The growth and influence of nontraditional media and the convergence of these technological platforms on mainstream media brings a host of new issues surrounding media coverage of high profile trials. Hardly a new phenomenon, the media has made a business of covering high profile trials since before the founding of this nation. But the advent of blogs in 1999 and the growing influence they have on the public further complicates the issue. In addition, adoption of more nontraditional delivery platforms, such as blogs, by traditional media as they strive to retain and enlarge readership confirms the growing influence of these nontraditional sources of information for the public. The impact this technology has on the controversy surrounding media coverage of trials, especially celebrity prosecutions, provides ample fodder to ask whether current United States' media practices and the courts' regulation of these practices best serve the individuals involved, the public and the criminal ...

The neologism "biolaw" describes all areas of law informed by the life sciences. Health law, bioethics, environmental law, natural resources law, agricultural law, food and drug law, biotechnology, law and neuroscience, law and behavioral psychology, and evolutionary analysis of law all share a common scientific core. Lawyers and legal scholars too often address these topics in isolation. This piecemeal approach undermines the scientific cohesion that connects these areas of legal practice and theory. The common core, of course, is biology - all of the life sciences, unified in pursuit of subjects considered worthy of legal attention. This essay defines biolaw as the field of law and the life sciences in its entirety. Part I of this essay will provide a brief guide to the various branches of biolaw. Part II offers some thoughts on the intellectual significance of treating biolaw as a scientifically coherent enterprise. In other words, I will first define biolaw. Then I will ...

A growing number of disturbing incidents involving minors as victims of sexual solicitation, assault and even murder have been traced to a fairly new type of Internet communication, social networking sites. These sites, hugely popular with teens, provide unique and largely independent and unsupervised channels of self expression and socialization for children. Yet the sites also present real dangers to today's youth, the most serious being child victimization by sexual predators. To understand the magnitude of the issue this Article begins by defining what social networks are, explaining how they work and tracing their ever increasing popularity. Millions of users have already registered with these social networking sites with thousands more being added daily. The social networking craze is even being adopted in the business and entertainment world and will likely be transferred to other technologies in the near future. As currently operated, social networking sites provide a ...

This is a short piece geared to practitioners but also discusses a case that may be of interest to professors of professional responsibility. In the case of Brown v. Commonwealth, 226 S.W.3d 74 (Ky. 2007), the Kentucky Supreme Court has provided trial courts and lawyers, especially criminal lawyers, with some much needed ethical guidance. While the case itself was a criminal appeal, not an attorney discipline matter, the Court's opinion provides insight into the ethical sticky wicket of the proper conduct of the lawyer for a criminal defendant when the defendant intends to commit perjury. Such a situation pits the constitutional rights of criminal defendants against the ethical duties of defense counsel to act with candor to the court.

Key federalism concerns are raised by the specter of preemption of state products liability actions by federal regulatory schemes. For example, the FDA has recently taken the position that its approval of the labeling on prescription drugs preempts civil tort claims grounded in a manufacturer's failure to warn. Using the FDA's recent stance on the issue of preemption, this Article demonstrates that federal agencies can engage in “strategic characterization” by pointing to Congress as the source of preemption, rather than the agency itself. In doing so, agencies avoid political and judicial scrutiny of agency action. This Article proposes that courts use a more realistic, totality of the circumstances approach when deciding whether Congress or an agency is the source of preemption. Further, the Article demonstrates that properly identifying a case as one of preemption by the agency can result in a type of “hard look” review of the agency activity which purportedly preempts ...

Professor Elyn R. Saks is a chaired professor at the University of Southern California Law School. She was valedictorian at Vanderbilt University, has a degree from Oxford University, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. She has written numerous works on mental health issues. Professor James T. R. Jones is a professor at the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville. He graduated with highest distinction from the University of Virginia and second in his class from Duke Law School. He worked at a Wall Street law firm, clerked for two federal judges, taught at the University of Chicago Law School, and is a noted expert on domestic violence. What do Professors Saks and Jones have in common? Both have severe mental illnesses: schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, respectively. Both have been hospitalized for their conditions and take drugs that cause weight gain, tardive dyskinesia, high cholesterol, and nocturnal drooling. Severe Mental Illness in the Academy: A ...

Land conservation serves a critical function of protecting watershed health and integrity, which are necessary for healthy natural environments, human life, economic activity, and society. This article describes the various impacts of land use on water quality and watersheds. Having documented land development's growing degradation of watershed functions, the article examines four methods of protecting water quality through land conservation. These four methods are land use planning and regulation, public land management, private land conservation, and changes in land-use behaviors and values. Analysis of legal tools and limits is supported by a case study of the Anacostia River watershed, one of the most degraded watersheds in the U.S. yet recently the object of diverse and substantial efforts to restore its waterways and manage land development practices. The article concludes that no single method of land conservation is adequate to protect watersheds. Instead, a policy of ...

Primarily because of stigma, one of the unanswered questions in legal education is how many in the Academy have severe mental illnesses. When Professor Elyn R. Saks of the Gould School of Law at the University of Southern California published The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness about her secret life with schizophrenia, mental illness in legal education finally had a face. Now, it has another representative. In Walking the Tightrope of Bipolar Disorder: The Secret Life of a Law Professor, Professor James T. R. Jones of the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville writes about his life, and successful career in legal academics, with the secret that he has bipolar disorder. He discusses why he went public with his condition; offers hope to others in legal education who have severe mental diseases; and joins Professor Saks in inviting those colleagues to consider, after due reflection, joining the fight against stigma by disclosing their own ...

My article is a forward-looking, historical piece that offers a critique of colorblind constitutionalism through an examination of the Court's race jurisprudence. Justice O'Connor's affirmative action decisions serve as a model for a critique of neutrality and inversion - the doctrinal technique of turning substantive concepts inside out in the name of neutrality only to preserve systemic oppression - the Court has dramatically reinterpreted the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice O'Connor's decisions serve as a pivotal point for this radical re-interpretation. What is striking about this shift is that Justice Thomas has become a leading race theorist on the Court - he turns history inside out so that a militant historical figure like Frederick Douglass becomes a proponent for colorblind constitutionalism. This article critiques this doctrinal development through an in depth analysis of the themes underlying Justice O'Connor's race jurisprudence and Justice Thomas's rhetorical use of ...

Important provisions of the 2007 American Bar Association Code of Judicial Conduct relate to impermissible conflicts of interest. Two key issues relate to judicial disclosure to the parties about potentially disqualifying conditions, and the type of disqualifying conditions that can lead to the judge's disqualification or the imposition of disciplinary sanctions for the judge's failure to disqualify. For both, the Code standards should provide more guidance to maintain the belief of litigants and the public in the integrity of the judicial system.

This article explores the legacy of the Supreme Court's 1879 decision in Trade-mark Cases in the field of intellectual property law. But it explores that legacy from a somewhat unorthodox perspective; namely, by imagining what might have happened had the Court decided the case the opposite way. Opening that imaginary door reveals some interesting possibilities. At the very least, a different result in Trade-mark Cases would have dramatically altered the course of United States trademark law. In addition, depending on the reasoning the Court employed to reach a contrary holding, much of federal intellectual property law might look quite different than it does today. On tis latter point, the article questions the Court's axiom that creativity is a sine qua non of federal protection under the Intellectual Property Clause.

Secured parties with motor vehicle collateral are disposing of their repossessed collateral on eBay Motors, the internet auction site of eBay.com. Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code does not validate or invalidate internet dispositions of collateral, nor does it adopt any specific requirements for internet dispositions. Thus, a secured creditor selling repossessed collateral on eBay Motors must satisfy the universal standards of Article 9 for a valid disposition¿reasonable notification of the disposition and commercial reasonableness of all aspects of the disposition. Article 9 adopts detailed provisions for notification, but the boundaries of commercially reasonable are determined mainly by the courts. In his article, eBay Auctions of Repossessed Motor Vehicles--A Template for Commercial Reasonableness Under Revised Article 9, Professor Nowka analyzes how the Article 9 standards for disposition sales of collateral affect secured creditors selling repossessed motor ...

This article evaluates American fetal homicide laws in the light of John Rawls's political philosophy. In particular, it seeks to discern whether fetal homicide indicates a societal recognition of fetal personhood, and, if so, whether such recognition renders the right to abortion inconsistent with our principles of justice. The article proceeds in three parts. The first part outlines the contours of the bifurcated fetal-rights scheme and demonstrates that it is an established societal judgment with robust institutional support. The middle part introduces Rawls's philosophy, and explains how it can, under certain circumstances, provide us with insight into the stability of public policies. The final part, which constitutes the core of the article, uses Rawls's philosophical model to gauge the stability of the bifurcated fetal-rights scheme. Specifically, it demonstrates that, in a Rawlsian society, the emergence of fetal-homicide laws necessarily reflects a public ...

Elyn R. Saks is Associate Dean for Research and Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California's Gould School of Law and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine. She graduated with a B.A. in philosophy as class valedictorian at Vanderbilt University; earned a M. Litt. in philosophy from Oxford University; and got her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She has written three books and numerous articles and book chapters on mental health-related issues. She has won major awards for her scholarship. Overall, she has excelled in legal academia. She also has had schizophrenia for most of her life. Her story, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, is a fascinating look at life coping with the most severe mental illness. Her memoir is frightening, gripping, courageous, inspiring, and ultimately ...

The authority and regimes for controlling land use, water quality, and water use are highly fragmented, both internally and from one another. However, a growing body of evidence demonstrates that this fragmentation comes at great cost to natural and human environments, with increasing impacts of land use practices, water quality conditions, and water uses on one another. This article introduces a concept of wet growth that attempts to achieve some level of integration among these three inter-related aspects of law and public policy. The Wet Growth concept is distinguished from the popular, yet vague, concepts of Smart Growth, which has failed to give sufficient attention to the water-related impacts of land development and use. The article describes examples of emerging efforts to achieve integration of land use and water regulatory policies. It summarizes the ideas and research of several leading scholars in a book on Wet Growth. The article makes a case for policy diversity ...

This article makes a case for teaching property law - or any area of the law - from the perspective of modern pragmatism, using teaching methods that promote active learning. In particular, a problem method of pedagogy that focuses on the practical utility of legal principles and the jurisprudentially pragmatic foundations of law is best suited to the features of law student learning, as we have come to understand from both theory and empirical research on adult learning. These features include active learning, learning in context, students' practical goals, professional respect, diversity of learning styles, and expectations-oriented learning. The article demonstrates how the contextualism and instrumentalism of modern legal pragmatism can be combined with the characteristics of the problem method of teaching to maximize law student learning. The analysis is presented in the context of a book review of Rabin and Kwall, Fundamentals of Modern Real Property Law, 3rd edition, a ...

This article articulates a land use planning perspective on environmental justice, which is about the impacts of environmental and land use policies and practices on low-income and minority communities. In analyzing a typology of five conceptions of environmental justice (evidentiary, power/political, legal rights, environmental enforcement, and market/economic), the article identifies an underlying reactive character to environmental justice concepts and efforts. There is a need for an additional proactive, planning perspective on environmental justice, focused on the capacity of low-income neighborhoods of color to participate in decision making and to shape their local environments. In developing the argument for a planning perspective, the article presents empirical evidence of disproportionate distributions of industrial and other intensive zoning by race and class, using analysis of zoning patterns in 31 census tracts in 7 cities. It also describes the historical failures ...