Jeannie Chi Young Suk

Taking the Home

This essay juxtaposes two Supreme Court cases, Kelo v. City of New London, and Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales. Both reflect on the meanings of home as simultaneously the source of security against the focal point of anxieties about crossing between the categories of the private and the public. This essay traces the specter of doubleness that haunts the home in the law: the uncanny ways in which the home emerges as the exemplary private institution and the exemplary public concern in our society.Abstract Law resists the uncanny. The home is the exemplar of the uncanny. Two Supreme Court cases, decided four days apart, Kelo v. City of New London and Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, grapple with the uncanny home. Both reflect on the meanings of the home as simultaneously the source of security against and the focal point of anxieties about crossing between the categories of the private and the public. This essay traces the specter of doubleness that haunts the home in the law: the uncanny ways in which the home emerges as the exemplary private institution and the exemplary public concern in our society.

The Fashion Originators’ Guild of America: Self-Help at the Edge of IP and Antitrust

The question of intellectual property for original fashion design has attracted enormous public attention in recent years. As we show in this chapter, the question has a storied past. In the 1930s, as American fashion was coming into its own as a cultural force, designers worried about knockoffs. Then, as now, they lacked intellectual property protection for original fashion designs, and sought legislative protection. But they also pursued a regulatory solution, as part of New Deal responses to the Great Depression. They ultimately settled on an effective but controversial solution: a set of self-help measures targeting both copyists and retailers willing to merchandise knockoffs.The resulting boycott, devised by the Fashion Originators’ Guild of America (“Guild”), was a massive private IP scheme. At its height, a staggering 4000 new designs were protected each month. The designers’ organized efforts at self-help to create design protection eventually gave rise to antitrust lawsuits in federal and state courts, culminating in a pair of 1941 Supreme Court cases.This chapter tells the story of the Depression-era fashion designers, and the solutions they pursued to remedy the lack of intellectual property protection for their work. It describes the Guild’s formation and activities within the social, economic, and legal context of the Depression, and the fatal government scrutiny that eventually led to the Guild’s demise. Finally, it suggests some lessons as to both means and ends drawn from this story about fashion design protection: about self-help as a private solution to a public lack on the one hand, and about intellectual property protection for design on the other.

Timing of consent

Consent distinguishes certain criminal acts from non-criminal ones. Sex without consent is sexual assault. Sex with valid consent is just, well, sex. In this chapter, we focus on one particular aspect of consent to sex – the timing of consent. That is, not whether consent is given, how consent is given, or the scope of consent that is given, but rather when consent is given. More precisely, we explore the relation between the timing of consent and these other aspects of the consent calculus, in light of the changing definitions of sexual assault in criminal law and university sexual misconduct codes. In this setting, retrospective consent offers a partial corrective for definitions of sexual misconduct that render most sex technically a violation. Keywords: sexual assault, consent, retrospective, retroactivity