Tag Archives: law

tumblr

shared content

“

“Would you want The New England Journal of Medicine to be edited by medical students?” asked Richard A. Wise, who teaches psychology at the University of North Dakota.

Of course not. Then why are law reviews, the primary repositories of legal scholarship, edited by law students?

These student editors are mostly bright and work hard, but they are young, part-time amateurs who know little about the law or about editing prose. Yet they are in charge of picking the best articles from among many hundreds of submissions written by professors with authentic expertise in fields the students may never have studied.

”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/us/law-scholarships-lackluster-reviews.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

Banksy’s murals are most often public art drawn – illegally, in some cases – on private property. This raises issues of ownership and preservation.

Amy Adler, professor of art law at New York University, suggests that “amendments to planning legislation are therefore a possible next step”, in order to empower public authorities to preserve art in public spaces.

In Los Angeles, legal proceedings were brought when a large mural by the artist Ed Ruscha, on private land, was suddenly painted over. This was one of the few instances in which a work of public art was protected under federal visual artists rights regulations, preserving the work even if the ownership of the physical property changes.

Adler contends, however, that in Banksy’s case, “for this to apply, Banksy himself would have to file for protection, which given his penchant for anonymity and illegality of his graffiti, he does not do”.

When a mural has been put on a publicly owned space, local authorities have greater power to decide what to do – in some cases, they have taken on the task of preservation themselves. In 2006, Bristol city council polled residents when a Banksy image appeared on a public clinic: 97% said they wanted it to stay.

”

– http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/oct/06/banksy-new-york-murals-law

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“There are two ways to look at many types of civil litigation. Is the plaintiff’s lawyer seeking to defend the rights of his client, and perhaps those in similar situations? Or is the lawyer abusing the process in the hope of forcing a settlement out of a company that prefers to avoid the costs of litigation?”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/business/extracting-a-toll-from-a-patent-troll.html?pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

The full faith and credit clause of the U.S. Constitution was designed to avoid the potential absurdities and uncertainties, by requiring the states to credit the “public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state.” Before DOMA, states mostly went along with this sensible uniformity.

But there is historical precedent for one state strongly objecting to a sister state’s marriage laws.  States that forbade interracial marriages often refused to recognize such marriages from other states. That lasted until the Supreme Court declared all bans on such unions unconstitutional in 1967, in Loving v. Virginia. 

It’s safe to say that Pennsylvania won’t be citing the interracial marriage bans to justify its declaration that Palladino and Barker’s marriage is void. But what will Gov. Corbett say? What public policy can he invoke? It’s hard to imagine how the governor can come up with a rationale that’s any better than the justifications for DOMA that the Supreme Court rejected as legislative gay-bashing.  In 2013, simple dislike or disapproval of gay and lesbian couples isn’t good enough, legally speaking.

If Palladino and Barker win, and Pennsylvania has to recognize their marriage, the state still won’t have to authorize its own same-sex weddings. But that will soon become a distinction without a difference. Pennsylvania couples can plan their destination weddings in all of New England, New York, Delaware, Maryland, and D.C.—and head home knowing that their marriages are also legal and binding in the state of Pennsylvania. And once this strategy catches on around the country, we’ll have gay couples living with the same rights and protections as straight couples everywhere—even if some states continue to pretend otherwise.

”

– http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/10/the_pennsylvania_lawsuit_with_the_best_chance_of_toppling_state_laws_against.html

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

Federal wiretap law exempts interception of communication if it is necessary in a service provider’s “ordinary course of business,” which Google said included scanning e-mail. That argument did not fly with Judge Koh.

“In fact, Google’s alleged interception of e-mail content is primarily used to create user profiles and to provide targeted advertising — neither of which is related to the transmission of e-mails,” she wrote in last week’s ruling.

Judge Koh also dismissed Google’s argument that Gmail users consented to the interception and that non-Gmail users who communicated with Gmail users also knew that their messages could be read.

“Accepting Google’s theory of implied consent — that by merely sending e-mails to or receiving e-mails from a Gmail user, a non-Gmail user has consented to Google’s interception of such e-mails for any purposes — would eviscerate the rule against interception,” she wrote.

”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/technology/google-accused-of-wiretapping-in-gmail-scans.html?ref=todayspaper

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

Above all he approves of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which states that government can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Historically, many of these provisions were introduced in order to head off the danger of violence in the name of religion, though they function nowadays mainly to protect small churches and cranky sects that pose no real threat to anyone. But their real justification, according to Dworkin, has nothing specifically to do with religion: there is no special right to religious freedom, but only what he calls a “general right to ethical independence” – or, to put it differently, a restraint on any government activity based on the assumption that one conception of the good life is superior to another. He admits that it may be hard to decide what this principle implies, but has no doubt that it rules out any attempts to criminalise homosexual acts or early abortions, outlaw same-sex marriage or force schools to teach intelligent design.

Dworkin’s secularist defence of religious freedom is thus not as paradoxical as it might seem: for him, it is no more than specific application of a purely secular right – the right to “ethical independence”. But he puts a double lock on his doctrine with an argument to the effect that, strange as it may sound, religion should not be defined in terms of belief in God, and that secular atheism of the kind he espouses should be treated by the law as a form of religion.

”

– http://rationalist.org.uk/articles/4313/wrong-in-the-right-way

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

In other words, efforts to simply eradicate piracy by shutting down sites can’t work. The internet moves too quickly, and has unlimited space for infringing sites to hide. This is a very strong admission for an industry-funded report, and one that shows the extrajudicial DNS blocking that SOPA would allow can’t work. Never mind the censorship concerns—killing websites that host infringing material, unwittingly or not, won’t kill piracy.

That on its own runs counter to the prevailing refrain in the copyright lobby. But what’s even more surprising is that the report offers an actual solution, as Techdirt adroitly pointed out: If you want to combat piracy, make your content available elsewhere.

”

– http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-best-way-to-combat-piracy-is-to-make-movies-easier-to-watch

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“Legend has it that Hemingway won a bet that he could write a story in six words by scribbling on a napkin, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Ms. Mazzie asked her students and fellow faculty members to gin up some of their own “flash fiction,” either about law school or just law. She’s posted a few submissions on the blog.

In the spirit of collegiality, Law Blog jotted down a few about law school.

• For sale: law degree, no promises.

• Three years later, they weren’t ready.

• $200,000, 24 B+’s, first-year associate.

• You’ll get hired. So they claimed.

• ‘But I’m tenured!’ the professor replied.

• The former dean pleaded not guilty.”

– http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/09/20/describing-law-school-in-six-words/?mod=WSJBlog

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

Take this hypothetical example coined by the Supreme Court: If the police demand that you give them the key to a lockbox that happens to contain incriminating evidence, turning over the key wouldn’t be testimonial if it’s just a physical act that doesn’t reveal anything you know.

However, if the police try to force you to divulge the combination to a wall safe, your response would reveal the contents of your mind — and so would implicate the Fifth Amendment. (If you’ve written down the combination on a piece of paper and the police demand that you give it to them, that may be a different story.)

The important feature about PINs and passwords is that they’re generally something we know (unless we forget them, of course). These memory-based authenticators are the type of fact that benefit from strong Fifth Amendment protection should the government try to make us turn them over against our will. Indeed, last year a federal appeals court held that a man could not be forced by the government to decrypt data.

But if we move toward authentication systems based solely on physical tokens or biometrics — things we have or things we are, rather than things we remember — the government could demand that we produce them without implicating anything we know. Which would make it less likely that a valid privilege against self-incrimination would apply.

”

– http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/the-unexpected-result-of-fingerprint-authentication-that-you-cant-take-the-fifth

Standard