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On Questioning Automation
Get PDFGiven the rapid pace of innovation and adoption, it can be hard to make sense of automated technologies. New products that leverage algorithms and artificial intelligence seem to be both promising and frightening. Law and policymakers, as well as the general public, are grappling with when to be excited and when to be concerned. If you\u27re confused, you\u27re not alon
Social Enterprise Law: Trust, Public Benefit and Capital Markets
No full textSocial enterprises represent a new kind of venture, dedicated to pursuing profits for owners and benefits for society. Social Enterprise Law provides tools that will allow them to raise the capital they need to flourish.Social Enterprise Law weaves innovation in contract and corporate governance into powerful protections against insiders sacrificing goals such as environmental sustainability in the pursuit of short-term profits. Creating a stable balance between financial returns and public benefits will allow social entrepreneurs to team up with impact investors that share their vision of a double bottom line. Brakman Reiser and Dean show how novel legal technologies can allow social enterprises to access capital markets, including unconventional sources such as crowdfunding. With its straightforward insights into complex areas of the law, the book shows how a social mission can even be shielded from the turbulence of an acquisition or bankruptcy. It also shows why, as the metrics available to measure the impact of social missions on individuals and communities become more sophisticated, such legal innovations will continue to become more robust.By providing a comprehensive survey of the U.S. laws and a bold vision for how legal institutions across the globe could be reformed, this book offers new insights and approaches to help social enterprises raise the capital they need to flourish. It offers a rich guide for students, entrepreneurs, investors, and practitioners.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1350/thumbnail.jp
The Future of Law as a Profession
No full textFor far too many years, lawyers and commentators have debated whether law is a profession or merely a business. The so-called business-profession dichotomy is somewhat of a misnomer. For many, maybe most lawyers, law is clearly a business in the sense that these lawyers seek to maximize their individual wealth as much (or as little) as other business persons. More importantly perhaps, lawyers in private practice widely acknowledge that adopting improved business practices is critical to providing competent legal services. The question remains however, whether, unlike some other commercial occupations, law is also a profession and if so, what is the future for the professional aspects of legal practice in the United States and elsewhere
Review of Punishment in Popular Culture by Charles Ogletree Jr. & Austin Sarat, eds.
Get PDFThe editors of Punishment in Popular Culture remind us that through practices of punishment ... cultural boundaries are drawn, that solidarity is created through acts of marking difference between self and other, that these processes proceed through disidentification as much as imagined connection. (p. 2) This is no doubt true about the organization, justification and reception of various forms of punishment in society. It is no less true about the creation and cultivation of popular cultural forms of entertainment such as television and film. To be sure, punishment acts directly on bodies. And cultural forms-visual or texual stories about punishment or justice-act on bodies less directly. But both act on us, constituting individuals and communities as subjects, shaping our expectations and desires, implicating us in the moral points made. Narratives do not stand outside social authority - they are part of it. (Binder and Weisberg 2000: 23
The Lawyering Lab: 1L Curriculum Reform, Building Consensus for Experiential Education, and Faculty Integration
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Big corporations are trying to silence their own shareholders
No full textCorporate lobbyists at the Business Roundtable — led by JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon — are heralding an effort to sharply limit the ability of investors to have a say in their companies through shareholder proposals. If successful, it will reduce stockholders’ ability to shape the companies they own and hold corporate managers accountable. As with political voting rights, these corporate voter-suppression efforts demonstrate that even the most basic rights need constant vigilance to protect them
Payroll Tax & the Blockchain
Get PDFBitcoin is an application that runs on blockchain technology. Blockchain is a foundational technology that is bringing in the second era of the Internet – the era where value can be transferred, rather than just information.
Blockchain is developing along a four-stage path similar to that which TCP/IP took. Both are foundational technologies. TCP/IP brought the Internet, and eventually brought significant (transformational) technological changes in business like Amazon.com and Skype. These are changes that could not have been forecast at the beginning of the Internet age.
Blockchain is an immutable distributed ledger. It replaces the inefficient use of multiple centralized ledgers. It will support smart contracts that automatically make payments, adjust accounts, and coordinate records among multiple organizations.
A payroll application on blockchain’s distributed ledger will allow employees to be paid, and all related deductions and deposits to be made in real-time. It will allow multiple government agencies to immediately have audit-level access to all employee records, and all employer matching-payments. With a fiat crypto-currency a payroll application on the blockchain will allow immediate global payroll compliance at a fraction of the cost of current payroll compliance.
Based on the trajectory of ITP/IP’s development it is reasonable to assume that a payroll application will be seen on a blockchain (most likely Quorum, a private/permissioned blockchain based on the Ethereum platform) by 2018-2021. The first one will be constructed either by a government (Finland or Estonia) or by a private company (in the USA). Costs will be so low that the industry will consolidate (picture the arrival of Amazon.com among the group of brick and mortar books stores that preceded it in the late 1990’s).
A traditional payroll service provider today needs to prepare for this change by developing a pilot program internally that will educate its workforce to the advantages and operational intricacies of a service based in the blockchain
Co-Belligerency
Get PDFExecutive branch officials rest the President’s authority in today’s war against ISIS, al Qaeda, and other terrorist groups on an expansive interpretation of a 15-year-old statute, the 2001 “Authorization for Use of Military Force” (AUMF), passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. They rely on that statute to justify force against groups neither referenced in – nor even in existence at the time of – the 2001 statute, by invoking a creative theory of international law they call “co-belligerency.” Under this theory, the President can read his AUMF authority flexibly, to justify force against not only those groups covered by the statute, but also new groups that “join the fight.”In relying on “co-belligerency,” executive branch officials maintain that the President’s authority is bound by a clearly constraining rule with an established legal pedigree, but the co-belligerency theory does not in fact deliver on either. Instead, the Executive’s position is fluid, evolving, internally contested, and – contrary to the assurance that it has a firm foundation in international law – rests on shaky doctrinal grounds. In fact, the record suggests that executive branch officials are not even unified themselves on what the concept means or where it comes from. And yet the existence of this contested idea nevertheless acts as some impediment if not a barrier to executive action. It is, in effect, a grey-ish legal space, dangerously close to what David Dyzenhaus has called a “legal grey hole,” a mere “façade” of legal constraint. This article presents a story of a creative idea that became entrenched law, but in the process lost much of its shape. The result has been neither a clear limit on Presidential power, nor an executive branch run completely amok, but rather an amorphously-defined pool of discretionary authority for the President that few if any fully understand
Regulating Patent Assertions
Get PDFRecent years have seen a proliferation of statutes regulating and lawsuits challenging patent enforcement conduct. The Federal Circuit, however, has held that acts of patent enforcement are illegal only if there is clear and convincing evidence both that the patent holder’s infringement allegations were objectively baseless and that the patent holder knew or should have known its allegations were baseless. This chapter summarizes recent efforts by state governments and the federal government to control patent enforcement behavior, questions the broad immunity the Federal Circuit has conferred on patent holders, and seeks to improve pending federal legislation governing patent enforcement. In the past three years, the Supreme Court has twice overturned Federal Circuit case law embracing objective/subjective tests similar to the court’s immunity rule. A more flexible standard, focused on the patent holder’s good faith or bad faith, would not only accommodate the Supreme Court’s disdain for rigid rules in patent law, it would accord with a century of well-reasoned regional circuit and district court case law that the Federal Circuit has ignored. More importantly, a good-faith standard would allow courts to condemn the questionable tactics lately deployed by so-called bottom feeder patent trolls while still respecting patent holders’ rights to make legitimate allegations of infringement.
Although pending federal legislation to regulate patent assertions would rely heavily on the Federal Trade Commission for implementation, this chapter sketches a regulatory model that emphasizes the comparative advantages of both state governments and the federal government. The federal government’s strengths include Congress’s ability to provide a uniform legal standard governing patent assertions and to clarify questions of personal and subject matter jurisdiction that arise in cases challenging patent enforcement conduct. By contrast, state governments, as well as private parties, have a superior ability to identify unfair or deceptive patent assertions and to pursue lawsuits against patent holders who violate the law. A model of cooperative federalism, grounded in these functional considerations, would deter and punish overzealous patent enforcement with minimal uncertainty about what, exactly, the law prohibits