16885 research outputs found
Sort by
International Bridges to Justice in Kigali, Rwanda
No full textMauro Rosato will support IBJ’s work providing free legal representation to the most vulnerable people in Rwanda and Burundi. He will contribute to efforts to raise awareness of the populations’ legal rights while combatting inhumane conditions in detention facilities
State Separation of Powers and the Federal Courts
Get PDFThe cases discussed herein mostly surfaced in the regulatory era of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. This Article first discusses arguments as to state delegations of legislative power, and the Court’s rejection of legislative-style deference that state agencies often argued for. This Article next discusses the Court’s decisions as to state adjudicative bodies, and its refusal to treat state agency adjudicators as full-fledged courts. This Article then addresses the Court’s response to arguments for unreviewable executive discretion and to laws allowing delegations to private parties. It then addresses whether the discussion sheds light on modern debates as to the use of private enforcement and as to the Independent State Legislature Doctrine.
This abstract has been taken from the author\u27s introduction
No Equitable Relief: The Failings of the CASE Act to Protect Middle-Class Creatives from Copyright Infringement
Get PDFCopyright law in the United States incentivizes creative activity for the public benefit by granting creators an exclusive right to control their original works. Many individuals and small businesses rely on this right and the protection of copyright law to build their reputations as artists, create a market for their work, and secure a livelihood for themselves and their families. When someone violates this right and infringes on these individuals’ and small businesses’ copyrights, the forum for seeking redress and preventing future infringement is a lawsuit in federal court. But bringing a copyright infringement claim in federal court is expensive. And advancements in technology create new sources of potential copyright infringement. As early as 2006, Congress recognized that the combined escalating costs of copyright litigation and the increasing number of copyright infringements prevented many lower-income individual creators (“middle-class creatives”) and small businesses from enforcing their copyright. The result was that, for many of these individuals, their livelihood and incentive to create died by a thousand small cuts, with societal respect for copyright law suffering the same fate.
Because copyright law was only protecting the exclusive rights of copyright holders with the financial resources to bring a copyright claim in federal court, in 2020, Congress passed the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2020 (CASE Act). The CASE Act aims to remedy copyright law’s inequity by creating the Copyright Claims Board, an inexpensive dispute resolution process for small copyright claims under $30,000. Ideally, middle-class creatives and small businesses will be able to protect their exclusive rights to control their copyright by pursuing their copyright claims in this less-expensive forum. However, for a copyright holder who can afford to bring a copyright infringement claim in federal court, their copyright may be protected by an arsenal of legal and equitable remedies. In contrast, those individuals whose sole option is to bring a copyright infringement claim under the CASE Act will only be protected by legal remedies. This Note argues that the lack of injunctive relief available to copyright holders under the CASE Act will limit its effectiveness in protecting middle-class creatives’ and small businesses’ exclusive copyrights
Advances in Patent Rights Acquisition in International Patent Law
Get PDFAt this centennial event, we have been asked to reflect on the most consequential developments in international intellectual property law of the last 100 years, with an eye towards important future developments as well. This is no small task, given the proliferation of intellectual property-related treaties and the profound changes in business structures, manufacturing, and trade that the last century has seen. The rise of the multinational corporation has been fueled in part by changes to trade laws, and the inclusion of intellectual property in trade-related treaties has facilitated cross-border research and development, manufacturing, and distribution of goods subject to intellectual property rights. I think the most consequential development in the last century both reflected and facilitated these changes, and that is the broad adoption of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Law (TRIPS Agreement)--an agreement made as part of the World Trade Organization Agreement in 1994. The TRIPS Agreement has arguably led to the biggest substantive changes in intellectual property law in countries throughout the world in the last 100 years. As such, it merits discussion. But I am not the first speaker, and there have been other developments that were hugely consequential for intellectual property rights globally. So, instead of focusing on the substantive changes required by the TRIPS Agreement, I want to discuss changes that are ostensibly about the process of intellectual property rights-acquisition, and patent acquisition specifically, that have affected both the practice and substance of intellectual property rights protection. In particular, the centralization of patent filing that was facilitated by the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) also made it nearly inevitable that the United States and Canada would switch from their first-to-invent to first-to-file patent systems. The PCT has changed global patent prosecution and made it more efficient, but this sort of procedural streamlining can often make substantive changes seem inevitable.
This abstract has been taken from the author\u27s introduction
Plaintiff\u27s Problem: Constitutional Concerns with Service of Process Under Alaska Rule of Civil Procedure 4(D)(7)-(8)
Get PDFRule 4 of Alaska’s Rules of Civil Procedure prescribes how service of process must be completed for a civil lawsuit, much like Rule 4 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. When filing suit against the State of Alaska or one of its agencies or officers, Alaska Civil Rule 4(d)(7)–(8) require that service of process be delivered to multiple locations. The plaintiff will usually have to serve the Attorney General’s office in the district of filing (either Anchorage or Fairbanks) and also must deliver service of process to the Attorney General’s office in Alaska’s capital city of Juneau. If they are suing a state officer or state agency, the officer or agency must be served as well, meaning that certain defendants can require a minimum of three services of process.
This provision, which creates a situation where service must be delivered to Juneau for a case taking place in Anchorage or Fairbanks, may amount to an unconstitutional burden on due process rights by arbitrarily increasing the difficulty of perfecting service. Serving process in Juneau presents multiple challenges for a plaintiff, some of which have been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, Rule 4(d)(7) may burden a plaintiff’s First Amendment rights by placing restraints on a “right to sue” that some scholars and judges believe is contained within the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances
Trolley Problems, Private Necessity, and the Duty to Rescue
Get PDFLaidlaw v. Sage is generally, at best, an oddity in Torts casebooks today. A case that captured the imagination of New York newspaper readers at the time, Laidlaw involved an explosion that, William Laidlaw argued, the wealthy Russell Sage survived only because, at the last moment, he pulled Laidlaw in front of him to absorb the brunt of the blast. As taught in Torts classrooms, Laidlaw is either a case about the intent requirement for battery or a case about causation. But the case, assuming the plaintiff’s story was true, also provides an interesting window into what would seem to be contradictory tort doctrines: the defense of private necessity and the lack of any duty to rescue. When one’s property is used without prior consent in an emergency situation, one is essentially being made an unwilling rescuer, even though one would not normally, absent a preexisting duty, be compelled to contribute to a rescue at all. This confluence of doctrines becomes even more heightened when one’s bodily integrity is at stake, such as in the classic trolley problem, where one individual is, essentially, forced to become an involuntary rescuer of five others by giving up their life. While the trolley problem has been criticized on the basis of its departure from reality, the advent of self-driving cars and similar technologies will increasingly force us to determine how these tradeoffs should be made
ChatGPT: Making Law Librarians More Relevant Than Ever!
No full textThis session will explore how instructors – especially those grading written work – need to be extra careful in following up with source citations. I recently ran an experiment using an actual – and somewhat simple – research question, using both ChatGPT(4) and Bard. The results looked amazing, high quality, and included links. The only problem? As far as I could tell, none of the sources it listed actually existed, and even more worryingly the very authentic-looking URLs given were also totally made up.
Those of us working in legal academia, therefore, need to be better trained on the basic information literacy tools long used in other areas of higher education to help combat misinformation and fake news – most notably the “SIFT method”. Law librarians have long helped law review editors source sketchy citations, but now we may be called in to assist in other ways as professors battle with AI-generated – and completely made up – sources. Understanding how we can engage these tools in a ChatGPT world will help make us more relevant than ever