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In its recent and highly anticipated decision in MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., the U.S. Supreme Court appeared reluctant to make any significant changes to copyright law. The Court avoided comment on the vigorously debated definition of the "substantial noninfringing uses" standard from Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., affirmed the Sony doctrine without modifying it, and...

In the past two decades, business groups and their political allies have often criticized broad civil rights remedies—particularly the availability of money damages—as encouraging abusive and extortionate litigation practices. In its decision in Buckhannon Board & Care Home, Inc. v. West Virginia Department of Health & Human Resources, the U.S. Supreme Court seemed to heed those arguments...

An implicit dichotomy of the corporation exists in legal scholarship. On one side of the dichotomy rests the publicly held corporation suffering from a significant conflict of interest between its managers and dispersed shareholders; on the other side, the closely held corporation plagued by intershareholder conflict. This Article argues that understanding the agency problems that can exist...

An enduring challenge for administrative law is the tension between the ideal of democratic policymaking and the ubiquity of bureaucratic discretion. This Article seeks to reframe the problem of agency discretion by outlining an interpretivist model of administrative law based on the concept of fiduciary obligation in private legal relations such as agency, trust, and corporation. Administrative...

In 1999, California enacted domestic partnership legislation for the first time. In its initial stages, registration of a domestic partnership offered few rights and no responsibilities to partners. Subsequent legislation added greater rights and responsibilities to the skeleton of the registry, culminating in the Domestic Partner Rights and Responsibilities Act of 2003, which conferred upon...

Incentive awards to representative plaintiffs in class actions have been the focus of recent law reform efforts and have generated inconsistent case law. But little is known about such awards. This study of 374 opinions from 1993 to 2002 finds that awards were granted in about 28 percent of settled class actions. The rate of awards varied by case category as follows: consumer credit actions 59...

Two primary arguments are advanced for the contemporary functional importance of federalist constraints on centralized political power. The first is captured in Justice Brandeis's famous invocation of the states as the laboratories of democracy in which "a single courageous State" may blaze new paths by trying "novel social and economic experiments." The second ties the smaller, decentralized...

At the conclusion of every class action lawsuit, a judge must hold a fairness hearing to assess the reasonableness of the outcome. The fairness hearing contains the promise of providing real monitoring of class counsel. In practice, it has not fulfilled this promise and scholars have largely, therefore, forsaken it. In this Article, William Rubenstein provides a sustained investigation of the...

Sometimes, no news is good news. In an important article, Theodore Eisenberg and Geoffrey Miller add to the emerging literature that uses empirical research to shed light on the real-world operation of class action lawsuits. The conclusions that Eisenberg and Miller draw about incentive awards to class representatives are consistent with the conclusions of their previous study of class-counsel...

In United States v. Booker, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the mandatory nature of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines violated the Sixth Amendment because they required a judge to enhance a defendant’s sentence based on facts that were neither found by a jury nor admitted by the defendant. The remedial portion of the opinion deemed the Guidelines “effectively advisory,” thereby permitting judges...

In Rojas v. Superior Court the California Supreme Court demonstrated its clear intent to encourage mediation by providing absolute privilege to evidence and materials “prepared for the purpose of, in the course of, or pursuant to, a mediation.” However, the Court declined to address the important question of how to determine when materials are prepared for mediation. The Court’s failure to...

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, and David Nimmer. The UCLA Law Review has...

The vast majority of Americans favor sanctions that require offenders to engage in responsible behavior—to work, pay restitution, or support dependents; to participate in a mandatory job-training, literacy, or drug-treatment program; or to meet some other prosocial obligation. While this intuitive preference crosses political and ideological divides, nothing in our classical theories of...

One of the most widespread contemporary assumptions in the discourse of separation of powers is that while the president tends to have preferences that are more national and stable in nature, Congress is perpetually prone to parochial concerns. This deeply ingrained assumption not only pervades legal scholarly treatment of the administrative state, but it is also used to frame debates about the...