CategoryPrint

Monopolizing Trade: Airline Ticket Change Policies and the Thwarted Secondary Market

Suppose you have a domestic economy-class airline ticket that you can no longer use. In the 1980s and early ’90s, there was a secondary market in domestic airline tickets, carried out openly in newspaper classifieds. Though many tickets were nominally nontransferable, back then, the airlines didn’t check every passenger’s name. Problem solved. But now, American, Delta, and United will charge you...

Copyright Enforcement in the Digital Age: When the Remedy is the Wrong

This Article conducts a comprehensive empirical study of copyright statutory damages. An extensive examination of docket entries and case law reveals a widespread practice of overclaiming of remedies in copyright litigation. Although 80 percent of plaintiffs in all disputes claim that they suffered conduct that constitutes willful infringement, courts find willful infringement in just 2 percent...

Statutory Interpretation as “Interbranch Dialogue”?

Much in the field of statutory interpretation is predicated on “interpretive dialogue” between courts and legislatures. Yet, the idea of such dialogue is often advanced as little more than a slogan; the dialogue that courts, legislators, and scholars are imagining too often goes unexamined and underspecified. This Article attempts to organize thinking about the ways participants and theorists...

Copyright Enforcement in the Digital Age: When the Remedy is the Wrong

This Article conducts a comprehensive empirical study of copyright statutory damages. An extensive examination of docket entries and case law reveals a widespread practice of overclaiming of remedies in copyright litigation. Although 80 percent of plaintiffs in all disputes claim that they suffered conduct that constitutes willful infringement, courts find willful infringement in just 2 percent...

Everything Is Obvious

Inventive machines are increasingly being used in research, and once the use of such machines becomes standard, the standard of the “person skilled in the art” used to judge “obviousness” for patentability should be a person using an inventive machine, or just an inventive machine. As inventive machines continue to improve, this will increasingly raise the bar to patentability, eventually...

Invoking Federal Common Law Defenses in Immigration Cases

This article argues that we should take a deeper look at the applicability of federal common law defenses in immigration cases. In the rare cases where noncitizens attempt to raise common law defenses, such arguments tend to be dismissed by immigration judges because removal proceedings are civil, not criminal. Yet many common-law defenses may be raised in civil cases. This article proposes three...

Private Accountability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

This article explores the impending conflict between the protection of civil rights and trade secrecy in an age of big data, as exemplified by a number of recent cases involving algorithmic bias and discrimination. In a world where the activities of private corporations are raising concerns about privacy, due process, and discrimination, we must focus on the role of corporations in addressing the...

Open Records, Shuttered Labs: Ending Political Harassment of Public University Researchers

This article confronts a dangerous contemporary trend: the escalating political harassment of public university scholars through the use of public records requests. This phenomenon impedes academic enterprises as diverse as climate change research and biomedical experiments. The article argues that most of professors’ records should not be subject to laws that exist to promote democratic...

Accountability in the Deep State

The story behind the resignation of Joel Clement—the head of the U.S. Interior Department’s Office of Policy Analysis—provides a window into the relationship between the political leadership and the civil service at the Interior Department in the first year of the Trump administration. It also serves as a jumping-off point to revisit the value in having a civil service with some independence from...

(Re)Constructing Democracy in Crisis

This article complements academic discourse about democratic backsliding by focusing on two questions: In what ways has democracy been chronically or systemically weakened and prevented, and what kinds of new institutional and organizational forms do we need to realize democratic aspirations in the twenty-first century.

America's Conscience: The Rise of Civil Society Groups Under President Trump

The article explores the role and transformation of civil society groups under the presidency of Donald Trump. It observes such groups face the risk of overlooking injustices that do not involve President Trump, the urge to sharpen tactics against the administration’s lawyers, and the temptation to forget that the country will be better off when, once more, the work of civil society groups is not...

Administrative Law Without Courts

This article argues that it is a mistake to fixate on courts as the core safeguard in the modern administrative state. The article surveys federal agencies that regulate us in many ways that either evade judicial review entirely or are at least substantially insulated from such review.