Ioan-radu Motoarca

There are two main questions that any account of corporate lawyers’ moral obligations needs to answer: (1) Do corporate lawyers have moral obligations to third parties? and (2) In cases of conflict between obligations to the corporation and obligations to third parties, which should prevail? This Article offers answers to these questions in the context of lawyers working in medical corporations. I argue that lawyers do have moral obligations to third parties, and that in cases where patients’ rights are being violated by a medical company, patients’ rights should prevail. Consequently, attorney–client confidentiality rules should be relaxed to allow for attorney disclosures in egregious cases of potential harm to third parties.

It is usually taken for granted, in discussions about fiction, that real things or events can occur as referents of fictional names . In this paper, I take issue with this view, and provide several arguments to the effect that it is better to take the names in fiction to refer to fictional surrogates of real objects. Doing so allows us to solve a series of problems that arise on the reference-continuity view. I also show that the arguments philosophers usually rely on in order to ban surrogates are not as serious as they have been taken to be. In the first part of the paper, I describe the two conflicting views. In the second part, I discuss several specific arguments in favor of surrogates. In the third part I take up the kind of reasons ordinarily offered against them

William D’Alessandro has recently argued that there are no implicit truths in fiction. According to the view defended by D’Alessandro, which he terms explicitism, the only truths in fiction are the ones explicitly expressed therein. In this essay, I argue that explicitism is incorrect on multiple counts. Not only is the argument D’Alessandro gives for it invalid, but explicitism as a theory of truth in fiction fails drastically to account for a number of phenomena that are crucial to our understanding and interpretation of fiction, such as pragmatic implicatures and speech acts occurring in fiction, psychological profiles of fictional characters, and fictional truths determined by literary conventions.

It is customary for institutions that organize sporting competitions and events to exercise a considerable degree of authority over the participants. That authority is often manifested in the enforcement of penalties for infringements of fair play. This paper focuses on one concrete case from soccer, although I take the discussion to extend to other sports as well. I argue that not all fair play rules should be enforced by the respective organizing institutions, and that enforcing all of them indiscriminately is a cause of injustice, rather than promoting fairness in sports. I propose a principled way of making the necessary distinction between those fair play rules that are enforceable and those that are not

This essay proposes a way of dealing with the strict liability of Internet sellers of other manufacturers’ products, such as Amazon under its ‘Fulfillment by Amazon’ program. I discuss and reject two approaches to the problem that have been proposed by the courts, and advance a view according to which the relevant inquiry is whether Internet intermediaries such as Amazon could have prevented a defective product from reaching the US market. This view accounts in a satisfactory manner for the notion of responsibility that is at the core of US strict products liability law, and avoids the pitfalls of alternative policies. However, since this view also entails a de facto quasi-immunity to lawsuits for Internet intermediaries in many cases, safeguards to that quasi-immunity are also addressed. While the essay focuses on US law, the principles and policies under discussion should be applicable in other jurisdictions as well.

In this article, I set out a theoretical framework for analyzing fictional copyright protection of fictional characters in literature. Using this framework, I argue that the two most prominent approaches that U.S. courts have adopted with respect to fictional character copyright (the Nichols test and the Sam Spade “Story Being Told” test) are unsustainable. The idea of distinct delineation that came out of Nichols may be understood in two ways: on one view, fictional characters are distinctly delineated if they deviate from a literary type. On the other view, they are distinctly delineated if they are attributed a sufficient number of properties in the fictions where they appear. Both views succumb to serious objections, while the test in Sam Spade is no better. The failure of the two judicial tests suggests that, instead of asking questions about fictional character copyrightability, courts should instead focus on the substantial similarity question. In the last part of the paper, I draw a distinction between two types of fictional character copyright infringement cases (transformations and transfers), and suggest that a Nichols-type substantial similarity analysis is all that is required in transformation situations. Although the focus of this article is U.S. law, the issues discussed and the analyses proposed may prove helpful in addressing fictional copyright in other jurisdictions as well.

There are two kinds of mainstream realist views of fictional characters: (1) They are abstract entities, created by the writers. They do not genuinely possess the properties ascribed to them in the fiction. (2) They are non-existent objects (alternatively, abstract objects) that do genuinely possess the properties ascribed in the fiction. The dissertation criticizes (1) and (2) and argues for a third realist view, according to which fictional characters exist and have the properties ascribed in the fiction. That solves some of the semantic and metaphysical problems associated with (1) and (2), and makes better sense of our ways of speaking about fictional characters.