Law Commons^™

Seeking Inconsistency: Advancing Pluralism In International Criminal Sentencing, Nancy Amoury Combs

Nancy Combs

No abstract provided.

Grave Crimes And Weak Evidence: Fact-Finding Evolution In International Criminal Law, Nancy Amoury Combs

Nancy Combs

International criminal courts carry out some of the most important work that a legal system can conduct: prosecuting those who have visited death and destruction on millions. Despite the significance of their work--or perhaps because of it--international courts face tremendous challenges. Chief among them is accurate fact-finding. With alarming regularity, international criminal trials feature inconsistent, vague, and sometimes false testimony that renders judges unable to assess with any measure of certainty who did what to whom in the context of a mass atrocity. This Article provides the first-ever empirical study quantifying fact-finding in an international criminal court. The study shines …

Book Review Of Fraudulent Evidence Before Public International Tribunals: The Dirty Stories Of International Law, Nancy Amoury Combs

Nancy Combs

No abstract provided.

"Fact-Finding Without Facts": A Conversation With Nancy Combs, Nancy Amoury Combs

Nancy Combs

No abstract provided.

Thinking Globally, Policy Locally: A Plan For Decentralized Law Enforcement In Côte D’Ivoire, __ J. Of Int’L Bus. & L. __ (Forthcoming 2015), Hugh Mundy

Hugh Mundy

During a 2009 speech in Ghana, President Barack Obama said, “Africa doesn’t need strongmen. It needs strong institutions.” Obama credited Ghana’s “impressive rates of growth” to the country’s “repeated peaceful transfers of power even in the wake of closely contested elections.” Free elections and non-violent power transfers, he said, “may lack the drama of the twentieth century’s liberation struggles” but “will ultimately be more significant.” Last July, the president expressed similar sentiments during a highly anticipated trip to Kenya. Côte d’Ivoire offers a stark example of the instability wrought when an unseated leader refuses to cede power. Once hailed as …

The Road Most Travel: Is The Executive’S Growing Preeminence Making America More Like The Authoritarian Regimes It Fights So Hard Against?, Ryan T. Williams

Ryan T. Williams

"Toiling In The Danger And In The Morals Of Despair": Risk, Security, Danger, The Constitution, And The Clinician's Dilemma, Michael L. Perlin, Alison Julia Lynch

Michael L Perlin

Abstract: Persons institutionalized in psychiatric hospitals and “state schools” for those with intellectual disabilities have always been hidden from view. Such facilities were often constructed far from major urban centers, availability of transportation to such institutions was often limited, and those who were locked up were, to the public, faceless and often seen as less than human.

Although there has been regular litigation in the area of psychiatric (and intellectual disability) institutional rights for 40 years, much of this case law entirely ignores forensic patients – mostly those awaiting incompetency-to-stand trial determinations, those found permanently incompetent to stand trial, those …

“Friend To The Martyr, A Friend To The Woman Of Shame”: Thinking About The Law, Shame And Humiliation, Michael L. Perlin, Naomi Weinstein

Michael L Perlin

The need to pay attention to the law‘s capacity to allow for, to encourage, or (in some cases) to remediate humiliation, or humiliating or shaming behavior has increased exponentially as we begin to also take more seriously international human rights mandates, especially – although certainly not exclusively – in the context of the recently-ratified United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, a Convention that calls for “respect for inherent dignity,” and characterizes "discrimination against any person on the basis of disability [as] a violation of the inherent dignity and worth of the human person...."

Humiliation and shaming, …

A Spectrum Of International Criminal Procedure: Shifting Patterns Of Power Distribution, Jessica S. Peake

Jessica S Peake

International criminal procedure is characterized by a fundamental structural shift in the allocation of power between the actors in a criminal trial – the judges, Prosecution and defense - away from that traditionally ascribed under an adversarial system and towards the power distribution structure more common to the inquisitorial system. By looking at the Statutes and RPEs of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), it is possible to identify varying degrees of power shifts in each court: across each we see a …