Paying With Our Health: The Real Cost of Freight Transport in California

Examines the health costs of asthma and other illnesses, and the level of economic opportunity provided to affected communities, with the transport of goods in California. Estimates the cost of state-recommended pollution controls to transporters

Gone in Sixty Milliseconds: Trademark Law and Cognitive Science

Trademark dilution is a cause of action for interfering with the uniqueness of a trademark. For example, consumers would probably not think that Kodak soap was produced by the makers of Kodak cameras, but its presence in the market would diminish the uniqueness of the original Kodak mark. Trademark owners think dilution is harmful but have had difficulty explaining why. Many courts have therefore been reluctant to enforce dilution laws, even while legislatures have enacted more of them over the past half century. Courts and commentators have now begun to use psychological theories, drawing on associationist models of cognition, to explain how a trademark can be harmed by the existence of similar marks even when consumers can readily distinguish the marks from one another and thus are not confused. Though the cognitive theory of dilution is internally consistent and appeals to the authority of science, it does not rest on sufficient empirical evidence to justify its adoption. Moreover, the harms it identifies do not generally come from commercial competitors but from free speech about trademarked products. As a result, even a limited dilution law should be held unconstitutional under current First Amendment commercial-speech doctrine. In the absence of constitutional invalidation, the cognitive explanation of dilution is likely to change the law for the worse. Rather than working like fingerprint evidence--which ideally produces more evidence about already-defined crimes--psychological explanations of dilution are more like economic theories in antitrust, which changed the definition of actionable restraints of trade. Given the empirical and normative flaws in the cognitive theory, using it to fill dilution\u27s theoretical vacuum would be a mistake

Through the Eyes of Children: Social Oppression Under Nazi Rule from 1933 to 1938 Reflections of Three Holocaust Survivors

This paper discusses the experiences of three Berlin native child survivors of the Holocaust through analysis of their oral testimonies. Their unique voices help shed light on the various ways in which lives were forever changed for those who were legally identified as Jewish in Nazi Germany by way of social oppression. This paper highlights three key years that each survivor discussed at length in their testimonies: Hitler’s Chancellorship in 1933, the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, and Kristallnacht in 1938. Ultimately, this paper argues for the importance of these years and labels them as being a crucial part in the events that led up to the Holocaust and carrying out of the Final Solution, in regards to the victims, perpetrators, and bystanders