When U.S. bankruptcy law converges with federal admiralty law, complex jurisdictional conflicts and constitutional issues arise.  This Article explores the history of how courts have treated the intersection of these two complex bodies of federal law, with a particular focus on Article III of the United States Constitution in the wake of the United States Supreme Court’s decision Stern v. Marshall.  Because this fundamental issue regarding the power of bankruptcy courts to adjudicate admiralty matters may have a significant practical effect on maritime creditors, it is important that maritime practitioners be cognizant of the principles of bankruptcy jurisdiction.  The Article [...]

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Sarah Schindler, Kara McQueen-Borden, Annalisa Cravens, Kathryn Munson, Paul Stevens, Jr., Chris Hilton, and Andrew Kingsley received awards at the Tulane Law Review‘s annual banquet on April 18, 2013.

Awarded to the author of the best lead article in the current volume.

Sarah B. Schindler

Established in honor of Robert E. Friedman, a 1935 graduate of Tulane Law School and Editor in Chief of the Tulane Law Review in 1934-35. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Order of the Coif. [...]

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An author exploring the role of doctors as money lenders to their patients in an article published in Volume 84 again weighed in on a similar issue (that is, medical credit cards) in a recent Fox Business article.

Fox Business discussed the potential risks of seeking a credit card that is exclusively for medical and dental costs, including higher interest rates than those of traditional credit cards, in Medical Credit Cards: Treatment Today, Payment Headaches Tomorrow, published on March 25, 2013.

In the article, Jim Hawkins, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, explained that medical credit cards [...]

The post Author Weighs in on Medical Credit Card Abuse appeared first on Tulane Law Review.

Tulane law faculty member Vernon Palmer, as a former advisor of the Review, will be awarded an honorary doctorate from the Université Paris-Dauphine in Paris, France.

The honor is known as the Honoris Causa and is one of the most prestigious the university can bestow, requiring approval from the French Foreign Affairs Ministry.

Professor Palmer has devoted his career to the study of civil and comparative law and teaches courses at Tulane in comparative law, obligations, European legal systems, products liability, and sales and leases in addition to serving as director of Tulane’s Institute of European Legal Studies in Paris. This honor is [...]

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Sacerrimus intimæ pietatis indagator (“Devoted investigator of profound faithfulness”).

Born April 2, 1936, in Edinburgh, Scotland, John Antony Weir, called “Tony” by friends and colleagues, graduated in 1952 from Fettes College, Edinburgh.  Both polymath and polyglot, he was excused from regular classes in his last year at Fettes to roam through self-designed reading lists.  At age sixteen he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge.  He deferred enrollment at Trinity for several years so that he could perform military service in the Cameronians, a Scots rifle regiment.

Initially a student of classical languages, Weir switched to law at Trinity and [...]

The post Friendship’s Bounty appeared first on Tulane Law Review.

The concerns addressed by the civilian rules on unworthiness to inherit (indignitas succedendi) must be addressed by any legal system.  When they arose in Scotland, responses tended to be found by the extension or development of other rules.  Even where there was reference to the idea of unworthiness, as in the Parricide Act 1594 and in Buchanan v Paterson (1704), the result was later re-conceptualized along different lines.  In recent years, the Scottish courts have been more receptive to the public policy principle that no one is to benefit from his or her own wrong, taken from the English common [...]

The post Unworthiness to Inherit, Public Policy, Forfeiture: The Scottish Story appeared first on Tulane Law Review.

“Path dependence” is an important explanation in comparative law, but it also recognises that the law does develop by breaking out of the mould cast by the past.  Path dependence affects not only the legal concepts that the law uses to solve problems, but whether the law will intervene in a problem area or not.  Path dependence assumes that there is no ideal solution, but an equilibrium can be found within a particular society between the role of law and that of other social institutions.  The scope for change depends significantly on the extent to which a particular legal approach [...]

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This Article is a study of the relationship between two academic lawyers of the twentieth century, David Daube and Sir Thomas Broun Smith, with particular focus on their period as colleagues at Aberdeen University in Scotland in the early 1950s.  The Article also considers their position in relation to the then-recent experience of World War II and Nazi Germany.  It highlights the importance of the relationship for the development of modern academic law in Scotland.  The Appendices publish the texts of relevant correspondence between the two men.

The post A Friendship in the Law: David Daube and T.B. Smith appeared first on Tulane Law Review.

The revival of the study of Roman law in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century was a complex development not yet fully understood.  It is evident that awareness of German scholarship in Roman law, both systematic and historical, and the development of curricula in the universities were crucial in this revival, which also influenced the writing of treatises on the common law.

This Article focuses on the publication of Erwin Grueber’s textbook on the Lex Aquilia intended for use by students in Oxford.  It places it in context and explores the reaction to it of James Muirhead, [...]

The post English Torts and Roman Delicts: The Correspondence of James Muirhead and Frederick Pollock appeared first on Tulane Law Review.

This short Article written in memory of Tony Weir considers a broad general theme reflected in his own work: the importance for the development of law, in the face of competing policy arguments, of never losing sight of principle. Case law clearly brings out the tension between principle and policy. But the proper role of policy also underlies issues of statutory interpretation. By way of example the Article looks at one case and one statute. It suggests that before weighing up countervailing policies, it is important to pay close attention to the underlying structure and principles of case law. Similarly, [...]

The post A Case, a Statute, and Some Thoughts on the Proper Role of Policy appeared first on Tulane Law Review.

This Article takes as its starting point Tony Weir’s comparative essays on the law of torts.  In particular it examines the circumstances in which requirement to establish malice subsists in the intentional torts and tracks “the staggering march of negligence” first charted by Weir fifteen years ago.  As the conclusion argues, this process is certain to continue unless greater precision can be achieved identifying the element of intention entailed in different wrongs and the interests thereby protected.

The post Malice in the Jungle of Torts appeared first on Tulane Law Review.

Taking a cue from Weir’s observation that law is shaped by cultural preoccupations, perhaps we may profitably examine the march of negligence, at least in defamation actions, in terms of English and American social differences.  Social contrasts between the libel laws of the two jurisdictions are stark.  Committed to free speech protections of the first amendment, an American reader may be surprised that English practice has made a plaintiff’s showing of a defendant’s negligence adequate for their  recovery for libel.  An English lawyer’s dilution of the freedom of speech seems alien to the American counterpart:  “One person’s freedom to speak [...]

The post A Clear Case of Tort Gone Wrong: A View From the Other Side of the Pond appeared first on Tulane Law Review.

The Roman jurists developed a method that is not like that of Greek philosophy, modern physics, or economics.  Their fundamental concepts were familiar from ordinary experience–for example, possession, fault, and consent.  They were not abstracted from experience like substance and accident, mass and energy, or supply and demand, which are understood only by those who have studied philosophy, physics, or economics.  The Romans refined and identified these concepts by putting concrete cases.  They would move from a concept to its application in a particular case all at once without explaining how they got from the one to the other. In [...]

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An article published in volume 86 of the Tulane Law Review discussing the tension between trademark protections and licensing of the intellectual property of sports teams has been selected for publication in the annual Intellectual Property Law Review.

In selecting From Dallas Cap to American Needleand Beyond: Antitrust Law’s Limited Capacity to Stitch Consumer Harm from Professional Sports Club Trademark Monopolies by Professor Matthew J. Mitten, the Intellectual Property Law Review‘s Editor Karen B. Tripp noted that the article represented “one of the best law review articles related to intellectual property law published within the last year.”

Professor Mitten [...]

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Listen to Professor Matambanadzo discuss The Body, Incorporated.

Legal personhood has become a contested issue for individuals of all political persuasions. Some activists seek to expand the boundaries of legal personhood to include fetuses, human tissue, or even animals. Other activists, however, have sought to limit the community of legal persons by expelling one long-recognized group: corporations. Since the United States Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, a variety of activists, artists, entertainers, and political commentators have claimed that corporate personhood should be severely limited or completely eliminated.This Article addresses the current controversy surrounding [...]

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The National Environmental Policy Act’s (NEPA) information-disclosure requirements have the potential to create a quasi-carbon tax on greenhouse gas emissions arising out of major federal actions. By requiring government polluters to expend more resources, both financial and political, on disclosure as project-related emissions increase, NEPA can operate like a carbon tax that forces agencies to internalize negative externalities associated with emissions.

Federal agencies routinely undertake actions with enormous potential to affect the earth’s climate. When the predicted impacts of such actions on the environment are significant, NEPA demands that the agency prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to disclose and [...]

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Despite the dramatic changes in family structure in the past decades—including the unprecedented and skyrocketing number of families who live in nonmarital arrangements— marriage and marriage-mimic institutions remain the only legal options for the recognition of relationships. This regulatory regime leaves millions of Americans without the means to establish and protect relationship rights. This Article suggests that the legal issues arising from nonmarital relationships would be best addressed if more options for legal recognition of such relationships were offered. Accordingly, this Article presents the primary principles of a registration-based marriage alternative that is founded on contract: “registered contractual relationships” (RCRs). [...]

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Listen to Professor Griffin discuss A Bibliography of Executive Branch War Powers Opinions Since 1950.

While there is extensive literature on presidential war powers,1 to my knowledge there has never been a comprehensive listing of the relevant legal opinions provided by the executive branch.  This bibliography of executive branch legal opinions on war powers since the beginning of the Korean War in 1950 is therefore intended as an aid to future scholarship.  The opinions are listed in chronological order.  Most have been published as public documents, although some were confidential at the time they [...]

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“Locavores” aim to source their food locally. Many locavores are also more broadly concerned with living sustainably and decreasing reliance on industrial agriculture. As more people have joined the locavore movement, including many who reside in urban and suburban areas, conflict has emerged between the locavores’ desires to use their private property to produce food—for personal use and for sale—and municipal zoning ordinances that seek to separate agriculture from residential uses. In this Article, I consider the evolution of this conflict and its implications for our systems of land use, local government, and environmental law. Specifically, I investigate the police [...]

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