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Legal Agency of Small States: Regional Law Cooperation Amid Indo-Pacific Pressures
Get PDFDiscussions about the Indo-Pacific contestation between China and the United States often focus on both superpowers’ geopolitical strategies and economic and military might. The experiences of small and less powerful Indo-Pacific states navigating these tensions are relatively overlooked or even discounted. Yet, they are not passive bystanders in their longstanding neighborhood drama— they often seek strength in unity via their regional organizations and produce regional law to safeguard their collective interests. In short, they exercise legal agency. Using the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (“ASEAN”) experience of regional law cooperation to navigate challenges (including, but not limited to, the U.S.-China contestation), this cross-disciplinary article conceptualizes how small Indo-Pacific states have exercised legal agency amid geopolitical pressures to safeguard common security and economic interests. This has resulted in the exercise of legal agency corresponding to three distinct geopolitical environments: via realist rhetoric laws in the Cold War, constructivist cooperation laws amid globalization, and rules-based ordering in the contemporary Indo-Pacific. Through the intensification of legal agency over fifty-seven years, ASEAN has transformed from a diplomatic grouping with a basic aim of preventing inter-member aggression to promote national economic development, to a rules-based integrationist community that pursues ASEAN centrality in foreign power engagement to safeguard members’ intraregional and external security and economic interests. ASEAN’s experience may have generalizable lessons for how other Indo-Pacific or Global South regimes facing geopolitical pressures exercise their legal agency. As the former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong put it: “Small states [have] little buffer against shocks. But [we] are by no means without agency . . . we can make up . . . through . . . cooperation . . . and upholding the multilateral rules-based system.
There Is No Helpful General Rule About Appealing Dismissals Without Prejudice
Get PDFWith some frequency, courts wrestle with whether litigants can appeal after dismissal without prejudice. But there is no helpful general rule to answer this question. That’s because the without-prejudice designation is more or less irrelevant to whether the dismissal is a final, appealable decision. In this Essay, I show that the nature of the underlying dismissal— what the dismissal did, not its without-prejudice nature—is what matters for appealability. Courts would do well to ignore whether an action was dismissed without prejudice when it comes to determining appealability
Tort Liability, Privacy, and Regulatory Considerations for Level 3 Autonomous Vehicles
Get PDFRecent developments in emerging technology, such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous vehicles, have generated inquiries about the incorporation of these technologies into the law, as well as the philosophical and ethical questions that accompany their use. This paper considers existing legal doctrine and regulatory frameworks as applied to the niche area of Level 3 autonomous vehicles. Specifically, this paper considers tort liability in the form of negligence and products liability, privacy risks, and regulatory considerations in relation to Level 3 vehicles. Finally, societal risks and potential solutions are considered to provide insight into potential areas of additional work
Researching ADR in Michigan and beyond
Get PDFThe June Michigan Bar Journal was full of valuable analysis of alternative dispute resolutions issues, but you don’t need to wait for the next ADR special issue for more. In this column, I highlight some additional Michigan-focused resources followed by a selection of resources that practitioners and scholars in any jurisdiction may find useful
Taxation and Corporate Governance
Get PDFIn recent years, legal and economic research has shown a growing interest in the interaction between corporate governance and taxation. Some specific aspects have drawn more interest, particularly the tax rules related to the remuneration of directors, measures taken by management in the context of market for corporate control, and the double taxation of inter-corporate dividends. However, there is still little legal literature on many other aspects of the interplay between the two systems, and several authors have identified this gap in the literature and the dire need for further study in this “fertile area of research.” The aim of this article is to begin filling this gap by exploring some of the more intriguing aspects of the interplay between the two systems. It argues that the corporate tax can be justified on the ground that it reduces the corporate agency problem and that alternative systems have fewer desirable effects
The New Frontier of Guidance Reviewability
Get PDFIn the administrative context, agency actions must be “final” to trigger judicial review. The Supreme Court’s opinions in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes Co. marked an important shift in finality doctrine by emphasizing that the calculus of whether agency guidance is “final” may turn on its practical effects. For decades, agency guidance rarely warranted judicial review because it is not legally binding and, thus, not final. But the advent of the Sackett-Hawkes pragmatic analysis has changed the landscape, raising particular concerns for agencies relying on promulgating guidance documents to “softly” regulate. This presents a puzzle: guidance varies in form and purpose, so what guidance is final? This Note makes two contributions. First, it offers a taxonomy of how circuit courts have developed the Sackett-Hawkesfinality test into different doctrinal strands. Second, it evaluates a recent case in the Fifth Circuit, Clarke v. CFTC, to explain why no-action letters should remain insulated from judicial review. Unlike other guidance documents, no-action letters are “committed to agency discretion” because they are a species of prosecutorial discretion. Conflating the reviewability of no-action letters with general guidance risks doctrinal, constitutional, and policy consequences
Intellectual Property Liability for Businesses in the Age of AI: What New Liabilities Businesses Using AI Could Face and the Possible Methods of Self-Protection
Get PDFThe invention of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) has triggered a wave of copyright and trademark litigation that will likely shape the intellectual property laws governing AI for the foreseeable future. Lawsuits against AI giants like Meta and OpenAI stand to declare popular uses of AI as actionable infringement as well as possibly reshape how copyright and trademark law view concepts, such as fair use and derivative works in the age of technology. Meanwhile, businesses are pushing forward rapidly with adopting AI and implementing its use in everyday functions. For many of these businesses, AI is a highly desirable but poorly understood technology, creating the possibility that businesses may be using AI in ways that lead to surprise lawsuits and penalties depending on the outcome of the cases currently pending.
This note surveys many of the ongoing lawsuits alleging violations of authors’ copyright and trademark rights, explaining what claims have been brought and their significance for businesses if accepted by the courts. In particular, this note discusses the novel claims being brought, such as the claim that an AI model should itself be declared an infringing derivative work once a work has been uploaded to it without the author’s permission. After explaining the business impacts of these claims, this note suggests that businesses should seek to license any work they wish to upload into an AI model from the author, search for insurance providers willing to develop insurance against copyright and trademark infringement claims for improper AI use, and request specific liability-insulating features when commissioning a custom AI program from developers
99th Henry M. Campbell Moot Court Competition: Final Round
No full textHenry Munroe Campbell was a distinguished lawyer who served as legal counsel to the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents for several years.
He was born in 1854, the son of famed Michigan Supreme Court Justice James V. Campbell. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1876 and later from the University of Michigan Law School. In 1878, he established a law partnership in Detroit with Henry Russell. Over the years, the firm prospered and continues today as the Detroit-based firm Dickinson Wright PLLC.
Campbell became an attorney of considerable eminence in Michigan and was widely regarded as a constitutional scholar. He helped draft the Michigan Constitution in 1908 and served as chief counsel to the delegates who petitioned the Michigan Supreme Court to secure early submission of the document to the electorate.
Campbell maintained a keen interest in the affairs and growth of the University of Michigan. In Board of Regents of the University of Michigan v. Auditor General, 132 N.W. 1037 (Mich. 1911), he successfully argued for the constitutional autonomy of the University and its governing body. Campbell was a well-liked and inspiring teacher. One of the young lawyers he trained recalled years later that “he created and fostered a sense of loyalty, of cooperation, and uncompromising integrity that must endure. To him the law was a science, its profession a service.”
Following Campbell’s death in 1926, his law partners met with then-University of Michigan Law School Dean Henry Bates to discuss a fitting memorial. They decided to establish a case club competition to foster training for law students in appellate advocacy in his honor. The first Henry M. Campbell competition was held in the 1927–1928 academic year.
A trust fund to finance the competition was established in 1927 and has been periodically augmented with gifts from Dickinson Wright PLLC. Each year, prizes are paid from the income of the trust fund to the finalists in the Henry M. Campbell Moot Court Competition. This year cash prizes will be paid to the top five finalists