Toby’s blog

The Boston/Cambridge area offers a couple of pretty good options for the casual cyclist: the path along the Charles River is nice, though maybe a little short, but the Minuteman Trail starts only a two miles from HLS and stretches 11 miles from Alewife to Bedford. Not bad! You’ll find me there regularly when the weather is warm.

I noticed an article in the Globe this weekend about some engineering students over at Northeastern putting together some ambitious plans for extending and combining trails on the Boston side of the Charles River. Looks like a project that could use the help of a few current or future Harvard Law students…

Visit the article here.

A couple of items:

We’re winding down a bit in the JD admissions office. I expect to do one more major round of admit phone calls (i.e. congratulatory calls) next week and then we’ll probably stop and go to the waitlist (and of course, deny everyone else)–i.e., those under review will either be on the waitlist or denied. Still, like in prior years, I expect to admit a fair number off the waitlist and will try to do much of that in May or early June. Interview calls may well continue. This applies to everyone (!!!!!!–note additional exclamation points in response to additional comments/questions below).

In response to one of the comments, files “under review” are under periodic review throughout the cycle–this status can last for one week or several months (for 2007-08 — we may adjust the process next year). When we make a decision, we tell you.

Also, you may notice that I’ve started allowing comments on this blog, but they will be cleared by a moderator. People become very strident and strange when they are hidden in the cloak of anonymity. Witness some of the sad, sorry displays on the public message boards. We’ll not have that here. I would appreciate constructive criticism and ideas, however.

I saw this posted to the HLS home page and thought you might be interested.

Professor Minow just forwarded me a list of our 6 winners of the Food and Drug Law Institute’s H. Thomas Austern Memorial Writing Competition. The students were in Peter Hutt’s winter term course Food and Drug Law:

John Murphy (”Mandatory Labeling of Foods Made from Cloned Animals: Grappling with Moral Objections to the Production of Safe Products”) - First place, Short Paper

Amanda Lydon (”The FDA’s Decision to Make Emergency Contraception Available Without a Prescription: Guaranteed Access for Women or Just the First Step?”) -Honorable mention, Short paper

Daniel Gorlin (”Starving Off Death: An Assessment of the Pharmaceutical Industry’s Strategies to Protect Blockbuster Franchises Upon the Loss of Marketing Exclusivity”) - First place, Long paper

Leah Satine (”Is My Yogurt Lying? Developing and Applying a Framework for Determining Whether Wellness Claims on Probiotic Yogurts Mislead”) - Second place, Long paper

Brianna MacDonald (”Perspectives on FDA’s Regulation of Nanotechnology: Emerging Challenges and Potential Solutions”) - Honorable mention, Long paper

Evan Diamond (”Reverse-FOIA Limitations on Agency Actions to Disclose Human Gene Therapy Clinical Trial Data”) - Honorable mention, Long paper

I just got this in my inbox and it looked interesting — my classmate Adam Hootnick ‘01 is one of the presenters:

Event: TAKING THE PLUNGE: How to Dive into a Dream Career in the Arts

Date: Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Time: 6:00–7:30 p.m.

Location: Pound Hall 335, Harvard Law School

A Panel Discussion sponsored by the HLS Law and the Arts Initiative

The Panel

Viola Canales ‘89 – Author of Orange Candy Slices and Other Secret Tales and The Tequila Worm, winner of the 2006 Pura Belpré Medal for Narrative

Adam Hootnick ‘01 – Director and producer of Unsettled, former producer at MTV News & Docs for politics and international affairs

David Zippel ‘79 – Tony Award winning lyricist for City of Angels, two time Academy Award Nominee, two time Grammy nominee, and three time Golden Globe nominee

Moderator

Harvey Silverglate ‘67, Prominent criminal defense and civil liberties litigator; journalist publishing in The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and The Los Angeles Times; author of the forthcoming Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent

The HLS Law and Arts Initiative is a collaborative venture involving students, alumni, faculty, HLS career services and other members of the community interested in the widest possible array of intersections between law and the arts. Please join us and let us know what you are doing!

For more information, check www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/jhalley/lawandarts.

…of Taiwan. Story here.

In a effort to shake things up a bit recently, I decided to let some students have a little fun interviewing their professors. One such individual was 1L Talhia Tuck who sat down for a chat with her professor of Race Relations Law: From the Jim Crow Era to the Present Moment, Randall Kennedy.

Professor Kennedy specializes in the intersection between racial conflict and legal institutions in American life. He currently teaches race Relations Law, Issues Involving Freedom of Expression, and Contracts.

Before coming to HLS, Talhia spent most of her professional life in television, first as a production assistant for Hardball with Chris Matthews and a researcher for The Nightly News with Tom Brokaw and then later TV-News Reporter for the WINK-TV, the CBC Affiliate in Fort Myers, Florida. She is interested in combining her interest in journalism with law by pursuing avenues such as First Amendment law, communication law, or media law.

Talhia Tuck and Randall Kennedy: (23:21)

In case you don’t keep an eye on the home page, I wanted to highlight these videos from the big public interest reunion. We had 600 public interest alumni back on campus to mix and mingle and attend a series of panel and events. Speeches by former Mass. Governor William Weld ‘70 and death penalty litigator Bryan Stevenson ‘85 and a “conversation” between Dean Elena Kagan ‘86 and Michigan first couple Jennifer Granholm ‘87 and Daniel Mulhern ‘86 were part of the fun.

These links take you to the full stories and within the stories are links to the video:

Gov. Bill Weld

Gov. Jennifer Granholm

Bryan Stevenson

You can read the complete story here at the HLS home page.

Do you find yourself emptying your wallet every semester for costly course packets? Did you ever angrily speculate that, as part of the public domain, you should be allowed free access to your materials? Scholar and writer Lewis Hyde, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, gave a talk recently to discuss the reclamation of fair use rights and to brainstorm on what educators should do to lobby on behalf of their fair use rights.

According to Hyde, fair use regulations came into being centuries ago to benefit the public good. “This concern began to shift to a focus on the commercial good with Justice Joseph Story following the case of Folsom v. March in 1841,” said Hyde. “The question of free speech versus the ownership of ideas began to be scrutinized….fair use as a concept comes from the spreading range of copyright control.” However, the fair use defense of copyright infringement was not formally codified until 130 years later under section 107 of the 1976 Act. When considering fair use of an original work, the user should take into account (1) the purpose and character of use; (2) the nature of copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; (4) and the effect of use upon the market or potential market for the original work.

“The problem here of course is the vagueness of these guidelines,” said Hyde. “There’s no distinction between derivative works such as translations and transformative works, which mark a departure from the original work.” Hyde explained the that, for scholars and teachers, infringement has little meaning. “The doctrine is too general, and where it is specific, it’s too specific for application.”

The real question then is how to adopt educator-developed practices of fair use. After weighing the abolition of fair use and the implementation of further guidelines, Hyde proposed developing a system of best practices by convening communities of scholars to discuss normative use. “There needs to be a research phase to identify the problems and limits of fair use…culminating in a publication that articulates the case of the community in question.” Hyde insisted that this system would allow educators, musicians, and authors, among many others, to return to their professional norms in determining right and wrong fair use behavior. “The publication must then be taken to adjudicators to ensure that it is in line with current legal practices… and then the community conducts outreach.”

“Educational fair rights use has been eroded,” concluded Hyde. “Now is the time to return to the mission of higher learning and the dissemination of knowledge.”