Andrea West Wortzel *
Energy and water are integrally linked. Water is necessary to produce and deliver energy,[1] both for cooling and for pollution control. For certain energy sources, such as natural gas and coal, water is needed in the extraction process. Energy powers water treatment processes and pumps for transporting water to end users. Energy is also needed to treat water after it has been used and to return it to the stream or to another user.
Continue reading.
* Of Counsel; Environmental & Natural Resources Practice Group, Troutman Sanders LLP; Coordinator, Mission H2O; J.D., 1996, University of Richmond School of Law; B.A., 1991, The College of William and Mary. Mission H2O is a stakeholder group focused on regulatory and legislative developments impacting water supply in Virginia.
[1]. See Energy and Industry, Nat’l Geographic, http://environment.nationalgeogra phic.com/environment/freshwater/energy-and-industry/ (last visited Feb. 18, 2014); Energy-Water Nexus Overview, Sandia Nat’l Lab., http://www.sandia.gov/energy-water/nex us_overview.htm (last visited Feb. 18, 2014).
Lauren Maxey
In May 2012, Roanoke Athletic Club in Virginia revoked a family club membership from two dads and their two-year-old son Oliver, after discovering that the two dads were gay and that they did not qualify for club membership. William Trinkle, Juan Granados, and Oliver applied for membership at the athletic club so that they could enjoy the summer by the pool as a family. Trinkle purchased a family membership and club officials approved his application, but soon after the family started using the facilities, the operations director contacted the couple. The director revoked their membership because they did not qualify under the club’s definition of a family. Thus, Trinkle, Granados, and Oliver were denied a family membership simply because of Trinkle’s and Granados’ sexual orientations. In addition, Oliver was denied the access available to children of heterosexual couples. Although the athletic club later changed its definition of a family to allow families like Trinkle, Granados, and Oliver to gain membership, this event highlights one of the many problems gay dads face in Virginia as a result of the current state of Virginia law regarding legal parentage.
Continue reading.
Leah Stiegler *
“No beaches have been closed due to ethanol spills!”[1] An ethanol advocacy group near the United States Capitol shouted these words in 2010. Proponents of ethanol parade an environmentally benign image that plays up ethanol as a “clean fuel” that could never harm water resources, unlike well-publicized oil spills, such as the Exxon Valdez incident.[2] But this is not the case.
Continue reading.
* J.D. Candidate, 2015, University of Richmond School of Law; B.A. and B.S., 2012, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University. I am grateful to have this opportunity to publish and would like to thank the entire University of Richmond Law Review staff and editorial board for their work to make it possible. A special thank you to Jonathan Tan and Christopher Bascom for providing guidance and edits throughout my writing process. Finally, I would like to thank my friends, family, and especially my mother, Janet Stiegler, for her inspiration and encouragement to improve my writing.
[1]. Erica Gies, As Ethanol Booms, Critics Warn of Environmental Effect, N.Y. Times (June 24, 2010), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/business/energy-environment/25iht-r bogeth.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
[2]. See id.
Thomas K. Clancy*
What is the purpose of the Fourth Amendment? How should rules – legal principles – be crafted to implement that purpose? This article addresses those questions. Nothing is more fundamental to the development of Fourth Amendment principles than the answers to those questions. Given the wide applicability of the Fourth Amendment to the countless intrusions by the government in daily life, how the Fourth Amendment is to be construed is itself of fundamental concern to all Americans. It is the foundation upon which other freedoms rest.
Continue reading
__________
*Director, National Center for Justice and the Rule of Law and Research Professor, University of Mississippi School of Law. J.D., Vermont Law School; B.A., University of Notre Dame. The development of this article benefited significantly from a workshop with Professors Christopher Green, Matthew Hall, and Jack Nowlin.
Charles R. Korsmo*
The events of May 6, 2010 took high-frequency trading from the edges of public consciousness to being front page news. American stock markets had opened that morning to unsettling rumblings from Europe. The previous day had seen violent protests in Greece against proposed austerity measures designed to avert a default on Greek government debt. The ongoing riots seemed likely to scupper a proposed European Union bailout of Greece, potentially touching off a chain-reaction debt crisis with disastrous consequences for the entire euro zone. Given these inauspicious augurs, it is hardly surprising that investor sentiment was somewhat jumpy and decidedly gloomy for much of the day. Over the course of the morning, prices slid in increasingly volatile trading. By 1:00 p.m., the Standard & Poor’s 500 (“S&P 500”), a well-known index of stock prices for 500 top American companies, had fallen by about 1%—a significant drop, to be sure, but not yet particularly alarming.
Around 1:00 p.m., the dollar value of the Euro started to decline precipitously, and the sell-off in the broader market began to accelerate. The volatility of stock prices increased sharply, triggering automatic slowdowns in trading for numerous stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange (“NYSE”). By 2:00 p.m., the S&P 500 had fallen a total of 2.9% for the day. Such a large drop is unusual, and undoubtedly cause for consternation, but was nowhere near as severe as the multiple 5%+ daily swings seen at the height of the 2008 financial crisis. Few would have guessed that the stage was now set for the most extraordinary hour in the history of the American stock market.
Continue reading
__________
*Assistant Professor, Case Western Reserve University School of Law. J.D., Yale Law School.
Viva R. Moffat*
In passing the Copyright Act in 1976, Congress provided that “pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works” were to be protected, but at the same time made clear that works of industrial design, as opposed to works of applied art, were not to be protected by copyright law. Put simply, “useful articles” are not copyrightable. This is so because useful things belong in the patent realm, if they are to receive protection at all. Seemingly straightforward, this distinction—between applied art and industrial design, between copyright law and patent law—has long perplexed policymakers, courts, and academics.
While the law and the language, as shall be seen, can be jargon-filled and obscure, at issue is a straightforward and real-world concern: whether and to what extent items like bicycle racks, smartphones, belt buckles, mannequins, and all manner of everyday products ought to be protected by some kind of exclusive right. Put another way, the question is whether copyright provides the proper form of protection for items of industrial design.
This article concludes emphatically that, while some kind of protection—that is, some kind of restriction on copying, be it design patent, trade dress, or a sui generis form of protection—may be appropriate, copyright law is not the right approach. More specifically, “not copyright” for industrial design is sufficiently important that a bright-line rule excluding industrial design from copyright, in contrast to the nuanced standards currently employed, should be adopted.
Continue reading
__________
*Associate Professor, University of Denver Sturm College of Law.
