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The Implications of Section 230 for Black Communities
No full textSection 230 of the Communications Decency Act generally immunizes online platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and Uber from liability for third-party user content (e.g., posts, comments, videos) and for moderation of that content. This article addresses an important issue overlooked by both defenders and critics of Section 230: the implications of the law and proposed reforms for Black communities. By relieving tech platforms of most legal liability for third-party content, Section 230 helps facilitate Black social activism, entrepreneurship, and artistic creativity. Further, Section 230 also relieves platforms of most legal liability for content moderation, which boosts platforms’ freedom to remove or downrank unlawful activity, as well as an array of “lawful but awful” content that government is constitutionally unable to restrict—such as hate speech, white supremacy organizing, medical disinformation, and political disinformation. However, unfortunately, platforms’ overly broad interpretations of Section 230 also provide incentives for platforms to allow unlawful activity directed at Black communities, such as harassment, white supremacist violence, voter intimidation, and housing and employment discrimination, and to prevent legal recourse when platforms erroneously downrank Black content. These insights provide factors that can help policymakers assess whether proposed Section 230 reforms—such as notice-and-takedown, content moderation neutrality, and carve-outs to immunity for algorithmic recommendations and advertisements—will benefit or harm Black communities
Interpretations of Modern Legal Philosophies. Essays in Honor of Roscoe Pound. (Ed. Paul Sayre, 1947)
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Ash Ave LLC v. Wilder
No full textIn this licensee holdover proceeding, the court denied the tenant\u27s motion to dismiss, upholding the landlord\u27s subject matter jurisdiction over the case. The tenant\u27s claims of improper service and lack of personal jurisdiction were rejected due to insufficient detail in the denial of service. Additionally, the court found unresolved factual issues regarding the tenant\u27s status as a tenant or licensee, necessitating a trial. The landlord\u27s cross-motion for discovery and use and occupancy was also denied due to procedural shortcomings
The Delaware-Inspired Next Step Toward Brazil Becoming the South American Leader in Corporate Law: Making Public Company Arbitrations a Matter of Public Record
No full textBrazil is South America’s leading domicile for listed public companies and has enjoyed substantial economic growth in the last generation. But it remains a nation constrained by limited resources to address all of its challenges and opportunities. Because of this reality, Brazil has chosen to use arbitration as the method to resolve disputes between the stockholders of public companies about critical issues such as the fairness of interested transactions and other claims for breach of fiduciary duty or compliance with statutory law and securities laws.
Likewise, important commercial disputes involving public companies are also resolved in arbitration. This is problematic in one hugely important way: Brazil has not yet recognized that arbitration of this kind that affects public companies, their stockholders, and other stakeholders is distinct from purely private arbitration. As a result, the arbitration process for public companies lacks the accountability and integrity that accompanies public adjudication and also fails to create a body of decisional law that provides a basis for the evolution of sound corporate governance best practices and that encourages arbitrators to base their decision on principled and coherent interpretations of commercial, corporate, and securities law. Recognizing that one of the primary reasons Delaware has emerged as an international leader in corporate and commercial law is that its system of adjudication resolves cases promptly, expertly, and publicly, and provides practitioners, academics, regulators, stockholders, corporate leaders, and the public with reasoned decisions about important determinations affecting public companies, we argue that features of Delaware’s approach could be usefully employed within Brazil’s system of public company arbitration. We thus support and encourage recent reforms in Brazil to open up the system of public company arbitration and provide specific suggestions for making the new movement toward public arbitration in public company cases effective. By capitalizing on the speed and expertise that can be brought to bear by arbitration, but combining it with credibility- and consistency-enhancing features, Brazil can further its ambitions to be an international leader in the market for incorporation and better encourage investment in its economy
Maine Recognizes the Independent Tort of Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress: Gammon v. Osteopathic Hospital
No full textGerald Gammon opened his deceased father\u27s hospital bag, expecting to find his personal effects. Instead, he discovered a bloodied leg, severed below the knee and bluish in color. Recoiling in horror, he yelled, Oh my God, they have taken my father\u27s leg off.” His aunt later recalled at trial that he was as white as a ghost and she thought he was going to have a heart attack. Gerald received a call on November 7, 1982, from the Osteopathic Hospital of Maine informing him that his father, Linwood Gammon, had succumbed to cancer that morning. A funeral home employee picked up the body and two bags purportedly containing the personal effects of the deceased from the hospital morgue. One of the bags, however, actually contained a pathology specimen from another hospital patient, an unfortunate mistake which caused Gerald a great deal of emotional suffering. After this traumatic incident, Gerald began to awake at night shaking and crying from nightmares for the first time in his life. His personality changed for the worse as he became extremely withdrawn and irritable with his wife and children, to the point where his wife seriously considered divorce. Gerald was suffering from classic symptoms of traumatic neurosis : repetitive frightening dreams, reproducing directly or symbolically the traumatic incident . . . irritability, usually expressed at home, particularly regarding the children and their noise . . . [w]ithdrawal . . . most commonly expressed in loss of sexual interest, poor concentration and memory, avoidance of sexual contacts, [and] intolerance of discussing symptoms or the traumatic event. At trial, Gerald\u27s claim for negligent infliction of severe emotional distress against the hospital and funeral home resulted in a directed verdict for the defendants. The trial court allowed his claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress to go to the jury, which found that, although Gerald had suffered severe emotional distress, it was not proximately caused by the intentional or reckless conduct of the defendants. The directed verdict left Gerald Gammon without redress for a wrong done to him by the defendants\u27 negligence. Gammon appealed and the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine, sitting as the Law Court, vacated the directed verdict on the claim of negligent infliction of emotional distress, and held that the plaintiff had established a claim despite his failure to allege either physical consequences of his emotional distress or an independent underlying tort. Gammon v. Osteopathic Hospital propels Maine once again to the forefront of a growing trend in this country to recognize and protect a person\u27s right to be free from negligently inflicted emotional distress. In the past two decades, the Law Court has been willing on occasion to accord the tort independent legal status. Recently, however, the court has retreated from this position by supporting the majority view which does not permit recovery for negligent infliction of emotional distress without certain accompanying circumstances. These circumstances usually involve either an underlying tort, some physical manifestation of the emotional distress, the plaintiff\u27s fear for his own safety under the zone of danger rule, or special factual situations involving either the negligent mishandling of the corpse of a plaintiff\u27s relative or the negligent transmission of a death message. Gammon removed these artificial barriers to recovery in a carefully reasoned opinion. This Note analyzes the Law Court\u27s reasoning and holding in Gammon as it affects the status of the tort of negligent infliction of emotional distress in Maine. Through an analysis of case law in Maine and other jurisdictions, the Note concludes that, although Gammon provides some welcome relief from prior uncertainty surrounding the tort, the opinion leaves both the elements and outer bounds of the tort in an ambiguous state
Educating Deal Lawyers for the Digital Age
No full textCourses and programs that address law and emerging technologies are proliferating in U.S. law schools. Technology-related issues pervade the curriculum. This Essay presents two instances in which new technologies present challenges for deal lawyers. It explores how exposing students to closing opinions practice can prepare them to engage these challenges. Both examples involve common commercial contexts and lessons relevant to students of business associations and of the Uniform Commercial Code. The first, which deals with enforceability opinion letters, presents technical legal difficulties arising from recent developments in law and technology. The second, involving complex doctrines at the heart of financial markets, presents ethical questions for students, attorneys, and lawmakers to digest. These examples show how thoroughly emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and distributed ledgers can implicate business law doctrine and practice and, consequently, how imperative it is that legal education prepare students for practice in the digital age
Reflections on Race, the Constitution, and Growing up in the Segregated South
No full textThe following passages are excerpted from the manuscript entitled Balcony Reserved for White Spectators that Walter Dellinger was writing at the time of his death in February 2022. These particular excerpts were chosen first and foremost because they demonstrate Dellinger’s unwavering and lifelong commitment to the pursuit of racial justice. But they were also chosen because they illustrate the array of talents that Dellinger brought to his work—his encyclopedic knowledge of constitutional history, his powers of legal analysis and persuasion, his attunement to the latent meanings in popular culture, and last, but certainly not least, his spellbinding storytelling.
Note: The excerpts have been lightly edited, reordered, and notated in order to fit into a law review format
