Volume and Issue: Vol. 94, No. 6

An Empirical Study of Gender and Race in Trademark Prosecution

This Article is the first to empirically examine the extent to which women and minorities succeed in prosecuting trademark applications before the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”). Trademark registration is an important measure of entrepreneurial activity and progress in business, education, and the arts. To explore how women and minorities are succeeding in this domain, we compared 1.2 million trademark applications over thirty years with demographic information on race and gender.             We analyze whether trademark prosecution reflects systematic underrepresentation of women and minorities similar to those reported in patent and copyright prosecution. We found that trademark data showed significant differences from the other two federal intellectual property (“IP”) regimes. Our analysis reveals that women regularly secure trademark registration at a higher rate than men. Women are underrepresented in the pool of trademark applicants compared to their presence in the population, but not all minority groups are underrepresented. For women and underrepresented minorities, the disparity is decreasing at a rate not seen in other IP registration systems.

       While recent work has significantly advanced our understanding of trademark prosecution, no published studies consider the race and gender of trademark applicants. By filling that void, this Article substantially contributes to our understanding of minority intellectual property ownership and provides a new foundation for policy shifts and further research to assure that intellectual property ownership paths, theory, law, and reform are grounded in equality.

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For Whom Corporate Leaders Bargain

At the center of a fundamental and heated debate about corporate purpose, an increasingly influential view (which we refer to as “stakeholderism”) advocates giving corporate leaders increased discretionary power to serve all stakeholders and not just shareholders. Supporters of stakeholderism argue that its application would address growing concerns about the impact of corporations on society and the environment. By contrast, critics of stakeholderism argue that corporate leaders should not be expected to use expanded discretion to benefit stakeholders. This Article presents novel empirical evidence that can contribute to resolving this key debate.

       Following a stakeholderist framework, the constituency statutes adopted by more than thirty U.S. states authorize corporate leaders to give weight to stakeholder interests when considering a sale of their company. Using hand-collected data, we study how corporate leaders in fact used their stakeholderist discretion in transactions governed by such statutes in the past two decades. In particular, we provide a detailed analysis of more than one hundred transactions governed by such statutes in which corporate leaders negotiated a company sale to a private equity buyer.

       We find that corporate leaders used their discretion to obtain gains for shareholders, executives, and directors. However, despite the clear risks that private equity acquisitions often posed for stakeholders, corporate leaders generally did not use their discretion to negotiate for any stakeholder protections. Indeed, in the small minority of cases in which some stakeholder protections were formally included, they were generally cosmetic and practically inconsequential.

       Beyond the implications of our findings for the long-standing debate on constituency statutes, these findings also provide important lessons for the ongoing debate on stakeholderism. At a minimum, stakeholderists should identify the causes for constituency statutes’ failure to deliver stakeholder benefits in the analyzed transactions and examine whether embracing stakeholderism would not similarly fail to produce such benefits. After examining alternative explanations for our findings, we conclude that the most plausible explanation lies in corporate leaders’ incentives not to protect stakeholders beyond what would serve shareholder value. Our findings thus indicate that stakeholderism cannot be relied on to produce its purported benefits for stakeholders. Stakeholderism therefore should not be supported as an effective way for protecting stakeholder interests, even by those who deeply care about stakeholders.

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The Constitutional Right to Travel Under Quarantine

The constitutional right to travel has long been an enigma for courts and academics alike. Despite being widely recognized and regularly applied, relatively little has been written about the breadth or limits of this constitutional guarantee. This gap is particularly striking in the context of restrictive measures designed to curb the spread of a dangerous disease, like quarantines. Although travel rights are directly implicated by such regulations, the law of quarantines (to the limited extent that one has been developed) has almost entirely disregarded the constitutional right to travel. This Article seeks to close this gap by building a detailed model of the Constitution’s protections of movement and travel and then applying this model to quarantines and similar regulations aimed at controlling the spread of a contagious disease. In so doing, this Article makes contributions to the fields of constitutional law and health law, while providing a robust framework of immediate use to policymakers, courts, and litigants responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Civil vs. Criminal Legal Aid

The past few decades have highlighted the insidious effects of poverty, particularly for poor people who lack access to legal representation. Accordingly, there have been longstanding calls for “Civil Gideon,” which refers to a right to counsel in civil cases that would address issues tied to housing, public benefits, family issues, and various areas of law that poor people are often disadvantaged by due to their lack of attorneys. This civil right to counsel would complement the analogous criminal right that has been constitutionalized. Notwithstanding the persuasive arguments made for and against Civil Gideon, it is less clear why there is such a sharp distinction between civil and criminal legal aid. This Article re-examines longstanding assumptions about the civil-criminal legal aid divide and highlights some underexamined explanations: the legal profession’s historical implication in this division; courts’ unwillingness to use their inherent powers to appoint counsel; and courts’ enduringly narrow understandings of when poor people should be provided with lawyers. These insights prompt alternative reflections on how to best deliver legal services to poor people.

*                Presidential Assistant Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School. J.D., University of California, Berkeley, School of Law; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley; M.L.A., University of Pennsylvania; B.S. Northwestern University. This Article benefitted from feedback and conversations with Guy-Uriel Charles, Scott Cummings, Anne Fleming, Trevor Gardner, Myriam Gilles, Helen Hershkoff, Olati Johnson, Steve Koh, Seth Kreimer, Serena Mayeri, K-Sue Park, Clare Pastore, Portia Pedro, Dave Pozen, Dan Richman, Louis Rulli, Kathryn Sabbeth, Matt Shapiro, Emily Stolzenberg, and Catherine Struve. Special thanks to Megan Russo and Madeline Verniero for editorial support and Alexa Nakamura, Amy Lutfi, and the Southern California Law Review staff for their overall assistance with the Article. All errors are mine.

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The Expressive Fourth Amendment

After the eight-minute and forty-six second video of George Floyd’s murder went viral, cities across the United States erupted in mass protests with people outraged by the death of yet another Black person at the hands of police. The streets were flooded for months with activists and community members of all racesmarching, screaming, and demonstrating against police brutality and for racial justice.Police—like warriors against enemy forces—confronted overwhelmingly peaceful protesters with militarized violence and force. Ultimately, racial justice protesters and members of the media brought lawsuits under section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act in the district courts of Minneapolis, Dallas, Oakland, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis, claiming extreme violence and unlawful and abusive use of less lethal weapons by police during protests. The first Part of this Article provides a recent history of this police brutality against racial justice activists in the George Floyd protests. The second Part of this Article reviews circuit court opinions in protest cases from the last three decades and district court injunctions from the George Floyd protest litigation to analyze how courts currently evaluate, in section 1983 Actions, the Fourth Amendment reasonableness of police force pursuant to Graham v. Connor. This Part demonstrates that in their Fourth Amendment reasonableness calculus, courts discount plaintiffs’ involvement in valuable politically expressive conduct. The third Part of this Article argues that the Fourth Amendment mandates courts evaluate the reasonableness of protest policing in light of freedom of expression which means they must positively weigh plaintiffs’ expressive protest activity. This reframing of reasonableness is supported by historical evidence of the Framers’ intent and Supreme Court jurisprudence on searches of books, papers, and other expressive materials when such items arguably deserve First Amendment protection. The fourth Part of this Article discusses the difference an expression-specific Fourth Amendment—the expressive Fourth Amendment—reasonableness test would have made in one of the circuit protest cases.

Pita LoorDownload