For decades, American fashion designers have been fighting, to no avail, for a federal law that protects their designs. In light of this inaction at the federal level, this Note explores the possibility of making use of the states’ traditional role as “laboratories of democracy” and passing a state law protecting works of fashion, specifically garment designs....
It is a virtual axiom in the world of law that legal norms come in two prototypes: rules and standards. The accepted lore suggests that rules should be formulated to regulate recurrent and frequent behaviors, whose contours can be defined with sufficient precision. Standards, by contrast, should be employed to address complex, variegated behaviors that require the weighing...