Volume 81, Number 6 (September 2008)
At the heart of the extensive literature on corporate-law federalism is the belief that federalism engenders regulatory competition and federalization eliminates it. Federalism, a mode of governance where states act as providers of corporate law, is said to drive states to compete for charters. By contrast, federalization, which occurs when the federal government promulgates law, preempts state-level competition. Consequently, scholars who believe that regulatory competition promotes the provision of “good” laws have long railed against federal securities statutes like Sarbanes-Oxley that nationalize elements of traditional (state) corporate law. Meanwhile, other scholars have lauded preemptive securities regulation, arguing that federal intervention prevents the dismantling of regulatory standards and a race to the bottom.
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Should the law recognize an individual’s right not to be a genetic parent when genetic parenthood does not carry with it legal or gestational parenthood? If so, should we allow individuals to waive that right in advance, either by contract or a less formal means? How should the law’s treatment of gestational and legal parenthood inform these questions? Developments in reproductive technology have brought these questions to the fore, most prominently in the preembryo disposition cases a number of courts have confronted—disputes over the use of stored frozen preembryos that couples have fertilized in the course of In Vitro Fertilization (IVF)— but other examples abound.
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The Supreme Court has held that, as a general matter, an injunction cannot issue if there is an adequate remedy at law. This follows, according to the Court, because the standard for when injunctions may issue derives directly from the practice of the English Court of Chancery around 1789, which followed the same principle. This Article argues that the Supreme Court’s reading of general Chancery custom is inapposite in copyright cases. The historical record shows that legal remedies were deemed categorically inadequate in copyright cases, and that by 1789, the Chancery’s jurisdiction to issue copyright injunctions had become concurrent and incontestable. The Supreme Court could thus hold today, without running afoul of traditional equitable principles, that a copyright injunction can issue without regard to the adequacy of legal remedies. This Article reaches its conclusion only after undertaking the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date. It relies primarily on the original manuscript records of 220 infringement suits brought in the Court of Chancery from 1660 to 1800, which are stored at the National Archives in London, England, and a further review of earlier copyright-infringement suits from 1557 to 1680 in antecedent tribunals, many of which are also only available in manuscript form. The topic of this Article is particularly timely given the Supreme Court’s recent decision in eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C., where it discussed the standard for issuing injunctions in patent cases, and where Chief Justice Roberts stated in a concurring opinion that lower courts should consider the inadequacy requirement in light of historical practices.
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Over a decade after being arrested in a western Montana cabin, Theodore Kaczynski is once again grabbing headlines. Although he is currently in a federal maximum-security prison serving the life sentence that he received for committing the Unabomber crimes, Kaczynski is now engaged “in a legal battle with the federal government and a group of his victims over the future of [his] handwritten papers.” The government has proposed selling “sanitized versions of the materials” via an Internet auction in order to raise money for a group of his victims, and Kaczynski is fighting that plan.
At issue, largely, is the extent of the government’s power under the Victim and Witness Protection Act of 1982 (“VWPA”) and further, what the government may do with the property it seized from Kaczynski. This property includes his “handwritten . . . journals, diaries and drafts of his anti-technology manifesto . . . [which] contain blunt assessments of 16 mail bombings from 1978 to 1995 that killed 3 people and injured 28, as well as his musings on the suffering of victims and their families.” Moreover, due to its unique set of facts, Kaczynski’s case also provides an intriguing opportunity to evaluate whether the VWPA violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution or conflicts with the Copyright Act of 1976 (“Copyright Act”), and to explore the fascinating interplay between these two areas of law, both of which provide protection for individuals’ free expression.
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One important rule of the Bankruptcy Code is that a creditor generally is not entitled to receive interest on a claim that accrues after the date when the bankruptcy petition is filed. As with most general rules, however, there are several exceptions to this ban on postpetition interest, one of which is that postpetition interest may be allowed in certain cases when the debtor is solvent. This exception is expressly codified in § 726(a)(5) of the Code, which evinces a policy in favor of requiring debtors to pay postpetition interest on creditors’ claims when the debtor can afford to do so.
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