Dictionaries and the Law

Exhibition program from a Spring 2019 exhibit presented in the Daniel R. Coquillette Rare Book Room at the Boston College Law Library. The exhibit focused on the history of legal dictionaries published over the last 500 years

Compulsory Arbitration - What Is It?

The identification of arbitration as it is constituted in legal lore is not very difficult. There is a near consensus of judicial utterances and statutory provisions posing it as a process for hearing and deciding controversies of economic consequence between parties. It begins with and depends upon an agreement between the parties to submit their claims to one or more persons chosen by them to serve as their arbitrator. The identification of compulsory arbitration is more difficult; it is more elusive. The instances or particulars of compulsion as covered by the name compulsory arbitration in legal lore, vary substantially. They are to be found in different statutes. The administration of these compulsions and the consequences of disregarding them also are variable. Joinder of any of these instances or particulars of compulsion with arbitration seems to serve no useful purpose in evaluating their legality. Some of them appear to be an anathema to parties in interest and to politicians. Other and different instances have been cited as praiseworthy. Arbitration does not count for much in resolving these likes and dislikes

Artistic License or Breach of Contract? Creator Liability for Deceptive or “Defective” Documentary Films and Television Programs

With the explosion of the documentary form, documentaries have increasingly integrated the storytelling strategies, production techniques, and performative aspects of scripted television drama. While the news and entertainment industry may regard these as matters of aesthetics, ethics, or artistic expression, a number of recent lawsuits suggest that audiences perceive them as deceptions with legal ramifications. This Article defines and analyzes the term “documentary” from a legal perspective, and identifies the point at which a documentary’s use of fabricated materials, selective editing, producer-controlled situations, and other “documentary deceptions” implicate legal liability. Ultimately, this Article concludes that while a “documentary” does not promise truth, when the term is used in the context of a contract, it does promise that the work is comprised of documentary evidence chronicling actual facts, events, processes, or people. A work that substantially deviates from this standard may amount to breach of contract or breach of warranty. Conversely, if a work is deceptive in some respect, it does not produce legal liability. Instead, that deception either precludes the work from meeting the objective definition of “documentary” or renders the work “defective.

Copyright and Incomplete Historiographies: Of Piracy, Propertization, and Thomas Jefferson

Because we learn from history, we also try to teach from history. Persuasive discourse of all kinds is replete with historical examples – some true and applicable to the issue at hand, some one but not the other, and some neither. Beginning in the 1990s, intellectual property scholars began providing descriptive accounts of a tremendous strengthening of copyright laws, expressing the normative view that this trend needs to be arrested, if not reversed. This thoughtful body of scholarly literature is sometimes bolstered with historical claims – often casual comments about the way things were. The claims about history, legal or otherwise, are used to support the normative prescription about what intellectual property law should be. One normative approach to arrest the growing strength of copyright has been through “constitutionalizing” copyright. This approach produced meaty theoretical ideas with practical implications, but failed to capture the judicial imagination and largely ran aground on the Eldred v. Ashcroft and MGM Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. decisions. In contrast to this constitutional critique, many legal scholars have recently written about the increasing “propertization of intellectual property” – this is both a descriptive account and a normative critique that describes recent developments as unwisely moving copyright toward a property paradigm. Whereas the constitutional critique of copyright provided specific prescriptions, the propertization critique may now be cresting because it has failed to present clear alternatives to what it criticizes and, in some sense, the critique boils down to one of intellectual life’s most familiar lessons: be careful that the terminology you use does not become the master of your thinking process

The people of no religion: the demographics of secularisation in the English-speaking world since c.1900

This article argues for study of the decline of religion in western countries, not merely in terms of loss and negative consequences for (predominantly) Christianity, but in positive terms for the individuals who have taken the decision to forsake organised religion. It puts forward the need to consider ways of examining secularisation which grant respect to categories of secularity selected by respondents. After contextualising an examination of the category of ›no religion‹ (also known as ›none‹) from state censuses and surveys, the article compares the growth in the numbers of people adopting these labels in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the United States and the four countries of the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland). This shows ultra-low levels prior to 1960, followed by a common pattern of rapid change in the late 1960s; however the rates of change, and the destiny of the change, differ thereafter. The article concludes by examining demographic information as to who ›no-religionists‹ were in terms of age, gender and race, and explores some economic and religious-heritage determinants of growth. It posits a key linkage between feminism and ›no-religionism‹, but acknowledges the need for a vast increase in research