Issue 3 | Volume 97 | Law Review at Washington University in St. Louis

Article

Collective Goods and The Court: A Theory of Constitutional Commodification

Eric W. Orts and Amy J. Sepinwall

Not everything is or should be for sale. Collective goods such as our democracy and parts of our natural environment would be destroyed if they were transformed entirely into commodities to be bought and sold in commercial markets. This Article examines a discrete and unexplored topic within the larger literature on commodification: the extent to which the U.S. Supreme Court participates in the commodification of collective goods. The Court shifts…

Note

Statutory Speedy Trial Period Calculations for Dismissed and Refiled Charges: A Case Study of Colorado’s Approach

Marie Zoglo

Colorado’s current approach of allowing the speedy trial period to restart creates too large a loophole in the state’s statutory right to a speedy trial within six months because it grants too much leeway to prosecutors. As courts have yet to apply the exception to restarting upon a showing that the prosecution dismissed and refiled to circumvent the speedy mandate, the exception is too vague to provide sufficient notice to…

Article

The Hidden Transactional Wisdom of Media Discrimination in Pre-AWCPA Copyright

Kevin Emerson Collins

Media neutrality in copyright’s subject matter means that works of authorship are protected against copying, or not, regardless of the tangible medium in which they are fixed. For example, the same features of a sculptural work are protected regardless of whether they are fixed in a statue or a photograph of a statue. Media neutrality in subject matter is a fundamental and largely unquestioned copyright principle with a firm policy…

Note

Littering for $500: How Does Judicial Estoppel Solve the Problems that Factually Baseless Pleas Pose to the Double Jeopardy Clause?

Rob Mangone

A factually baseless plea is one entered by a defendant for an offense that the defense, prosecution, and judge know that the defendant did not commit. Factually baseless pleas undermine justice. Inherently, these pleas are lies that our system has adopted to patch together a case-by-case attempt to render fair verdicts. While these factually baseless pleas may help individual defendants receive lenient sentences and may allow prosecutors and judges to…

Article

Privacy Law’s False Promise

Ari Ezra Waldman

Privacy laws have never seemed stronger. New international, national, state, and local laws have been passed with the promise of greater protection for consumers. Courts across the globe are reclaiming the law’s power to limit collection of our data. And yet, our privacy seems more in danger now than ever, with frequent admissions of nefarious data use practices from social media, mobile apps, and e-commerce websites, among others. Why are…

Article

Regulation of Book Markets

Miriam Marcowitz-Bitton and Jacob Nussim

Over the years, many European countries have regulated their national book markets. Chief among the regulatory schemes is the resale price maintenance (“RPM”) regime, under which booksellers must offer books for a fixed price for a limited time period. The suggested rationales for this legal regime are mainly: (1) viewing books as cultural goods that deserve special treatment; (2) advancing diversity in the book market; (3) creating a wide distribution…

Commentary

Robotic Collective Memory

Michal Shur-Ofry and Guy Pessach

The various ways in which robots and AI will affect our future society are at the center of scholarly attention. This Commentary, conversely, concentrates on their possible impact on humanity’s past, or more accurately, on the ways societies will remember their joint past. We focus on the emerging use of technologies that combine AI, cutting-edge visualization techniques, and social robots, in order to store and communicate recollections of the past…