Legal Commentary

New Draft of Punishing Family Status on SSRN

Posted on August 08, 2008
I apologize for the relative dearth of blogging on my part the last few weeks. Between Vancouver and Prawfsfest! and SEALS, there has been surprisingly little time to start and/or finish a few articles and a book, and throw in some blogging. Though I have some thoughts and reactions I want to share on a host of topics in the near future, I'll use this post for familiar purposes :-) Happily, Ethan, Jennifer Collins and I have just uploaded to SSRN a new draft of our piece, Punishing Family Status...

Dinner and a Movie: How Terrorist Groups Come to an End

Posted on August 08, 2008
I've been a fan of TBS's Dinner and a Movie for quite a while and I think academia can serve up the same sort of interesting pairings. If the recently issued Rand report How Terrorist Groups End is the main course, then the Battle of Algiers is the movie...

Capturing the Paskowitzes

Posted on August 08, 2008
The other night I saw the movie, Surfwise. The documentary follows Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz on his life journey, starting with his penchant for laying tefillin and naked calisthenics. The movie focuses on the period where he puts his Stanford Med degree behind him, and instead travels with his wife and 9 children in a 24 foot camper to surf full time...

Public Agencies and High Stakes ($7 Billion) Investor Compensation

Posted on August 07, 2008
The New York Times reports today that Citigroup is on the brink of settling claims that it misled clients about investments in auction-rate securities. According to the Times, the settlement is with state and federal regulators and includes a buy-back of more than $7 billion of these securities from individual investors...

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Law review submission strategery

Posted on August 07, 2008
Publishing, I've found so far, is, if not exactly like a box of chocolates, kinda like a bag of gummi bears. Getting published in any journal is pretty good, but mmm, those red ones are tasty. Also, if you put them in water overnight, they get really huge and gross...

On Boycotts: Individuals, Groups, and Specialized Groups

Posted on August 07, 2008
I had hoped for more light than heat given the large number of legal bloggers writing about the proposed boycott of the AALS meeting. (For the links, see here and here.) I'm not sure I got it. I certainly appreciated my co-blogger Rick's questions, and there were a few good posts here and there, plus Brian's tongue-in-cheek view that any reason to boycott the AALS annual meeting is a good one...

On Subjectivity, Tax, and other Icky Things

Posted on August 07, 2008
This post started as a comment on Sarah Lawsky's post over at Concurring Opinions, but then it got too long, so now it's here. A brief recap: Sarah thinks it's interesting that no one really likes oatmeal raisin cookies. Also, she's written a cool paper about what it means when tax lawyers make statements of probability, such as the statement they must make (under IRS regs...

Randy Newman and the Conservative Justices

Posted on August 06, 2008
Here's a fun one. Randy Newman has a new album CD called Harps and Angels, containing a track called A Few Words in Defense of Our Country. He talked about the song in an NPR interview today, explaining that the song means that, no matter how rough things are now, our public officials still are better than those in power in Rome or during the Spanish Inquisition...

Thoughts on the Scrabulous Lawsuit, Part IV: A Theory of Copyright and Games

Posted on August 06, 2008
This is Part IV of my 3-part series on Hasbro's suit against the creators of Scrabulous. See Part I ("The Complaint"), Part II ("The Mystery of Alfred Mosher Butts"), and Part III ("The Question of the Copyrightability of Games"). In my last post, I asked what the purpose of the traditional blackletter rule that "games are not copyrightable" is...

Finnis on Endorsing Religious Discrimination

Posted on August 06, 2008
John Finnis has written a short, strange essay defending the charming position that Western countries should exclude and expel Muslim immigrants through a ?humane? combination of incentives and compensation (I assume for forced removal). There are at least four strange things about Finnis?s defense...

Exercise in a Pill

Posted on August 06, 2008
It's a pleasure to be back for another guest stint at Prawfs. I bring to your attention an article in last week's NYT. It describes recently published research on drugs that seem to mimic or augment the beneficial effects of exercise with little or no actual exercise required: Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego reported that they had found two drugs that did wonders for the athletic endurance of couch potato mice...

Questions on Paper Assignments

Posted on August 05, 2008
I?m teaching an advanced criminal procedure course this Spring. This course is not subject to our school?s usual grading curve, so I?m planning to require an academic paper instead of giving an exam. I haven?t assigned an academic paper in a course previously, but I believe I have seen other professors set schedules in paper courses, where students must propose paper topics and submit drafts before the final paper is due at the end of the semester...

Thoughts on the Scrabulous Lawsuit, Part III: The Question of the Copyrightability of Games

Posted on August 05, 2008
In Part I of this series, "The Complaint," I considered Hasbro's complaint in its suit against the creators of Scrabulous, with a particular focus on the copyright claim. In Part II, "The Mystery of Alfred Mosher Butts," I discussed a potential historical problem with that claim, namely that it is not clear that the board was published by Butts, the original author, with the required copyright notice, which would invalidate the copyright in at least the game board (Hasbro's strongest claim)...

Boycott at AALS?

Posted on August 05, 2008
I'm vacationing in British Columbia (beautiful!) and was, for much of the last week, camping and climbing on Mt. Rainier (I am disappointed to say that I failed to summit this year), so I've been for a while under the closest thing one can get these days to a news blackout...

"I'm bored."

Posted on August 05, 2008
Whenever I have heard these words from my older daughter, I dutifully have responded by trying to motivate her to find productive ways not to be bored. Apparently, though, I instead could respond, "That's OK, sweetheart, it's just your internal SPAM filter kicking in...

Auctioning Airport Access

Posted on August 05, 2008
Anyone who has flown into a New York airport knows that getting stuck in a traffic jam is not just a problem for ground transportation. Moreover, the ripple effects of New York delays make them a national concern. In response, the Department of Transportation has proposed auctioning slots for landing and take-off at some of the country's busiest airports, as a recent New York Times article reports...

Two Conceptions of Proportionality

Posted on August 05, 2008
George Fletcher and Jens David Ohlin have co-authored a new book arguing that the international law regulating the use of force by states should be informed by domestic criminal law regulating the use of force by individuals. Their central argument is that the U...

A Patent Lie

Posted on August 05, 2008
Paul Goldstein is a distinguished intellectual property scholar and author of both Copyright?s Highway, perhaps the best layman?s introduction to copyright law there is, and Goldstein on Copyright, one of the essential treatises for copyright experts...

More against the Judge-Umpire Analogy

Posted on August 05, 2008
Some recent discussion of the analogies between judges and umpires (or other sports officials) over the past few days at the Volokh Conspiracy (here, here, here, and here) and Erike Lilliquist at CoOp (here). Ilya Somin calls the analogy "a good shorthand way of emphasizing the judge's duty to set aside his policy preferences and be impartial between litigants...

Why tax entities?

Posted on August 04, 2008
Over at Conglomerate this week, they're discussing Heather Field's fine and ambitious new paper, "Checking in on Check the Box." One of the many tough questions Heather takes on is whether there should be a separate layer of tax for entities -- that is, whether we should tax corporations at all...

Laws of War and Norm Entrepreneurs

Posted on August 04, 2008
Hello out there and thanks to my colleague Dan for inviting me for another guest stint on Prawfs Blawg. This past Thursday, Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Couch, a prosecutor at the Office of Military Commissions, was kind enough to speak at FSU Law School as part of a Human Rights and National Security Series hosted by the FSU Center for the Advancement of Human Rights...

Happy to be Back ...

Posted on August 04, 2008
For another stint of guest-blogging at PrawfsBlawg, having just returned from a long weekend in Seattle, where we visited the the Olympic Sculpture Park for the first time. It's a really wonderful combination of outdoor art display, urban park, and beach, all within walking distance of fun areas of Seattle...

Thoughts on the Scrabulous Lawsuit, Part II: The Mystery of Alfred Mosher Butts

Posted on August 04, 2008
In Part I of this series, I reviewed the Hasbro complaint against RJ Softwares and the Agarwalla brothers, the creators of Scrabulous, and noted that the strongest copyright claim appears to be for infringement of Scrabble's copyrighted game board. Indeed, given the Boisson v...

Lineuppers vs. Sidezoomers

Posted on August 04, 2008
I quite enjoyed this little article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine on the age-old debate: when entering an exit lane on the freeway, are you a polite but angrily norm-enforcing "lineupper," or one of those damned "sidezoomers" who takes advantage of the empty line to cut in at the last minute? I could have done without the extremely annoying writing style, which takes far too much advantage of the vertical pronoun, but the subject itself is terrific...

More on Critical Mass and the Role of Video

Posted on August 04, 2008
The videotaped assault at last month's Critical Mass ride by a rookie NYPD officer against a rider has become a singularly perfect illustration of the many effects of video evidence, good and bad, on civil-rights enforcement that I analyze in my hopefully-soon-to-be-submitted paper...

Corporate charter competition through the mirror

Posted on August 03, 2008
Why don't non-profit firms reincorporate in other states? We know, of course, that states compete to offer the most enticing set of corporate law rules (along with fees for incorporating) to for-profit firms, who can "charter" in any state. There's a long-standing debate about what drives the competition -- is it market pressure for efficient rules, producing a "race to the top" for the best state laws, or something else, such as self-serving managers? I tend to agree with Bebchuk and others that the second story makes more sense, given available evidence...

More on Duke Lacrosse at SEALS: Updated and Moved to Top

Posted on August 01, 2008
Updated and moved to top: Audio file is here. Download DukePanel0730.mp3 We held the panel on the Duke lacrosse controversy yesterday at SEALS. I thought it went very well, an excellent, vibrant discussion. We managed to hit almost all the points and issues I wanted to hit, although not necessarily in any expected order; in fact, we got knocked out of expected order after the first answer...

Hola

Posted on August 01, 2008
Greetings again to the Prawfs audience, this time from amidst a pile of cardboard boxes in our nation's capital. Of the two or three readers who remember my first stint, one or two may recall that Dan urged me not to blog about tax, notwithstanding the indisputable success of other tax bloggers (scroll down to "best post ever")...

Markets for Space in Law School Classes

Posted on August 01, 2008
Apparently NYU law students have developed an informal market for space in law school classes. As reported in a recent New York Post story, some students have posted offers of cash and other goods in return for class spots. According to new NYU registration guidelines, the practice of "ad hoc add-drop" with no waiting list forced law students to "troll for open spots or arrange late-night trades with friends...

Thoughts on the Scrabulous Lawsuit, Part I: The Complaint

Posted on August 01, 2008
So Hasbro finally pulled the trigger on the Scrabulous lawsuit that, no doubt, their lawyers (Patterson Belknap) have been working on for months. The New York Times Bits Blog has coverage, Mike Madison has an interesting high-level view, and IPTAblog has the complaint...

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