice Antonin Scalia defied such caricatures. His consistent judicial philosophy made him the leading exponent of originalism, textualism, and formalism in American law, and over the course of his three decades on the Court, he changed the terms of judicial debate. Now, as a result, supporters and critics alike start with the plain meaning of the statutory or constitutional text rather than loose appeals to ...
Foundling Fathers: (Non-)Marriage And Parental Rights In The Age Of Equality, Serena Mayeri Jun 2016
Foundling Fathers: (Non-)Marriage And Parental Rights In The Age Of Equality, Serena Mayeri
The twentieth-century equality revolution established the principle of sex neutrality in the law of marriage and divorce and eased the most severe legal disabilities traditionally imposed upon nonmarital children. Formal equality under the law eluded nonmarital parents, however. Although unwed fathers won unprecedented legal rights and recognition in a series of Supreme Court cases decided in the 1970s and 1980s, they failed to achieve constitutional parity with mothers or with married and divorced fathers. This Article excavates nonmarital fathers' quest for equal rights, until now a mere footnote in the history of constitutional equality law.
Unmarried fathers lacked a social ...
Patent Exhaustion And Federalism: A Historical Note, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Apr 2016
Patent Exhaustion And Federalism: A Historical Note, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
This essay, written as a response to John F. Duffy and Richard Hynes, Statutory Domain and the Commercial Law of Intellectual Property, 102 VA. L. REV. 1 (2016), argues that the patent exhaustion (first sale) doctrine developed as a creature of federalism, intended to divide the line between the law of patents, which by that time had become exclusively federal, and the law of patented things, which were governed by the states. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century courts were explicit on the point, in decisions stretching from the 1850s well into the twentieth century.
By the second half of ...