Lawyers and Legal Scholarship

This [i.e., engaging in the conversation started in this post] wasn’t where I’d planned to start, but since I’ve got some thoughts on the scholarship-practice divide I might as well add my two cents. I spent just over eight years in practice before entering academia, so I have some understanding for the practitioner perspective. My firm maintained subscriptions to many of the top law reviews, which I would browse as time permitted. My reactions ranged from “wow that’s really interesting!” to “wow that’s complete ivory tower BS!” to “you know, I think I can actually use that!” And use them I did. I distinctly recall, for example, discussing Alan Michaels’ “Constitutional Innocence” article in the Harvard Law Review at oral argument before the Minnesota Court of Appeals. Nobody laughed.

So I think there’s plenty of scholarship, even work done at relatively high levels of abstraction, that can be put to work in practice.

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Fastcase Update: To Be Offered at Marquette Law Library

In a post earlier in the week, Jessica Price highlighted Fastcase, the online legal database that will soon be available to members of the Wisconsin State Bar at no additional cost. The Marquette Law Library explored Fastcase over the summer and is in the final integration stages of a subscription that will allow law students and law faculty access to the complete Fastcase database.

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Scrabulous Not Infringing (Copyright) in India

When it rains, it pours. This week there has been a slew of developments in copyright law. The motion picture studios have sued RealNetworks over its RealDVD application, claiming that RealNetworks violated the license it signed to get the decryption keys to DVDs. Congress passed a measure designed to ease the pressure on small webcasters after the Copyright Royalty Tribunal suddenly increased their fees. Congress also passed a version of the PRO-IP bill, which, ignoring a district court judge’s call to reduce copyright penalties, actually adds to them by allowing civil forfeiture of computer equipment in certain cases.

But the development I want to highlight here is the apparent decision by a court in India that Scrabulous does not infringe on the copyright for Scrabble. (The name, however, was held to infringe on the Scrabble trademark.) I wrote a four-part series for Prawfsblawg back in August that analyzed the case and copyright in games generally. (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.) Unfortunately the only news of the decision is from the Agarwalla brothers, the creators of Scrabulous, themselves; we don’t have the judge’s reasoning. But I’d be eager to see if it matches any of the points of my analysis.

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