2011 Conference Program (PDF) - Syracuse University College of Law

legislative process. The American concept of law deriving its ultimate legitimacy from
“We, the People” tends toward opposition to a specialist ruling class whose product and
process are unfathomable to the public at large. While our world and its problems are not
easily simplified, I suggest that, despite the temptation to do otherwise, it behooves
lawmakers to tend toward transparency and simplicity as normative goals.
Sue Liemer
On the Origins of Le Droit Moral: How Non-Economic Rights Came to Be Protected in
French I.P. Law
The playwrights of the Comédie Française during the ancien regime had a key role in the
development of French intellectual property law and the droit moral, in particular. These
dramatists complied with a strict regulatory scheme and a social double-bind, and came
to expect certain treatment in return for their compliance. A generation after the French
Revolution, ordinary court decisions about contracts and wills recognize the interests
protected by le droit moral, showing how accepted these expectations and interests
already were in the society. Thus, the rules regulating the Comédie Française before the
French Revolution helped le droit moral develop long before the usually-credited 19th
century German Romanticists.
Stephen R. Alton
The Game is Afoot!: The Significance of Gratuitous Transfers in the Sherlock Holmes
Canon
This paper presents a recently discovered and previously unpublished manuscript written
by John H. Watson, M.D., and edited by Professor Stephen Alton. Dr. Watson’s
manuscript records an extensive conversation that took place between the good doctor
and his great friend, the renowned consulting detective Mr. Sherlock Holmes, regarding
issues of gratuitous transfers of property—issues involving inheritances, wills, and
trusts—that have arisen in some of the great cases solved by Mr. Holmes. This felicitous
discovery confirms something that the editor has long known: these gratuitous transfer
issues permeate many of these adventures. Indeed, the action in a given case often occurs
because of the desire of the wrong-doer to come into an inheritance, a bequest, or the
present possession of an estate in land more quickly—perhaps by dispatching the
intervening heir, beneficiary, or life tenant.
7.7 The Power, Purchase, and Pragmatism of Modern Virtue
Chapin Cimino
Citizenship, the Campus Community, and Competing Rights: An Aristotelian Analysis
Not since feudal times have we thought that landowners may condition citizenship rights
of those residing on the land to adherence to the landowner’s preferences. Landowners
may control how their property is used, but usually such control does not implicate
citizenship. However, under the otherwise-mundane First Amendment “limited public
forum” doctrine, it does. A public university may, by virtue of its status as a landowner,
condition official campus recognition (and thus citizenship) of student groups on
adherence to university policy. The result is that, when a university policy absolutely
privileges non-discrimination, the citizenship of student religious groups can be at stake.
This is a problem if citizenship on campus matters. The recent Supreme Court case of
CLS v. Hastings illustrates the problem, and my paper offers a new way to think about its
resolution. The paper sets out an Aristotelian means-ends rubric to apply when
nondiscrimination rights clash with expressive association rights on campus. The meansends
rubric takes better account of both the right to be free from discrimination (a
“means” of campus citizenship) and the right of expressive association of student groups
(an “end” of campus citizenship) than does current First Amendment jurisprudence.
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