8353 research outputs found
Sort by
The Disappointments of Networks
Get PDFThe past 25 years have seen a ‘turn to culture’ in copyright scholarship. This cultural turn has produced an expansive account of copyright’s disadvantages with respect to qualitative cultural and political goals such as: promoting democracy, individual self-authorship, expressive diversity, and more inclusive power distribution in shaping culture and discourse. The prevailing view among proponents of the cultural turn is that copyright stands in the way of the democratisation of creative and discursive spheres online. This article challenges that view. I contend that online, ‘free’ content economies—characterised by peer production, decentralised selection, and peer to peer content sharing—have not lived up to the hopes of cultural turn thinkers. I focus on structural matters (structures of incentive, structures of power), critically applying descriptive and normative frameworks of the cultural turn. Proponents of the cultural turn have been concerned about copyright’s role in concentrating cultural power. They should also be concerned about concentrations of cultural and communicative power in ‘free content’ economies. If they were concerned that commercial incentives under copyright regimes privileged bland and homogeneous content, they should also be concerned about the troubling incentives at play in online economies based on harvesting user attention and selling advertisements. This is not to say we should aim for maximalist copyright online. I show that both expansions of exceptions and limitations to copyright, and measures that strengthen copyright owners’ exclusive rights, may entrench problematic incentives and power structures both online and off. The practical implication of my analysis is this. We should carefully assess how developments in law (proposed or actual) affect structures of power and incentive in the creative sphere as a whole, whether they formally ‘weaken’ copyright or ‘strengthen’ it
Docket Control, Mandatory Jurisdiction, and the Supreme Court\u27s Failure in Rucho v. Common Cause
No full textThis paper, part of a Symposium on Andrew Coan\u27s book, Rationing the Constitution: How Judicial Capacity Shapes Supreme Court Decision-Making, traces congressional changes to Supreme Court jurisdiction over more than a century, noting that those changes were regularly made in response to concerns about the Court\u27s caseload. To the extent that Coan, and the Court, turn to doctrinal methods of controlling caseloads, such as deferential standards of review, they are overlooking the important congressional role in setting the Court\u27s jurisdiction. The paper concludes by criticizing the recent decision of Rucho v. Common Cause in which the Court held that extreme partisan gerrymandering is nonjusticiable without discussing Congress\u27s very deliberate decision to maintain mandatory jurisdiction for the Supreme Court in constitutional challenges to redistricting. That congressional decision should have been honored by adjudicating the Rucho plaintiffs\u27 claims and by recognizing that the Court\u27s floodgates concerns should have been taken up by Congress if the flood of litigation in fact materialized
Vol. 37, No. 1
Get PDFConflict Resolution for Chicago Police and Community: Healing a Constitutional Crisis at the Thirteenth Floor through Native American Reparative Justice
By Stephanie Brinson
Recent Developmentshttps://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/iperr/1113/thumbnail.jp
Navigating Uncertainty — Addressing Purely Functional Claim Limitations in A Post-Williamson World with Ongoing PTAB Climate Change
Get PDF
Good Reason Laws under the Gun: May-Issue States and the Right to Bear Arms
Get PDFThis note proposes a framework for analyzing the point at which discretionary restrictions on the concealed carry of firearms are unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, which, at its core, guarantees the responsible, law-abiding citizen at least the right to use a firearm for self-defense. Although the Supreme Court has yet to affirmatively answer whether and to what extent this right extends beyond the home, every state allows its residents to publicly carry a firearm in some form—be it open or concealed. But states have the power to limit who may exercise this right; and some states curtail it to the point at which few, if any, individuals are granted a permit to carry a firearm. Should the Supreme Court face this issue, I argue that the latter approach is impermissible under the Second Amendment’s developing jurisprudence.
To briefly illustrate, most states develop a list of criteria that a permit applicant must satisfy, and, assuming he or she does so, the state will issue the applicant a concealed carry permit. However, some states, although they have a similar list of criteria, may also require an applicant to prove he or she has a special need for self-defense above that of the general public. Because permit schemes are already designed to isolate law-abiding citizens from potentially dangerous ones, I argue that, by drawing a distinction between (a) responsible, law-abiding citizens and (b) responsible, law-abiding citizens with a special need for self-defense, states have infringed upon the Second Amendment’s core