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Most under-appreciated thing about Warren Buffett: he built Berkshire to last well beyond him.  (LAC, at BRK annual meeting via Motley Fool, here.)

University governance as a new topic of public discussion.

An unusual profile of Mary Anne Franks (kw)

Aggressive copyright litigation run amok. (fp)

USA Today's Matt Krantz quoting me on Warren Buffett joining Twitter.  (LAC)

Private prisons? Why, sure! What could possibly go wrong? (kw)

TNR profiles Susan Crawford (kw)

Berkshire Hathaway is bigger than Warren Buffett.  Manual of Ideas (LAC).

Guns don't shoot people, kitchen appliances shoot people (kw)

Via Glom, Sat Eve Post review of The Essays of Warren Buffett.


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Volume 60, Issue 4 (April 2013)

posted by UCLA Law Review

Volume 60, Issue 4 (April 2013)
Articles

Real Women, Real Rape I. Bennett Capers 826
Disaggregating Disasters Lisa Grow Sun & RonNell Andersen Jones 884

Comments

Decomposing the Precarious Future of American Orchestras in the Face of Golan v. Holder Hannah Dubina 950
In Need of a Fix: Reforming Criminal Law in Light of a Contemporary Understanding of Drug Addiction Patrick Eoghan Murray 1006
Second Amendment Challenges to Student Housing Firearms Bans: The Strength of the Home Analogy Michael L. Smith 1046

  April 27, 2013 at 1:31 am   Posted in: Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   No Comments

The Anti-Partisan Principle–The Admission of States

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I want to make some other observations about what I’m calling the anti-partisan principle before I wrap this up next week and start grading exams.

One perplexing constitutional anomaly is the lack of congressional representation for the District of Columbia.  The Twenty-Third Amendment, of course, gave DC the right to choose presidential electors.  Another amendment was passed by Congress in the 1970s to give DC congressional representation, but that was not ratified. Many statutes have been proposed to accomplish the same goal, but none have passed.  One could imagine a law that admits most of DC as a state so long as some inner core remains to satisfy the requirement that there be a federal district as the seat of government.  (Just giving DC voting rights or admitting the whole district as a state may be unconstitutional, even though there is a question about whether that would be justiciable.  Can the Supreme Court declare a state illegal?)

Why isn’t DC represented by voting members in Congress today?  The answer is that everybody knows that they would all be Democrats.  As a result, the GOP blocks any such proposal.  The same might well be true if Puerto Rico ever applies for statehood, though that is less clear.  Note that this is not true for all state admissions.  Most territories do not have a predictable voting pattern when admitted.  Indeed, the District of Columbia itself was not clearly aligned when the Twenty-Third Amendment was ratified, which probably explains why the amendment was ratified.

Does this mean that we would think it is fundamentally wrong to admit a state when that admission would benefit only one party?  I would say no.  If there were five such states at once, though, that would raise legitimate concerns of “state-packing.”  We got close to this during Reconstruction.  The GOP tried to admit at least two states over President Johnson’s vetoes because they knew they would be represented by Republicans in the Senate, but they only managed to admit one (Nebraska).  Indeed, there was even talk of doing this during Johnson’s impeachment trial, as that could have changed the verdict.

More examples of a hypothetical vein tomorrow.

 

  April 26, 2013 at 2:40 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   10 Comments

Ralph Lauren’s Deal with SEC and DOJ

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Ralph Lauren Corp.’s mid-level executives discovered that a few line employees in Argentina had bribed local officials. That enabled importing of the company’s clothing products without the necessary paperwork or inspection.  The bribes, paid from 2005 to 2009, ran to $593,000.

Bribing foreign officials is a US federal crime, whether or not the action is a crime under foreign law.  A routine internal corporate review of controls and compliance programs by Lauren managers uncovered the employee actions.  The corporate response was swift, a textbook exercise in corporate crisis management.

A prompt investigation was conducted, involving translation and examination of documents and interviews of witnesses.  It resulted in dismissal of several employees and recommendations for internal governance reforms that included new reporting protocols and training programs.

Within two weeks of the discovery, Lauren provided the resulting full report  to US federal authorities, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice, accompanied by the documentary record.  (The company then went further: terminating operations in Argentina and conducting a worldwide review of compliance and training programs.)

Read the rest of this post »

  April 26, 2013 at 8:18 am   Posted in: Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   No Comments

Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I came across an interesting bit of trivia yesterday that I wanted to share.  Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment states:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress . . . who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or an as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” [By a two-thirds vote, Congress may remove the disability.]

Now this provision was obviously directed against ex-Confederate officials.  In 1919, though, the House of Representatives invoked Section Three to exclude Victor L. Berger, who was elected from Wisconsin as a Socialist.  Berger was excluded because he opposed our involvement in World War I, was German, and was convicted under the Espionage Act (though that conviction was reversed by the Supreme Court).  After his exclusion, Berger’s constituents elected him again, and the House excluded him again. He was elected for a third time in 1922 and was finally seated.

It’s worth noting that this means there are really four qualifications for election to Congress.  There’s age, citizenship. residency, and “not being disloyal.”

  April 25, 2013 at 9:39 am   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   7 Comments

Disaster Compensation Funds

posted by Gerard Magliocca

Authorities in Boston have set up a fund (supported by voluntary donations) to compensate the victims of the bombing last week.  Ken Feinberg, the man who administered the 9/11 Fund and the BP Disaster Fund among others, has been called in to help with this one too.

We need more scholarship and regulation of this trend in tort compensation.  While there are advantages in setting each of these funds up as an ad-hoc arrangement and using the expertise of a single individual, drawing up a model statute for states to enact that would create a basic framework for these funds when they are necessary would be better over the long run.

  April 24, 2013 at 5:05 pm   Posted in: Tort Law, Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   One Comment

Excerpt of “American Founding Son”

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I am pleased to post this excerpt of the book, which consists of the Introduction and Chapter One.  It’s about 10 pages of text.  The book can be pre-ordered from NYU Press here.  The Amazon link should be up soon.

  April 23, 2013 at 3:13 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   3 Comments

Summer Law Review Submissions

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I’m trying to compile a list of law reviews that will accept submissions during the summer.  (I’m the Associate Dean for Research at my school.)  If anyone can point me to a source or if law review editors want to contact me directly, I’d be much obliged.

  April 22, 2013 at 4:28 pm   Posted in: Law School, Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   No Comments

Robots Take Over University of Washington School of Law

posted by Ryan Calo

I recently returned from a two-day conference at Stanford Law School on robotics and the law to find that robots had, in my absence, taken over my own law school.  Setting aside my thirty-student (15 law, 15 engineering) robotics and the law seminar, my colleague Lea Vaughn is using a telepresence company as the quarter-long case study in her employment law class.  Bill Covington’s tech policy clinic has a dozen students working on driverless car and drone legislation.  Our entrepreneurial law clinic is helping a robotics start up think about product liability.  And our law review is hosting a symposium on law and artificial intelligence in March 2014 (including a contribution by Concurring Opinions’ own Frank Pasquale and Danielle Citron).  It is increasingly clear to me that I will have to buy this t-shirt.

  April 19, 2013 at 5:49 pm  Tags: Robotics  Posted in: Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   No Comments

Judging Contested Elections

posted by Gerard Magliocca

This is tangential to my last couple of posts, but I want to make an observation about the way that congressional election disputes are resolved.  The Constitution gives each House of Congress the power to “be the judge of its elections, returns, and qualifications of its own members.”  Well into the twentieth century, disputed House or Senate elections were resolved by Congress.  That has not happened, though, in the last thirty years.  (The last case came from a House race in Indiana.)  Since then, every contested election for Congress was decided by state courts under state law.

There are two interesting facets of this.  The first is that this constitutes an extraordinary delegation of authority.  Indeed, this could be the only example of a congressional power being delegated completely (and without any guiding principle) to the states.  Second, the decision to do this may be based on the idea that Congress cannot fairly judge such issues.  Why?  Because it would just be done on a party-line vote.

  April 19, 2013 at 3:15 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   3 Comments

Internet Governance: When Domestic Public Law Is No More than Bluster

posted by Olivier Sylvain

A couple weeks ago, in a post on the latest Internet dust-up du jour, I observed that Internet governance, such as it is, continues to be going through growing pains. Activity on the Hill yesterday on HR 1580 as well as my general, inexpert interest brings me back to the topic.

Yesterday, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce agreed to language addressed to nothing less than “Internet freedom.” After some wrangling between Democrats and Republicans over language, the bill to which Committee members unanimously agreed asserts that it is the policy of the U.S. “to preserve and advance the successful multistakeholder model that governs the Internet.” As innocuous as the language seems, the words chosen represent a compromise. Democrats disapproved of an earlier version of the bill that stated the official policy of the U.S. to be the promotion of “a global Internet free from government control.” Such broadly worded language, Democrats and others worried, invited challenges to all manner of government regulation, including FCC enforcement of “open Internet” rules. The agreed-to language accommodates the interest in diluting governmental control in Internet governance, while also furthering the cooperative, consensus-building model that seems to have functioned relatively well for the past decade and a half. In the end, that the Committee members from both parties could come to some agreement is, these days, short of a miracle. It remains to be seen whether both chambers are feeling agreeable.

HR 1580  is partly a response to recent efforts by some governments, including China and Saudi Arabia, to limit the policymaking authority of ICANN, the main transnational multistakeholder organization responsible for administering the Internet’s domain name system. These critics argue that, among other things, domestic intellectual property law and national security considerations ought to play a greater role. (For what it’s worth, the U.S. Commerce Department has expressed concerns about the difficulty for trademark owners to file timely defensive applications if anyone can apply for a top level domain name.)

Today, these governments manifest their concerns only through an advisory council within ICANN. For a decade now, these countries and others have unsuccessfully sought greater official state participation in global Internet policymaking, beyond the powers they already have under international treaties and through the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an agency of the United Nations, in the global Internet and telecommunications governance regime. Their critique today is not directed solely at the substance of the policies promulgated by ICANN, but also to that organization’s constitutional legitimacy and policymaking processes.

As with others, I am suspicious of some of these governments’ intentions, particularly as I have a hard time understanding what it is they plan on advocating at the level of global Internet policymaking, but also because these very countries in particular are notorious for cracking down on domestic Internet users and dissidents.

Yet, at the same time, I also have doubts about the purpose and relative efficacy of the House’s recent effort. HR 1580 is hot bluster, as the language itself will have very little legal effect, other than occupy space in the congressional record. Just consider the statement released by Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton in which he asserts that the vote was “an important step in showing our nation’s resolve and it will send an important signal to the international community.”

Read the rest of this post »

  April 18, 2013 at 3:25 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   One Comment

The Anti-Partisan Principle and Slavery

posted by Gerard Magliocca

Another set of examples that illustrates what I’m calling the anti-partisan principle (or norm) comes from the slavery era.  While we think of partisanship in terms of party, in that era the fundamental division in society was between slave states and free states.  The Constitution made some efforts to preserve a balance of power between those factions, most notably in the Fugitive Slave Clause, the Direct Tax Clause, which made it difficult for Congress to tax slaves, and the Importation Clause, which guaranteed the right to import slaves for a minimum of twenty years.

This structural design was extended in a series of measures adopted during the ante-bellum period.  The Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850 each consisted of a series of laws that were enacted as a package to maintain the slavery/freedom balance.  One component of these deals was that the number of free and slave states should be equal.  That equilibrium lasted from the 1810s until 1850.  When California was admitted in 1850, a further arrangement was made that one of its senators would support slavery and one would oppose it, which, if you think about it, was a pretty significant limit on state sovereignty.

The Civil War resulted from the breakdown of this fundamental principle that the slave and free factions must be balanced.  Lincoln famously said that the Union could not remain half free and half slave. Dred Scott declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional.  And Minnesota was admitted in 1858 as a free state while Kansas was not admitted as a slave state.  The violation of the anti-partisan norm triggered the South’s secession.  Consider the following question.  Why did the South secede in 1860-61?  They could block any constitutional amendment on slavery.  Lincoln pledged in his First Inaugural that he would not touch slavery in the states where it already existed.  These guarantees, though, were not good enough because he no longer would guarantee that slavery interests would be given equal weight within the Federal Government.  So they left.

The difference between political partisanship and slavery is that the Framers were unfamiliar with the former but familiar with the latter.  That is why you could find explicit efforts to balance the factions in one but not the other.

Tomorrow I’ll move on to another set of examples that postdate

 

  April 18, 2013 at 1:16 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   One Comment

Reflections on Today’s Tragedy

posted by Aaron Zelinsky

I imagine that I may not be the only one in legal academia who feels frustrated and a bit adrift today. Here’s what I plan on saying to my Civil Procedure class in several minutes after observing a moment of silence. — Aaron

In moments like this, it often feels that the process we’re engaged in – the study of law – is a waste of time. After all, one of our country’s greatest cities has come under attack. Over 100 people are injured. SWAT teams are deployed up and down the Eastern Seaboard. And we’re about to spend the next 1.5 hours discussing issue preclusion and res judicata.

But I like to think that what we’re doing here is worthwhile. Because while we don’t know who attacked us today, we do know what separates us from them: a belief in human rights and the rule of law.

And even in civil procedure, these values shine through. In fact, some might say especially in civil procedure, where we consistently grapple with values like due process and individual rights.

When the President said earlier tonight that those who carried out this attack would be held “accountable” and would feel the “full weight of justice,” he was invoking the central ideals of our country and our legal system. And those ideals are reflected in what we are studying here.

Because while Rule 1 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure states that it applies only to “civil actions,” it’s actually a bit wrong. Rule 1 tells us that the law that follows must be “construed and administered to secure the just [and] speedy . . . determination of every action and proceeding.” But this is true of so much more than just civil procedure. We’re talking about more than contract disputes or slip-and-falls.

Rule 1’s exhortation is about how to construe law generally — to reflect our fundamental values — and tells us a little bit about ourselves as a people and a nation. We are committed to a “just and speedy” determination of “every action and proceeding” – in that order. “Just and speedy.” And as in our nation, so in civil procedure: we don’t always get it right, but we always try to meet our noblest ideals.

So tonight, I hope we play some small part in what makes our country so special — as we do our tiny bit in moving forward the “full weight of Justice.”

  April 15, 2013 at 8:14 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   26 Comments

Papers of the Justices

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I want to draw your attention the following article by Kathryn Watts on “Judges and Their Papers.”  It’s fair to say that I’m biased as a historian in thinking that researchers should have broad access to legal materials, but . . .

Here’s the Abstract:

Who should own a federal judge’s papers? This question has rarely been asked. Instead, it has generally been accepted that the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal judges own their own working papers, which include papers created by judges relating to their official duties, such as internal draft opinions, confidential vote sheets, and case-related correspondence. This longstanding tradition of private ownership has led to tremendous inconsistency. For example, Justice Thurgood Marshall’s papers were released just two years after he left the bench, revealing behind-the-scenes details about major cases involving issues like abortion and flag burning. In contrast, Justice David Souter’s papers will remain closed until the 50th anniversary of his retirement, and substantial portions of Justice Byron White’s papers, including files relating to the landmark case of Miranda v. Arizona, were shredded. In addition, many collections of lower federal court judges’ papers have been scattered in the hands of judges’ families. Notably, this private ownership model has persisted despite the fact that our country’s treatment of presidential records shifted from private to public ownership through the Presidential Records Act of 1978. Furthermore, private ownership of judicial papers has endured even though it has proven ill-equipped to balance the many competing interests at stake, ranging from calls for governmental accountability and transparency on the one hand to the judiciary’s independence, confidentiality and collegiality on the other.

This Article is the first to give significant attention to the question of who should own federal judges’ working papers and what should happen to the papers once a judge leaves the bench. Upon the 35th anniversary of the enactment of the Presidential Records Act, this Article argues that judges’ working papers should be treated as governmental property — just as presidential papers are. Although there are important differences between the roles of President and judge, none of the differences suggest that judicial papers should be treated as a species of private property. Rather, the unique position of federal judges, including the judiciary’s independence, should be taken into account when crafting rules that speak to reasonable access to and disposition of judicial papers — not when answering the threshold question of ownership. Ultimately, this Article — giving renewed attention to a long forgotten 1977 governmental study commissioned by Congress — argues that Congress should declare judicial papers public property and should empower the judiciary to promulgate rules implementing the shift to public ownership. These would include, for example, rules governing the timing of public release of judicial papers. By involving the judiciary in implementing the shift to public ownership, Congress would enhance the likelihood of judicial cooperation, mitigate separation of powers concerns, and enable the judiciary to safeguard judicial independence, collegiality and confidentiality.

  April 14, 2013 at 9:38 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   10 Comments

“Brain Spyware”

posted by Ryan Calo

As if we don’t have enough to worry about, now there’s spyware for your brain.  Or, there could be.  Researchers at Oxford, Geneva, and Berkeley have created a proof of concept for using commercially available brain-computer interfaces to discover private facts about today’s gamers. Read the rest of this post »

  April 14, 2013 at 12:57 am   Posted in: Bioethics, Civil Rights, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (ID Theft), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (Medical), Technology, Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   One Comment

The Anti-Partisan Principle

posted by Gerard Magliocca

Yesterday I said that I would do a set of posts on unwritten constitutional norms.  (I won’t say “unwritten unwritten,” as that went over like sour milk.)  One of my observations was that the Court-packing crisis of 1937 should be understood as holding that fundamental structural change may not be undertaken in a knowingly partisan way.  In other words, the problem is not whether Congress expands the size of the Supreme Court.  The problem is doing that in a way that is intended to benefit a particular faction.

This anti-partisan principle connects many of the other powerful precedents set by the political branches.  Consider some examples:

1.  Justices may not be impeached and removed due to mere political or ideological disagreements.  (The failed impeachment of Samuel Chase).

2.  The President may not be impeached and removed due to mere political or ideological disagreements.  (The failed impeachment of Andrew Johnson, though this only works as I’ve framed it if that removal would turn the White House over to a different faction, which was true in 1868.)

3.  The antebellum rule that a state could not be admitted if that would upset the balance between free and slave states. (1820-1861)

4.  The admission of Hawaii (a Democratic state) and Alaska (a Republican state) as a pair in 1959.  (This also, BTW, probably explains why the constitutional amendment proposed by Congress to give DC congressional representation was not ratified by the states in the 1970s.  Everybody knew that would mean two more Democratic Senators for decades.)

5.  The way in which the size of the House of Representatives was adjusted from 1789 until 1929 (when the number was basically fixed at 435).   (I’ll explain that more later.)

None of these are judicially enforceable, of course.  A more difficult question is whether, as I’ve previously suggested, this could also explain why the Chief Justice refrained from striking down the individual mandate.

Anyway, no more posts until Monday.  The Masters is on, you know.

  April 11, 2013 at 9:04 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   3 Comments

In Praise of the Telephone

posted by Aaron Zelinsky

Alexander Graham Bell, receiving an early call about a prospective intern

Law school reform discussions tend to focus on two mantras: first, “it’s the debt, [stupid]” – high debt loads preclude certain jobs and create long-term problems for many who don’t land the most lucrative positions. Second, “if you build it, the firms will come” – more practice-ready JDs will mean more jobs. Rather than rehash this debate, I’d like to explore an oft-overlooked and underused tool we all have to help our students find employment:

The telephone.

There is a generational divide over telephone etiquette. To paint with an overbroad brush, many professors over fifty prefer not to “cold call” – that is, reach out to individuals whom they don’t already know. More younger faculty feel comfortable picking up the phone and calling a potential employer (summer, internship, externship, or post-graduate) to talk up their student, even if they have no preexisting relationship with the individual on the other end of the line.

Cold calling is the right thing to do.

Simply put, I’ve never heard of someone being turned down for a job because a professor called to support them. Of course, a call to someone you know is better than one to someone you don’t, but a cold call is better than no call at all. And professors do need to keep some of their powder dry – no one wants a reputation for being overly exuberant about any person who has ever darkened your office door – but my feeling is that, regardless of age, we don’t call enough.

Sterling recommendations letters aren’t the end of our work. Telephone calls,  even those that go unreturned, convey a personal interest from the professor and may help the student get out of the massive “applications” pile into the “seriously consider” group. And a call is different from an email; phoning sends a stronger signal and is viewed more seriously by potential employers. Spending a few more minutes making cold calls won’t solve the larger problems facing legal education, but might just help individual students get jobs.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

  April 11, 2013 at 11:44 am   Posted in: Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   9 Comments

The Yale Law Journal Online: Implementing Aggregation in Law

posted by Yale Law Journal

The Yale Law Journal Online has just published Implementing Aggregation in Law: The Median Outcome Rule, an essay by Alon Cohen. Cohen argues that

[i]n multiple-claim lawsuits, courts tend to address each claim separately, thereby disregarding valuable information about the defendant’s misconduct that might be gained by considering claims together. Ignoring that information may lead to the misalignment of liability with wrongdoing. To avoid such distortion, Ariel Porat and Eric Posner have argued in The Yale Law Journal that courts should adjudicate multiple-claim lawsuits in the aggregate. They do not specify the method to implement this novel idea, however, leaving it susceptible to several complications that might undermine its merits. To deal with these potential complications, this Essay introduces the concept of the “median outcome rule.”

Preferred citation:

Alon Cohen, Implementing Aggregation in Law: The Median Outcome Rule, 122 YALE L.J. ONLINE 359 (2013), http://yalelawjournal.org/2013/04/09/cohen.html.

  April 10, 2013 at 12:27 am   Posted in: Law Rev (Yale), Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   No Comments

The Twenty-Third Amendment

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I was reading the Constitution the other day (’cause that’s what people like me do in their spare time), and I paused over something in the Twenty-Third Amendment that I had not thought about.  The Amendment gave the District of Columbia the right to vote in presidential elections, but the text specifically says that the District shall not be entitled to more electoral votes “than the least populous state.”  So even though Washington DC has more people than Vermont or Wyoming, the District cannot get more electoral votes than they do.

In practice, I do not think that this has mattered since the 23rd Amendment was ratified.  In other words, the District has not been entitled under the standard calculation to anything other than three electoral votes over the past fifty years (1964 was the first presidential election in which DC voted).  That could change at some point, though, and I wonder why this provision was included.  Just to make it clear that the District is second-class?  You would think that denying Washington DC its own Senators and Representative would make that plain enough.

  April 9, 2013 at 10:29 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   One Comment

Bones and Genes: Fortune’s Bones Redux

posted by Taunya Banks

As a follow up to my post last week asking about human dignity, unburied bones and ownership of human cells, here are two related issues that appeared in the Sunday news.

The first item from Sunday’s Baltimore Sun is the belated report of a Reuters story about the controversy over disposition of King Richard III’s newly discovered remains uncovered in a municipal parking lot by the University of Leicester.  The long-lost remains of the King, who died in 1485, were exhumed, and the University was given permission to re-inter the remains in Leicester. But the King’s descendants objected claiming that they were not “consulted … over the exhumation and the license allowing the university to re-bury the King, and [that] this failure breached the European Convention on Human Rights.” They want the body buried in York.

The second item is an op-ed by two medical school academics, Jeffrey Rosenfeld and Christopher E. Mason, that appeared in Sunday’s Washington Post about Association for Molecular Pathology et al v. Myriad Genetics, et al, a case that will be argued in the Supreme Court on April 15th. This is important case that has been mentioned on this blog as recently as last February.  SCOTUS even featured a symposium spurred by the controversy. At issue is whether, on some level, human genes are patentable. Rosenfeld and Mason oppose patenting DNA.  On the other hand, much like the researchers discussing the HeLa cell, the respondents, Myriad Genetics, et al, argue that the issue is much narrower, namely whether the “human” aspect of the specific sequence of isolated human DNA is the result of the efforts of the respondent, and thus patentable. Read the rest of this post »

  April 8, 2013 at 2:53 pm   Posted in: Bioethics, Health Law, Intellectual Property, Privacy, Supreme Court, Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   2 Comments

On Snarkiness: Evgeny Morozov’s To Save Everything Click Here

posted by Olivier Sylvain

The title of Evgeny Morozov’s new book, To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, comes as no surprise to those of us who have read his book reviews, op-eds, and first book. Morozov has cultivated an important position in the grand debate about the place that Internet-based technologies have or, rather, ought to have in our lives today. He has distinguished himself above all as an equal opportunity take-down artist, unafraid to criticize the biggest names in Silicon Valley, punditry, and academia for their overdetermined claims about the meaning of the Internet.

As the title of his recent book suggests, Morozov believes that contemporary “Internet-centric” thinking clouds our judgment and ability to make choices for ourselves.  He argues that the social value of recent technological innovations is far more contingent than the breathless claims of pundits like Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky suggest. Technologists, journalists, scholars, and users, he argues, should treat every new product launch or beta release from Apple or Samsung or Facebook with the same healthy dose of skepticism that they reserve for everything else.

In short, To Save Everything methodically catalogs and then meticulously shoots down the fanfare associated with the marketing, reporting, and scholarship about technological innovation today. This is a formula that has served Morozov well for the past several years, and keeps readers coming back for more. The question is whether the critiques do anything more than temporarily rescue us from the mindless gushing about things like Google Glass, only for us to revert to our old ways after watching another carefully choreographed demonstration. And I’m afraid the answer is: no. Read the rest of this post »

  April 6, 2013 at 12:44 am   Posted in: Uncategorized  Print This Post Print This Post   No Comments


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Authors

Daniel J. Solove
Kaimipono Wenger
Dave Hoffman
Frank Pasquale
Deven Desai
Danielle Citron
Lawrence Cunningham
Sarah Waldeck
Jaya Ramji-Nogales
Solangel Maldonado
Gerard Magliocca

Guests

Kelli A. Alces
Taunya Lovell Banks
Ryan Calo
Claire Hill
Jay Kesten
William McGeveran
Meredith Render
Aaron Saiger
David L. Schwartz
Olivier Sylvain
Charles K. Whitehead
Aaron Zelinsky


















Previous Guests

Michael Abramowicz
Michelle Adams
Robert Ahdieh
Marvin Ammori
Michelle Anderson
Laura Appleman
Derek Bambauer
Taunya Lovell Banks
Ann Bartow
Steven Bellovin
Adam Benforado
Gaia Bernstein
Francesca Bignami
Josh Blackman
Joseph Blocher
Jeremy Blumenthal
Kathleen Boozang
Bruce Boyden
Donald Braman
Khiara Bridges
Al Brophy
Neil H. Buchanan
Bill Burke-White
Scott Burris
Paul Butler
Ryan Calo
Naomi Cahn
Anupam Chander
Miriam Cherry
Jack Chin
Glenn Cohen
Gabriella Coleman
Jennifer Collins
Caroline Mala Corbin
Thomas Crocker
andré douglas pond cummings
Allison Danner
Laura DeNardis
Brannon Denning
Deven Desai
Mike Dimino
Mark Edwards
Maxine Eichner
Jessica Erickson
David Fagundes
Lisa Fairfax
Joshua Fairfield
Christine Haight Farley
Kim Ferzan
Dan Filler
Mary Anne Franks
Susan Freiwald
Michael Froomkin
Amanda Frost
Brian Frye
Timothy Glynn
Rachel Godsil
Eric Goldman
Kyle Graham
David Gray
Craig Green
Tristin Green
Jonathan Hafetz
Vivian E. Hamilton
Meredith Harbach
Michelle Harner
Angela Harris
Jeffrey Harrison
Hosea Harvey
Erica Hashimoto
Jennifer Hendricks
Carissa Hessick
Laura Heymann
Robert Hillman
Gilbert A. Holmes
Nicole Huberfeld
Christine Hurt
Darian Ibrahim
Sherrilyn Ifill
John Ip
Shavar Jeffries
Kevin Johnson
Kristin Johnson
Jeff Jonas
Courtney Joslin
Dan Kahan
Jeffrey Kahn
Brian Kalt
Sam Kamin
Michael Kang
Chimène Keitner
Alicia Kelly
Orin Kerr
Nancy Kim
Heidi Kitrosser
Adam Kolber
Russell Korobkin
Alex Kreit
Anita S. Krishnakumar
Susan Kuo
Greg Lastowka
Sarah Lawsky
Youngjae Lee
Margaret Lewis
Erik Lillquist
Jeff Lipshaw
Jonathan Lipson
Jacqueline Lipton
Matthew Lister
Joseph Liu
Michael Madison
Tayyab Mahmud
Kevin Noble Maillard
Solangel Maldonado
Jason Mazzone
Linda McClain
William McGeveran
Salil Mehra
Carrie Menkel-Meadow
Max Minzner
Viva Moffat
Scott Moss
Eric Muller
Janai Nelson
Jaya Ramji-Nogales
Helen Norton
Elizabeth Nowicki
Paul Ohm
Angela Onwuachi-Willing
David Opderback
David Orentlicher
Michael O'Shea
Kristen Osenga
Mary-Rose Papandrea
Rafael Pardo
Marcy Peek
Eduardo Peñalver
Robert Percival
Michael J. Pitts
Marc Poirier
David Post
Amanda Pustilnik
Shruti Rana
Geoffrey Rapp
William Reynolds
Neil Richards
Lori Ringhand
Alice Ristroph
Marc Roark
Brishen Rogers
Sasha Romanosky
Tuan Samahon
Susan Scafidi
David Schleicher
David Schraub
Paul Secunda
Lea Shaver
Jonathan Siegel
Jessica Silbey
Peter Smith
Judd Sneirson
Adam Steinman
Charles Sullivan
Rick Swedloff
Peter Swire
Olivier Sylvain
Steph Tai
Andrew Taslitz
Robert Tsai
Jenia Turner
Joseph Turow
Steve Vladeck
Ari Waldman
Spencer Weber Waller
Howard Wasserman
Melissa Waters
Elizabeth A. Wilson
Frank Wu
Alfred Yen
Corey Yung
David Zaring
Timothy Zick
Michael Zimmer
Jonathan Zittrain

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