The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog

Richard Rorty, 1931-2007

Richard Rorty, world-renowned philospher and literature professor, passed away on Friday. He received his bachelors degree in 1949 and his master's degree in 1952, both in philosophy from the University of Chicago.   We were lucky to have Professor Rorty at the Law School in April 2006 to deliver the Dewey Lecture in legal philosophy. Professor Rorty spoke to a packed room, and if you missed it then, we hope you'll listen to the podcast.

The Wrong Side of History

After the long years of the Bush administration, the United States needs to elect a president in 2008 who can inspire the nation and call upon us to be the best Americans we can be. In that light, I watched last week’s Republican presidential debate with special interest. The moment in the debate I found most revealing, most distressing, was when the moderator asked the ten Republican candidates to raise their hand if they believe gay and lesbian Americans should be allowed to serve openly in the armed forces of the United States. Not one of them raised his hand.

What's the "harm" in establishments of religion?

Any day now, the Justices will announce their decision in a case called Hein v. Freedom from Religion Foundation, Inc.  This case presents a question about "taxpayer standing" to challenge the actions of Executive Branch officials on Establishment Clause grounds. 

In March, Professor Sunstein published an op-ed in the Boston Globe ("Church, State, and Taxpayers") defending taxpayer standing in Establishment Clause cases, noting that "[t]he Constitution bans the establishment of a religion by government, and a major point of this ban is to ensure that the power to tax and spend would not be used to favor one religion over another or to support religion in general."  At another blog, I wondered if one could make (pretty much) the same argument with respect to other provisions or structural features of the Constitution.  (That is, if we need taxpayer standing to vindicate the point of the Establishment Clause, then why don't we need it, and why don't we have it, to vindicate the point of, say, "the separation of powers" or "the enumerated-powers principle"?)

I'm thinking now, though, about a different (though related) question:  What, exactly, is the harm or (in "standing" terms) the "injury" that we think an "establishment of religion" works or imposes?

iTunes and Identity-Based Digital Rights Management

Over the last week, it has been become clear that Apple is embedding some identifying information in songs purchased from iTunes, including the name of the customer and his or her e-mail address. This has raised the ire of consumer advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation which addressed this again yesterday.

Last year, I published a paper entitled Mistrust-Based Digital Rights Management (online preprint available here). In that paper, I argued that as we switched from content products such as CDs and DVDs to content services such as iTunes, Google Video and YouTube, we would embrace identity-based digital rights management. This is exactly what we are seeing from iTunes. How should we assess identity-based DRM?

Decentralizing Distribution

This is one of a series of posts; the last post was here.

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But even with the rise of copying started by Xerox, copying on physical media—paper, cassettes, VCR tapes and DVDs—brought with it critical limitations that ultimately restricted how much content could be distributed by consumers: it is just hard for consumers to share stuff. Most of the problem is organizational. Before the VCR, we had come up with a good way to share only two things: books and tuxedos. That isn’t quite right, but you probably see the basic point.