Faculty Bibliography

Panelist, What I’m Reading, American Bar Association, Dispute Resolution Section Annual Conference

Copyright Law in an Age of Limitations and Exceptions brings together leading copyright scholars and the field's foremost authorities to consider the critical role of copyright law in shaping the complex social, economic, and political interaction critical for cultural productivity and human flourishing. The book addresses defining issues facing copyright law today, including justifications for copyright law's limitations and exceptions (L&Es), the role of authors in copyright, users' rights, fair use politics and reform, the three-step test in European copyright law, the idea/expression principle with respect to functional works, limits on the use of L&Es in scientific innovation, and L&Es as a tool for economic development in international copyright law. The book also presents case studies on the historical development of the concept of 'neighboring rights' and on Harvard Law School's pioneering model of global copyright education, made possible by the exercise of L&Es across national borders.

Calls for public-private partnerships to address U.S. cybersecurity failures have become ubiquitous. But the academic literature and public debate have not fully appreciated the extent to which the United States has already backed into a de facto system of "public-private cybersecurity." This system is characterized by the surprisingly important, quasi-governmental role of the private sector on key cybersecurity issues, and correspondingly by instances in which the federal government acts more like a market participant than a traditional regulator. The public-private cybersecurity system challenges scholarly approaches to privatization, which focus on maintaining public law values when government functions are contracted out to private parties. The informal and complicated structure of public-private relationships in cybersecurity renders concerns about public law values at once more serious and more difficult to remedy. This Article first explores the line between public and private functions and provides a descriptive account of the public-private cybersecurity system. It highlights the relative roles of the U.S. government and private sector in four important contexts related to international cybersecurity threats: (1) disrupting networks of infected computers used by transnational-criminal groups ("botnet takedowns"), (2) remediating software vulnerabilities that can be used for crime, espionage, and offensive operations ("zero-day vulnerabilities"), (3) attributing cyber intrusions to state-sponsored attackers, and (4) defending privately-owned systems and networks from sophisticated, nation-state-sponsored attackers. The Article then uses the public-private cybersecurity system to challenge and complicate existing scholarship on privatization. Procedurally, the public-private cybersecurity system differs from traditional privatization because private actors--not the government--decide what functions they should perform, and private actors operate outside of the contractual frameworks that have traditionally restrained private contractors. Substantively, the cybersecurity context implicates public law values addressed in prior work--including accountability, transparency, and due process or fairness--but it also raises additional concerns about security and privacy. Evaluating how the public-private cybersecurity system attains and falls short of public law values yields broader lessons for cybersecurity governance and for privatization. The public-private cybersecurity system shows that concerns about public law values are not unidirectional--sometimes threats to public values come from the government, not the private sector. On the other hand, while empowered private parties play a crucial role in cybersecurity and in many ways currently support public values, this alignment is a present fortuity, not a structural feature, and so may shift in the future, posing new threats to public law values. These complexities require new kinds of context-dependent solutions to safeguard public law values. The Article concludes by suggesting several such remedies for the public law failings it identifies.

Motor vehicle fuel-economy standards have long been a cornerstone of U.S. policy to reduce fuel consumption in the light-duty vehicle fleet. In 2011 and 2012 these standards were significantly expanded in an effort to achieve steep reductions in oil demand and greenhouse gas emissions through 2025, consistent with long-term U.S. policy goals. As a policy approach, however, standards that focus on efficiency alone, as opposed to lifetime consumption, impose unnecessarily high costs and do not deliver guaranteed petroleum savings. On the basis of a commitment to cost-benefit analysis, defining U.S. regulatory policy for more than 30 years, we propose a novel policy solution that would implement a cap-and-trade system in transportation. Acknowledging that the very idea of cap and trade has become controversial, we show that this approach would increase the certainty of reductions in fuel consumption in transportation and do so at a far lower cost per gallon avoided. Such an approach is consistent with the regulatory authority existing at key federal agencies.

After five decades of punitive expansion, the entire U.S. criminal justice system— mass incarceration, the War on Drugs, police practices, the treatment of juveniles and the mentally ill, glaring racial disparity, the death penalty and more — faces challenging questions. What exactly is criminal justice? How much of it is a system of law and how much is a collection of situational social practices? What roles do the Constitution and the Supreme Court play? How do race and gender shape outcomes? How does change happen, and what changes or adaptations should be pursued? The New Criminal Justice Thinking addresses the challenges of this historic moment by asking essential theoretical and practical questions about how the criminal system operates. In this thorough and thoughtful volume, scholars from across the disciplines of legal theory, sociology, criminology, Critical Race Theory, and organizational theory offer crucial insights into how the criminal system works in both theory and practice. By engaging both classic issues and new understandings, this volume offers a comprehensive framework for thinking about the modern justice system. For those interested in criminal law and justice, The New Criminal Justice Thinking offers a profound discussion of the complexities of our deeply flawed criminal justice system, complexities that neither legal theory nor social science can answer alone.

David L. Lange Lecture in Intellectual Property, Duke Law School

The article discusses the investigation conducted by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) with its director James B. Comey on the involvement of Russiaa in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

"As the Internet grows more sophisticated, it is creating new threats to democracy. Social media companies such as Facebook can sort us ever more efficiently into groups of the like-minded, creating echo chambers that amplify our views. It's no accident that on some occasions, people of different political views cannot even understand each other. It's also no surprise that terrorist groups have been able to exploit social media to deadly effect. Welcome to the age of #Republic. In this revealing book, Cass Sunstein, the New York Times bestselling author of Nudge and The World According to Star Wars, shows how today's Internet is driving political fragmentation, polarization, and even extremism—and what can be done about it. Thoroughly rethinking the critical relationship between democracy and the Internet, Sunstein describes how the online world creates "cybercascades," exploits "confirmation bias," and assists "polarization entrepreneurs." And he explains why online fragmentation endangers the shared conversations, experiences, and understandings that are the lifeblood of democracy. In response, Sunstein proposes practical and legal changes to make the Internet friendlier to democratic deliberation. These changes would get us out of our information cocoons by increasing the frequency of unchosen, unplanned encounters and exposing us to people, places, things, and ideas that we would never have picked for our Twitter feed. #Republic need not be an ironic term. As Sunstein shows, it can be a rallying cry for the kind of democracy that citizens of diverse societies most need." -- Publisher

This chapter is primarily an exposition of the applicable constitutional doctrine on the enforcement of national law against subnational units in the US. It also offers some general observations about the underlying theory of federalism that generates US constitutional doctrine. In the US the question of the enforceability of national law against state governments is a matter of some theoretical interest but relatively little practical importance. The reasons for that situation are a combination of institutional and historical conditions, which the chapter refers to in more detail. For those outside the US, however, the primary message here is that the constitutional doctrine dealing with this sort of enforcement is quite limited in scope and importance, in contrast to its importance in systems whose constitutions create a less centralized version of constitutional federalism.

The theory of insurance is considered here when an insured individual may be able to sue another party for the losses that the insured suffered—and thus when an insured has a potential source of compensation in addition to insurance coverage. Insurance policies reflect this possibility through so-called subrogation provisions that give insurers the right to step into the shoes of insureds and to bring suits against injurers. We show that subrogation provisions are a fundamental feature of optimal insurance contracts because they relieve litigation-related risks and result in lower premiums—financed by the litigation income of insurers. This income includes earnings from suits that insureds would not otherwise have brought. We also characterize optimal subrogation provisions in the presence of loading costs, moral hazard, and non-monetary losses.

An editorial is presented on U.S. Donald Trump administration's attempt to rollback fuel efficiency standards for vehicles set by former President Obama and it states it is a retrograde step as the standards were set based on available technologies and to protect the environment.

Japanese communities with nuclear reactors have the reactors because they applied for them, and they applied for them for the money. Among Japanese municipalities, they were some of the most dysfunctional before the reactors had even arrived. Communities depend on young families for the social capital that holds them intact, and these were the communities from which those families had already begun to leave. After the reactors arrived, young families continued to disappear. Unemployment rose. Divorce rates climbed. And in time, the communities had little -- other than reactor-revenue -- to which they could turn.

This report addresses a number of key considerations that those managing open source software development initiatives should take into account when thinking about structure, organization, and governance. The genesis of this project involved an investigation into anecdotal reports that companies and other institutions developing open source software were facing difficulties obtaining tax exempt nonprofit status under Section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code. Based on conversations with a number of constituents in the open source software development community, the authors have prepared this report to address specific questions about nonprofit status alongside questions about corporate formation and governance models more generally. Nothing in this report should be viewed as a substitute for specific legal advice on the narrow questions facing particular organizations under particular sets of factual circumstances. But, the authors are hopeful the document provides a general overview of the complex issues that open source initiatives face when balancing a need for structure and continuity with the innovative and experimental spirit at the heart of many open source development projects. The report has two primary parts: • First, it addresses some formal organizational considerations that open source software initiatives should weigh, evaluating the benefits of taking on a formal structure and the options for doing so. The report provides information about different types of corporate organization that open source projects may wish to consider. And, it delves into Internal Revenue Service policy and practice and US tax law concerning questions about the tax exemptions referenced above. • In its second half, the authors pull back to consider more broadly questions of organizational structure, offering ideas about governance models that open source organizations may wish to explore, separate from formal corporate structure, as they seek to achieve their missions. Different considerations may inform the choice of formal, legal organizational structures (on the one hand) and governance models (on the other hand). By addressing both, the authors hope that this report will be useful to the broadest possible range of managers of and contributors to open source development initiatives.

Although the corrective tax has long been viewed by economists as a desirable remedy for the problem of harmful externalities. Liability, in contrast, has great importance in controlling harmful externalities. I compare the tax and liability in theory and suggest that the conclusions help explain the observed predominance of liability over taxation, except in the area of pollution. The following factors are emphasized: inefficiency of incentives under taxes when the state cannot practically take into account all variables that significantly affect expected harm; efficiency of incentives under strict liability, which requires only that actual harms be measured; efficiency of incentives under the negligence rule; administrative cost advantages of liability deriving from its being applied only when harm occurs; and dilution of incentives under liability when suit is unlikely or injurers cannot pay fully for harm.

Market power is the most important determinant of liability in competition law cases throughout the world. Yet fundamental questions on the relevance of market power are underanalyzed, if examined at all: When and why should we inquire into market power? How much should we require? Should market power be viewed as one thing, regardless of the practice under scrutiny and independent of the pertinent anticompetitive and procompetitive explanations for its use? Does each component of market power have the same probative force? Or even influence optimal liability determinations in the same direction? This Article’s ground-up investigation of market power finds that the answers often differ from what is generally believed and sometimes are surprising — notably, higher levels of certain market power measures or particular market power components sometimes disfavor liability. This gulf between conventional wisdom and correct understanding suggests the need to redirect research agendas, agency guidance, and competition law doctrine.

Boundaries: between public and private law – Political dimensions of private and public law – Boundaries between domestic law and transnational and international law – Boundaries between law and other disciplines, including economics, comparative politics, normative political theory, and hermeneutic disciplines – National styles of comparative law scholarship – Analytic and pragmatic traditions in comparative law scholarship.

The prudent investor rule, enacted in every state over the last 30 years, is the centerpiece of trust investment law. Repudiating the prior law's emphasis on avoiding risk, the rule reorients trust investment toward risk management in accordance with modern portfolio theory. The rule directs a trustee to implement an overall investment strategy having risk and return objectives reasonably suited to the trust. Using data from reports of bank trust holdings and fiduciary income tax returns, we examine asset allocation and management of market risk before and after the reform. First, we find that the reform increased stockholdings, but not among banks with average trust account sizes below the 25th percentile. This result is consistent with sensitivity in asset allocation to trust risk tolerance. Second, we present evidence consistent with increased portfolio rebalancing after the reform. We conclude that the move toward additional stockholdings was correlated with trust risk tolerance, and that the increased market risk exposure from additional stockholdings was more actively managed.

The use of social media as a recruitment tool for research with humans is increasing, and likely to continue to grow. Despite this, to date there has been no specific regulatory guidance and there has been little in the bioethics literature to guide investigators and institutional review boards (IRBs) faced with navigating the ethical issues such use raises. We begin to fill this gap by first defending a nonexceptionalist methodology for assessing social media recruitment; second, examining respect for privacy and investigator transparency as key norms governing social media recruitment; and, finally, analyzing three relatively novel aspects of social media recruitment: (i) the ethical significance of compliance with website "terms of use"; (ii) the ethics of recruiting from the online networks of research participants; and (iii) the ethical implications of online communication from and between participants. Two checklists aimed at guiding investigators and IRBs through the ethical issues are included as appendices.

Can we say, definitively, when an armed conflict no longer exists under international law? The short, unsatisfying answer is sometimes: it is clear when some conflicts terminate as a matter of international law, but a decisive determination eludes many others. The lack of fully-settled guidance often matters significantly. That is because international law tolerates, for the most part, far less violent harm, devastation, and suppression in situations other than armed conflicts. Thus, certain measures governed by the laws and customs of war — including killing and capturing the enemy, destroying and seizing enemy property, and occupying foreign territory, all on a possibly large scale — would usually constitute grave violations of peacetime law. This Legal Briefing details the legal considerations and analyzes the implications of that lack of settled guidance. It delves into the myriad (and often-inconsistent) provisions in treaty law, customary law, and relevant jurisprudence that purport to govern the end of war. Alongside the doctrinal analysis, this Briefing considers the changing concept of war and of what constitutes its end; evaluates diverse interests at stake in the continuation or close of conflict; and contextualizes the essentially political work of those who design the law. In all, this Legal Briefing reveals that international law, as it now stands, provides insufficient guidance to precisely discern the end of many armed conflicts as a factual matter (when has the war ended?), as a normative matter (when should the war end?), and as a legal matter (when does the international-legal framework of armed conflict cease to apply in relation to the war?). The current plurality of legal concepts of armed conflict, the sparsity of IHL provisions that instruct the end of application, and the inconsistency among such provisions thwart uniform regulation and frustrate the formulation of a comprehensive notion of when wars can, should, and do end. Fleshing out the criteria for the end of war is a considerable challenge. Clearly, many of the problems identified in this Briefing are first and foremost strategic and political. Yet, as part of a broader effort to strengthen international law’s claim to guide behavior in relation to war and protect affected populations, international lawyers must address the current confusion and inconsistencies that so often surround the end of armed conflict.

Nudges are choice-preserving interventions that steer people’s behaviour in specific directions while allowing people to go their own way. Some nudges have been controversial, because they are seen as objectionably paternalistic. This study reports on nationally representative surveys in eight diverse countries, investigating how people actually think about nudges and nudging. The study covers Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, Russia, South Africa, and South Korea. Generally, we find strong majority support for nudges in all countries, with the important exception of Japan, and with spectacularly high approval rates in China and South Korea. We connect the findings here to earlier studies involving the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Denmark, France, Germany, and Hungary. The largest conclusion is that while citizens generally approve of health and safety nudges, the nations of the world appear to fall into three distinct categories: (1) a group of nations, mostly liberal democracies, where strong majorities approve of nudges whenever they (a) are seen to fit with the interests and values of most citizens and (b) do not have illicit purposes; (2) a group of nations where overwhelming majorities approve of nearly all nudges; and (3) a group of nations with markedly lower approval ratings for nudges. We offer some speculations about the relationship between approval rates and trust.

Harvard Negotiation Law Review 2017 Symposium: Reflections on the Intersection of Alternative Dispute Resolution and Activism. http://www.hnlr.org/symposium-central/symposium-2017/

Comprehensive and compelling, this book represents a sustained effort to account, constitutionally, for these modes of “speech.” While it is firmly centered in debates about First Amendment issues, it addresses them in a novel way, using subject matter that is uniquely well suited to the task, and whose constitutional salience has been under-explored. Drawing on existing legal doctrine, aesthetics, and analytical philosophy, three celebrated law scholars show us how and why speech beyond words should be fundamental to our understanding of the First Amendment.

In this report, Halperin attempts to clarify what is at stake in choosing among the various recent proposals for corporate tax reform. He addresses the issues of limiting any preference for corporate income to business income as opposed to income from services or investments, the ability to provide equivalent treatment for passthrough investors (which, surprisingly, can be achieved by taxing only the return on reinvested earnings at the low corporate rate), and the difficulty of achieving full taxation at the shareholder level.

"In a thoughtful yet uncomplicated style, Business Organizations reveals the structure of corporate, partnership, agency, and securities law. J. Mark Ramseyer places the law in historical context and analyzes the law’s economic effect. Overviews in each chapter and hypothetical examples illustrate the synthesis of legal, financial, and economic relationships in a way that will inform and interest readers whether their previous exposure to economics has been minimal or extensive. Comprehensive coverage embraces all of the principal cases in the leading casebooks. Clear and incisive analysis explores what motivated the parties and why the judges decided as they did." -- Wolters Kluwer

In this case study, the authors chronicle the creation of the municipal smart grid and fiber-to-the-home Internet access project in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, and quantify early paybacks on the town’s investments. (A companion report, Smart Grid Paybacks: The Chattanooga Example, describes paybacks on a national model for such a project, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.) In 2009, Concord voters authorized the town’s municipally-owned electric utility (Concord Municipal Light Plant, or CMLP) to build a $3.9 million smart grid which included a 100-mile fiber-optic network passing 95 percent of premises in town. Next, in 2013, the town borrowed $600,000 to fund the startup of an Internet access business, called Concord Light Broadband. The town began making fiber connections to subscribers’ premises in early 2015. By the end of 2016 CMLP was serving about 750 customers with service of up to 200 Mbps upload and download. Today the town’s network has added reliability to elements of the town’s electricity grid, helped the town avoid $108,000 in annual communications costs, and generated $88,000 in annual leasing revenue. The town has recently begun a strategic planning process in part to help identify how the smart grid can best be used to reduce expensive peak-hour electricity demand, reduce operating costs, enhance revenue, and cut greenhouse gas emissions. One vendor estimates that CMLP could earn $125,000 in revenue by allowing the regional transmission system to use the town’s smart grid to help balance regional electricity supply and demand. Although the financial paybacks on the town’s project are not yet fully covering debt service and operating costs, the long-term prospects are bright, especially given that the fiber will last 30 or more years, and debts on the smart grid will be paid off after 15 years.