Faculty Bibliography

Chapter 9 of the South African Constitution refers to ‘institutions protecting constitutional democracy’ (IPDs). Contemporary constitution designers have written into new constitutions numerous such institutions, and scholars have begun to identify them as a fourth branch of government alongside the traditional legislative, executive, and judicial branches. This article explores some of the conceptual issues associated with the new fourth branch: what justifies the creation of these IPDs (the short answer: a particular type of conflict of interest); what are their generic characteristics (the short answer: they are reasonably permanent institutions rather than ad hoc or statutory ones, unlike their antecedents); what is their relation to a constitutional court – another twentieth-century innovation; and why should they be understood to be a ‘branch’ of government rather than a congeries of useful innovations (the short answer: like the traditional branches, they perform distinctive function not readily performed by institutions located within those branches)?

The space between jurists and advocate at the Supreme Court is only a little more than six feet during oral arguments. As counsel for the state in Massachusetts v. EPA learned, the exchange of fire over that small divide is highly penetrating and usually hostile.

In developing international humanitarian law (IHL), States have aimed in part to lay down the primary normative and operational framework pertaining to principled humanitarian action in situations of armed conflict. The possibility that certain counterterrorism measures may be instituted in a manner that intentionally or unintentionally impedes such action has been recognized by an increasingly wide array of States and entities, including the United Nations Security Council and the U.N. Secretary-General. At least two aspects of the contemporary international discourse on intersections between principled humanitarian action and counterterrorism measures warrant more sustained attention. The first concerns who is, and who ought to be, in a position to authentically and authoritatively interpret and apply IHL in this area. The second concerns the relationships between IHL and other possibly relevant regulatory frameworks, including counterterrorism mandates flowing from decisions of the U.N. Security Council. Partly in relation to those two axes of the broader international discourse, a debate has emerged regarding whether the U.N. Security Council may authorize one particular counterterrorism entity — namely, the Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) — to interpret and assess compliance with IHL pertaining to humanitarian action in relation to certain counterterrorism contexts. In a new legal briefing for the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict (HLS PILAC), Dustin A. Lewis, Naz K. Modirzadeh, and Jessica S. Burniske seek to help inform that debate by raising some preliminary considerations regarding that possibility. The authors focus on the possible implications of States and other relevant actors pursuing various responses or not responding to this debate. One of the authors’ goals is to help raise awareness of this area with a focus on perspectives drawn from international law. Another is to invite a broader engagement with the question of the preservation of the humanitarian commitments laid down in IHL in a period marked by a growing number — and a deepening — of the intersections between situations of armed conflict and measures to suppress terrorism.

Neoclassical and credit approaches to money represent dramatically different theories of value. For many within the neoclassical tradition, the market exists as a conceptual enterprise – a place where independent agents compare and rank real goods, exchanging them afterwards to in accord with their preferences. That theory reflects a particular approach to value, identifying it as a pre-existing quality ranked by individual choice. The theory also generates a particular approach to money, assuming that a term of measurement naturally imports commensurability into evaluation. By contrast, public credit approaches suggest that creating commensurability in a world heterogeneous in so many aspects is a profound challenge. Modern political communities have responded by substantiating value in a unit that is cognizable to all: they issue credit tokens that can be set off against widely shared public obligations. That means, first, that value cognizable in money follows rather than pre-exists market activity: it is produced as individuals use credit money as a medium. Second, because value is produced as people use money, the character of that money matters: its nature as credit carries with it an allocative bias. Both governments and private lenders (banks) advance credit in order to spend selectively: they create a credit medium by providing credit to some people relative to others. According to the way money is created, definitionally we might say, individuals will not be equally situated in the process that generates prices. Decisions about value are made in the wake of that fact. The essay closes by contrasting the democratic visions at stake in neoclassical and public credit approaches to value. That exercises suggests that, if the public credit approach better describes money and market, their potential can only be realized by promoting rather than assuming equality.

When the Supreme Court announced its ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, the decision was immediately hailed as a landmark. But this was the farthest thing from anyone’s mind when Joe Mendelson, an idealistic lawyer working on a shoestring budget for an environmental organization no one had heard of, decided to press his quixotic case. In October 1999, Mendelson hand-delivered a petition to the Environmental Protection Agency asking it to restrict greenhouse gas emissions from new cars. The Clean Air Act had authorized the EPA to regulate “any air pollutant” that could reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health. But could something as ordinary as carbon dioxide really be considered a harmful pollutant? And even if the EPA had the authority to regulate emissions, could it be forced to do so? Environmentalists urged Mendelson to stand down. Thinking of his young daughters and determined to fight climate change, he pressed on—and brought Sierra Club, Greenpeace, NRDC, and twelve state attorneys general led by Massachusetts to his side. This unlikely group—they called themselves the Carbon Dioxide Warriors—challenged the Bush administration and took the EPA to court. The Rule of Five tells the story of their unexpected triumph. We see how accidents, infighting, luck, superb lawyering, and the arcane practices of the Supreme Court collided to produce a legal miracle. An acclaimed advocate, Richard Lazarus reveals the personal dynamics of the justices and dramatizes the workings of the Court. The final ruling, by a razor-thin 5–4 margin, made possible important environmental safeguards which the Trump administration now seeks to unravel.

This Article seeks to contribute to the heated debate on the disclosure of political spending by public companies. A rulemaking petition urging SEC rules requiring such disclosure has attracted over 1.2 million comments since its submission seven years ago, but the SEC has not yet made a decision on the petition. The petition has sparked a debate among academics, members of the investor and issuer communities, current and former SEC commissioners, and members of Congress. In the course of this debate, opponents of mandatory disclosure have put forward a wide range of objections to such SEC mandates. This Article provides a comprehensive and detailed analysis of these objections, and it shows that they fail to support an opposition to transparency in this area. Among other things, we examine claims that disclosure of political spending would be counterproductive or at least unnecessary; that any beneficial provision of information would best be provided through voluntary disclosures of companies; and that the adoption of a disclosure rule by the SEC would violate the First Amendment or at least be institutionally inappropriate. We demonstrate that all of these objections do not provide, either individually or collectively, a good basis for opposing a disclosure rule. The case for keeping political spending under the radar of investors, we conclude, is untenable.

The financial crisis considerably strengthened the case for a “macro-prudential” component in financial regulation – that is, regulatory measures developed and implemented with a view to the stability of the financial system as a whole, rather than with sole attention to the circumstances of individual financial firms. Of particular conceptual appeal are time-varying measures that would discourage the creation of excessive risk, or at least augment the resiliency of firms and markets that could suffer greater losses in periods of economic or financial stress. Unfortunately, the analytic, political and practical hurdles to imposing effective time-varying measures during good times – whether through rules or discretionary action – are substantial. And, during periods of stress, market forces may demand that firms maintain fortress balance sheets, thereby thwarting the macro-prudential aim of allowing those firms to support economic activity through new lending that reduces capital levels and draws down liquidity reserves. This short paper examines these challenges through two examples – counter-cyclical capital requirements and the liquidity coverage ratio. It also suggests an approach that might begin to overcome these challenges, tough only partially and only for macro-prudential measures that increase regulatory requirements. The problem of market constraints on macro-prudential relaxation of requirements remains a problem.

Alex Whiting thoroughly analyzes the submissions by the ICC Office of the Prosecutor and statements made by the Prosecution. He explains the different approaches of the first and the second Prosecutor: The first embraced a theory of ‘disruption and specific deterrence’, seeking to intervene in real time to stop ongoing crimes with the Court being a force for diplomacy and peace. The second Prosecutor, on the other hand, focuses on the judicial tasks of the Court, chooses fewer cases, acts slowly and carefully. This way, the Court moved towards an expressive theory of punishment, investigations and cases are a way of expressing, shaping and enforcing norms. In the end, Whiting concludes that at the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor theory does not dictate practice – it is the other way round: The Office’s strategy is reactive to and constrained by the dependency on state cooperation and the limits of the ICC’s authority. Only within those constraints, can theories of punishment play a role: ‘robust theories of punishment are a luxory of actors with power’.

Should we use the language of international criminal law (ICL) to discuss, analyze, and address Western policies of migration control? Such policies have included or resulted in indefinite and inhumane detention, deportations, including through practices of push- and pull-backs and numerous deaths of migrants attempting to cross land or sea borders. And yet, recourse to ICL's conceptual and rhetorical apparatus, often reserved for “unimaginable atrocities,” may seem ill-fitting and an emotive stretch of doctrine. Drawing from international strategic litigation practice on Australian and European policies, this article examines whether the legal concept of crimes against humanity can apply to the deaths, detention, and deportation of migrants, as part and consequence of Western policies of migration control. As migration control policies involve increasingly sophisticated practices of outsourcing and responsibility avoidance, I further ask whether the tools ICL has developed to describe system criminality can trace individual liability against the distance created by such policies. I also inquire into the potential that the transnational nature of migration and the spreading of anti-migration policies have in activating the jurisdiction of courts and the prioritization of the role of the International Criminal Court. Finally, I consider the danger of fetishizing an international punitive approach, before offering some thoughts that aim to bridge a critical approach to international criminal law with its use in meaningful strategic litigation. Throughout the Article, I argue that applying the categories of ICL to Western policies of migration control can contribute to revealing both the potential and the limits of the regime and its institutions, as well as the structures of asymmetry and injustice present both in anti-migration policies and in international criminal law itself.

The administrative state faces a pervasive problem: “benefit neglect,” understood as insufficient attention to the benefits of regulation. In 2017, for example, President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13771, calling for a regulatory budget of $0 and directing agencies to eliminate two regulations for every regulation that they issue. The order has two laudable ambitions: to reduce the stock of existing regulations and to stem the flow of new regulations. But because it entirely ignores the benefits of regulations and focuses only on costs, it is a singularly crude instrument for achieving those goals. In both theory and practice, it threatens to impose large net costs (including significant increases in mortality and morbidity). It would be much better to abandon the idea of a regulatory budget, focused solely on costs, and instead to engage in two sustained but independent efforts: (1) a continuing “look back” at existing regulations, with the goal of simplifying or eliminating those that are unwarranted, and (2) cost-benefit discipline for new regulations. A third goal, no less important than (1) and (2), should be a very high priority, which is to produce institutional mechanisms to promote issuance of regulations that would have high net benefits (including reductions in mortality and morbidity). Congress, courts, and the executive branch should take steps to combat benefit neglect.

Boston Housing Authority v. Y.A., 482 Mass. 240 (2019), is the most recent guidance from the Supreme Judicial Court concerning the application of the federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), 34 U.S.C. §§ 12291 et seq., to summary process (eviction) cases. Among other safeguards provided under VAWA, the statute protects victims of domestic violence from eviction from federally subsidized housing so long as the basis for the eviction is a direct result of domestic violence. Boston Hous. Auth. v. Y.A., 482 Mass. 240, 245 (2019); 34 U.S.C. § 12491(b)(1) (2018); 24 C.F.R. § 5.2005(b).

Alan Dershowitz has been called “one of the most prominent and consistent defenders of civil liberties in America” by Politico and “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights” by Newsweek. Yet he has come under intense criticism fire for applying those same principles, and his famed “shoe‑on‑the‑other‑foot test,” to Donald Trump, especially after arguing on the president’s behalf before the U.S. Senate as it deliberated impeachment. Defending the Constitution seeks to refocus the debate over impeachment to the same standard that Dershowitz has upheld for decades: the law of the United States of America, as established by the Constitution. Citing legal examples from a long lineage of distinguished judges and attorneys, and examining the impeachment language in the Constitution itself, Dershowitz proves—first to the U.S. Senate, and now to readers everywhere—that President Trump should not have been impeached, and certainly should not be removed, for causes that do not meet the standards laid out by the founding fathers. This book is Alan Dershowitz’s argument for a return to nonpartisan judgment based on the Constitution, for a preservation of the separation of powers and the checks and balances that make American government great. It is essential reading for anyone interested in or concerned about the impeachment of President Trump, and for everyone who cares about the future of U.S. government and society.

In 2018, Ukraine established a High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC). Ukrainian civil society groups, with the crucial support of the international community, pushed for this specialised court as a way to address the ineffectiveness of Ukraine’s regular courts in addressing high-level corruption. The HACC’s most distinctive institutional feature is the role of international experts in the judicial selection process, intended to safeguard against the capture of the HACC by corrupt elites.

The relationship between votes and seats in the legislature lies at the heart of democratic governance. However, there has been little previous work on the downstream effects of partisan gerrymandering on the health of political parties. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive examination of the impact of partisan advantage in the districting process on an array of downstream outcomes. We find that districting bias impedes numerous party functions at both the congressional and state house levels. Candidates are less likely to contest districts when their party is disadvantaged by a districting plan. Candidates that do choose to run are more likely to have weak resumes. Donors are less willing to contribute money. And ordinary voters are less apt to support the targeted party. These results suggest that gerrymandering has long-term effects on the health of the democratic process beyond simply costing or gaining parties seats in the legislature.

In cities across the country, artists, protestors, and businesses are using light projections to turn any building’s façade into a billboard, often without the owner’s consent. Examples are legion: “Believe Women” on a New York City Best Buy; a scantily clad male model on the side of an apartment building; a nativity scene on the Los Angeles chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Two courts have considered claims by owners seeking to stop these projections under theories of trespass and nuisance. In each case, the courts held that because light is intangible and the projections result in no economic harm to the property, the common law affords no relief. This Article argues that property law can and should address projection claims by private owners. It traces the history of property tort claims involving light, explaining how the law developed to emphasize economic and physical harm and identifying the forgotten strands of doctrine that nonetheless support liability for targeted projections. Projections are forms of appropriation: they disrupt the owner’s use and control, but they also cause dignity and privacy harms by exploiting the owner’s realty toward unwanted ends. Protections for these noneconomic interests have long been parasitic on trespass and nuisance, but the light projections expose a gap between the two forms of action. This Article offers a pathway to mend the gap despite hurdles in both nuisance and First Amendment law. More generally, the projection cases teach broader lessons about the development of the property torts, the relationship between privacy and property, and the nature of property itself.

Tort law is badly misunderstood. In the popular imagination, it is “Robin Hood” law. Law professors, meanwhile, mostly dismiss it as an archaic, inefficient way to compensate victims and incentivize safety precautions. In Recognizing Wrongs, John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky explain the distinctive and important role that tort law plays in our legal system: it defines injurious wrongs and provides victims with the power to respond to those wrongs civilly. Tort law rests on a basic and powerful ideal: a person who has been mistreated by another in a manner that the law forbids is entitled to an avenue of civil recourse against the wrongdoer. Through tort law, government fulfills its political obligation to provide this law of wrongs and redress. In Recognizing Wrongs, Goldberg and Zipursky systematically explain how their “civil recourse” conception makes sense of tort doctrine and captures the ways in which the law of torts contributes to the maintenance of a just polity. Recognizing Wrongs aims to unseat both the leading philosophical theory of tort law—corrective justice theory—and the approaches favored by the law-and-economics movement. It also sheds new light on central figures of American jurisprudence, including former Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Benjamin Cardozo. In the process, it addresses hotly contested contemporary issues in the law of damages, defamation, malpractice, mass torts, and products liability.

A former member of the UN Human Rights Committee, Harvard’s Gerald Neuman, analyzes its draft document on peaceful assembly, in this third of a series.

During the Second World War, fraudulent recruiters sometimes promised young Korean women factory jobs but sent them instead to war-zone brothels called "comfort stations." Western historians take it on faith that the Japanese military forced Korean women into brothels as well. Unfortunately, in doing this they do not just ignore the role that politics (Korean, Japanese, and Western academic) have played in the dispute. They also ignore the contracts that the rest of the -- not defrauded -- young women actually concluded. In the article that follows, I examine the employee-level contracts in the market for sexual services within the Japanese empire. The contracts reflect the straightforward logic of "credible commitments" so basic to elementary game theory. Realizing that the brothel owners had an incentive to exaggerate their future earnings, the women demanded a large portion of their pay upfront. Realizing that they were headed to the war zone, they demanded a relatively short maximum term. And realizing that the women had an incentive to shirk, the brothels demanded provisions that gave women incentives to work hard. Ultimately, the women and brothels concluded identure contracts that coupled a large advance with one or two year maximum terms, and an ability for the women to return early if they generated sufficient revenue. Crucial to the current dispute, the Japanese military did not force -- or even recruit -- Korean women into prostitution. Instead, the brothels surrounding the bases began and remained as privately owned and operated enterprises. They employed contracts that reflected these game-theoretic principles of promissory credility. The women were poor, they were young, and they were born into the bad circumstances. But basic principles of market economics apply to poor young people too -- and we would do well to recognize how resourcefully the women used those principles to respond to their plight.

"Described as “superb” and “inspiring” by Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, Civil Rights Enforcement dives deeply into doctrines concerning the enforcement of civil rights (rather than the content of those rights) and the aspects of those doctrines of most importance to those litigating in the field. The book is organized as a litigator might think through a case, and it provides students rich, detailed hypothetical problems to which they can apply what they are learning. Alongside these practice-focused elements, the book’s notes, questions, and topic transitions push students to grapple both with (1) strategic questions about impact litigation and the role of civil rights litigation in constitutional enforcement, and (2) theoretical questions such as tradeoffs between the values of federalism and judicial review and the relationship between rights and remedies." -- Wolters Kluwer

This is a complete but unfinished draft of an article on the history of American family law. The first part describes four stages in the legal conceptualization of the family in the U.S. over the period from the late 18th century to ca. 1960. It is part of a larger intellectual history project depicting the stages of American legal consciousness as a whole. In this part, I treat the socio-economic background and the political struggles that shape and are shaped by consciousness as context for the story of conceptual change. In the second longer part of the piece, I present the interaction of political forces with legal consciousness (as evolved in Part One), along with social, economic and cultural change, in a single narrative of the historic transformation of American family law doctrine, ca. 1950-2015. This part defines family law broadly to include rules about marriage and parenthood along with social welfare law and the law of sex and reproduction, and includes their constitutionalization. It is in the tradition of political economy, starting with conflicting groups led by elites, understood not just as collections of individuals but as loose collectives with goals and strategies that are based on shared material and ideological interests. An important theme is the influence on legal change of tacit pro-sex and neo-puritan attitudes within the law making elites.

Japanese communities with nuclear reactors have them 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. These were the villages that had long fought for targeted subsidies, but ignored infrastructural investments. Subsidies operate as a regressive tax on out-migration, of course, and the lack of private-sector infrastructure reduces the returns to high-value human capital. As a result, these were the villages from which the most talented young people had probably begun to disappear—even before the reactors arrived. After the communities built the reactors, talented young people continued to leave. Unemployment rose. Divorce rates climbed. And in time, the communities had little other than reactor-revenue on which to rely.

This paper studies the design of enforcement policies to detect and deter harmful short-term activities committed by groups of injurers. With an ordered-leniency policy, the degree of leniency granted to an injurer who self-reports depends on his or her position in the self-reporting queue. By creating a "race to the courthouse," ordered-leniency policies lead to faster detection and stronger deterrence of illegal activities. The socially-optimal level of deterrence can be obtained at zero cost when the externalities associated with the harmful activities are not too high. Without leniency for self-reporting, the enforcement cost is strictly positive and there is underdeterrence of harmful activities relative to the first-best level. Hence, ordered-leniency policies are welfare improving. Our findings for environments with groups of injurers complement Kaplow and Shavell's (1994) results for single-injurer environments. Experimental evidence provides support for our theory.

Readings in Comparative Health Law and Bioethics examines how different countries around the world approach the same challenges in health care law and ethics: how to finance care for as many people as possible; how to ensure quality care; how to best secure patients' rights; how to regulate abortion, end of life decision-making, and assisted reproduction; and how to manage infectious diseases, tobacco use, and human subject research. The new edition considers a broader array of countries, particularly from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.

It is standard to think that corrective taxes, responding to externalities, are generally or always better than regulatory mandates, but in the face of behavioral market failures, that conclusion might not be right. Fuel economy and energy efficiency mandates are possible examples. Because such mandates might produce billions of dollars in annual consumer savings, they might have very high net benefits, complicating the choice between such mandates and externality-correcting taxes (such as carbon taxes). The net benefits of mandates that simultaneously reduce internalities and externalities might exceed the net benefits of taxes that reduce externalities alone, even if mandates turn out to be a highly inefficient way of reducing externalities. An important qualification is that corrective taxes might be designed to reduce both externalities and internalities, in which case they would almost certainly be preferable to a regulatory mandate.

When members of a minority group can monitor and constrain each other, they can leverage their internal social capital to financial gain. When they live within dense networks of personal contacts, they will more often have the information necessary to learn whether potential trade partners have kept their word and to punish those who have not. When members of a minority group lack that social capital, they not only lose these advantageous transactions but become vulnerable to their own self-appointed leaders as well. Lacking a network of close ties, they can neither monitor nor constrain others in the group. This vacuum creates an opening for opportunists to purport to act on their behalf (perhaps to obtain ethnic subsidies or other group preferences), but actually to divert rents to themselves--and incite hostility toward the group in the process. Arrovian statistical discrimination and selective out-migration follow. The opportunists raise the level of dysfunction within the group. Faced with an outside majority that treats minority members by the observed group mean, those minority members with the highest outside options will now leave and abandon the group to the opportunists. Any ethnic subsidies will offset the discrimination in part, of course. The higher the level of subsidies, the fewer the number of minority members who will find it advantageous to leave; the higher the level of subsidies, the slower the pace at which the dysfunctional minority will merge into the mainstream I illustrate these dynamics with examples from the burakumin outcastes in Japan, the Korean residents in Japan, and the Okinawans.

This article seeks to identify and discuss the impact of Nina Olson, in her role as National Taxpayer Advocate (NTA), on low-income taxpayer clinics (LITCs). The article discusses the background of Ms. Olson including her advocacy that led to grant funding for LITCs and the background of LITCs before she began administering the grant funds as NTA. The accomplishments of Ms. Olson with respect to LITCs are discussed in six separate topic areas: Changes to Clinic Structure; Pushing for Actions and Resources That Aided Clinics; Expanding Taxpayer Advocate Service Oversight of Low-Income Taxpayer Clinics; Changing the Culture of Low-Income Taxpayer Advocacy; Connecting LITCs to the Tax Court; and Creating Research Office That Provided Empirical Data to Support LITC Positions.

The American administrative state has become, in important respects, a cost-benefit state. At least this is so in the sense that prevailing executive orders require agencies to proceed only if the benefits justify the costs. For defenders of the cost-benefit state, the antonym of their ideal is, alternately, regulation based on dogmas, intuitions, expressivism, or interest-group power. The focus on costs and benefits is an important effort to attend to the real-world consequences of regulations – and it casts a pragmatic, skeptical light on modern objections to the administrative state, invoking public-choice theory and the supposed self-serving decisions of unelected bureaucrats. In the future, however, there will be better ways to identify those consequences, by focusing directly on welfare, and not relying on imperfect proxies.

The governance of online platforms has unfolded across three eras – the era of Rights (which stretched from the early 1990s to about 2010), the era of Public Health (from 2010 through the present), and the era of Process (of which we are now seeing the first stirrings). Rights-era conversations and initiatives amongst regulators and the public at large centered dominantly on protecting nascent spaces for online discourse against external coercion. The values and doctrine developed in the Rights era have been vigorously contested in the Public Health era, during which regulators and advocates have focused (with minimal success) on establishing accountability for concrete harms arising from online content, even where addressing those harms would mean limiting speech. In the era of Process, platforms, regulators, and users must transcend this stalemate between competing values frameworks, not necessarily by uprooting Rights-era cornerstones like CDA 230, but rather by working towards platform governance processes capable of building broad consensus around how policy decisions are made and implemented. Some promising steps in this direction could include delegating certain key policymaking decisions to entities outside of the platforms themselves; making platforms “information” or “content” fiduciaries; and systematically archiving data and metadata about disinformation detected and addressed by platforms.

The fair use doctrine requires courts “to avoid rigid application of the copyright statute when, on occasion, it would stifle the very creativity which that law is designed to foster.” Campbell v. Acuff–Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 577 (1994). The Federal Circuit’s rejection of a jury finding of fair use instead embraced a rigid approach that, as a matter of law, would bar any copying of code into a new program, even for a different platform, as non-transformative and unfair. To justify its ruling, the Federal Circuit abandoned a consensus in the lower courts about the broad scope of fair use when dealing with highly functional software elements. It made key mistakes about the fair use factors and their balancing, including inflating the relevance of commerciality, applying an erroneous “no more than necessary” standard for copying, dismissing as insignificant the highly functional nature of computer programs, and conflating the market for Java SE as a whole with the market for individual declarations. Absent these legal errors, it is clear that the jury was at least reasonable in making factual findings that supported a finding of fair use. The extent to which a new work has a new meaning, message, or purpose—transformativeness—is often and rightly prioritized in the fair use analysis. But what constitutes transformativeness is often contentious. Here, the new purpose of Google’s new code implementing the declarations was the creation of a new computing environment in which Java programmers could readily create programs on multiple platforms, which required the use of limited portions of highly functional declarations. This type of purpose has been recognized as transformative because of its role in furthering competition and innovation. A computer interface supports the creation of other creative works, and in such situations, it is important to avoid locking in third parties to specific platforms. Factors two and three of the fair use test help define the boundaries of this type of fair use. In cases such as the one at bar, the highly functional nature of the copied declarations and the limited amount of the overall Java SE work used, consistent with industry practices, are vital considerations supporting the conclusion that Google’s use was a transformative use that served copyright’s basic goal of encouraging creation of new works. By discounting to the point of irrelevance the thinness of protection for highly functional aspects of computer interfaces (factor two) and of the industry practice of treating the amount Google reimplemented as reasonable (factor three), the Federal Circuit distorted its analysis of the other fair use factors, threatening the coherence of fair use doctrine and the ultimate progress of creativity. By downplaying the relevance of the nature of the work and the amount taken, the Federal Circuit fell into the well-known trap of circularity: reasoning that, because Oracle could have charged a license fee for this type of use if fair use were unavailable, Oracle suffered cognizable market harm. Because such claims can be made for any fair use, which by definition is not paid for, this reasoning cannot distinguish fair and unfair uses. But factors two and three can help identify when crediting such claimed market harm would be inconsistent with copyright’s overall balance between past and future creators. Thus, given the limited copying of functional elements here, factors one and four also support fair use, because Google’s purpose was generative of additional creativity by third parties and because Oracle’s claimed market harm goes beyond the legitimate scope of its thin copyright in highly functional declarations. A thin copyright for software, including Java SE, provides software copyright owners with meaningful protection against copying of significant amounts of expression, but meaningful protection does not require the expansive rights that the Federal Circuit granted. Providing a broad scope to highly functional elements of software is unnecessary and dangerous to competition and innovation. Factors two and three enable fair use to implement this distinction between types of works. The Federal Circuit erred in not recognizing this interaction between the fair use factors and instead adopting a rigid rule that would preclude fair use in computer programs.

Amici take no position on whether BOOKING.COM is generic, but write to encourage the Court to be cautious in resolving this case, which involves a generic term combined with a common top-level domain name identifier (.com). Trademark applications raise almost infinitely varied scenarios, including generic terms combined with other elements, and the top-level domain name identifier has some specific features that make it analogous to functional matter. Whatever rule the Court adopts should be highly attentive to the risks to competition of overassertion of registered marks that are largely or entirely comprised of generic elements. Because courts deciding infringement cases are often unfamiliar with the context of a trademark registration, they may miss limitations on the scope of the registered mark that the Trademark Office believed existed and, as a result, enforce broader rights than the registrants should actually have. Ordinary businesses receiving cease and desist letters are even more unlikely to have the expertise to understand the limits on a registration. This practical reality should guide the Court’s standards for registrations with generic components. Relatedly, the Court should reaffirm the basic principle that “de facto secondary meaning” does not give rise to protectability as a trademark. Courts have long distinguished between “de facto secondary meaning” and secondary meaning “to which courts will attach legal consequences.” De facto secondary meaning refers to an association between a generic term and a particular producer that is usually the result of an extended period of market dominance, whether achieved through advertising or through lack of competition. Because of the need to protect potential and future competition, a generic term cannot be appropriated as a trademark even if it has de facto secondary meaning The practical exclusivity afforded by domain name registration means that there may often be de facto secondary meaning in domain names, which can be difficult to distinguish from true trademark secondary meaning. This easily elided distinction affects how the Court should evaluate Booking.com’s survey, which purports to show secondary meaning. But the fact that de facto secondary meaning does not lead to trademark status does not mean it is irrelevant to the law. Even when a term is not protectable as a trademark, narrower unfair competition remedies may be available to prevent true passing off. When a term is generic or a product shape is functional, neither can be protected as a trademark and others may not be enjoined from competing using the term or shape.. Those competitors, however, may be required to distinguish themselves in the market by adding identifiers or otherwise differentiating their use, if the competitors’ use might deceive consumers. Thus, a rule that strongly protects competition by denying registration to generic terms does not leave consumers exposed to clever bad actors.

Immense amounts of information are now accessible to people, including information that bears on their past, present and future. An important research challenge is to determine how people decide to seek or avoid information. Here we propose a framework of information-seeking that aims to integrate the diverse motives that drive information-seeking and its avoidance. Our framework rests on the idea that information can alter people’s action, affect and cognition in both positive and negative ways. The suggestion is that people assess these influences and integrate them into a calculation of the value of information that leads to information-seeking or avoidance. The theory offers a framework for characterizing and quantifying individual differences in information-seeking, which we hypothesize may also be diagnostic of mental health. We consider biases that can lead to both insufficient and excessive information-seeking. We also discuss how the framework can help government agencies to assess the welfare effects of mandatory information disclosure.

This review addresses four key issues in the modern (post-1976) era of capital punishment in the United States. First, why has the United States retained the death penalty when all its peer countries (all other developed Western democracies) have abolished it? Second, how should we understand the role of race in shaping the distinctive path of capital punishment in the United States, given our country's history of race-based slavery and slavery's intractable legacy of discrimination? Third, what is the significance of the sudden and profound withering of the practice of capital punishment in the past two decades? And, finally, what would abolition of the death penalty in the United States (should it ever occur) mean for the larger criminal justice system?