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In this Comment, Jennifer Walwyn examines California Penal Code section 12022.53 and the controversy among the California Courts of Appeal surrounding the vicarious application of firearm sentence enhancements to aiders and abettors of gang crime. She explores the traditional doctrines of conspiracy and aider-and-abettor liability and contrasts those doctrines with the operation of statutory...

Last year, Lawrence Lessig delivered the fifteenth Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture, in which he invoked Professor Nimmer's concern with the balance between copyright protection and the First Amendment right of free speech.' Lessig addressed the imbalance that has developed in copyright law from the point of view of a constitutional scholar. I am an English professor, not a lawyer. Therefore...

Applying the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to denials of treatment by assisted reproductive technology (ART) practitioners raises particularly challenging legal and ethical issues. On the one hand, the danger that physicians will inappropriately deny treatment to patients with disabilities is especially worrisome in the context of ARTs, given the widespread stigma associated with...

This Article discusses what can be done to promote productive behavior in mediation and reduce bad conduct. Although most participants do not abuse the mediation process, some people use mediation to drag out litigation, gain leverage for later negotiations, and generally wear down the opposition. Rules requiring good-faith participation are likely to be ineffective and possibly counterproductive...

During its last term, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed its approval of mandatory arbitration in Circuit City Stores, Inc. v. Adams and Green Tree Financial Corp.-Alabama v. Randolph. The 5-4 votes in these decisions show, however, that this public policy remains controversial. Many firms now require employees to waive their right to sue on employment claims and to submit to their employers'...

Legal scholars have thoroughly analyzed Buckley v. Valeo's treatment of limits on campaign contributions and expenditures. Scholarship has paid substantially less attention to footnote 65 of Buckley, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that Congress could condition the provision of public funding to candidates on their willingness to accept expenditure limits. Critics have argued that the Court...

In supporting the invocation of stare decisis in constitutional cases, the Supreme Court has maintained that its decisions affect how the people conceptualize the government and their rights. Such an argument, which prioritizes contemporary understandings of the Constitution over both the intentions of Framers and the nuances of doctrine, suggests that constitutional decisions may affect the...

During the decade since the Americans with Disabilities Act went into effect, mental health inquiries by bar examining committees have engendered intense controversy. Courts have reached no clear consensus as to what, if any, questions about mental illness or substance abuse may be posed by licensing agencies. The trend has been towards a form of "relaxed scrutiny" that authorizes inquiries as...

Motion pictures are generally highly collaborative works, containing many different creative contributions. In the United States motion picture industry, most of those contributions are created as works made for hire for an employer or commissioning party, simplifying potential questions as to rights and obligations among the contributors under copyright law. Occasionally, contributions are...

This Article evaluates the merit of liberalizing unemployment insurance eligibility as a means to achieve progressive wealth redistribution-an idea that has recently gained popularity among policymakers and legal scholars. Unemployment insurance (UI) provides temporary, partial wage replacement to workers who suffer unexpected job loss, but it tends to exclude workers who have very low wages or...

The garment industry, one of the largest manufacturing bases in the United States, withholds millions of dollars annually from its employees in unpaid minimum wages. However, courts have not clearly addressed the question of whether the Fair Labor Standards Act, which establishes federal wage and hour aws, makes garment manufacturers and retailers liable for the minimum wage violations of their...

The topic of sovereign immunity from adverse possession is largely unexplored. This Comment addresses the issue, specifically focusing on whether such sovereign immunity is justified by public policy, and conversely, whether the traditional justifications for adverse possession apply with equal force in the context of government-owned land. First, government land is not sufficiently different...