Copyright in Inanimate Characters: The Disturbing Proliferation of Microworks and the Negative Effects on Copyright and Free Expression

In its September 2015 decision in DC Comics v. Towle, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recognized the existence of a copyright for inanimate characters. The court held that the Batmobile – a fictional car driven by a fictional superhero – was an independently copyrightable work. This article explores the problems with the Ninth Circuit's analysis and argues that increasing copyright protection for what the authors call “microworks” is misguided and harms First Amendment interests.     

The Settlement of Disputes in International Law: Institutions and Procedures

Netherlands International Law Review -     

Clearer Cues,More Consistent Voters: A Benefit of Elite Polarization

Scholars typically argue that elite polarization has only negative consequences for American politics. I challenge this view by demonstrating that elite polarization, by clarifying where the parties stand on the issues of the day, causes ordinary voters to adopt more consistent attitudes. Scholars have made such claims in the past, but because only observational data has been available, demonstrating a cause-and-effect relationship has proven to be difficult. I use original experiments to verify that there is a small but significant causal link between elite polarization and voter consistency. These findings have important normative implications for our understanding of the consequences of elite polarization, the role of political parties in a modern democracy, and the standards scholars use to assess citizen competence and participation.     

Sex,gender, and promotion in executive office: Cabinet careers in the world of Westminster

This article provides the first analysis of gendered promotion issues for cabinet ministers using most-similar systems design for three “Westminster-style” governments: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Using individual-level data and controlling for biographical, institutional, and country effects we find, in common with earlier literature, that women are more likely to be given less prestigious cabinet posts and be assigned to “feminine” portfolio. Using both sequence and event history analysis, we see the careers of men and women starkly diverge. We find that women are less likely to be promoted than men but find no relationship between prestigious portfolio and promotion. However, feminine portfolio assignments decrease the promotion prospects for women yet increase them for men.     

Local supply,temporal dynamics,and unrealized potential in teacher hiring

We explore the dynamics of competitive search in the K–12 public education sector. Using detailed panel data on teacher hiring from Boston Public Schools, we document how teacher labor supply varies substantially across vacancies even within a single district depending on position type, school characteristics, and the timing of job postings. We find that early-posted positions are more likely to be filled and end up securing new hires that are better qualified, more effective, and more likely to remain at a school. In contrast, the number of applicants to a position is largely unassociated with hire quality, suggesting that schools may struggle to identify and select the best candidates even when there is a large pool of qualified applicants. These patterns persist even when we restrict comparisons to only positions within an individual school using school fixed effects. Our findings point to substantial unrealized potential for improving teacher hiring.     

Race,Place, and Police-Caused Homicide in U.S. Municipalities

We test structural hypotheses regarding police-caused homicides of minorities. Past research has tested minority threat and community violence hypotheses. The former maintains that relatively large minority populations are subjectively perceived as threats and experience a higher incidence of police-caused homicide than whites do, the latter that higher rates of violent crime among minorities create objective threats that explain these disparities. That research has largely ignored some important issues, including: alternative specifications of the minority threat hypothesis; the place hypothesis, which maintains highly segregated minority populations are perceived as especially threatening by police; and police-caused homicide in the Hispanic population. Using data for large U.S. cities, we conducted total-incidence and group-specific analyses to address these issues. A curvilinear minority threat hypothesis was supported by the Hispanic group-specific findings, whereas the place hypothesis found strong support in both total and group-specific analyses. These results provide new insights into patterns of police-caused homicide.