Israel Reflections 2015–Day Four: Dinner with Lawyers

For dinner on our fourth night, we joined lawyers from the region around the Sea of Galilee for a meal and mingling.  Much thanks for the yummy food and company to the partnership between this region in Israel and Milwaukee that sets this up every year.   Many students built professional relationships during this meal, gleaned advice from practitioners and professors, and engaged in meaningful dialogue.

Student Lucas Bennewitz had a particularly thoughtful discussion:

 During our trip, we had dinner at a kibbutz in Tiberius with different Israeli attorneys practicing in different areas.  Both our stomach and our brains were stuffed to the brim that evening with both excellent food and lively discussions about Israeli law and politics.  While enjoying more hummus and rice than we could handle, we gained valuable insight on the nature of the Israeli legal system, heard some criticism from the Israeli lawyers about their current system, and compared the Israeli and the American legal systems.  We also discussed the role that legal internships play in the Israeli law school experience. 

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A Rebellion of Giants: Dixon, Ryan, and Taming the Railroads in the Gilded Age

Chief Justice Luther S. Dixon
Chief Justice
Luther S. Dixon

This is the fifth in a series of Schoone Fellowship Field Notes.

Eastern jurists such as John Marshall, James Kent, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Benjamin Cardozo have received the lion’s share of attention from law professors and historians over the years. Two fellow giants from the Midwest, Michigan’s Thomas Cooley and Iowa’s John Dillon, have been relegated to comparative obscurity.

Cooley and Dillon played a central role in shaping the contours of modern American constitutional law. They forged their philosophies in the heat of two critical judicial debates over the role of railroads in American society. Two Wisconsin justices, Luther Dixon and Edward Ryan, were also leaders in those debates, and their contributions to American constitutional law deserve to be better known.

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The 2015 Nies Lecture: IP as Semicommons

cows-on-meadow-1410432-mThe title of the 2015 Nies Lecture, being given by Harvard Law Prof. Henry Smith on Thursday, April 16th, at 4:30pm (register here), is “Semicommons in Fluid Resources.” What’s a “semicommons,” and what does it have to do with intellectual property? (I should note that I haven’t talked to Prof. Smith about his lecture; Tuesday’s post and today’s are based just on the abstract read in light of Prof. Smith’s previous scholarship.)

Before I go further, let me recap Tuesday’s post. Prof. Smith has, in a series of articles, laid out a theory of property law that takes into account the informational costs of assigning property rights in various ways. Some ways of describing who has a certain right, and monitoring whether that right is being respected, are very concise: “Kerry owns that red ball.” “Hey, that’s not your ball, it’s mine!” I called these object-based rules, but Prof. Smith calls them “exclusivity rules.” The idea is the same: saying Kerry has the exclusive right to use the red ball for any purpose is a short and easily comprehended way of assigning all uses of that particular object to Kerry. It’s easy to identify who Kerry is, what the object is, and what Kerry (or anyone else) can do with it.

But that’s not the only way to assign rights to objects. Instead of giving all uses of a particular object to one person in an undivided lump, we could instead specify various uses of the object under various conditions, and say that different people can engage in those uses. In other words, we could manage access to the ball.

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