Law Commons^™

Designing Bespoke Transitional Justice: A Pluralist Process Approach, Jaya Ramji-Nogales

Michigan Journal of International Law

Although many scholars agree that contemporary transitional justice mechanisms are flawed, a comprehensive and unified alternative approach to accountability for mass violence has yet to be propounded. Like many international lawyers, transitional justice theorists have focused their assessment efforts on the successes and failures of established institutions. This Article argues that before we can measure whether transitional justice is working, we must begin with a theory of what it is trying to achieve. Once we have a coherent theory, we must use it ex ante, to design effective transitional justice mechanisms, not just to assess their effectiveness ex post. Drawing …

Sex Representation On The Bench: Legitimacy And International Criminal Courts, Nienke Grossman

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay examines the relationship between legitimacy and the presence of both male and female judges on international criminal court benches. It argues that sex representation – an approximate reflection of the ratio of the sexes in the general population – on the bench is an important contributor to legitimacy of international criminal courts. First, it proposes that sex representation affects normative legitimacy because men and women bring different perspectives to judging. Consequently, without both sexes, adjudication is inherently biased. Second, even if one rejects the proposition that men and women "think differently", sex representation affects sociological legitimacy because sex …

All Judges Are Political—Except When They Are Not: Acceptable Hypocrisies And The Rule Of Law, Keith J. Bybee

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This paper contains the introduction to the new book, All Judges Are Political—Except When They Are Not: Acceptable Hypocrisies and the Rule of Law (Stanford University Press, 2010).

The book begins with the observation that Americans are divided in their beliefs about whether courts operate on the basis of unbiased legal principle or of political interest. This division in public opinion in turn breeds suspicion that judges do not actually mean what they say, that judicial professions of impartiality are just fig leaves used to hide the pursuit of partisan purposes.

Comparing law to the practice of common courtesy, the …

The Use Of Article 31(3)(C) Of The Vclt In The Case Law Of The Ecthr: An Effective Anti-Fragmentation Tool Or A Selective Loophole For The Reinforcement Of Human Rights Teleology?, Vassilis P. Tzevelekos

Michigan Journal of International Law

In Part I the Article will briefly introduce the question of the fragmentation of international law, and will more extensively delineate the role that the ILC attributed to Article 31(3)(c) and the ILC's expectations regarding its success in this role. Next, Part II will give an overview of the special elements of the ECHR socio-normative environment, which gave rise to the case law into which Article 31(3)(c) came into force. The Article will argue that, in addition to benefiting from the very special nature of the ECHR, the Strasbourg Court also has a significant number of interpretative tools that allow …

The Functions Of Ethical Originalism, Richard A. Primus

Articles

Supreme Court Justices frequently divide on questions of original meaning, and the divisions have a way of mapping what we might suspect are the Justices’ leanings about the merits of cases irrespective of originalist considerations. The same is true for law professors and other participants in constitutional discourse: people’s views of original constitutional meaning tend to align well with their (nonoriginalist) preferences for how present constitutional controversies should be resolved. To be sure, there are exceptions. Some people are better than others at suspending presentist considerations when examining historical materials, and some people are better than others at recognizing when …