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Special economic zones (SEZs) have a long and complicated relationship with the United States. The lineage of the country runs back to proto-SEZs, created when Old World governments sold entrepreneurs charters to build for-profit colonies in the New World, such as Jamestown and New Amsterdam. In more recent times, though, the United States has lagged behind the rest of the globe in tapping the potential of SEZs, which have exploded in number, types, territory, and population. True, the US hosts a large and growing number of Foreign-Trade Zones (FTZs), but these do little more than exempt select companies from federal customs obligations. Elsewhere, SEZs have done much more to increase jurisdictional competition and improve citizens' lives. Consider the SEZs that spread from Hong Kong throughout China, lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty in the process, or the huge private developments now taking root in Africa, the Middle East, and India. This paper proposes that the United States combine the best of foreign and domestic policies to create a new generation of SEZs. These United States Special Economic Zones (USSEZs) would arise on federally owned property, such as lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and generate sorely needed public funds by selling territorial exemptions from select state and federal taxes, laws, and regulations. Through USSEZs, special jurisdictions might bring economic growth, human welfare, and individual freedom back to America.

Libertarians do not fit into the left-right spectrum very comfortably; by their own account, they transcend it. This brief paper, written for a Chapman Law Review symposium on libertarian legal theory, argues that libertarians should likewise transcend the dichotomy currently dividing constitutional theory. The Left tends to regard the Constitution as adaptable to current needs and defined by judicial authority; the Right tends to search the historical record for the Constitution’s original meaning. Each of those conventional approaches has its own virtues and vices. Combining the best of both — the responsiveness of living constitutionalism and the textual fidelity of originalism — generates a distinctly libertarian theory. This theory maximizes the consent of the governed and, thus, the justifiability of constitutional authority.

US copyright law deserves credit for encouraging an outpouring of original expressive works, bequeathing us a rich cultural heritage. But the copyright regime has grown too big and too powerful. We need to pursue a new direction in copyright reform: toward freedom. We can best improve copyright by limiting its power, repairing its foundations, and opening up ways to escape it entirely. Specifically, we should strive to (1) reinstate the Founders’ Copyright Act, (2) withdraw the US from the Berne Convention, (3) develop misuse doctrine into an escape from copyright, (4) focus copyright policy on consumers’ costs, not producers’ profits, and (5) reconceive “IP” as “Intellectual Privilege.” Property is neither an accurate label for copyright nor one we have to embrace by default. We can more accurately label copyright a privilege—a statutory exception to common-law rights and obligations that vests its holder with special powers and immunities. Copyright’s statutory privileges come only at hazard to our natural and common-law rights. To preserve our freedoms, therefore, we must reform copyright.

What will international copyright law look like in ten years? It will doubtless offer many different facets and will, as at present, elude any comprehensive portrait. This brief paper thus focuses on just one plausible and interesting scenario: Parties overseas will come to offer unauthorized performances of copyrighted works to consumers in the United States, a practice that will rouse the ire of copyright holders but that the Copyright Act will do little to stop. Depending on where the transmitted performances take place, legally speaking, they might not qualify as infringing under the Act. Even if they do qualify as infringing, moreover, unauthorized cross-border performances will in practice prove very hard to stop. Technological advances in media devices and growth in bandwidth will soon bring pirated performances to every family room - indeed, to every laptop, digital tablet, and smartphone. This prospect of unauthorized performances from abroad, to domestic consumers, stands to teach us about both the present and future of copyright law.

We often speak of consent in binary terms, boiling it down to "yes" or "no." In practice, however, consent varies by degrees. We tend to afford expressly consensual transactions more respect than transactions backed by only implied consent, for instance, which we in turn regard as more meaningful than transactions justified by merely hypothetical consent. A mirror of that ordinal ranking appears in our judgments about unconsensual transactions. This article reviews how a wide range of authorities regard consent, discovering that they treat consent as a matter of degree and a measure of justification. By abstracting from that evidence, we can outline a theory of graduated consent. This article concludes by testing a graduated consent theory against such problems as enforcing standardized agreements, justifying political coercion, and reading a constitution. In those and other applications, a theory of graduated consent can contribute to legal, moral, and economic reasoning.(Part II of this paper materially revises and expands on material first presented in, "The Scale of Consent," a working paper available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1322180.)

We often speak of consent in binary terms, boiling it down to "yes" or "no." In practice, however, consent varies by degrees. We tend to afford expressly consensual transactions more respect than transactions backed by only implied consent, for instance, which we in turn regard as more meaningful than transactions justified by merely hypothetical consent. A mirror of that ordinal ranking appears in our judgments about unconsensual transactions. This working paper reviews how legal and other authorities regard consent, revealing that they treat consent as a matter of degree and a measure of justification. The scale described here plays a vital role in a larger project, one that will also explain consent's importance and apply graduated consent theory to such longstanding puzzles as the enforceability of standard form agreements, the justifiability of political coercion, and the meaning of a constitution. As a preliminary to that project, this working paper explains how consent and justification vary by degree and covary in value.

Does copyright protection offer the best means of stimulating the production of expressive works? Perhaps, at the moment, it does. If so, however, copyright protection will probably become inefficiently over-protective as the market for expressive works grows. With such growth, copyright holders will find it increasingly remunerative to focus on customers willing to pay a premium for particular expressive works. In a larger, more finely segmented market, copyright holders will find that their statutory rights generate larger monopoly rents. Yet copyright holders will suffer no corresponding increase in production or distribution costs; thanks to technological advances, we can expect those costs to continue to decline. The private benefits of copyright protection will rise. So, too, will its social costs. Holding all else equal, therefore, growth in the market for expressive works will make copyright policy inefficient. This paper explains that effect and discusses how policymakers should respond.

Courts and commentators have misunderstood, and consequently underestimated, the recent Supreme Court case of Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. Voicing concern that once a copyrighted work has fallen into the public domain it should stay there, the Dastar Court held that authors of such works cannot use federal unfair competition law to force copiers to give them credit. The Court guaranteed that result by stipulating that "origin" in § 43(a)(1)(A) of the Lanham Act does not refer to the source of an idea, concept, or communication. That holding barred a reverse passing off claim brought under § 43(a) against Dastar Corp. for its having sold videotapes without crediting the plaintiffs as the origin of formerly copyrighted material included on those tapes. Because lower courts have focused on the legal means employed by the Dastar Court, however, rather than its evident policy goals, they have extended it to facts materially different from those at issue in the case. Courts have applied the case to bar Lanham Act claims against the unauthorized use of copyrighted, uncopyrightable, and trade secret-protected goods. Courts have stretched it to cover services, too. Most significantly, in a move that effectively doubles Dastar’s reach, courts have even begun applying the case to bar unfair competition claims brought under state law. Although they don’t apparently realize it, courts relying on Dastar to preempt state unfair competition claims have signaled a revolution in copyright law. Ever since the enactment of Copyright Act § 301(a) nearly thirty years ago, the express terms of that section have monopolized copyright preemption doctrine. But § 301(a) cannot explain or justify Dastar’s evident power to preempt state unfair competition claims. Intentionally or not, the Dastar Court has revived the long-moribund and somewhat ill-defined doctrine of implied copyright preemption. Here, even more than with regard to unfair competition, Dastar’s consequences look likely to far outreach the Court’s original, modest aims. We have surely misunderestimated Dastar’s impact on unfair competition law. With regard to copyright law, however, we may still have time to understand and estimate Dastar’s ultimate ramifications.

The power to punish treason against the U.S. conflicts with the First Amendment freedoms of speech and of the press. Far from a question of mere theory, that conflict threatens to chill public dissent to the War on Terrorism. The government has already demonstrated its willingness to punish treasonous expression. After World War II, the United States won several prosecutions against citizens who had engaged in propaganda on behalf of the Axis powers. Today, critics of the War on Terrorism likewise face accusations of treason. Under the law of treasonous expression developed following World War II, those accusations could credibly support prosecutions. Any such prosecutions could win convictions, moreover, unless courts narrow the law of treasonous expression to satisfy the First Amendment. That potential clash between the power to punish treason and our freedoms of expression has, thanks to advances in communications technologies, become a matter of everyday concern. In terms of abstract doctrine, the law of treason condemns anyone who owes allegiance to the U.S., who adheres to U.S. enemies, and who gives them aid and comfort by an overt act to which two witnesses testify. As courts have applied that doctrine, however, it threatens any citizen or resident of the U.S. who publicly expresses disloyal sentiments. The Internet has made it cheap, easy, and dangerous to publish such sentiments. It hosts many an expression that an eager prosecutor could cite both as proof of adherence to U.S. enemies - a subjective state of mind - and as proof of an overt act giving them aid and comfort - an objective fact to which any two of the expression's readers could testify. Even if no prosecutions for treason arise, the alarmingly broad yet ill-defined reach of the law of treason threatens to unconstitutionally chill innocent dissent. This paper details the scope of the law of treasonous expression, explains why technology threatens to bring that law into conflict with the First Amendment, and suggests a way to safely separate the power to punish treason from our freedoms of expression.

Self-help plays a nearly unnoticed but increasingly important role in free speech jurisprudence. Under both the compelling interest and least restrictive means prongs of strict scrutiny, courts have determined the constitutionality of content-based restrictions on speech by comparing the efficacy of state action to that of alternative, self-help remedies. Courts and commentators, however, have yet to explore and justify how self-help does and should influence First Amendment law. Thanks largely to the obscuring effect of the captive audience doctrine, courts have invoked self-help in compelling interest inquiries in a consistent, but only implicit, manner. In contrast, although the Supreme Court has encouraged lower courts to consider self-help remedies as part of that inquiry, the Court itself has given similar consideration only very recently. The present paper thus analyzes the extant case law to reveal how self-help has powerfully affected free speech strict scrutiny jurisprudence. The paper moreover justifies self-help's role as consistent with a fundamental principle of governance: political entities should undertake only those projects that they can accomplish more effectively than can private ones. Evaluations of the relative efficacy of political and private means will change with the relevant facts, of course. As a general matter, however, technological advances giving private parties increasingly refined means of manipulating information should lead courts to reduce the permissible scope of state action. Just as we upgrade computer software to benefit from progressively better hardware, in other words, we should upgrade First Amendment jurisprudence to benefit from progressively better self-help.

Copyright law, originally excused as a necessary evil, threatens now to become an inescapable burden. Because state and common law rights seemed inadequate to protect expressive works from unrestricted copying, the Founders expressly authorized federal copyright legislation. Lawmakers have read that constitutional mandate liberally. Each new version of the Copyright Act has embodied longer, broader, and more powerful legal protections. Meanwhile, private initiatives have developed increasingly effective means of safeguarding copyrighted works. Alarmed that these dual trends benefit copyright owners at too great an expense to the public interest, many commentators argue that the Copyright Act should limit and preempt non-statutory alternatives. But that puts matters exactly backwards. Besieged by lobbyists and bloated by public choice pressures, the Copyright Act has fallen into statutory failure. Insofar as common law and self-help technologies unite to secure exclusive rights in expressive works, in contrast, they succeed in overcoming the market failure that originally justified the Copyright Act. If legislativeand private protections prove too powerful in combination, therefore, copyright owners should have the right to choose between the two. Rather than automatically nullifying private efforts, courts should allow the owners of expressive works to abandon the Copyright Act's protections and rely once more on non-statutory ones. Because the idea has only just begun to draw scholarly attention, this paper offers a comprehensive analysis of such an exit option. It finds that principles of law, equity, and policy favor opening an escape from copyright and describes both potential and currently functioning means of putting that theory into practice.

With regard both to inhibiting Internet pornography and promoting Internet privacy, the adequacy of self-help alternatives ought to play a crucial role in evaluating the propriety of state action. Legislation that would have restricted Internet speech considered indecent or harmful to minors has already faced and failed that test. Several prominent organizations dedicated to preserving civil liberties argued successfully that self-help technologies offered less restrictive means of achieving the purported ends of such legislation, rendering it unconstitutional. Surprisingly, those same organizations have, of late, joined the call for subjecting another kind of speech - speech within or by commercial entities and about Internet users - to political regulation. With regard to privacy no less than pornography, however, self-help offers Internet users a less restrictive means of preventing the alleged harms of free speech than does state action. Indeed, a review of privacy-protecting technologies shows them to work even more effectively than the filtering and blocking software used to combat online smut. Digital self-help, in defense of Internet privacy, thus offers an alternative, making regulation by state authorities not only constitutionally suspect but also, from the more general point of view of policy, functionally inferior.