Jan

20

How Should the Supreme Court Handle Warrantless GPS Tracking?

Posted by: | January 20, 2012 | 2 Comments

One of the most anticipated decisions of the current U.S. Supreme Court term is United States v. Jones, which was argued last fall (transcript here).  The case concerns Fourth Amendment protections from GPS tracking of automobiles.   The lower court, the D.C. Circuit, held that the government was prohibited from placing a GPS tracking device on the [...]

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Dec

16

Intent and the Eighth Amendment: New Restrictions on Sentencing in Cases of Felony Murder?

Posted by: | December 16, 2011 | Leave a Comment

The felony-murder rule is perhaps the most troubling and controversial surviving relic of the common law of homicide, branding felons as murderers notwithstanding an absence of the sort of culpability otherwise required for a murder conviction. If we are not going to make culpability-based distinctions in these cases at the guilt stage, then we ought to [...]

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Dec

9

Why Following the Rules Should Get You Out of Prison Early

Posted by: | December 9, 2011 | Leave a Comment

I have a new paper on SSRN entitled “Solving the Good Time Puzzle: Why Following the Rules Should Get You Out of Prison Early.” Most U.S. jurisdictions permit inmates to obtain credit toward early release based on good behavior in prison. It’s not immediately clear, though, why the severity of a prison sentence should vary [...]

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Dec

8

New Article by Prof. Calboli Explores Tension Between Free Trade and Trademark Rights

Posted by: | December 8, 2011 | Leave a Comment

Irene Calboli grapples with a longstanding controversy over the “first sale rule” in trademark law in her new article, “Market Integration and (the Limits of) the First Sale Rule in North American and European Trademark Law,” 51 Santa Clara L. Rev. 1241 (2011).  As she explains, Trademark law grants trademark owners the right to prevent [...]

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Nov

15

New Issue of Marquette Law Review

Posted by: | November 15, 2011 | 1 Comment

Congratulations to the editors of the Marquette Law Review for the publication of Vol. 94, No. 4.  Here are the contents: MELMS V. PABST BREWING CO. AND THE DOCTRINE OF WASTE IN AMERICAN PROPERTY LAW Thomas W. Merrill ………………………………………………………………………… 1055 COMMENT ON MERRILL ON THE LAW OF WASTE Richard A. Posner …………………………………………………………………………. 1095 CONTRACT AND PROCEDURE [...]

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Oct

7

R.I.P. Derrick Bell, Pioneer of Critical Race Theory

Posted by: | October 7, 2011 | 2 Comments

  On Wednesday of this week, the world lost several visionaries. Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a prominent civil rights activist, and Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, Inc. both died.  But there was a third visionary whose light went out on Wednesday:  Derrick Bell. Bell was a visiting professor of law at New York University School of [...]

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Oct

5

Marquette Students Win IP Writing Competition

Posted by: | October 5, 2011 | 1 Comment

Congratulations to Mitchell Stock and Francisco Quiroz, winners of the State Bar’s 2011 IP Writing Competition.  Stock won first place for his paper entitled “Hypothetical, Actual, or Footstar: How the Courts Should Handle Patent and Copyright Licenses in Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.”  Quiroz took second for ”The Decline of Fair Use: How the DMCA Marginalized Fair Use and [...]

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Oct

4

Barrock Lecture on Thursday

Posted by: | October 4, 2011 | Leave a Comment

As described in greater detail here, Professor Robert Weisberg of Stanford Law School will be delivering our annual Barrock Lecture on Criminal Law at 12:15 on Thursday.  In anticipation of his visit, I’ve been reading a few of his recent law review articles.  Here are my reflections on these works: Weisberg on Dan Kahan (our 2008 [...]

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Sep

26

Generalist Versus Specialist Judges

Posted by: | September 26, 2011 | 1 Comment

The Federal Circuit and a few other counterexamples notwithstanding, American courts are not substantively specialized.  By and large, the American judge is thus a generalist.  For better or worse, our judiciary seems to be holding out against the  pressures toward specialization that have so marked the contemporary legal and medical professions.  Is this a good [...]

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Aug

25

Why Confess?

Posted by: | August 25, 2011 | 1 Comment

Why do suspects confess to the police? Researchers Allison Redlich, Richard Kulish, and Henry Steadman set out to answer this question by interviewing 65 jail inmates who had confessed, slightly more than half of whom claimed to have falsely confessed. The results are reported in their new article “Comparing True and False Confessions Among Persons [...]

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Aug

2

Adoption Across Race: Disparate Treatment of Native Americans and African Americans

Posted by: | August 2, 2011 | Leave a Comment

David Papke has a new paper on SSRN that contrasts the laws governing the adoption of Native American and African American children by whites. Once rare in this country, “transracial” adoptions became common over the latter decades of the twentieth-century. Such adoptions sparked concerns within both Native American and African American communities, but the legal [...]

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Jul

24

The Uncertain Future of Multiemployer Benefit Plans

Posted by: | July 24, 2011 | Leave a Comment

Multiemployer benefit plans, writes Paul Secunda, “once represented one of the greatest triumphs in American labor relations in providing employee benefits to workers of small employers in itinerant industries (such as in building and construction, trucking, retail, and the entertainment industry).” In a new paper on SSRN, Paul explores three major challenges facing multiemployer plans. [...]

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