Jul
19
New Issue of IP Law Review
Posted by: Michael M. O'Hear | July 19, 2011 | Leave a Comment
The latest issue of the Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review is now out in print. The contents include: Mark Lemley’s Nies Lecture, “Can the Patent Office Be Fixed?” Ysolde Gendreau’s lecture on copyright reform in Canada, “Canada and the Three-Step Test: A Step in Which Direction?” Dalila Hoover’s article, “Coercion Will Not Protect Trademark Owners in [...]
Jul
2
Diminishing the Harmful Effects of “Cultural Cognition” in Labor and Employment Litigation
Posted by: Michael M. O'Hear | July 2, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Our recent past Boden Lecturer Dan Kahan and his colleagues have developed a provocative body of empirical and theoretical scholarship on “cultural cognition” (see, e.g., his article here in the Marquette Law Review). Kahan’s basic thesis is that judges and other legal decisionmakers tend to perceive facts in ways that are congenial to their social [...]
Jun
21
Ail to the Chief
Posted by: Michael M. O'Hear | June 21, 2011 | Leave a Comment
The dark underside of life tenure for Supreme Court Justices is the difficulty of removing an obviously ailing Justice even after his or her capacity to serve has seriously deteriorated. However, despite the absence of effective formal removal mechanisms, Chief Justices have sometimes been successful in nudging declining Associate Justices off the bench, as in the cases of [...]
Jun
21
How to Hold Onto Your Sports Franchise
Posted by: Michael M. O'Hear | June 21, 2011 | Leave a Comment
The Oklahoma City Thunder had a nice run in the recently concluded NBA playoffs, but it was nothing compared to their run from Seattle. The story of the escape of the former SuperSonics from Seattle is the central case study in a new paper on the retention of major league franchises by Paul Anderson and William [...]
Jun
19
Do Changes in Benefits for Public Employees Violate the Contracts Clause?
Posted by: Michael M. O'Hear | June 19, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Paul Secunda has a new paper on SSRN that considers under what circumstances statutory changes affecting public-employee benefits might violate constitutional restrictions on the impairment of contracts. Paul particularly focuses on a very timely case study: Wisconsin’s recent budget-repair bill and its impact on city employees in Milwaukee. Here is the abstract: The recent spate [...]
Jun
14
Marquette Law Review Article Sparks Debate on Use of Dictionaries to Decide Legal Cases
Posted by: Michael M. O'Hear | June 14, 2011 | Leave a Comment
A recent article in the Marquette Law Review was featured in Adam Liptak’s “Sidebar” column for the New York Times earlier this week. Liptak wrote about the increasingly common citation of dictionaries in Supreme Court opinions: A new study in The Marquette Law Review found that the justices had used dictionaries to define 295 words or [...]
May
31
Local Food Systems and the Reawakening of Republicanism
Posted by: Gabe Johnson-Karp | May 31, 2011 | Leave a Comment
This post is a summary of a full-length piece that the author is currently working on with Marquette Law School Professor Chad Oldfather. The ideas expressed in this post represent a work in progress, and portions of the argument are likely to undergo substantial revisions before the final piece is completed. Notwithstanding the collaboration with [...]
Mar
22
William Stuntz, R.I.P.
Posted by: Michael M. O'Hear | March 22, 2011 | 1 Comment
It’s being reported that Harvard Law Professor William Stuntz died last week at the tragically young age of 52 (see the Times obit here). I never met Stuntz, but I’ve read and been deeply influenced by much of his writing. Indeed, I doubt there is any scholar who has had a more profound influence on my generation of criminal procedure [...]
Mar
22
Science, Religion, Politics, and Stem Cell Research
Posted by: Michael M. O'Hear | March 22, 2011 | Leave a Comment
In a new paper on SSRN, Ed Fallone explores one of the most contentious policy questions in the field of public bioethics: whether and under what constraints the federal government ought to fund stem cell research. Ed provides a thorough overview of the history and competing viewpoints in the debate. He also draws interesting parallels between [...]
Mar
18
Doubts About Deference to Police Hunches
Posted by: Michael M. O'Hear | March 18, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Over the course of the past decade or so, legal scholars have been paying increasing attention to psychological research on cognition and decisionmaking. In general, this has meant that scholars have become more sensitive to the common sorts of cognitive bias that have the potential to warp legal decisionmaking. But, inspired in many cases by Malcolm [...]
Feb
28
Rethinking Indeterminate Sentencing
Posted by: Michael M. O'Hear | February 28, 2011 | 1 Comment
My new article, “Beyond Rehabilitation: A New Theory of Indeterminate Sentencing,” is now available here on SSRN. The article grew out of my interest in the revival of early-release opportunities that has occurred over the course of the past decade. This revival has the effect of making sentencing less determinate in many jurisdictions — it [...]
Feb
16
Racial Disparities in the Federal Death Penalty: Uncovering the Key Role of Geography
Posted by: Michael M. O'Hear | February 16, 2011 | 1 Comment
The federal death penalty is plagued by two important types of disparity. One is racial: as of last year, nearly half of federal death row inmates (28 of 57) were black. The other is geographic: out of the 94 federal districts, just 16 have produced 75 percent of the death sentences, and nine have produced nearly [...]
Blog Editors
- Alan Borsuk
- Bruce E. Boyden
- Edward A. Fallone
- Melissa L. Greipp
- Scott C. Idleman
- Lisa Mazzie
- Michael M. O'Hear
- Ryan Scoville
