Concurring Opinions » Amazon

Contracts in the Real World: Ready for Pre-Ordering

Lawrence Cunningham — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 11:08:28 +0000

This new book on contracts, regaling readers with stories ripped from the headlines, will be published soon and can be pre-ordered now on amazon.com and other fine booksellers.

Contracts in the Real World: Stories of Popular Contracts is intended to be a fun, fast, reliable read. It is very useful for 1Ls struggling with the subject, perfect for anyone thinking about going to law school, and designed to entertain devotees of pop culture. It will also captivate experts in contract law by connecting current events with venerable principles and classic cases.

Stories feature such notables as Eminem, Lady Gaga, Charlie Sheen, Donald Trump, and Sandra Bullock, as well as examples such as your cell phone contract, lottery sharing partnership, and on-line privacy policy.

List price is $33. The table of contents follows.

1. Getting In: Contract Formation

A. Gifts, Bargains, Reliance: MLK and BU

A Charitable Pledge, Estopping Aretha Franklin

B. Ads or Offers: Pepsi and Harrier Jets

First Come First Served, Jesting

C. Frolic or Acceptance: Boasts on “Dateline NBC”

The Curious Smokeball, A Hole in One

D. Mutual Assent: Spyware and Secret Clauses

Two Ships Peerless

E. Policies or Pacts: The Cleveland.com Blogger

Employment Handbooks, Promises of Secrecy

2. Facing Limits: Unenforceable Bargains

A.Unconscionability: Gail Waters’ Annuity Swap

Chasing Alaska Gold, Escaping Nazi Germany

B. Blackmail: Michael Jordan’s Paternity

David Letterman and Child Support

C. Palimony: The Rapper 50 Cent

Lee Marvin’s Lover

D. Gambling: Octogenarian Powerball Sisters

E. Making Babies: Baby M, Baby Calvert

3. Getting Out: Excuses and Termination

A. Mistake and Warranty: Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme

Forged Dimes, Fertile Cows and Fake Stradivarius

B. Impossibility and Force Majeure: Donald Trump

C. Infancy: Craig Traylor of “Malcolm in the Middle”

D. Outrage: AIG’s Employee Bonuses

E. Embarrassment: The New York Mets and Citi Field

4. Paying Up: Remedies

A. Interests and Limits: Paris Hilton and “Pledge This!”

Vanessa Redgrave, Jack Dempsey and Robert Reed

B. Compensation: Paris Hilton and Hairtech

The Hairy Hand, The Beatles’ Recordings

C. Markets and Mitigation: Redskins Season Tickets

The Bridge to Nowhere, Lost Volume Sellers, Shirley MacLaine

D. Stated Remedies: Sprint’s Early Termination Fees

The Delayed Mausoleum, Vanderbilt’s Traitorous Football Coach

E. Specific Performance: Tyson Chickens and IBP Pork

A Unique Manhattan Billboard

5. Rewinding: Restitution and Unjust Enrichment

A. Gratuity or Exchange: Caring for Aunt Frances

Bascom’s Folly, Emergency Surgery

B. Mere Volunteers: Battling Alaskan Beetles

C. Trailing Promises: Lena Saves Lee’s Life

The Heroic Lumberman, An Escaped Bull

D. Novel Ideas: The Making of “The Sopranos”

E. Off-Contract Remedies: Rod Stewart at The Rio

6. Writing It Down: Interpretation, Parol, Frauds

A. Plain Meaning I: Eminem’s Digital Records

B. Plain Meaning II: Dan Rather’s Last Broadcast

C. Parol Evidence: The Golden Globes

D. Scrivener’s Error: Who Owns the L. A. Dodgers?

The Fraudulent Architect, The Erroneous Deed

E. Statute of Frauds: Cliff Dumas’s Phantom Radio Deal

Jane Fonda’s Luckless Agent, Elizabeth Arden’s Fortunate Hire

7. Performing: Duties, Modification, Good Faith

A. Implied Terms: Butch Lewis and Maya Angelou

Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon

B. Express Terms: Clive Cussler’s Movie “Sahara”

C. Unanticipated Circumstances: Deutsche Building

Industrial Detritus, The Salmon Fishermen’s Threat

D. Accord and Satisfaction: Lady Gaga

The Disputed Home Improvements

E. Adjustment: Conan and “The Tonight Show”

8. Hedging: Conditions

A. Interpretation and Effect: Kevin Costner’s Bison

An Aborted Vineyard Sale, A Crop Insurance Caper

B. Order of Performance: Charlie Sheen and Warner

The Country Hotel Sale Bust, The Four-Stage Construction

C. Partial or Total Breach: Sheen and Warner II

An Accidental Bulldozing

D. Waiver: Sheen and Warner III

The Imbibing Professor

E. Substantial Performance: Sandra Bullock’s Lake House

Wrong Plumbing Pipes, Misplaced Walls, Unrestored Farms and Ungraded Gravel Lots

9. Considering Others: Third Parties and Society

A. Beneficiaries: Supply Chain Abuse at Wal-Mart

A Sweatshop in Brooklyn

B. Assignment: JP Morgan’s Cablevisión Loan

C. Interference: New England Patriots and StubHub

D. Torts: Katie Janeway’s Tragic Accident

Amnesty for Ordinary Negligence, A Misleading Authorization

UCLA Law Review Vol. 58, Issue 4 (April 2011)

UCLA Law Review — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 16:00:32 +0000

Volume 58, Issue 4 (April 2011)

Articles

Digital Exhaustion	Aaron Perzanowski & Jason Schultz	889
Fixing Inconsistent Paternalism Under Federal Employment Discrimination Law	Craig Robert Senn	947
Awakening the Press Clause	Sonja R. West	1025

Comments

Still Fair After All These Years? How Claim Preclusion and Issue Preclusion Should Be Modified in Cases of Copyright’s Fair Use Doctrine	Karen L. Jones	1071
Patenting Everything Under the Sun: Invoking the First Amendment to Limit the Use of Gene Patents	Krysta Kauble	1123

Mechanical Turk, Research Ethics, and Research Assistants

Glenn Cohen — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 13:49:46 +0000

A recent faculty workshop by my witty and brilliant colleague Jonathan Zittrain on “ubiquitous human computing,” (this youtube video captures in a different form what he was talking about ), prompted me to thinking about some ways in which platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, interface with university research and research ethics in interesting ways.

For those unfamiliar, Mechanical Turk allows you to farm out a variety of small tasks (label this image, enter date of this .pdf to a spreadsheet, take a photo of yourself with the sign “will turk for food,” etc) at a price per unit you set. Millions of anonymous users can then do the task for you and collect the bounty, a form of microwork.

As Jonathan detailed, this raises a host of fascinating issues, but I want to focus on two that are closer to bioethics.

First, I have begun to see some legal academics recruiting populations for experimental work using Mechanical Turk, and there is an emerging literature on the pros and cons of subject recruitment from these populations. Are Mechanical Turkers “research subjects” within the legal (primarily the Common Rule if one receives federal funding) or broader ethical sense of the term? Should they be? Take as a tangible example the implicit bias research of the kind Mahzarin R. Banarji has made famous, and imagine it was done over something like Mechanical Turk. How (if at all) should the anonymity of the subject, the lack of subject-experimenter relationship of any sort, the piecemeal nature of the task, etc, change the way an institutional review board reviews the research? It is a mantra in the research ethics community that informed consent is supposed to be a “process” not a document, but how can that process take place in this anonymous static cyberspace environment?

Second, consider research assistance.

I often have my R.A.’s read over papers before I send them out to hunt for typos (alongside more substantive tasks I give them). Imagine that tomorrow I decided (imagine a shrinking research budget due to times of fiscal austerity) to farm the typo-hunt off to Mechanical Turk because I could get results faster and at one tenth the price, since there were individuals in destitute circumstances willing to do it at a rate far below that I pay my (wonderful, in case they are reading) R.A.’s. Even if the accuracy of the Turkers was individually less good, it seems plausible that having four of them pour over each page might be better and still cheaper than using R.A.’s to do it. Lest you think this only an interesting hypothetical, consider Samasource, whose mission statement suggests it “enables marginalized people, from refugees in Kenya to women in rural Pakistan, to receive life-changing work opportunities via the Internet” in just this way.

Would I have violated any rules at your university? Have I done something wrong? Perhaps I have deprived Harvard students of the opportunity to work closely with a faculty member (although on typo hunting?) Am I problematically circumventing Harvard’s minimum wage for R.A. work? Am I exploiting these Kenyan refugees or rural Pakistani women or instead giving them “life-changing work opportunities via the Internet?”

I’d be curious to hear the thoughts of any readers, as well as any reports on whether your institution has a policy on this subject.

BRIGHT IDEAS: Deborah Rhode’s The Beauty Bias

Danielle Citron — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 15:03:23 +0000

Oxford University Press has just published Professor Deborah L. Rhode’s newest book, The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law. I got my copy from Amazon on Friday and enjoyed every moment reading it over the weekend. The book is illuminating and important: it explores the often unacknowledged, yet pervasive, discrimination against people, particularly women, who don’t conform to mainstream notions of beauty and appearance. Professor Deborah Rhode is the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. She is the one of the country’s leading scholars in legal ethics and gender. Professor Rhode is incredibly prolific: she has written over 20 books and countless articles. She is the director of the Stanford Center on the Legal Profession and a columnist for the National Law Journal. Before joining the Stanford Law faculty, she was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Lucky for CoOp readers, I had a chance to interview Professor Rhode about The Beauty Bias. I reproduce our conversation below:

DC: What prompted you to write this book?

DR: It partly started with shoes. I have always viewed women’s footwear design as a haven for closet misogynists; so much of what they produce is so dysfunctional for its primary purpose—comfortable walking. Yet in many contexts, including my years as Chair of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession, I was struck by how often some of the nation’s most prominent, powerful, and otherwise sensible women were hobbling about in what we described in high school as “killer shoes.” They were stranded in cab lines and late for meetings — held back both literally and figuratively — because of shoes. And inconvenience is the least of the problems. High heels are a major contributor to serious back and foot problems, and four-fifths of women eventually experience such difficulties. A growing percentage are even willing to undergo foot surgery to fit into their designer footwear. I was sufficiently irritated to write an op for the New York Times and it triggered more of a response than probably anything I’ve ever published.

That experience underscored a question I had long puzzled over. Of all the inequities that the contemporary women’s movement has targeted, why have those related to appearance shown among the least improvement? Half of American women report unhappiness with how they look, a figure greater than a quarter century ago. In a country where large percentages of the population can’t afford basic health care, cosmetic surgery is the fastest growing specialty. Our global investment in appearance is over 200 billion, and millions of individuals, particularly women, are paying a huge cost not just in money but in time, physical health, and psychological well-being. Discrimination based on appearance, especially weight, is among the most common forms of bias; it is much more frequent and equally arbitrary as many forms of discrimination that are now unlawful. But except in a few jurisdictions, bias based on appearance is perfectly legal.

DC: How does this fit into your broader scholarship?

DR: As a legal academic with a particular interest in gender equality, I wanted a better understanding of where our preoccupation with appearance comes from, what costs it imposes, and what could we do about it from a policy perspective. I’ve always been interested in the gap between our aspirations and achievements involving social justice in general and women’s rights in particular. Appearance raises those issues and provides a window on questions involving the law’s capacities and constraints in producing social change. Appearance discrimination has also attracted relatively little public or scholarly attention, and part of the problem is that so few individuals realize that we have a serious problem. This project offered the chance to provide the first comprehensive overview of the law in this area, and new research on the experience of the few jurisdictions that explicitly prohibit some form of appearance discrimination. And because I’m always interested in connecting research to practice, I tried to write in a way that will be interesting and accessible to a broad public and policy audience.

DC: Are you hopeful that we might combat this bias?

DR: I’m optimistic about reform but not naive about what stands in the way. The importance of attractiveness is deeply rooted, and the economic stakes in its pursuit are enormous. But the costs of our preoccupation with appearance are also considerable and could be much more fully appreciated. Many individuals realize that it hurts to be beautiful, but few realize how much and how many billions are squandered in worthless or unhealthful cosmetic and weight reduction efforts. And even fewer of us realize how much it hurts not to be beautiful, or to conform to culturally prescribed norms that are much more demanding for women than men, and that compound disadvantages based on race, class and ethnicity. Most Americans have bumped up against some aspect of the problem and might be energized to do something if they came to see this as not just an individual problem but a social injustice and cultural challenge.

The final chapter of the book offers a wide range of strategies — at both the individual and policy level — that would move us towards a more attainable, healthy, and inclusive standards of attractiveness and less arbitrary discrimination based on appearance. The chapter also identifies further protections that could be available from fraudulent or risky appearance related products and services, and further ways to support healthy lifestyles without demonizing those who fall short.

I surely don’t want to overstate the attention that I think can or should be devoted to the issue. On the reform agenda of women’s rights advocates, appearance does not deserve top billing. But in terms of public recognition of a problem, it remains a major challenge. The kind of attention people once gave to the state of their souls, they now give to the state of their bodies. And too often, the result is far from constructive. Beauty may be only skin deep, but the costs associated with its pursuit go much deeper, and demand closer attention and collective action. We will never eliminate all the injustices, but we can surely do better.

Links and short thoughts on Amazonfail

Kaimipono D. Wenger — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 22:52:28 +0000

Deven has already mentioned Amazonfail, in which Amazon temporarily delisted all MacMillan books — one-sixth of its inventory — because of a disagreement over Kindle pricing. (MacMillan was tired of Amazon using its books as a loss leader to get folks to buy Kindles).

It’s been interesting to read over folks’ analyses. The best overview comes from Scalzi, who lists seven ways that this was a complete fail on Amazon’s part. There’s also very good analysis from Cory Doctorow; another very good analysis from Tobias Bucknell; yet another very good analysis from Scott Westerfield (and there are more good analyses out there); a funny photoshopped picture at Engadget; and of course calls for revolution from a variety of folks, such as Tobias Bucknell.

At the end of the day, I’m thinking that the critics were right. Amazon apparently can’t be trusted not to do really stupid things, which may seriously harm readers and authors (and publishers with whom Amazon is squabbling). Amazon’s move was really stupid, and puts a major dent in their credibility. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can say that I read a variety of MacMillan titles, and I own a Kindle — and following this whole kerfuffle, I’m seriously thinking about Apple’s new feminine-products device.