译者:吴志宇 中国政法大学博士生
审稿:董辰 中国政法大学硕士生
         Jessie PKU硕士
编辑:Gary 詹远 UNSW J.D.
责编:Izzy 美国西北大学LL.M.
Transcending Equality Versus Adequacy
超越公平与充足之争
作者:Joshua E. Weishart
A debate about whether all children are entitled to an “equal” or an “adequate” education has been waged at the forefront of school finance policy for decades. In an era of budget deficits and harsh cuts in public education, I submit that it is time to move on.
几十年来,所有儿童是否均有权获得“公平”或“充足”教育是学校财务政策争论的突出问题。在一个预算赤字和公共教育供给严重削减的时代,笔者认为是时候超越公平与充足的争论了。
Equality of educational opportunity has been thought to require equal spending per pupil or spending adjusted to the needs of differently situated children. Adequacy has been understood to require a level of spending sufficient to satisfy some absolute, rather than relative, educational threshold. In practice, however, many courts interpreting their states’ constitutional obligations have fused the equality and adequacy theories. Certain federal laws express principles of both doctrines. And gradually, more advocates and scholars have come to endorse hybrid equality-adequacy approaches. Still, the debate persists over seemingly intractable conceptual precepts and their political and legal ramifications.
教育机会的平等要求对学生人均教育支出的平等,或者教育支出根据不同情况的儿童的需要调整。[1] 教育充足则要求应有足够的支出来达到绝对的教育目标,而非维持相对的教育标准。[2] 然而,在实践中,许多法院在解释本州的宪法义务时,将教育公平和教育充足理论融合在一起。某些联邦法律规定了这两种理论的原则。越来越多的律师和学者开始支持教育平等与教育充足的混合进路。然而,由于这两种理论的概念难以厘清且伴随难以预料的政治和法律影响,相关争论仍未停息。
Tracking the philosophical origins and evolution of equality and adequacy as legal doctrines, I explain the significance of their points of convergence and argue that the few points of divergence are untenable in practice. Equality of educational opportunity should not be interpreted as pursuing equal chances for educational achievement for all children, because that ideal is infeasible. Nor should educational adequacy be interpreted as completely indifferent to objectionable inequalities that can be feasibly curtailed. Properly conceived, equality and adequacy are not merely congruent but reciprocal. That is, children are owed an education that is adequately equal and equally adequate.
追溯公平和充足的哲学渊源与其作为法律理论的演进历程,笔者阐释了它们趋同之处的重要意义,二者极少的分歧之处在实践中也不足为训。教育机会平等不应该被解释为对所有儿童平等的学业成就(educational achievement)机会的追求,因为这种追求本身就不现实。教育充足也不应该被解释为完全无视不平等现象,因为这种不平等其实是能够被切实遏制的。可以适当地设想,平等与充分性不仅仅是一致的,更是互惠的。质言之,应有充足的资源使得所有儿童获得平等的教育机会,同时在分配资源以达到绝对的教育目标时应尽可能消除不平等的现象。
The No-Reading Problem in Consumer Contract Law
消费者合同法中的条款不读问题
作者:Ian Ayres & Alan Schwartz
Instead of promoting informed consumer assent through quixotic attempts to have consumers read ever-expanding disclosures, this Article argues that consumer protection law should focus on “term optimism”—situations in which consumers expect more favorable terms than they actually receive. We propose a system under which mass-market sellers are required periodically to engage in a process of “term substantiation” through which sellers would learn whether their consumers held accurate beliefs about the terms of their agreement. Terms that meet or exceed the median consumer’s expectation would be enforceable even if buried or only available on request. But sellers could enforce unexpected, unfavorable terms only if they are disclosed in a “warning box” that has a government-provided standard border. To prevent overuse of the box, sellers would need (i) to exclude terms from the box that meet or exceed consumer expectations and (ii) to order terms in the box in descending order of consumer importance. Such a system of term substantiation coupled with targeted warnings about unexpected terms jettisons as unworkable the duty to read ideal. It instead economizes on consumers’ scarce attention by increasing the salience of those terms that are most likely to inhibit informed consent. Term substantiation lets the representative consumer determine what sellers disclose and thus democratizes the content of form contracts.
本文认为,与其不切实际地要求消费者阅读不断增加的披露信息来促进其知情同意,消费者保护法更应该关注“条款乐观主义(term optimism)”的情况——消费者预期的条款比其实际接受的条款更有利。我们提出一个制度,面向大众的经营者应定期进行“条款实质化(term substantiation)”程序,经营者借此来了解消费者是否对其协议条款有着准确的认识。符合或超出中位数消费者预期的条款是可执行的,即便该条款淹没在合同众多条款之中,或者是仅应请求才能提供。但消费者预期之外同时也不利于消费者的条款,只有当其在政府制式的“警示框(warning box)”中被披露时才可执行。为了避免警示框的滥用,经营者需要(1)将符合或超出中位数消费者预期的条款排除在警示框之外,并(2)将框中的条款按照对消费者的重要性降序排列。此等条款实质化制度,再加上对预期之外的条款针对性的警示,摆脱了不切实际的阅读义务(the duty to read)构想。相反,该制度通过提高那些最有可能阻碍知情同意的条款的显著性来节省消费者稀缺的注意力。条款实质化让有代表性的消费者决定经营者披露内容,从而使格式合同的内容民主化。
We report the results of an original term-substantiation field experiment documenting user expectations concerning unread Facebook end-user license agreement provisions. Consistent with our analysis, we find that users can correctly evaluate many of these provisions. Importantly, we find that term optimism exists: there are a few unexpected, unfavorable terms that, under our proposal, would be presumptively unenforceable unless subject to heightened disclosure.
我们报告了一场原创的条款实质化实地试验的结果,记录了用户对未读的Facebook终端用户许可协议条款的预期。与我们的分析一致,我们发现用户可以正确地评估其中许多条款。重要的是,我们发现条款乐观主义是存在的:根据我们的提议,有一些预期之外的、不利的条款应被推定为不可执行,除非对其的披露已加强。
Managerial Justice and Mass Misdemeanors
管理式执法与大规模轻罪
Issa Kohler-Hausmann
In the mid-1990s New York City inaugurated its era of mass misdemeanors by pioneering policing tactics featuring intensive enforcement against low-level offenses as part of its quality-of-life and urban crime control strategy. These tactics have since spread across the country and around the globe. But the New York City experiment embarrasses our traditional understanding of how an expansion of criminal enforcement should work: as misdemeanor arrests climbed dramatically as part of an intentional law enforcement strategy, the rate of criminal conviction fell sharply. Using extensive, original data from a multiyear study, this Article exposes an underappreciated model of criminal administration in New York City’s processing of mass misdemeanors, one that makes sense of this trend. Misdemeanor justice in New York City has largely abandoned what I call the adjudicative model of criminal law administration—concerned with adjudicating specific cases—and instead operates under what I call the managerial model—concerned with managing people through engagement with the criminal justice system over time. The adjudicative model holds that courts stand between the proscriptions of substantive criminal law and the hard treatment of punishment by employing the criminal process to select the right people for punishment and to determine the proper amount. The managerial model does not depend on punishing individual instances of lawbreaking, but rather on using the criminal process to sort and regulate the populations targeted with these policing tactics over time. These findings challenge the “assembly-line” account so often associated with lower criminal courts, showing that misdemeanor courts engage in a tremendous amount of discretionary differentiation in the treatment of the people who flow through their operations. However, the basis of this differentiation is not what we would expect from the traditional adjudicative model of criminal law, namely guilt and blameworthiness.
20世纪90年代中期,纽约市率先开启了大规模轻罪(mass misdemeanors)的时代,作为品质生活和控制城市犯罪战略的组成部分,纽约市采取强化轻微犯罪执法的警务策略。这些策略后来在全国乃至全球范围内推广。但是,与刑事执法扩张应如何运作的传统理解不同,纽约市的实践使人困惑:作为一种有目的的执法战略的一部分,轻罪逮捕人数急剧攀升,刑事定罪率却急剧下降。基于多年研究的大量原始数据,本文揭示了纽约市在处理大规模轻罪的案件过程中被低估的刑事执法模式,这种模式对理解上述变化趋势是有意义的。纽约市的轻罪司法在很大程度上放弃了所谓的刑事执法的裁决模式(adjudicative model)——关注具体案件的裁断,而是在笔者所称的管理模式(managerial model)下运作——关注长期与刑事司法系统接触者的管理。裁决模式下,法院站在实体刑法的禁止性规定和刚性的处置惩罚之间,利用刑事程序选择该当惩罚的人,并确定适当惩罚量。而管理模式并不依赖于对个别违法行为的惩罚,而是对这些警务策略所针对的人群利用刑事程序进行长期的分类和管理。这些调研结果挑战了常常与低级刑事法院相关联的“流水线”之说[3],结果表明轻罪法院对经过其业务流程者进行了大量酌情差别化处理。然而,该等差别化处理的基础并非是有罪与有责,而这些正是人们在刑事执法的裁决模式下所预期的。

The Exergen and Therasense Effects
埃克塞根案和斯尔森案的影响
作者:Robert D. Swanson
This Comment empirically investigates the doctrine of inequitable conduct in patent law. Inequitable conduct is a defense to patent infringement that accuses the patent holder of committing fraud on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to secure the patent. Before the Federal Circuit’s recent Exergen and Therasense decisions, the defense was seen as chronically overused. As a result, patent applicants cited more prior art in their applications to avoid later being charged, 
during litigation with fraudulent omissions. The Federal Circuit responded with Exergen and Therasense, which heightened the pleading standard and raised the legal proof required for inequitable conduct, respectively.
本文对专利法中不正当行为(inequitable conduct)的学理进行了实证研究。不正当行为是专利侵权的一种抗辩,即控诉专利持有人为获得专利而对美国专利商标局进行欺诈。在联邦巡回法院的埃克塞根(Exergen)案[4]和斯尔森(Therasense)案[5]之前,该抗辩被认为长期受到滥用。因此,专利申请者在其申请中引用更多在先技术,以避免后来在诉讼期间被指控为消极欺诈(fraudulent omissions)。联邦巡回法院以埃克塞根案和斯尔森案作为回应,分别提高了不正当行为的起诉标准与法定证据标准。
Many commentators, and especially members of the patent defense bar, now feel that the Federal Circuit has gone too far in restricting the inequitable conduct defense, to the point that it is essentially a dead doctrine. This Comment informs the debate by adding comprehensive data. To better comprehend the effects of the Exergen and Therasense cases, this Comment calculates the rates at which accused infringers plead and prove inequitable conduct—for every patent case over the periods in question. The results show that the inequitable conduct defense is used significantly less often than many assume, contradicting assertions by the Federal Circuit’s Therasense majority. Moreover, the data indicate that Exergen and Therasense have both contributed to an even further decline in accused infringers’ use of the inequitable conduct defense. Based on a full exploration of the data, the Comment concludes that the Federal Circuit went too far in Therasense (but not in Exergen). A better formulation of inequitable conduct doctrine would be the test advocated by the dissent in Therasense, which embraced the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s lower standard of materiality.
如今诸多论者,尤其专利辩护律师,认为联邦巡回法院过度限制了不正当行为抗辩的运用,以至于它基本成为不再被运用的学理。本文为争论提供了全面的数据。为了更好地理解埃克塞根案和斯尔森案的影响,本文计算了特定期间内专利侵权被告提出和证明不正当行为的案件占全部专利案件的比例。结果显示,不正当行为抗辩受援引的频率远远低于许多人的假设,这与联邦巡回法院埃克塞根案中的多数意见相矛盾。此外,数据显示,埃克塞根案和斯尔森案促使被控侵权人对不正当行为抗辩的援引进一步减少。基于对数据的全面探讨,本文得出结论:联邦巡回法院在斯尔森案中过度限制了不正当行为抗辩(但在埃克塞根案中没有)。对不正当行为学理的更好表述应该是斯尔森案中反对意见所主张的标准,即美国专利和商标局的较低的实质性标准(standard of materiality)[6]。

[1] 译者注:通说认为该种公平是一种“垂直公平(vertical equity)”,即为减轻学生在身体和社会方面劣势所带来的负面影响,应向最需要的学生分配更多的资源。
[2] 译者注:作者认为该种公平是一种“民主公平(democratic equality)”,即教育应使得所有人有足够的能力成为平等的公民,这一种应达到的绝对教育目标。
[3] 译者注:根据原文,此处的“流水线”是形容“机械地给被告定罪,并施以一刀切的惩罚”。
[4] 译者注:Exergen Corp. v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.575 F.3d 1312 (Fed. Cir. 2009).
[5] 译者注:Therasense, Inc. v. Becton, Dickinson & Co., 649 F.3d 1276, 1288 (Fed. Cir. 2011) (en banc).
[6] 译者注:该标准可参见美国联邦法规37 C.F.R.§1.56: Duty to disclose information material to patentability(披露可专利性实质信息的义务)
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