\u3ci\u3eEldred\u3c/i\u3e and \u3ci\u3eLochner\u3c/i\u3e: Copyright Term Extension and Intellectual Property as Constitutional Property

Since the ratification of the constitution, intellectual property law in the United States has always been, in part, constitutional law. Among the enumerated powers that Article I of the Constitution vests in Congress is the power to create certain intellectual property rights. To a remarkable extent, scholars who have examined the Constitution\u27s Copyright Clause have reached a common position. With striking unanimity, these scholars have called for aggressive judicial review of the constitutionality of congressional legislation in this area. The champions of this position--we refer to them as the IP Restrictors--represent a remarkable array of constitutional and intellectual property scholars. In this terms\u27s Eldred v. Aschroft, leading IP Restrictor Lawrence Lessig, representing petitioner Eric Eldred, sought to convince the Supreme Court that the IP Restrictors\u27 view of the Copyright Clause was the correct one. By a vote of 7-2, the Supreme Court rejected Eldred\u27s claim and upheld the statute. But while the Court rejected the IP Restrictors\u27 vision, it did not offer a satisfactory competing conception of the Copyright Clause and how the courts should construe it. Critically, even though the standard of review was of central significance, the Court applied a deferential form of rational basis scrutiny without explaining why this was the appropriate standard. This paper develops the case for deferential review of congressional legislation in the area of intellectual property and, at a deeper level, offers a new paradigm for understanding the Copyright Clause. We propose that from the vantage point of constitutional law, intellectual property should be treated as a form of constitutional property. Deference to congressional judgments is warranted because congressional legislation affecting intellectual property is analytically similar to congressional legislation affecting other forms of property. Courts subject congressional legislation affecting traditional forms of property to deferential review because of concerns about institutional competence and respect for majoritarian decisionmaking. These two concerns in conjunction with proper regard for holistic constitutional interpretation should also lead courts to deferential review of congressional legislation affecting intellectual property.In developing our position, we draw on constitutional history and, in particular, the lessons of Lochner v. New York. In defense of their vision of the Constitution, the IP Restrictors and the dissenters in Eldred make claims about the original understanding that, to an astonishing extent, echo those made by proponents of Lochner-era jurisprudence. We argue, however, that these claims fail for two reasons. First, the IP Restrictors and the dissenters disregard the limited scope of judicial review at the time of the Founding. Additionally, the IP Restrictors and dissenters disregard the range of views among the Founders about monopolies

The New Privacy

This article reviews Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance and the Limits of Privacy John Gilliom (2001). In 1964, as the welfare state emerged in full force in the United States, Charles Reich published The New Property, one of the most influential articles ever to appear in a law review. Reich argued that in order to protect individual autonomy in an age of governmental largess, a new property right in governmental benefits had to be recognized. He called this form of property the new property. In retrospect, Reich, rather than anticipating trends, was swimming against the tide of history. In the past forty years, formal claims to government benefits have become more tenuous rather than more secure. Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance and the Limits of Privacy, by John Gilliom, an associate professor of political science at Ohio State University, demonstrates both the tenuousness of welfare rights today and the costs that this system imposes on individual autonomy. In Overseers of the Poor, Gilliom uses his case study of welfare recipients as the occasion for an attack on classic notions of privacy rights. Gilliom finds that welfare clients do not engage in privacy talk - indeed, he finds the concept to be devoid of value for the welfare recipients. Here, another comparison can be made with Reich\u27s new property. Reich explicitly tied his idea of a property right in government entitlements to privacy. He felt that the new property was needed to protect privacy and, in particular, individual autonomy. Reich\u27s notion of privacy reaches back to a classic concept of privacy, one that we term the old privacy. It is precisely this classic idea that Gilliom finds welfare recipients to have rejected. Theoretical work inside and outside of the legal academy has pointed, however, to a new privacy. The new privacy is centered around Fair Information Practices ( FIPs ) and is intended to prevent threats to autonomy. The idea of privacy centered on FIPs is based not on a property interest in one\u27s information, but the idea that processors of personal data should be obliged to follow certain standards. If, as we will see, classic notions of privacy are not of much use in the welfare state, the new privacy may be. This review begins by examining Gilliam\u27s methodology and findings. It credits the insights of his look at the inner world of welfare recipients, but finds that he appears to ignore the need for income limits on aid recipients and the concomitant need for at least some personal information to enforce these limits. It also criticizes his failure to explore an interaction of an ethics of care among welfare recipients with possible use of retooled privacy rights or interests. In the second part of this review, The authors consider the extent to which theoretical work inside and outside of the legal academy points to a new privacy and discuss how Gilliam\u27s empirical research provides support for that scholarship. They also evaluate the extent to which the new privacy, centered on PIPs, can prevent the threats to personal autonomy so poignantly identified by Gilliom

The Case of the Dishonest Scrivener: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of the Federalist Constitution

At the end of the Constitutional Convention, the delegates appointed the Committee of Style and Arrangement to bring together the textual provisions that the Convention had previously agreed to and to prepare a final constitution. Pennsylvania delegate Gouverneur Morris drafted the document for the Committee, and, with few revisions and little debate, the Convention adopted Morris’s draft. For more than two hundred years, questions have been raised as to whether Morris covertly altered the text in order to advance his constitutional vision, but modern legal scholars and historians studying the Convention have either ignored the issue or concluded that Morris was an honest scrivener. No prior article has systematically compared the Committee’s draft to the previously adopted resolutions or discussed the implications of those changes for constitutional law. This Article undertakes that comparison. It shows that Morris made fifteen significant changes to the Constitution and that many of the Constitution’s central elements were wholly or in critical part Morris’s work. Morris’s changes strengthened the national executive and judiciary, provided the textual basis for judicial review, increased presidential accountability through an expansive conception of impeachment, protected private property, mandated that the census report reflect “actual enumeration,” removed the constitutional text suggesting that slavery was just, and fought slavery’s spread. This Article also shows that Morris created the basis for the Federalist reading of the Constitution. Federalists—notably including fellow Committee member Alexander Hamilton—repeatedly drew on language crafted by Morris as they fought for their vision of the Constitution. Because the changes Morris made to the Convention’s agreed language were subtle, both Republicans and Federalists were able to appeal to text in the great constitutional battles of the early republic. Modern originalists claim that the Republican reading reflects the original understanding of the Constitution, but this Article argues that the largely dismissed Federalist reading explains words, phrases, and punctuation that the Republican reading ignores or renders unintelligible. By contrast, the Federalist reading of the Preamble (which they saw as a grant of substantive power), the Article I and Article II Vesting Clauses (which were contrasted to argue for expansive executive power), the Article III Vesting Clause (which they read to mandate the creation of lower federal courts), the Contracts Clause (which they read to cover public as well as private contracts), the Impeachment Clause (which they read to cover both nonofficial and official acts), and the “law of the land” provision (which they construed as a basis for judicial review) gives effect to Morris’s—and the Constitution’s—words

Reflections on a More “Catholic” Catholic Legal Education

I am grateful to Professors Breen and Strang for their thoughtful book about Catholic legal education in the United States. It is an important topic, and their work promises to be a significant contribution to the conversation about the mission of Catholic law schools. My reflections here will focus on Chapter Five. All of us participating in this symposium are engaged in the collective enterprise of thinking through and implementing what it means to be a Catholic law school. As a historian, personally I am well aware of the value of studying where we have been as part of the conversation about where we should be going, so I welcome this enterprise

Gouverneur Morris and the Drafting of the Federalist Constitution

The Salmon P. Chase Colloquium series has had two themes: One is great moments in constitutional law, and the other is people who have been forgotten but should not have been. This colloquium is primarily in the latter category—it is about a forgotten founder of the Constitution. But the Constitution has more than one forgotten founder. I did a Google search this afternoon for “Forgotten Founder” and there are a whole series of books on various people who are the Constitution’s Forgotten Founder. So the Chase Colloquium series has another decade of subjects: Luther Martin, George Mason, Charles Pinckney, Roger Sherman. There is a lot to work with. Gouverneur Morris is the one “forgotten founder” who really shouldn’t be for-gotten. The classic picture of Gouverneur Morris is actually a joint picture painted by Charles Willson Peale in 1783. Gouverneur Morris is on the left, and Robert Morris is on the right. They weren’t relatives, despite the shared last name, but they were very close. Gouverneur Morris and Robert Morris were business partners during the Revolutionary War. Robert Morris, who is kind of the Jeff Bezos of the 1780s, was as close as the United States had to a president during the Revolutionary War. He was the head of finance and Gouverneur Morris was his number two. I will be focusing today on Gouverneur Morris’s work on the Committee of Style at the end of the Federal Constitutional Convention. As the Federal Constitutional Convention is drawing to close, it’s hot and everybody’s tired. It has been four weeks since they had a draft of the Constitution, which was composed by the Committee of Detail. There has been a month of debate and votes up, votes down. There’s no draft constitution, even though the Convention is near the end of its work. So, the delegates together form a committee—the Committee of Style and Arrangement—and over three days this committee drafts the Constitution with Morris as the lead drafter. And then, very hurriedly, the Convention reviews it, almost completely adopts it, and goes home. The work of the Committee is supposed to be polishing the Constitution—taking what’s already been agreed to and putting it in a final document. But what I argue in a recently published article in the Michigan Law Review— the basis of this talk—is that, as the drafter on the Committee of Style, Morris made fifteen substantive changes. As you’ll see, most of them are very subtle, but they have incredible consequence: He carefully picked words to advance particular substantive ends. With the passage of time, we have lost the meaning of much of this text. But if we are going to read the Constitution clearly—and as it was ratified at the time—we must recover the meaning of the texts that, on fifteen occasions, he changed. This is particularly important at a time when four members of the Supreme Court are originalists and focus on the original meaning of these words. One part of this talk is about the changes he made. There were a number of basic causes Gouverneur Morris tried to advance during the Constitutional Convention, and he lost a lot of those battles in the months before he became the Committee of Style’s drafter. He was a big government person. He was probably, with the possible exception of Alexander Hamilton, the strongest nationalist at the Convention. He was a big protector of private property. He was a champion of the judiciary and judicial review, and he was unquestionably the fiercest opponent of slavery at the Convention. And he was, with James Wilson, the Convention’s leading champion of the Presidency. In each of those areas, on the Committee of Style, he made very subtle changes to advance his goals. If you read the text in accordance with the meaning of the words in 1787, you’ll see how it reflects his meanings, what he wanted to achieve. Taken all together, with these changes, Morris created the Federalist Constitution. That will be the subject of the first part of this talk. But most originalists today read the Constitution very differently. They see the Constitution as a Jeffersonian Republican Constitution, not as a Federalist Constitution. And the reason why that occurred is the topic of the final part of this talk. I will discuss how the Constitution’s original meaning was lost. My thesis here is a simple one, but an important one for constitutional law. At the Convention, the Federalists won the battle over the Constitution’s text. In the years that followed, however, they lost the battle over what that text means