Page 8 of 52
Privacy and the First Amendment: privacy as property?
In Copyright and the First Amendment: The Unexplored, Unbroken Historical Practice, Terry Hart does an excellent job of exploring why the First Amendment has never been held to interfere with the enforcement of copyright, including pre-publication injunctive relief.
April 2012 / 2 min.
Contract law in the antebellum 19th century
The so-called “contracts clause” appears in Article I, section 10, clause 1 of the United States Constitution: “No State shall … pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” What did this mean before the Civil War?
March 2012 / 7 min.
Freedom to contract at the end of the nineteenth century
In Kermit Hall’s words, the nineteenth century saw the “triumph of contract” over property, tort, and equity, as the law came “to ratify those forms of inequality that the market system produces.”
March 2012 / 3 min.
Post-war contract law in the nineteenth century
In many respects, the so-called “black codes” put in place in the South immediately after the Civil War exemplify the potential extremes of nineteenth-century contract law. Although these laws only lasted for a few years before the Republican Congress – dominated by Northerners after the secession of the South – stepped in and forced the South to accept new […]
March 2012 / 3 min.
Reforming government regulations: Stephen Breyer’s technocratic solutions
In Breaking the Vicious Circle, Justice Stephen Breyer tackles the problem of regulation and risk in the American context.
March 2012 / 8 min.
Is everything old new again? Learning from the history of technology
Peter Decherney, Nathan Ensmenger, and Christopher S. Yoo recently published an article, Are Those Who Ignore History Doomed to Repeat it?, on Tim Wu’s book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.
March 2012 / 3 min.
If the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t exist, could Obama still be President? (Yes)
Periodically various lay people attempt to interpret the law in ways that fit their version of (un)reality. While I appreciate the mainstream media simply ignoring these people (in general), it can occasionally be educational to refute its points as if they were logical and rational.
February 2012 / 7 min.
Protecting vested interests in the face of new technology: the case of the Charles River Bridge
In the case of Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge, 36 U.S. 420 (1837), Justice Roger Taney – most known for his opinion in Dred Scott – decided against the owners and investors in the original bridge over the Charles River in Massachusetts. That bridge had been built by a company granted a charter in 1785 for the […]
February 2012 / 3 min.
Federal common law in the nineteenth century
What happened to federal common law in the nineteenth century?
February 2012 / 6 min.
Federal vs. State Power in Antebellum America
The Reconstruction Amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution) represented a fundamental shift in the balance of power between the states and the federal government, even though their full effect took a century to fully emerge.
February 2012 / 4 min.