SelectedWorks @ Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law
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Virtual Liquid Networks and Other Guiding Principles for Optimizing Future Student-Edited Law Review Platforms
No full textThis short essay was written for the Touro Law Review’s Associate Dean’s Symposium on “Student-Edited Law Reviews: Future Publication Platforms.” It maintains that the Associate Dean for Research has a responsibility to shape and develop the scholarly culture and intellectual life of the law school. Part of that charge should be to aid the student-edited law reviews in their contribution to that enterprise and to help those reviews evolve. In addition to their pedagogical value for the students (developing editing, reasoning, research, and writing skills), these reviews play a part in sending signals to the outside world of the scholarly commitment of a law school. And, most importantly, student-edited law reviews serve the higher value of distributing knowledge and disseminating legal thought that addresses doctrinal clarity, unpacks theoretical uncertainties, creates foundations for reform, or otherwise presents legal solutions to critical social issues. The ideal direction for student-edited journals is toward multiple platforms that deliver law review-quality content – maintaining long form articles and welcoming useful, online shorter forms as well. But, the irreducible minimum requirements for judging what constitutes quality “legal scholarship” – measured by its originality and unique contribution the literature – should not change. So, the first guiding principle that should control student-edited law reviews as they adopt new platforms is simple: maintain the distinctive function of publishing legal content – uniquely as a “law review” – that has the rigor and other qualities to count as legal scholarship. The Essay describes ways to control against the risks of quality dilution.The most innovative ways that law reviews can embrace the future include using new platforms and harnessing technologies to increase dialogue, exchange, and reasoning through what this Essay calls virtual liquid networks – drawing on lessons from Steven Johnson, Kevin Dunbar, and others who have explained the concept of “liquid networks” where innovation emerges in the natural world through the collision between elements in the system and should operate similarly in intellectual spaces. Law reviews and other academic outlets should aim to create “unusually fertile” and “shared environments” that make possible “serendipitous connections” and allow for the improvement and completion of ideas.This Essay spells out some of the architecture of student edited law review platforms that could serve this role. For example, beyond endorsing the concurrent or consecutive posting of response pieces at the same time as posting or printing main selected articles, already being done at many reviews, the Essay outlines a proposal to innovate with virtual workshops and virtual roundtables that facilitate strong liquid networks that leave open room to improve scholarly works before publication of a “final” product. The idea here is to truly replicate, in virtual form, the physical roundtable or workshop concept to achieve even higher-order liquid networking effects. These proposed virtual liquid network platforms hold the possibility of helping authors produce works of legal scholarship substantially improved from the forms such works might take in the traditional, more sterile, and inert publication platforms. Such virtual liquid network-based platforms also give student-edited law reviews a modern and expanded, service-oriented role in the continued production of useful scholarship
Deeds and the Determinacy Norm: Insights from Brandt and Other Cases on an Undesignated, Yet Ever-Present, Interpretive Method
No full textThe land one holds is generally only as good as the property rights contained in the deed.The rights contained in the deed are only as good as the ability to get those rights enforced.And, the enforcement is only valuable if it recognizes a determinate meaning in the deeds fromthe point of conveyance. This Article pens the term “determinacy norm” to explain a collectionof rules for the interpretation of deed terms that aim to make the meaning of deed terms determinate.I contend that, in order to satisfy the determinacy norm for deed interpretation,courts must (and arguably do) interpret the terms in deeds and land grants as having a fixedmeaning set contemporaneously with the transfer and based on the discernable intent andexpectations of the parties at the time of the conveyance or grant. This norm runs throughexisting case law and is pivotal to facilitating an effective property system. But, courts havefailed to recognize either the term (or even the organizing principle) that is the determinacynorm.As an illustrative example, some see the 2014 U.S. Supreme Court case of Brandt RevocableTrust v. United States as just a railroad right-of-way decision. But a closer look revealsthat it is a good exemplar of courts striving to add determinacy to deeds and equivalent instrumentslike statutory land grants. Brandt reveals a pattern of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudencethat the Court itself is not adequately articulating where the determinacy normlurks in the substructure of opinions.We should more directly recognize the determinacy norm’s presence in private deed andpublic land grant cases. Doing so will allow us to better monitor and check the actions ofjudges to be sure that they are living up to the constraints of the determinacy norm. Suchmonitoring will help us better identify and protect the rights in the deeds that help organizeour property system
Can We Secure the Hallowed Halls of Academe?
No full textOnce upon a time life in the academy was casual. Higher education is a different paradigm today. As Columbine, Virginia Tech and other tragedies illustrate, we have to worry about campus security today. Even prior to Virginia Tech, campuses wrestled with liability, criminal activity, sexual harassment, and suicides. Now they have to confront seemingly random acts of mass violence, which have spread throughout society. By their very nature, universities are open centers of learning. The exchange of knowledge extends to the community through guest lectures, visiting scholars, symposia, artistic performances and concerts, internet access, sporting events, museums, libraries, graduate and career fairs. The normal means of providing campus security will often be ineffective against the mass murderer; badging, armed guards, electronic key locks, emergency call boxes, escorts, lighted parking lots, metal detectors, and video surveillance, may reduce criminal activity, but they cannot secure the campus against a random act of mass violence. Large campuses of 30,000-50,000 students, thousands of faculty and staff, and tens of thousands of doors and windows, cannot be run as a closed environ. Building upon the lessons from Virginia Tech, Columbine, and similar tragedies, and rapidly evolving preventative actions in the academic community, this presentation examines the often innovative measures colleges may engage in today to minimize the risks of campus tragedies, as well as the limits and concerns raised by these These initiatives include: Background Checks; Computer Searches; Psychological Screening; Hotlines; Emergency Response Plans; Campus Communications and Community Notification
Moving Beyond Miranda: Concessions for Confessions
No full textAbstract: The law governing police interrogation provides perverse incentives. For criminal suspects, the law rewards obstruction and concealment. For police officers, it honors deceit and psychological aggression. For the courts and the rest of us, it encourages blindness and rationalization. This Article contends that the law could help foster better behaviors. The law could incentivize criminals to confess without police trickery and oppression. It could motivate police officers involved in obtaining suspect statements to avoid chicanery and duress. And, it could summon courts and the rest of us to speak more truthfully about whether suspect admissions are the product of informed, intelligent, and voluntary decisions. States could promote these outcomes by providing valuable sentencing concessions to those who confess
Copyrights, Privacy, and the Blockchain
No full textThe law of the United States forces authors to choose between copyrights and privacy rights. Federal lawmakers have noticed and tried to remedy that problem. The Copyright Act makes express provisions for anonymous and pseudonymous works. The Copyright Office has tried to remedy that tension, too; copyright registration forms do not outwardly require authors to reveal their real world identities. Nonetheless, authors still face a choice between protecting their privacy and enjoying one of copyright’s most powerful incentives: the prospect of transferring to another the exclusive right to use a copyrighted work. That power proves useful, to say the least, when it comes to making money off of copyrights. Run-of-the-mill authors can invoke it by licensing or assigning their unregistered copyrights or by registering their works themselves. But what about anonymous or pseudonymous authors? Despite a good faith effort to respect authorial privacy, current copyright registration practices fall short of ideal. Far from a trifling matter, this procedural hurdle threatens to prevent copyright law from satisfying its constitutional mandate. This paper maps the problematic conflict between copyright and privacy and points towards some possible solutions