St. John's University Law Faculty Blog

Professor Jeff Sovern’s  letter in the New York Times on June 10, 2014, responds to reports about General Motor’s failure to prevent the loss of life from its defective cars.  The letter states in part:

Candice Anderson was charged with manslaughter and ultimately pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide for an accident leading to the death of her boyfriend.

Now that G.M. has concluded that the accident was caused not by her but by a defective part, it will be interesting to see if anyone at G.M. is charged with similar crimes.

Professor Nina J. Crimm has published a chapter, Dilemmas in Regulating Electoral Speech of Non-profit Organisations, with Professor Laurence H. Winer in Not-for-Profit Law: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives (Matthew Harding, et al., eds. Cambridge University Press 2014).  The editors describe the chapter as  follows

[S]ound[ing] a note of caution . . . Crimm and Winer compare the regulation of electoral speech of not-for-profits in Australia and the United States.  The US experience shows how difficult it can be to manage a distinction between acceptable or beneficial electoral speech by not-for-profits on the one hand, and cynical manipulation of the electoral process by vested interests utilizing not-for-profits on the other; it also shows how striving to achieve such a balancing act is apt to generate legal complexity.

Professor Deepa Varadarajan‘s most recent article, Trade Secret Fair Use, was accepted for publication in Fordham Law Review. Here’s the abstract:

Trade secret law arose to help companies protect confidential information (e.g., the Coca-Cola formula) from competitors seeking to copy their innovative efforts. But companies increasingly use trade secret law to block a wide swath of information from the scrutinizing eyes of consumers, public watchdog groups, and potential improvers. Companies are able to do this, in large part, because trade secret law lacks sufficient limiting doctrines that consider the social benefits of unauthorized use. For example, trade secret law makes no allowance for the departing employee who uses proprietary information to identify glitches in software, create a substantially improved product, or disclose grave public health risks.

This Article argues that trade secret law’s indifference to the social benefits of unauthorized use stands in contrast to other intellectual property doctrines, like patent and copyright. Copyright law incorporates the robust affirmative defense of “fair use,” which protects a variety of unauthorized but socially beneficial uses of another’s copyrighted work (e.g., educational uses). To a lesser extent, patent law’s reverse doctrine of equivalents and remedies analysis direct courts to consider the social benefits of a defendant’s technological improvement. Such limiting doctrines act as safety valves to reconcile intellectual property rights with competing innovation and First Amendment interests. This Article demonstrates trade secret law’s need for a similar safety valve and argues that courts should adopt a multi-factor “trade secret fair use” analysis to better address these competing concerns.

The Reverend Joseph T. Tinnelly, C.M., Professor of Law Lawrence Joseph‘s book, The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose, is the subject of an essay review by Dean Emeritus and Professor of Law Joseph Tomain of the University of Cincinnati College of Law in the most recently published issue of the St. John’s Law Review.  Describing Professor Joseph as “the most important lawyer-poet of our era,” Professor Tomain writes

Quite simply, Joseph the lawyer, poet, and scholar has developed a jurisprudence of his own. . . The Game Changed gives us rules to live by, and challenges of love and truth, and beauty and justice, to meet.