16885 research outputs found
Sort by
Envisioning a Duty of Directors to Link Executive Compensation to Climate Change: Lessons from Europe
No full textThe practice of tying executive compensation to climate change goals has gained some traction. However, designing a duty of directors to link executive pay to climate change objectives poses significant challenges. Some lessons can be drawn from countries attempting to establish such a duty. This Article examines Europe’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and its negotiation process and draws insights for effectively crafting such a duty. The CSDDD, which entered into force on July 25, 2024, mandates large companies operating in Europe to conduct due diligence on human rights and environmental impacts with respect to their own operations and those of their business partners and subsidiaries globally. Although the proposed article 15 requiring the integration of sustainability and climate change objectives into executive remuneration was ultimately removed after intense negotiations, it serves as a valuable starting point for discussion. By scrutinizing article 15 and proposed amendments, this Article identifies several critical issues concerning the enforceability, materiality, measurability, transparency, and environmental justice implications of directors’ potential duty to tie executive pay to climate change. To address these issues, this Article suggests a research agenda for exploring the feasibility of incorporating specific metrics or targets. It also discusses the merits of making such metrics incrementally binding, material, measurable, transparent, sensitive to multiple stakeholders’ interests, and responsive to issues of environmental justice while preserving business flexibility and cost effectiveness. By envisioning this duty with these considerations, this Article sheds light on its potential for incentivizing effective corporate action on climate change amid ambiguous corporate environmental commitments
Dirty Water
No full textThere are tens of thousands of unregulated industrial substances manufactured and used in the United States. This Article focuses on three specific to plastic and its manufacturing process: microplastics, phthalates, and BPAs. These substances have been attributed to many known health harms and potentially more that have yet to be identified. The research is still nascent and continues to evolve, but what we do know is who is creating the problem. From big oil companies and plastics manufacturers, to creators of textiles and tires, to investors who all contribute to the problem, how can we hold these accountable for the problems they cause? Existing regulations do not encompass much, with federal agencies less able to act due to Congress and the courts.
One path that could hold manufacturers accountable for products that raise public health red flags is through Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). This process places the burden on manufacturers to take responsibility for their products at all stages of the product’s life cycle. Public health litigation (PHL) can deter manufacturers by holding them accountable for health harms. Extended Producer Responsibility and Public Health Litigation can work together: once EPR laws and standards are in the books, plaintiffs can use PHL to further their efforts by ensuring manufacturers are following the rules.
This abstract has been taken from the authors\u27 introduction
Why \u3cem\u3eJack Daniel\u27s\u3c/em\u3e Can\u27t Stop #WestElmCaleb, and What Now?
No full textThis Article proceeds in four Parts. Part I provides a basic overview of trademark law and brand protection. It explains the key components of the Lanham Act, the central federal legislation in this area—including the two federal causes of action, trademark infringement and trademark dilution—and explores the law’s role in brand protection. Next, Part II discusses the area of social media and brand promotion. It begins with examining the rise of social media and the emergence of hashtags, in addition to trademarks used within hashtags and the registration of hashtags by the United States Patent Trademark Office (USPTO) as well as objections to that practice. Then, the discussion moves to the effect of hashtags on social media, with a focus on both the positive and negative impacts on brands of the use of hashtags that include trademarks.
Part III discusses in depth the liability implications of the unauthorized use of such hashtags on social media. First, it provides an analysis of trademark infringement and trademark tarnishment caused by these hashtags, as well as of the possibility of so-called trademark “genericide” through hashtags (whereby the original owner loses protection once a trademark is deemed generic). Second, it examines closely the scope and strength of trademark dilution laws after Jack Daniel’s Properties, Inc. v. VIP Products LLC. Last, it describes some of the limitations and challenges to litigating under the current framework of trademark law when it comes to social media and hashtags. Part IV introduces proposals to bridge the gap under this existing framework. It also discusses how companies can combine trademark law with other tools such as practices related to employment law and training, or product safety measures, to effectively combat reputational damage to brands that may be caused by their employees’ or users’ actions.
This abstract has been taken from the authors\u27 introduction
AI and the Press Clause
No full textGenerative AI took a massive leap forward in late 2022 and early 2023 with the introduction of public access to ChatGPT and Bard. OpenAI, whose ChatGPT tool garnered more than 100 million users in fewer than two months, upgraded to GPT-4 in March 2023. These AI tools, and those who create and use them, almost certainly represent the vanguard of a new generation of publishers, which will join the long queue of communicators who have challenged courts to define the role and place of the Press Clause. AI publishers raise substantial legal questions in fields including defamation, intellectual property, and privacy law, particularly regarding the liability human actors incur when employing AI tools. This Article, however, focuses solely on whether the Press Clause protects AI publishers, not as extensions of human publishers, but purely as non-human entities that gather and communicate information that is available to audiences.
To address this question, this Article first outlines the background and nature of generative AI tools, particularly in their roles as publishers. Next, this Article examines the history of the Press Clause, focusing on how late eighteenth-century authors in the colonies defined and discussed press freedoms and the role of news in democratic society and how legal scholars have conceptualized the Clause and its meaning. From there, this Article examines crucial Supreme Court decisions regarding the press and Press Clause, particularly concerning how the Justices defined and communicated understandings regarding the press as being both instrumentally and institutionally crucial to the flow of ideas in a democratic society. The conclusions draw the conceptual building blocks from these areas together to identify whether AI communicators should receive Press-Clause protections.
This abstract has been taken from the author\u27s introduction
The Next Generation of Free Expression Scholarship: A Very Short Manifesto (in Memory of Fred Schauer)
No full textThis Manifesto begins with a discussion of the accomplishments of the prior generation of free expression scholarship. The core of the Manifesto starts with a description of the idea of epistemic authority and draws upon Leiter’s analysis to show its importance in free expression theory. It emphasizes, with Leiter, that epistemic authority is relational: between and among epistemic authorities, and between such authorities and “ordinary” citizens (that is, those who aren’t near the core of an epistemic community that, as a collective, defines the community’s core and boundaries).
That discussion is followed by a description of challenges to the idea of epistemic authority coming from within a number of epistemic communities: the natural sciences, journalism, and the university, including several disciplines. These internal challenges pose obvious questions for ordinary citizens: If insiders disagree, what are outsiders to do? Those questions are deepened by concerns taken up next: What social and political factors affect the ways in which epistemic communities are constituted in the first place and then allocate authority within the communities and determine who is within and who outside the community?
The Manifesto’s final Section briefly examines the normative implications of the preceding discussion. My personal normative takeaway is that the serious (that is, nonfrivolous) questions about epistemic authority and the accompanying sociopolitical analysis should lead to a normative modesty acknowledging that in almost all the interesting cases, whether there is some regulation of expression is likely to be a close question.
This abstract has been taken from the author\u27s introduction
Tim Sullivan: Marshall-Wythe Hall
No full text“One of the most amazing things, the first day of the first class I was to teach in law school. The course was, I believe, constitutional law. And it was because the law school was scattered out over buildings in the old campus. It was in the basement of Washington Hall. I arrived and there\u27s no one there. I had misjudged the time of the class, so I... I missed my first class, which was not a very auspicious beginning, I must say. And especially if you knew Dean Whyte, there would be consequences for that sort of delinquency. But I got past it and went on from there. The first year was, you know that phrase drinking from a firehose? That’s what I did.” -- Tim Sullivan, Dean and President Emeritus, on joining the law school faculty
Marshall-Wythe Hall circa 1970. Wolf Law Library Archives, PH.2006.001
Before moving to its current location on South Henry St in 1980, the Law School was housed on main campus in Marshall-Wythe Hall (pictured). To accommodate its growing size, the Law School held classes in various other places around campus as well. When Timothy Sullivan joined the law faculty in 1972, his first class assignment was in the basement of Washington Hall. After getting the time wrong and missing his first class, Sullivan said he then spent weeks contemplating what future, if any, he might have here. Ironically, Sullivan’s future at W&M included becoming Dean of the Law School and, later, President of the College.
Listen to Tim Sullivan\u27s oral history online.https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/oralhist-exhibit/1001/thumbnail.jp
