In every complex society, there have been famous people. But only in modern times do we have celebrities. Only in modern times do we have mass media; and it is the mass media that make it possible for us to be so familiar with famous people. This familiarity, as I have argued, is the essence of the celebrity. In this Article, I am going to talk about some of the…
The central thesis of this Article is that the criterion that can and should be used to judge exempt status in these cases of “commercial similarity” is whether the organization provides access to services for previously-underserved populations or provides specific services to the majority population that otherwise are not provided by the private sector. Using “enhancing access” as the main criterion in judging an organization’s entitlement to exemption makes considerable…
In this Article, we offer a fuller jurisprudential analysis of the gatekeeping choices that the Justices make as they set the direction in which the Court will proceed. Using more recent data that we gathered from the docket books of Justices Brennan and Marshall, we show that rule-based and strategic factors, while undeniably important, cannot adequately account for the Justices’ voting behavior at the certiorari stage. Although the Justices consider…
We propose to go beyond the common law origins of the infield fly rule and do what the author chose not to do: namely, explore the different spaces for an infield fly rule from the point of view of the great jurisprudential movements of the last hundred years. In so doing we conclude (i) that post-modern jurisprudence strongly suggests that the infield fly rule was far more socially constructed and…
In December 2001 I received a telephone call from a lawyer at a firm representing Baxter International, Inc. At that time, Baxter was facing lawsuits over a number of dialysis-related deaths that had occurred in Europe. Apparently dialysis filters manufactured at a Baxter plant in Sweden had been contaminated by a processing chemical resulting in adverse consequences when used with dialysis machines. Baxter had settled death claims involving ten Spanish…