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Dean\u27s Desk: Students find clerkships in smaller counties rewarding
Get PDFThe students at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law come to Bloomington from all over the nation. During their summers, the temptation is for them to work in the country’s largest cities, often with the majority working in Indianapolis, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York. Many others work in our innovative Stewart Fellows global internship program, where students are placed in countries throughout the world.
Fewer students, however, choose to work in Indiana’s smaller towns, and the hundreds of trial court judges working there often need help. Many trial courts have crowded dockets and limited staffing, particularly those in rural, smaller towns that have been affected most by the opioid crisis.
To address this need, the law school launched a pilot program last summer, the Rural Justice Initiative. The initiative sought to expose students who are committed to public service to different facets of rural and smaller-city practice while helping trial court judges with their heavy workloads in counties where that help is needed most. The goal was to underscore to students the benefits of clerking after graduation, to help improve access to courts and expand legal services, and to inspire some students to consider pursuing careers in rural Indiana. The program is part of the law school’s broader commitment to the state as one of the largest providers of pro bono legal services to low-income individuals in south central Indiana
Boilerplate Indignity
Get PDFCommentators have long tried to sound the alarm about boilerplate contracts, pointing out threats ranging from the loss of privacy rights to the erosion of public law and democratic self-governance. This Article argues that this list of concerns misses something important: that imposing certain boilerplate terms on individuals is incompatible with their dignity. After explaining and defending the conception of dignity presupposed here, this Article shows how boilerplate accountability waivers—like arbitration clauses—prevent people from accessing the distinctive dignity-vindicating role of courts and degrade their status as legal persons. And because governments may legitimately protect dignity interests, proposed reforms like the Arbitration Fairness Act have an even stronger justification than previously recognized. Boilerplate indignity should, in any event, force us to take a hard look at the dignity interests jeopardized by fine print, interests routinely sacrificed at the altar of commercial expediency
Empirical Studies of Patent Pools
No full textProfessor Mattioli\u27s contribution is titled, Empirical Studies of Patent Pools found in Volume 2.https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facbooks/1214/thumbnail.jp
Arbitration and the Federal Balance
Get PDFMandatory arbitration of statutory rights in contracts between parties of unequal bargaining power has drawn political attention at both the federal and state level. The importance of such reforms has only been heightened by the Supreme Court’s expansion of preemption under the FAA and of arbitral authority. This case law creates incentives for courts at all levels to prefer expansive readings of an arbitration clause. As attempts at federal regulation have stalled, state legislatures and regulatory agencies can expect to be subject to renewed focus. If state legislatures cannot easily limit arbitrability, an alternative is to try reforms that seek to make arbitration more closely resemble judging. Some common reforms that have been proposed or adopted at the state level include conflict-of-interest rules for arbitrators, default process rules, and publication requirements. These proposals might bring arbitration more in line with the processes and outcomes one might expect from a state court.
Reform along these lines is worth pursuing, but faces two significant problems. The first is federal preemption. Most prior cases have focused on state law controls before an arbitration gets started. State laws implemented during and after arbitration may avoid the same fate. A less obvious problem comes from the degree certain state reforms aim to treat arbitration as a substitute for court. Arbitrators lack the authority that judges have to develop the law, creating a further due process problem for parties who expect to be operating in a common law system. Accommodating arbitration may mean moving further from a model of common law adjudication
Design Patent Damages: A Critique of the Government’s Proposed 4-Factor Test for Determining the “Article of Manufacture”
Get PDFThe Supreme Court in Samsung Electronics Co. v. Apple, Inc. wrestled with the question of determining the meaning of “article of manufacture” in 35 U.S.C. § 289 when it comes to calculating the total profit of the infringer that is awarded to the patentee.
In its Petition for Certiorari, Samsung raised the novel theory that the article of manufacture could be less than the entire product sold by the infringer. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the following issue, as framed in Samsung’s Petition:
Where a design patent is applied to only a component of a product, should an award of infringer’s profits be limited to those profits attributable to the component?
Samsung argued that for a multi-component product, such as a smartphone, the article of manufacture needs to be defined in terms of only portions or components of the smartphone. Since Apple’s design patents were drawn to portions of the iPhone, rather than the entire iPhone, Samsung sought to limit its liability to its total profit on those portions. This would have greatly reduced the jury award of $399 million, which had been based on the total profit derived from Samsung’s sales of their entire smartphones to which the patented designs had been applied.
The Supreme Court said that the only question before it was narrow: “[W]hether, in the case of a multicomponent product, the relevant ‘article of manufacture’ must always be the end product sold to the consumer or whether it can also be a component of that product.”
Looking to the statutory text, the Supreme Court concluded that the term “article of manufacture,” as it is used in § 289, “encompasses both a product sold to a consumer and a component of that product.” The Court further indicated that the term “article of manufacture” is “broad enough to embrace both a product sold to a consumer and a component of that product, whether sold separately or not.” The Court declined, however, to “set out a test for identifying the relevant article of manufacture at the first step of the § 289 damages inquiry.”
Thus, the narrow question left unanswered from Samsung is how to determine the relevant article of manufacture for a multi-component product, such as a kitchen oven (the example given by Justice Sotomayor). If the product is a single component product, such as a dinner plate (again, Justice Sotomayor’s example), there is no issue, because, as she put it, “the product [sold to a consumer] is the ‘article of manufacture’ to which the design has been applied.”
The meaning of “total profit” was not at issue; as the Court stated: “‘[t]otal,’ of course, means all.” Thus, the Court left undisturbed the long-standing design patent rule against apportionment of the infringer’s total profit, as well as its sister rule prohibiting an inquiry into causation.
As noted above, the Court left formulation of a test for determining the article of manufacture to the lower courts in future litigation
Rethinking the 1948 Genocide Convention for North Korean Political Camps
Get PDFThe term genocide implies attacks on only four groups – national, racial, ethnic and religious – enumerated in Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In terms of protection of political group, severe political persecutions targeting a certain political group would not establish a successful genocide charge in courts and international courts have rendered judgements applying crimes against humanity to such atrocities. However, it is important to consider the possibility of protecting political groups regarding the victims in the North Korean political camps were selected on political grounds and their groupness is similar to other characteristics of the protected groups. It seems plausible to convict the genocide crime in North Korean context due to the unique nature of the incidents.
This thesis is, therefore, to analyze possible accusation of genocide crime in North Korean political camps in order to bring more tangible discussions to provide justice to the detained in the camps. It aims to demonstrate the detained in the political camps may constitute a political group and the Genocide Convention should be interpreted to include them, based on the limited factual descriptions in the camps. It was impossible to conduct a direct investigation in the camp sites since the state persists to remain exclusive, however, the most reliable findings were found by national and international authorities including the United Nations. In addition to the criminal charge of crimes against humanity found by the authorities, this thesis ultimately focuses on establishing genocide charge to the inhumane atrocities in the state political camps with more flexible and individual approach to the case. Although it is too challenging to bring a new interpretation or amendment to the existing Convention, the research conducted in this thesis hopefully predicts domestic or transitional justice procedure to incorporate the genocide term in a way which this thesis suggests, for the fairness and justice in North Korea’s future
Energy Re-Investment
Get PDFDespite worsening climate change threats, investment in energy—in the United States and globally—is dominated by fossil fuels. This Article provides a novel analysis of two pathways in corporate and securities law that together have the potential to shift patterns of energy investment.
The first pathway targets current investments and corporate decision-making. It includes efforts to influence investors to divest from owning shares in fossil fuel companies and to influence companies to address climate change risks in their internal decision-making processes. This pathway has received increasing attention, especially in light of the Paris Agreement and the Trump Administration’s decision to withdraw from it. But, alone, it will not be enough to foster transition to a cleaner mix of energy sources.
Key to achieving this goal of energy reinvestment is a second pathway focused on fostering investments in new companies innovating in clean energy. This pathway —which has received far less attention—uses emerging legal mechanisms to support greater investment in entrepreneurial clean energy ventures. The Article’s analysis of this pathway looks beyond the well-established ways in which subsidies support fossil fuels and renewable energy. It instead examines the significance for energy reinvestment of changes in U.S. securities regulation permitting greater crowdsourcing of investment and in state laws allowing for new types of corporations.
This Article is the first to examine how these two pathways can synergistically promote energy reinvestment. The first pathway moves money away from fossil fuels, while the second helps to spur needed reinvestment. The Article proposes strategies for deploying the tools in the two pathways together, taking into account the motivations and constraints of diverse investors and corporations