The DC@UB Law Faculty Contributions to Books collection includes information on books, book chapters, encyclopedia entries and other contributions published in books by all current and emeritus University at Buffalo School of Law faculty members. Links to purchase books are included where the books are still in print. Full text chapters are included where publisher policies permit their inclusion.
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The Changing Landscape of Trademark Law in Tinseltown: From Debbie Does Dallas to The Hangover
John Tehranian and Mark Bartholomew
This Essay, a chapter published in the book Hollywood and the Law (Palgrave Macmillan / British Film Institute, 2015), explores how courts have sought to balance the competing interests at stake when filmmakers make unauthorized uses of trademarks in their work and brand owners threaten liability for infringement. Using the seminal Rogers v. Grimaldi decision as a key pivot point, the Essay traces the remarkable change in approaches that courts have taken to First Amendment defenses in trademark cases in the past few decades. In presenting case studies of two opinions -- Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Inc. v. Pussycat Cinema, Ltd. (decided a decade before Rogers) and Louis Vuitton v. Warner Bros. (decided two decades after Rogers) -- the Chapter contextualizes the growing judicial recognition of free speech defenses by filmmakers, the critical limitations of this solicitousness to artistic choice, and the way in which this trend may have impacted the artistry and economics of Hollywood.
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Gossip Law
Samantha Barbas
Published as Chapter 6 in When Private Talk Goes Public: Gossip in United States History, Kathleen Feeley & Jennifer Frost, eds.
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Foundations of the Legislative Panopticon: Bentham’s Principles of Morals and Legislation
Guyora Binder
Published as Chapter 4 in Foundational Texts in Modern Criminal Law, Markus D. Dubber, ed.
Bentham contributed to the development not only of moral philosophy, jurisprudence, and policy analysis, but also criminal law. This chapter interprets his concepts of law and policy as explicated in his best known work, as foundations for his views on criminal law. These foundational concepts explain his view that criminal law should be expressed in a code consisting of offenses defined by reference to legally protected interests and culpable expectations of injury to those interests. In making this argument, the chapter explores Bentham’s analogy of legislation to architecture and of the utility principle to the foundation of a building.
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Homicide
Guyora Binder
Published as Chapter 31 in The Oxford Handbook of Criminal Law, Markus D. Dubber & Tatjana Hörnle, eds.
This review of the development of homicide law in England and the United States shows that contemporary law reflects the sustained influence of a utilitarian reform movement. That movement organized legal thought around a conception of human action as risking or causing results, and a conception of the function of law as minimizing cost. Within this framework, homicide was conceptualized as the expected causation of death. Traditional conceptions of homicide emphasizing manifestly violent acts or antisocial motives came to be seen as archaic and confused. During this development, requirements of violence were first reinterpreted as evidentiary presumptions of culpability, and then criticized as formalistic legal fictions. In this way homicide evolved from a crime of killing to a crime of causing.
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Animals and Law in the American City
Irus Braverman
Published as Chapter 6 in Environmental Law and Contrasting Ideas of Nature: a Constructivist Approach, Keith H. Hirokawa, ed.
Whereas a large and growing scholarly literature is dedicated to studying human populations in the city, not much has been written about nonhuman animals in this space. This essay explores the presence of nonhuman animals in the American city through a legal lens. I begin with a few general contemplations about the legal classification of animals in American cities, and then move to explore specific legal classifications of animals in cities: domestic and companion animals, agriculture or livestock animals, wild animals, and pests. I argue that such animal classifications are not as fixed and static as they present themselves to be. For example, a pig or a horse may be a companion animal under anti-cruelty provisions or livestock under provisions regulating agribusiness. Studying various examples of animal reclassification, this essay demonstrates the inherent messiness of the legal ordering of animals and reveals the legal struggles to redefine such ordering. The honeybee in particular demonstrates the fluidity between various animal classifications and the ways in which animals are subject to, and themselves affect, legal and administrative practices.
Alongside the attempt to classify animals, a considerable effort also goes into keeping animals confined within their particular classifications. The prohibitions from keeping wild and farm animals as pets, and those that prohibit treating pets as pests or pests as pets — all point to the desire of lawmakers to place and keep animals within their classifications so as to ensure that cities are safe, sanitized, and free of animal nuisances. At the same time, human and nonhuman animals also express their own, sometimes conflicting, trajectories that transgress and challenge their black-boxing within legal classifications, forcing lawmakers and enforcers to adapt or develop new legal ways to organize disorderly nature so as to redefine, reestablish, and reinforce order. My reading of animal laws thus illuminates the dynamic and often conflicted human-animal existence in the city and its translation and reiteration by legal texts and practices.
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Captive for Life: Conserving Extinct in the Wild Species through Ex Situ Breeding
Irus Braverman
Published as Chapter 12 in The Ethics of Captivity, Lori Gruen, ed.
Are there “fates worse than death,” to use Kurt Vonnegut’s title? Is captivity one such fate? Captive for Life examines these questions through the lens of conservation biology’s ex situ models of captive management — and captive breeding in particular — for wild animals, and especially for species that have been designated as Critically Endangered or as Extinct in the Wild. Drawing on interviews with leading conservation biologists, the chapter describes the erosion of the distinctions between species management in captivity and in wild nature, often referred to among experts as ex situ and in situ conservation. The chapter examines situations in which the extinction, or near-extinction, of a species in the wild is imminent, and a captive breeding program is initiated — typically by zoos — to ensure this species’ survival. Finally, I hint toward the possibility of abandoning the “in” and “out” paradigm, that has so characterized modern conservation narratives, in favor of an understanding of conservation that focuses on a more dynamic and less predetermined view of ecosystems and populations. Such a holistic model breaks with the bifurcations of modern conservation to offer relational configurations for managing wild life.
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Good Night, Zoo: a Children's Guide to Humanimal Spaces
Irus Braverman
Published in Real Virtuality: About the Destruction and Multiplication of World, Ulrich Gehmann and Martin Reiche, eds.
Children’s books interpellate their readers and listeners into a vision of nature in which boundaries and dualities begin to shudder and collapse. Braverman’s essay focuses on Peggy Rathmann’s story Good Night, Gorilla to show how images of city and wilderness, captivity and freedom, home and zoo, and human and nonhuman animality can become fluid, thereby opening up possibilities for other, novel spaces to emerge. This book’s liminal scheme sets up the stage for the surprising hybrids that can occur when species meet.
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Order and Disorder in the Urban Forest: A Foucauldian-Latourian Perspective
Irus Braverman
Published as Chapter 9 in Urban Forests, Trees, and Greenspace: A Political Ecology Perspective, L. Anders Sandberg, Adrina Bardekjian & Sadia Butt, eds.
We pass by street trees everyday. Their existence as well as their particular location in the city seems obvious, innocuous, natural. But, as is the case with most taken-for-granted "things" (Brown, 2011), some excavation is bound to reveal a more complicated and even ideological story. This study focuses on such a story: the story of the clandestine governance of nature and of humans by way of nature - all through the construction and regulation of city street trees. This story problematizes the mundane display of urban space in general, and of urban street trees in particular, as technical and apolitical, and instead promotes an understanding of nonhumans and humans as constantly negotiating spatial order and disorder through law.
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Who's Afraid of Methodology? Advocating a Methodological Turn in Legal Geography
Irus Braverman
Published as Chapter 5 in The Expanding Spaces of Law: a Timely Legal Geography, Irus Braverman, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney & Alexandre Kedar, eds.
Alongside the push to expand legal geography into new spaces and temporalities “out there,” this chapter proposes an inward expansion: a reflection on how we come to write what we write rather than where, when, and why we do so. Such greater awareness to the craftsmanship of our scholarship will pay off in a range of ways and, most importantly, by increasing our methodological diversity and interdisciplinarity. The chapter reflects on the pitfalls and virtues of my own zoo ethnography with the aim of inviting legal geographers to explore how they have crafted and choose to craft their own research. The chapter argues that because of our unique training in the nexus of law and geography, we are well equipped to explore administrative structures and cultures. Institutional and bureaucratic ethnographies should thus perform a more important role in legal geography.
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Introduction: Expanding the Spaces of Law
Irus Braverman, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar
Published as the introduction to The Expanding Spaces of Law: a Timely Legal Geography, Irus Braverman, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney & Alexandre Kedar, eds.
Legal geography is a stream of scholarship that takes the interconnections between law and spatiality, and especially their reciprocal construction, as core objects of inquiry. Legal geographers contend that in the world of lived social relations and experience, aspects of the social that are analytically identified as either legal or spatial are conjoined and co-constituted. The legal geography scholarship highlights that nearly every aspect of law is either located, takes place, is in motion, or has some spatial frame of reference. In other words, law is always “worlded” in some way. Likewise, every bit of social space, lived places, and landscapes are inscribed with legal significance. Distinctively legal forms of meaning are projected onto every segment of the physical world. These meanings are open to interpretation and may become involved in a range of legal practices. Such fragments of a socially segmented world — the where of law — are not simply the inert sites of law, but are inextricably implicated in how law happens.
This introduction to the forthcoming book The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography (Stanford University Press) identifies and elaborates on three modes of legal geographic research. The first mode of legal geography includes disciplinary work in law or in geography that is modeled on the conventional image of import and export. The second is an interdisciplinary pursuit in which scholars in the eponymous fields draw on the work of each other and seek to contribute to the development of a common project. The third mode moves beyond legal geography to trans-disciplinary, or perhaps even post-disciplinary, modes of scholarship. Although these three modes exist concurrently, the general trajectory over time has been from disciplinary to interdisciplinary and, finally, to post-disciplinary orientations. This triadic classification helps organize the rich yet eclectic legal geography scholarship that has evolved over the last thirty years or so. While this introduction contains elements of each mode, it also urges interested scholars to move legal geography beyond the disciplinary boundaries into the horizons of a post-legal geography. Ironically, then, the ultimate success of legal geography will be in its ability to transcend the bi-disciplinary focus that has characterized so much of this scholarship up to this point.
In addition to the introduction, the book consists of ten chapters. In the first three, Keebet and the late Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Mariana Valverde, and Nicholas Blomley identify gaps and obstacles in existing approaches to legal geography scholarship and offer remedies. An important sub-theme in each of these chapters is the importance of being more mindful of the temporalities of social, spatial, and legal phenomena. Authored by Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar and Irus Braverman, the next two chapters ask how a critical comparative legal geography might not only draw upon but also contribute to a rejuvenated project of comparative law and the methodological stakes of legal geography scholarship. The remaining five chapters expand legal geography into new spaces and make new connections. Specifically, Michael Smith, Antonio Azuela and Rodrigo Meneses, Lisa Pruitt, Melinda Benson, and David Delaney develop novel interpretive resources with the aim of enhancing interdisciplinarity, applying these tools to particular kinds of spaces and places: war zones, the street, the workplace, American rurality, and procedural spaces.
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Comparative Criminal Law
Luis E. Chiesa
Published as Chapter 47 in The Oxford Handbook of Criminal Law, Markus Dubber & Tatjana Hörnle, eds.
Criminal law is a parochial discipline. Courts and scholars in the English speaking world seldom take seriously the criminal statutes, cases and scholarly writings published in the non-English speaking world. The same is true the other way around. This is unfortunate. Much can be learned from comparing the way in which the world’s leading legal systems approach important questions of criminal theory.
This Chapter introduces the reader to comparative criminal law with the aim of demonstrating how comparative analysis can enrich both domestic and international understandings of criminal law. The Chapter is comprised of four parts. Part I clarifies what it means to do comparative criminal law and distinguishes it from similar endeavors such as compiling criminal law. Part II explains why engaging in comparative analysis is useful to both strengthen domestic criminal law doctrines and to better understand international criminal law. Part III discusses some of the obstacles that must be overcome in order to engage in meaningful comparative analysis. Finally, Part IV engages in a comparative analysis of attempt liability and mens rea in order to illustrate how to do comparative criminal law and the benefits that might be reaped from doing so.
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General Defences to Criminal Liability in the United States
Luis E. Chiesa
Published as Chapter 23 in General Defences in Criminal Law: Domestic and Comparative Perspectives, Alan Reed, Michael Bohlander, eds.
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United States of America
Luis E. Chiesa
Published as Chapter 23 in General Defences in Criminal Law: Domestic and Comparative Perspectives, Alan Reed, Michael Bohlander, Nicola Wake & Emma Smith, eds.
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Student Readings
Danielle Pelfrey Duryea
Published in The Clinic Seminar, Deborah Epstein, Wallace Mlyniec, & Jane Aiken, eds.
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The Role of Health and Mental Health Professionals in the Capital Punishment Process
Charles P. Ewing and Steven K. Erickson
Published as Chapter 22 in America's Experiment with Capital Punishment: Reflections on the Past, Present, and Future of the Ultimate Penal Sanction, Third Edition, James R. Acker, Robert M. Bohm & Charles S. Lanier, eds.
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Why Research Universities Should Support and Foster Teaching Excellence
Lucinda M. Finley
Published in Effective Teaching at the College and University Level in India, J. Adsit & P. Jalote, eds.
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Buddhism and Law in Tibet
Rebecca Redwood French
Published as Chapter 17 in Buddhism and Law: An Introduction, Rebecca Redwood French & Mark A. Nathan, eds.
The Tibetan plateau is an immense high-altitude desert that, except for a few larger towns, was very sparsely populated with agriculturalists, nomadic herders, and merchant traders prior to 1960. The small population and minimal urbanization are the most important distinguishing features of this Buddhist country because concentrated populations are commonly connected to the development of government administration, law, and intellectual production. Despite this, Tibetan culture is known for its long history of enormous production of literary, scholarly, and religious works. Books on Buddhism and other topics from the five traditional classifications of knowledge in Tibet – arts and crafts, medicine, language, logic and Buddhism – were written and printed throughout much of Tibetan history.
When discussing the relationship between law and Buddhism in Tibet, the number of topics and the many historical twists and turns are daunting given the long history, the growth in Tibetan scholarship, and the rich textual resources available. As it is not possible to cover all of Tibetan legal history, this essay will concentrate on four distinct periods, providing a brief political history followed by a discussion of law during each period: (1) the Empire period (c. 600–850), which is the origin of many of the original customary law practices that were codified over the centuries; (2) the First Patron-Priest period (c. 1264–1350) in which a particular political formation, “the patron-priest,” resulted in the interweaving of Buddhist principles with legal and political institutions into a “Buddhist government”; (3) the Law Code Drafting period (c. 1618–1705) in which the law codes were developed and took on a very specific form and shape that included Buddhist elements in the prologue, factoring, and forms of reasoning; and (4) the 1940s in Tibet, the period before the Chinese takeover, in which we can look at the daily practice of law as it blends ordinary bureaucratic decision-making with a continuous thread of customary practices from early times and embedded Buddhist concepts
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Introducing Buddhism and Law
Rebecca Redwood French and Mark A. Nathan
Published as the introduction to Buddhism and Law: An Introduction, Rebecca Redwood French & Mark A. Nathan, eds.
Some edited volumes are self-explanatory and others need a substantial introduction to the material; the latter is the case with this volume. While the title is intriguing, many readers will need a guidebook to explain much of what they are encountering here. And it is well worth the effort as the material is some of the most exciting and unorthodox both on legal systems and in Buddhist Studies. Therefore, the task of this introduction to the volume is to provide readers with a road map to define the object of study, and to offer ways to think about the field of Buddhism and Law.
This introduction is divided into three main sections: Buddhism, Law, and Buddhism and Law. The first, Buddhism, presents a brief account of the life of the Buddha before turning to an examination of dharma, a fundamental term in Buddhism that has long been translated as law. A discussion of Buddhist monasticism and some of the misconceptions that have surrounded the place of the monastic community in society comes next, followed by a consideration of the Vinaya, the canonical Buddhist law codes that have served to regulate the religious life of Buddhist monasteries. Buddhist traditions also possess a wealth of other legal texts and materials, most of which reflect attempts to devise supplementary rules and regulations that fit local conditions, and these are introduced last
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The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and Development
Meredith Kolsky Lewis
Published as Chapter 3 in Trade Liberalisation and International Co-operation: a Legal Analysis of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, Tania Voon, ed.
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What to Do When Disagreement Strikes? The Complexity of Dispute Settlement under Trade Agreements
Meredith Kolsky Lewis and Peter Van den Bossche
Published as Chapter 1 in Trade Agreements at the Crossroads, Susy Frankel & Meredith Kolsky Lewis, eds.
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An Eye Toward Effective Enforcement: A Technical-Comparative Approach to the Drafting Negotiations
Tara J. Melish
Published as Chapter 5 in Human Rights and Disability Advocacy, Maya Sabatello & Marianne Schulze, eds.
The unprecedented level of civil society participation that took place in the drafting of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) constitutes a major key to its success -- laying a solid foundation for the much longer and harder process of implementation ahead. This piece addresses how one civil society organization -- Disability Rights International (DRI) -- approached the negotiation process. Part I explains the strategic approach DRI adopted, highlighting its methodology, the guiding principles it embraced, and the resulting strategies of engagement it pursued. Part II turns to some of the key substantive issues DRI focused on in its interventions and advocacy before the Ad Hoc Committee. Part III concludes with a brief reflection on the CRPD, the ultimate efficacy of DRI's approach, and the road ahead.
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Property Constructs and Nature's Challenge to Perpetuity
Jessica Owley
Published as Chapter 4 in Environmental Law and Contrasting Ideas of Nature: a Constructivist Approach, Keith H. Hirokawa, ed.
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Teaching African-American Legal History
Stephanie L. Phillips
Published in Teaching Legal History: Comparative Perspectives, Robert M. Jarvis, ed.
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Bush v. Gore in the American Mind: Reflections and Survey Results on the Tenth Anniversary of the Decision Ending the 2000 Election Controversy
Amy Semet, Nathaniel Persily, and Stephen Ansolabehere
Published as Chapter 3
Very few, if any, Supreme Court cases have captured public attention on a scale comparable to that of Bush v. Gore. The Supreme Court’s involvement was the last scene in a political and courtroom drama that played out for more than a month on television. Even if the legal claims, let alone the holding, in the case were difficult for the public to understand, the import and consequences of the case were not: George W. Bush would be the next president. As a rare, high-salience case with understandable political consequences and clear winners and losers, Bush v. Gore provided a unique test of the Court’s legitimacy in the public mind.
Scholars who studied the aftermath of Bush v. Gore found conflicting evidence of the decision’s short-term effect on public attitudes toward the Court (see, e.g., Gibson, Caldeira, and Spence, 2003a, 2003b; Kritzer, 2001; Mate and Wright, 2008; Price and Romantan, 2004). A flurry of articles published between 2001 and 2004 debated whether Bush v. Gore indeed “wounded” the Court’s legitimacy (Gibson et al., 2003a, 2003b; Kritzer, 2001; Price and Romantan, 2004; Yates and Whitford, 2002). Some researchers found that the decision altered short-term attitudes toward the Court with opinion polarized along racial and partisan lines (Kritzer, 2001; Mate and Wright, 2008; Price and Romantan, 2004; Yates and Whitford, 2002), while others found little or no effect on feelings about the Court (Gibson et al., 2003a, 2003b). All seemed to agree, however, that Bush v. Gore led to no long-term effects on public opinion about the Court (Gibson, 2007; Mate and Wright, 2008). Within a year, the Court appeared to recover to its pre–Bush v. Gore levels in public support, and the structure of support did not reveal sustained levels of racial or partisan polarization.
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The Role of States in the National Conversation on Immigration
Rick Su
Published as Chapter 7 in Strange Neighbors: The Role of States in Immigration Policy, Carissa Byrne Hessick & Gabriel J. Chin, eds.