Anyone Interested in a Faculty Blog T-Shirt?

Look around your home and you are sure to find no shortage of cheap promotional items carrying the logo of one business or another.  In fact, I happen to have in front of me right now three pens emblazoned with the names of three different national hotel chains.  None of the hotel chains are especially trendy, so it is hard to imagine that anyone would actually pay a premium to use the pens because of the presence of the trademarks.  But some trademarks do have real cache — think Harley, Starbucks, or BMW — and there might be real money-making opportunities in selling pens, shirts, mugs, and so forth linked to those famous names.  So, you might wonder, would it be legal to start producing  and selling merchandise bearing famous names without first obtaining a license from the trademark owners?

As Irene Calboli explains in a new paper on SSRN, the answer has not been as clearly and satisfactorily worked out by the courts as you might think.  

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A Captivating New Paper

Paul Secunda argues in a new paper on SSRN that the National Labor Relations Act should be interpreted to prohibit “captive audience meetings.”  Employers require employee attendance at such meetings in order to communicate anti-union messages.  Paul has written interestingly about captive audience meetings from a number of perspectives (see, e.g., here).  In the new paper, he critically examines NLRB precedent that approves of such meetings.

Entitled “The Contemporary ‘Fist Inside the Velvet Glove’ — Employer Captive Audience Meetings Under the NLRA,” the paper will be published in a symposium issue of the Florida International University Law Review devoted to the NLRB.  The abstract appears after the jump. 

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Rediscovering the Privileges or Immunities Clause

The Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been largely dormant since the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873.  Courts generally treat the Clause as adding little or nothing to the Fourteenth Amendment’s two better-known provisions, the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses.  However, Bruce Boyden argues  in a new paper on SSRN that the Clause actually does have a distinctive role to play in constitutional doctrine, specifically, by regulating conflicts between states over competing “status regimes.”

As Bruce explains, America’s prototypical “status regime conflict” related to the rights of northern blacks who traveled to pro-slavery states prior to the Civil War.  Much litigation resulted from the refusal of some southern and western states to recognize the rights of such travelers.  Based on a review of the debates arising from these antebellum cases and the history surrounding the adoption of the Privileges or Immunities Clause, Bruce argues that the Clause was intended to ensure that interstate travelers could retain the legal status they enjoyed in their home states notwithstanding entrenched national divisions over legal status questions.

For Bruce, the ongoing significance of this history is that the Privileges or Immunities Clause should continue to be seen as a device for resolving status regime conflicts. 

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