Authoruclalaw

Over the past few years, patent law reform has been a hot topic of congressional debate. The cost and complexity of patent litigation and the frequency with which district judges are getting reversed on questions of claim construction are often cited as cause for alarm. Heeding the calls for reform, a patent pilot program for district courts was recently unveiled in the U.S. Congress in an...

In the active literature on regulatory reinvention, many have pointed to the Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) program of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) as a successful example of the potential for collaborative and experimentalist regulatory innovation. Yet, despite its frequent mention as a prototype for fostering public participation and adaptive decisionmaking, no thorough, systematic...

The Internet offers the potential for economic growth stemming from online human communications. But recent industry and government actions have disfavored these possibilities by treating the Internet like a content-delivery supply chain. This Article recommends that the Internet be at the center of communications policy. It criticizes the nearly exclusive focus of communications policy on the...

Judicial and scholarly assessment of emerging technology seems poised to drive the Fourth Amendment down one of three paths. The first would simply relegate the amendment to a footnote in history books by limiting its reach to harms that the framers specifically envisioned. A modified version of this first approach would dispense with expansive constitutional notions of privacy and replace them...

The presumption of sanity is a concept in criminal law used to allocate burdens relating to the insanity defense. In Clark v. Arizona, the U.S. Supreme Court relied on the presumption to affirm the exclusion of evidence introduced to negate mens rea. This Comment discusses the problems with using the presump¬tion to exclude evidence from mens rea determinations and examines other ways to regulate...

Tribal sovereignty suffered greatly by the 1953 passage of Public Law 280, which gave certain states jurisdiction over the Indian country within their borders. However, recent cases show that tribes can preempt this state jurisdiction, and thereby reclaim some measure of sovereignty, if they prose¬cute crimes first—so long as the surrounding state has a statute abrogating the dual sovereignty...

Employers would just as soon not hire ex-offenders. They see the potential for workplace violence or theft, negligent hiring liability, and public relations nightmares. Because current law places the burden on employers to evaluate the risk that a particular ex-offender poses on the job, but gives them few tools with which to make that evaluation, employers would rather err on the side of caution...

Each year, the UCLA School of Law hosts the Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture. Since 1986, the lecture series has served as a forum for leading scholars in the fields of copyright and First Amendment law. In recent years, the lecture has been presented by such distinguished scholars as Lawrence Lessig, Robert Post, Mark Rose, Kathleen Sullivan, David Nimmer, and Jonathan Varat. The UCLA Law...