Of Black Holes and Decentralized Law Making in Cyberspace

MAPS, the primary focus of this tale, is a California non-profit limited liability company. It coordinates a kind of group boycott by Internet service providers (ISPs) for the purpose of reducing the flow of what is commonly called spam - unsolicited bulk e-mail. It operates, roughly, as follows. The managers of MAPS create and maintain what they call the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL), which consists of a long list of Internet addresses. They place on the RBL any Internet address from which, to their knowledge, spam has originated. They also place on the RBL the address of any network that allows open-mail relay or provides spam support services. ... What are we to make of things like the RBL? Here we have a problem--the proliferation of unsolicited mass e-mailing operations--that is, we might agree, a serious, or at least a non-trivial, one. At just the moment that e-mail has become an indispensable form of communication, of incalculable commercial and non-commercial importance for a substantial and ever-growing segment of the world community, its value is being undermined by a barrage of unwanted and unsolicited communications. But is the RBL a reasonable means of addressing this problem? To what extent can we, and should we, rely on things like the RBL to devise a solution (however we might define a solution) to that problem

Territoriality, Jurisdiction, and the Right(s) of Publicity

When Professors Rothman and Ginsburg asked me to speak here on the issues surrounding territoriality, jurisdiction, choice of law, and the like in the law of publicity, I confessed that I knew little about the developing law of publicity rights. Having taught Copyright Law for many years, I had come across the well-known foundational publicity rights cases—the cases involving Tom Waits, Vanna White, and Bette Midler—because of the problematic relationship between those decisions (under California state law) and federal copyright law. But I had not studied the publicity doctrine, or the main corpus of cases and statutes, with any great care. I had, however, done some thinking over the years about territoriality and jurisdiction in other contexts. I was happy to have the opportunity to dive in and spend a couple of months immersing myself in the publicity cases and commentary to try to discover how those questions played themselves out in this particular corner of the legal universe. I found the results “alarming.” I use the term advisedly, so let me try to explain what I mean by it

Issues and Outcomes, Guidance, and Indeterminacy: A Reply to Professor John Rogers and Others

There is now a small but growing literature on the proper voting procedure for multijudge panels. Professor John Rogers began the most recent round of thinking about these vexing issues, arguing that a judge on a multimember panel should never vote against the result of his or her own reasoning by deferring to a majority on a sub-issue on which the judge differs. We responded, arguing in favor of just such action, which we labeled issue voting. We criticized Professor Rogers\u27s preferred mode of multimember court adjudication, which we labeled outcome voting, on the grounds that it provided limited guidance and inevitably produced path dependence and incoherence in the law. Professors Lewis Kornhauser and Lawrence Sager presented a third position that no simple rule favoring one voting protocol in all paradoxical cases can produce universally appealing results. They set forth a mechanism, which they called the metavote procedure, by which courts would resolve the question of which of these two voting rules to adopt in any particular case. Professor Maxwell Stearns also has examined these issues in detail, from a social choice perspective. Rogers now joins the fray once again, calling for blanket adoption of outcome voting for multimember courts, finding our arguments (and Kornhauser and Sager\u27s) unpersuasive on a number of grounds. Professor Rogers\u27s critique makes it clear that we did not deal with these questions definitively in our earlier paper. We are still unpersuaded, however, that his solution is the better one. In this brief Reply, we will sketch out a partial answer to Rogers\u27s concerns

Brief of Amici Curiae Michael L. Rosin, David G. Post, David F. Forte, Michael Stokes Paulsen, and Sotirios Barber in Support of Presidential Electors

The Framers of the Constitution crafted the Electoral College to be an independent institution with the responsibility of selecting the President and Vice-President. Therefore, they intended each elector to exercise independent judgment in deciding whom to vote for. A state cannot revise the Constitution unilaterally by reducing the elector to a ministerial agent who must vote in a particular way or face a sanction. The question of each elector’s moral or political obligation is not before the Court. Nor is the desirability of the current electoral system. Rather, this case turns on what the Constitution allows, and what it prohibits. The historical record strongly supports the notion that the Constitution allows an elector to exercise independent judgment and prohibits a State from interfering with an elector’s ability to do so—a position Congress has consistently reaffirmed. This robust historical record supports only one conclusion: Our constitutional framework allows each elector to vote as he or she chooses

Review of battery powered embedded systems design for mission-critical low-power applications

The applications and uses of embedded systems is increasingly pervasive. Mission and safety critical systems relying on embedded systems pose specific challenges. Embedded systems is a multi-disciplinary domain, involving both hardware and software. Systems need to be designed in a holistic manner so that they are able to provide the desired reliability and minimise unnecessary complexity. The large problem landscape means that there is no one solution that fits all applications of embedded systems. With the primary focus of these mission and safety critical systems being functionality and reliability, there can be conflicts with business needs, and this can introduce pressures to reduce cost at the expense of reliability and functionality. This paper examines the challenges faced by battery powered systems, and then explores at more general problems, and several real-world embedded systems