It is increasingly common for patent infringers to sink substantial resources into a product’s development, manufacture, and marketing before a patentee alleges infringement. Infringers may sign contracts, hire employees, and purchase specialized facilities and equipment—all before realizing that their product might infringe someone else’s patent. If a patent holder successfully proves...
Freedom of Contract in an Augmented Reality: The Case of Consumer Contracts
This Article argues that freedom of contract will take on different meaning in a world in which new technology makes information about places, goods, people, firms, and contract terms available to contracting parties anywhere, at any time. In particular, our increasingly “augmented reality” calls into question leading justifications for distrusting consumer contracts and strengthens traditional...
The President’s Unconstitutional Treatymaking
The President of the United States frequently signs international agreements but postpones ratification pending Senate consent. Under international law, a state that signs a treaty subject to later ratification must avoid acts that would defeat the treaty’s object and purpose until the nation clearly communicates its intent not to join. As a result, the President in signing assumes interim treaty...
Poverty Unmodified?: Critical Reflections on the Deserving/Undeserving Distinction
According to a familiar and influential analysis, antipoverty programs are structured by distinctions between the deserving and undeserving poor. Through techniques like behavioral conditions on benefit eligibility, these moral distinctions divide the poor and interfere with providing assistance to all those in need. This analytical framework animates much critical scholarship on social welfare...
The Pursuit of Legal Rights—and Beyond
Just over thirty years ago, in a seminal trilogy of books, Joel Handler and his collaborators made three foundational contributions to the study of public interest lawyers. The first was theoretical, defining public interest law as a positive externality producing legal activity; the second was organizational, conceptualizing public interest law as an industry with multiple sectors that provided...
Essays in Honor of Joel F. Handler
For more than five decades, Joel Handler’s remarkable influence, range, and productivity have made him one of the world’s leading scholars of social welfare policy and administration, government bureaucracy, law and social change, and sociolegal theory. The excellence of his research has been recognized through such honors as his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Law...
Professionalism and Matthew Shardlake
This Essay/Book Review examines the Matthew Shardlake series by C.J. Sansom. In particular, it examines the question of whether the sixteenth-century fictional lawyer Shardlake can serve as a role model for twenty-first-century lawyers, both in terms of his ethics and his professionalism. An examination of the Shardlake series as a whole yields some uncertain answers, both as to Shardlake and as...
Airspace in a Green Economy
The recent surge of interest in renewable energy and sustainable land use has made the airspace above land more valuable than ever before. Unfortunately, a growing number of policies aimed at promoting sustainability disregard landowners’ airspace rights in ways that can cause airspace to be underutilized. This Article analyzes several land use conflicts emerging in the context of renewable...