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Promoting Contract Flexibility through Trademarks: Branded Intellectual Property Licensing Practices
Get PDFUnderground Environmental Regulations: Regulations Imposed As Mitigation Measures Under CEQA Violate the California Administrative Procedure Act
Get PDFComparative Jury Procedures
Get PDFThe literature considering various possible procedural reforms to United States jury trial practice suffers from a high dose of American Exceptionalism. The experience of other nations rarely is acknowledged, much less considered as possibly informative. This Article argues that as a British-derived system of roughly identical vintage as the United States, the jury practices of Malta can inform American practice in three respects: (1) the desirability of increased juror interaction – in particular allowing oral juror questions to witnesses and allowing deliberation during the trial, (2) the utility of eliminating voir dire in jury selection, and (3) the possibility of procedural reform such as modifying the verdict form to insulate jurors from external pressures on the verdict
Fair Use and Appropriation Art
Get PDFPart I provides some background regarding aesthetic vocabulary in the arts, and traces the use of appropriated images in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Part II discusses the general application of copyright law to appropriation art. Part III examines the current status of the fair use cases that address appropriation art and concludes that the fair use results are better than before, largely because of the ascendancy of “transformativeness” as an important fair use factor. It also concludes, however, that fair use remains insufficient to protect appropriation art. Finally, Part IV re-proposes a solution—an exception to copyright, limited to fine art—grounded in the public benefit of dissemination of knowledge and the lack of damage to the original author’s economic interest resulting from appropriation art
Out of Breath and Down to the Wire
No full textThis article chronicles a series of breathtakingly disturbing police killings of unarmed black men (and a child) in a single year’s time, spanning from between July 2014 to July 2015, which have resulted in national outcry and sparked a movement toward police reform across the country. The article details a number of the suggested remedial measures offered to address the problem of excessive lethal police force across the country and concludes that, among the proposed reforms, one of the most important is a renewed emphasis of critical constitutional limitations upon permissible lethal police force and other unjustified treatment of individuals who are fleeing the police. Any meaningful police reform must emphasize, in particular, the Constitution’s prohibition of deadly police force against fleeing, unarmed civilians, and others who do not pose an imminent threat of physical harm to others, as well-established since Tennessee v. Garner.
The article further documents a troubling absence of Constitution-focused use-of-force emphases in police trainings and practices across the country. This deficiency inevitably has helped facilitate general misunderstandings among police and civilian communities alike regarding permissible (and impermissible) treatment of those who flee from the police. Rather than teach the limitations on permissible lethal force established by Tennessee v. Garner, for example, too many police training protocols appear to be based, instead, on the SWAT Magazine-inspired “21-foot rule,” which too often appears to substitute for Constitution-based restraints on deadly force against unarmed citizens by law enforcement officers, and is too commonly referenced by officers who try to justify shooting unarmed black men at close range, in the recent tragic police killings detailed in this article.
It is imperative that reform of police practices and procedures across the country must incorporate a renewed emphasis on Constitution-based use-of-force police training. In particular, as long as officers of the peace are allowed to shoot at fleeing suspects to stop them from getting away or because they are too close and appear “threatening” to officers even when unarmed, their training has failed to adhere to constitutional protections that are critical for the protection and preservation of a just and civil society
The Parts Are Greater Than the Sum: What I Learned From My Mediation Clinic Students
Get PDFI co-created the Mediation Clinic at California Western School of Law (hereafter CWSL) with my colleague Linda Morton in 1996 to provide students the opportunity to learn the process of mediation and to mediate live disputes in the community. We recognized the importance of “soft skills” such as communication, collaboration, initiative, and adaptability and therefore we sought to create an experiential learning opportunity for the students that encouraged them to nurture those skills. We wanted to teach students conflict resolution skills and to have them work together to use those skills to help individuals in the community resolve actual disputes. Simultaneously, we sought to expose the students to an under served population with whom most of them were not acquainted (incarcerated juvenile offenders) and to show them the value of helping others resolve their disputes peacefully, in a non-adversarial way. Moreover, we sought to teach the students that their new role as mediator required them to act professionally and ethically.
After teaching the class for approximately 15 years I became curious about what our students were doing. I was interested in learning whether they were practicing law and whether they were serving as mediators. I wanted to ascertain whether they were getting paid to mediate or whether they were mediating pro bono. This curiosity led to other areas of inquiry, such as determining the type of mediations the graduates were doing and the frequency of those mediations. Moreover I also wanted to know if they were using the communication skills we had taught them in the Mediation Clinic in their mediations, in their professional and personal lives.
This article, The Parts Are Greater Than The Sum, is the description and analysis of what I learned from the survey I sent to the graduates of the Mediation Clinic. Fortunately I received a very high response rate -- over 50% of those who received the survey responded to it.
I found the responses illuminating. I have learned that although the students were interested in mediation, this was not their initial motivation for participating in the clinic. Only a small percent of the graduates were mediating. Nonetheless, the graduates appreciate and use many of the communication skills they learned in the clinic in their professional and personal lives. Due to what I have learned from the graduates’ responses to the survey, I have changed the way I teach the class. I now place more emphasis on the discrete skills used in mediation, rather than on the entire process of mediation.
I believe that others who teach mediation can also benefit from the data I accumulated and analyzed. I am sharing this data through this article so that others may learn something about their programs and may re-consider their program’s goals and outcomes
Law School Based Incubators and Access to Justice
Get PDFAt the end of February 2015, law professors, law deans, incubator staff and attorneys, and self-selected others gathered at California Western School of Law for the Second Annual Conference on Law School Incubators and Residency Programs. The incubators that are the subject of this article tend to focus on transition to law practice and access to justice, and some are also working to incorporate technology for the practice of law as a means of enhancing access to justice. As more law schools decide to host, sponsor or offer an incubator, and following our panel discussion at the February 2015 incubator conference, we thought it would be helpful to consider fundamental issues deans grapple with when asked to launch an incubator. This list may not be exhaustive, but it will certainly more quickly advance the conversation, and offers a roadmap of sorts for an incubator business plan