Regulating Reproduction: The Problem with Best Interests
By I. Glenn Cohen. Full text here. Should the State permit anonymous sperm donation? Should brother-sister incest between adults be made criminal? Should individuals over the age of fifty be allowed access to reproductive technologies? Should the State fund abstinence education? One common form of justification that is offered to answer these and a myriad of…
Continue ReadingSuccessor Liability
By John H. Matheson. Full text here. The phrase mergers and acquisitions, or M&A for short, signifies both the business activity of growing (or divesting) corporate operations and the legal rules surrounding that activity. One typical acquisition technique is the purchase of business assets by one company from another. Asset sales transactions have various benefits, one…
Continue ReadingProperty Rights and the Efficient Exploitation of Copyrighted Works: An Empirical Analysis of Public Domain and Copyrighted Fiction Bestsellers
By Paul J. Heald. Full text here. Economists and policymakers have recently defended the extension of copyright protection to assure the efficient exploitation of existing works. They assert that works in the public domain may be underexploited due to the lack of property rights. This study compares the availability, number of editions, and prices of 166…
Continue ReadingEssay: Unsubsidizing Suburbia
By Nicole Stelle Garnett. Full text here.
Continue ReadingLawyers, Justice, and the Challenge of Moral Pluralism
By Katherine R. Kruse. Full text here. Each year law students confront the same question in their professional responsibility classes: should lawyers represent clients who want to use the law to do something immoral? Legal scholars who have addressed this question fall into two main camps: traditionalists and social justice theorists. Traditionalists argue that lawyers should…
Continue ReadingWhen Judges Lie (and When They Should)
By Paul Butler. Full text here. What should a judge do when she must apply law that she believes is fundamentally unjust? The problem is as old as slavery. It is as contemporary as the debates about capital punishment and abortion rights. In a famous essay, Robert Cover described four choices that a judge has in…
Continue ReadingThe Scientific Study of Judicial Activism
By Frank B. Cross & Stefanie A. Lindquist. Full text here. Claims of judicial activism are common from both the right and the left, but they are seldom scrutinized systematically. Prior tests of judicial activism published in law reviews have typically involved analysis of frequency distributions reflecting the number of cases in which Justices voted…
Continue ReadingWhy Supreme Court Justices Should Ride Circuit Again
By David R. Stras. Full text here. The practice of Supreme Court Justices circuit riding is as old as the federal judiciary itself and has a storied history that spans the first 120 years of this nation’s history. Yet the practice is also one of the least explored aspects of the Judiciary Act of 1789 and…
Continue ReadingNote: Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang: How Current Approaches to Guns and Domestic Violence Fail to Save Women's Lives
By Jennifer L. Vainik. Full text here. In comparison to the general population, battered women are much more likely to experience gun violence at the hands of their intimate partners. However, despite an increasing recognition that the government must take special measures to stop gun violence against battered women, current laws remain ineffective at disarming batterers.…
Continue ReadingNote: An Unacceptable Exception: The Ramifications of Physician Immunity from Medical Procedure Patent Infringement Liability
By Emily C. Melvin. Full text here. Medical procedures present a unique challenge to the patent system. Without patents, investors may be unwilling to commit resources to the costly development of new procedures. However, patents on these procedures may decrease public access to the procedures, which may harm society’s interest in accessible medical care. In response…
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