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Marshalling Copyright Knowledge to Understand Four Decades of Berne
Get PDFIn the year 1978, the 1976 Copyright Act had just entered into effect. Marshall Leaffer, whom this article will affectionately refer to by his first name, had just completed his duties as an attorney advisor at the U.S. Copyright Office. On his way to academia, he, like the fictional character Captain William “Buck” Rogers, was to experience cosmic forces beyond all comprehension. In a freak mishap, his car veered off a rarely used mountain road and was frozen by temperatures beyond imagination. He did not return to academia until more than forty years later. What will he discover upon his return? Will he find the developments in the intervening decades interesting or surprising? What observations would he make had he not been frozen in 1978
Judith A. Waltz
No full textJudith A. Waltz (JD 1981) has spent her career as a health care attorney in California, where she has been a partner with Foley & Lardner LLP in San Francisco since 1998. She is the co-chair of the firm’s Health Care Practice Group and Health Care Industry Team and former co-chair of the Life Sciences Industry Team. She focuses her practice on government investigations, false claims act, corporate integrity agreements, reimbursement strategies, bankruptcy, Medicare and Medicaid compliance counseling, and Medicare/Medicaid overpayments and enrollment disputes.
She is a member of the Government Enforcement Defense & Investigations and Bankruptcy & Business Reorganizations Practices.
Prior to joining Foley in 1998, Waltz served as assistant regional counsel for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in San Francisco and has held appointments as a special assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern and Northern Districts of California. She was formerly a chair of Foley’s Women’s Network Steering Committee.
In addition to her law degree, Waltz obtained a Masters in Public Administration from the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA). At IU Waltz was an associate instructor in the School of Business and a teaching assistant at SPEA. As an undergraduate student at IU she held leadership positions including vice president of the Indiana University Student Association, and served as a student member of the Bloomington Faculty Council and the Student Advisory Committee to the Dean of Students.
In service to the law school, Waltz has served on the Board of Visitors since 2009. She is a 2022 inductee to the law school\u27s Academy of Law Alumni Fellows.https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/notablealumni/1258/thumbnail.jp
Systemic Racism in the U.S. Immigration Laws
Get PDFThis Essay analyzes how aggressive activism in a California mountain town at the tail end of the nineteenth century commenced a chain reaction resulting in state and ultimately national anti-Chinese immigration laws. The constitutional immunity through which the Supreme Court upheld those laws deeply affected the future trajectory of U.S. immigration law and policy.
Responding to sustained political pressure from the West, Congress in 1882 passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, an infamous piece of unabashedly racist legislation that commenced a long process of barring immigration from all of Asia to the United States. In upholding the Act, the Supreme Court in an extraordinary decision that jars modern racial sensibilities declared that Congress possessed “plenary power”—absolute authority—over immigration and that racist immigration laws were immune from judicial review of their constitutionality.
The bedrock of U.S. immigration jurisprudence for more than a century and never overruled by the Supreme Court, the plenary power doctrine permits the treatment of immigrants in racially discriminatory ways consistent with the era of Jim Crow but completely at odds with modern constitutional law. The doctrine enabled President Trump, a fierce advocate of tough-as-nails immigration measures, to pursue the most extreme immigration program of any modern president, with devastating impacts on noncitizens of color.
As the nation attempts to grapple with the Trump administration’s brutal treatment of immigrants, it is an especially opportune historical moment to reconsider the plenary power doctrine. Ultimately, the commitment to remove systemic racism from the nation’s social fabric requires the dismantling of the doctrine and meaningful constitutional review of the immigration laws. That, in turn, would open the possibilities to the removal of systemic racial injustice from immigration law and policy
Tokenized: The Law of Non-Fungible Tokens and Unique Digital Property
Get PDFMarkets for unique digital property—digital equivalents of rare artworks, collectible trading cards, and other assets that gain value from scarcity—have exploded in the past few years. At root is the next iteration of blockchain technology, unique digital assets called non-fungible tokens. Unlike bitcoin, where one coin is the same as another, NFTs are unique, each with different attributes. An NFT that represented ownership of Boardwalk would be quite different from one that represented Baltic Avenue.
NFTs have grown from a few early breakout successes to a rapidly developing market for unique digital treasures. The attraction to buyers is that, unlike digital assets like e-books or licensed movies, NFTs can be bought, sold, displayed, gifted, or even destroyed just like personal property. Yet law has not kept pace with demand for unique digital property. In particular, the rules designed for the 2000s internet focused on expanding intellectual property licenses and online contracts to the point that consumers are mere users, not owners, of digital assets. This “end of ownership” legal structure stands in stark contrast to the expectations of those who create, buy, sell, and invest in NFTs.
This article proposes a clear path for the evolution of the legal underpinnings of NFTs. It argues that NFTs are personal property, not contracts (despite the “smart contracts” popular nomenclature) or pure intellectual property licenses (despite the currently governing law of digital assets like e-books). Because transactions in NFTs are in the form of a sale, the law of sales of personal property should apply. And finally, the article notes that NFTs will serve as a powerful, grounding example of digital personal property, a legal form of ownership that is both sorely needed and has not yet been clearly established online. That example will ground others, and permit law to again characterize those who buy scarce and valuable digital assets as true owners rather than mere users
Antitrust Class Actions in the Wake of Procedural Reform
Get PDFWhat is the current vitality of antitrust enforcement? Antitrust class actions—the primary mode of competition oversight—has weathered two decades of procedural reform. This Article documents the effects of those reforms. Relying on an original dataset of over 1300 antitrust class action settlements, this Article finds such cases alive but far from well. Certain suits do succeed on an impressive scale, returning billions of dollars to victims. But class action reform has made antitrust enforcement narrower, more time-consuming, and costlier than only a decade ago. And, as this Article’s sources reveal, new battle lines are forming. Across the political spectrum, people are trumpeting antitrust as the next great hope to resolve trade issues, equalize wealth inequity, and reform Big Tech. Even amid these rising calls, class action opponents continue to campaign for more reform. This Article describes those efforts and provides the essential data to repel them
Exclusion of Refugees from Refugee Status: History, Law, Terrorism, Security, State Interests and Ideology
No full textThis dissertation discusses the exclusion of “undeserving” refugees on the basis of the state national security interests in international refugee law. In determining the refugee status for those who are fleeing armed conflicts, civil war, and genocide, states’ main security concern is terrorism. The term “terrorism” is not mentioned under the refugee convention of 1951 nor its 1967 protocol; the term’s definition is too broad and can be applied under the “exclusion clauses” of Article 1F of the refugee convention. The sovereign state in international law is solely responsible for the protection of its national security interests. At the same time, the state is committed to providing the promised protection for refugees under international law. However, the “political will” of a state differs among states in conducting refugee status determinations on the basis of national security interests. Who is deserving to be included? And who is not?
The U.S. refugee policy has developed and been shaped throughout the years to adopt restrictions on ideological threats to its national security interests. Communism and terrorism threats have influenced refugee policymakers during different periods. The Cold War produced refugees from communist countries, and those refugees were prioritized as a national interest in combating communism during the Cold War. Additionally, the attack on 9/11 shifted U.S. refugee policymakers to make major changes to the core of U.S. immigration law. While formerly the purview of the Immigration and Naturalization services (INS), refugee determination became part of the sphere of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), indicating the importance of national security regarding refugee status determination and refugee resettlement in the United States
