Law Commons^™

Terrorism And Trial By Jury: The Vices And Virtues Of British And American Criminal Law, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

British tradition and the American Constitution guarantee trial by jury for serious crime. But terrorism is not ordinary crime, and the presence of jurors may skew the manner in which terrorist trials unfold in at least three significant ways. First, organized terrorist groups may deliberately threaten jury members so the accused escapes penalty. The more ingrained the terrorist organization in the fabric of society, the greater the degree of social control exerted under the ongoing threat of violence. Second, terrorism, at heart a political challenge, may itself politicize a jury. Where nationalist conflict rages, as it does in Northern Ireland, …

Why Preemption Proponents Are Wrong, Brian Wolfman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The basic idea of federal preemption is easily stated: It is a constitutionally mandated principle that demands that federal law trumps state law when the two conflict or in the rare instances when a federal law is so comprehensive that there’s no role left for state law to fill. But in practice, courts have often had difficulty applying the principle.

For plaintiff lawyers, preemption is an ever-present worry. When your client has been injured by a defective car, truck, medical device, boat, tobacco product, pesticide, or mislabeled drug, or has been victimized by a bank or other lending institution, the …

Original Understanding And The Whether, Why, And How Of Judicial Review, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For more than one hundred years, legal scholars have endlessly and heatedly debated whether judicial review of federal legislation was part of the original understanding of the Constitution. The stakes of the debate are high. If judicial review was part of the original understanding, then there is a strong argument that the practice is grounded in the majority’s will, just as the Founders’ Constitution is. But if it is not—if, as Alexander Bickel and others have claimed, judicial review was a sleight-of-hand creation of Chief Justice Marshall in Marbury v. Madison—then judicial review is either counter-majoritarian or else must …

Affirmative Inaction, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Perhaps the most exasperating aspect of racial discrimination in the United States is the self-righteous manner in which it is practiced. After a history of facilitating white exploitation of minority interests, the Supreme Court intimated in Grutter v. Bollinger that time was running out for racial minorities to take advantage of the opportunities for equality that the culture has offered in the form of affirmative action. Justice O'Connor's majority opinion seemed to say that in another twenty-five years, the Court would cease to tolerate such special favors for racial minorities, thereby leaving minorities only a limited amount of time remaining …