Authoruclalaw

This Article explores the historical and present-day significance of proposals for copyright reform advanced in 1918 by the controversial American poet, Ezra Pound. These proposals have never been discussed by legal scholars and have received but scant attention from literary scholars. Yet, like William Wordsworth and Mark Twain, whose efforts to reform copyright law are much better known, Pound...

After decades of struggle with paper discovery rules in an age of electronic discovery, President George W. Bush signed Federal Rule of Evidence 502 into law on September 19, 2008. Rule 502 is aimed at reducing the costs associated with privilege review. More specifically, Rule 502 gives more judicial support for nonwaiver agreements, which are agreements between adversarial parties that preserve...

The Fair Housing Act was enacted in order to protect certain groups against discrimination in housing. The Act extends this protection to any “dwelling,” but its coverage is not well defined for nontraditional sleeping facilities such as homeless shelters, substance abuse treatment facilities, or tent cities. Courts have applied the Fair Housing Act to any residence—defined by one court as “a...

Bias crime statistics legislation does not require law enforcement agencies to collect data on the ages of bias crime perpetrators, and bias crime penalty enhancements do not distinguish between youth and adult offenders. As a result, little data exists on youth bias crime, and the consequences of applying bias crime penalty enhancements to adult and youth offenders are generally the same:...

What will happen after District of Columbia v. Heller? We know that five justices on the Supreme Court now oppose comprehensive federal prohibitions on home handgun possession by some class of trustworthy homeowners for the purpose of, and maybe only at the time of, self-defense. Perhaps the justices will push further and apply Heller’s holding to state and local governments via the Fourteenth...

District of Columbia v. Heller has been hailed by its supporters as a model of “new originalism,” a methodology that focuses on original public meaning and eschews any concern for original intent. The decision and its methodology have drawn fire from legal scholars from across the contemporary ideological spectrum. The “public meaning” approach employed by the Heller majority rests on a flawed...

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson criticizes the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in District of Columbia v. Heller through the lens of post-Roe judicial conservatism, a doctrine that exalts judicial deference to the political branches above the interest in individual liberty. But that vision is incompatible with the sort of judiciary the Framers established, and Wilkinson’s prescription does not...

In this Article, I argue that the Heller majority, in discovering a new Second Amendment right to possess guns for personal self-defense, engaged in an unprincipled abuse of judicial power in pursuit of an ideological objective. The ideological nature of Justice Scalia’s opinion is revealed in his inconsistent brand of textualism, in which Scalia’s own longtime insistence on the importance of...