Law Commons^™

The President's Private Dictionary: How Secret Definitions Undermine Domestic And Transnational Efforts At Executive Branch Accountability, Sudha Setty

Faculty Scholarship

The 2016 EU-U.S. Privacy Shield is an agreement allowing companies to move customer data between the European Union and the United States without running afoul of heightened privacy protections in the European Union. It was developed in response to EU concerns that the privacy rights of its citizens have been systematically abrogated by the U.S. government in the name of national security, and contains a variety of assurances that the United States will respect and protect the privacy rights of EU citizens.

How trustworthy are the U.S. assurances under the Privacy Shield? Both the Bush and Obama administrations secretly interpreted …

Lawfare 101: A Primer, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Dunlap discusses the concept of lawfare—using law as a form of asymmetrical warfare—and provides some considerations for how to combat this phenomenon. The article establishes the intellectual framework and thematic direction for this Issue of Military Review.

Amicus Curaie, Submitted Susan Akram, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

B Summary of Argument

7. Palestinian refugees fall under a legal regime that is distinct from all other refugees in the world.¹² As such, they are covered by a series of special provisions that apply only to them and no other refugees. Their special status resulted from the decisions of the drafters of key international treaties to exclude Palestinian refugees from the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the 1954 Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons, and to conditionally exclude them from the benefits of the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees. …

The Civil Redress And Historical Memory Acts Of 2029: A Legislative Proposal, William J. Aceves

Faculty Scholarship

During the extant “War on Terror,” U.S. and foreign nationals who did not engage in hostilities were detained and mistreated abroad by the United States or by other countries with the acquiescence of the United States. These individuals were accused of being terrorists or were suspected of associating with terror groups, but they were, in fact, innocent. They were eventually released and were never charged by the United States with any crime. Despite their innocence, the United States has failed to provide them with any form of redress for their mistreatment. The Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations refused to apologize …

Response To Professor Holper's Article, "Redefining 'Particularly Serious Crimes' In Refugee Law", Fatma Marouf

Faculty Scholarship

An individual who faces a significant risk of persecution in her home country is barred from asylum in the United States if she is convicted of a “particularly serious crime” (“PSC”). Despite the grave consequences of such a conviction, there is relatively little scholarship exploring how a PSC should be defined. The term, which comes from the UN Refugee Convention, was incorporated into the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1980.

Professor Holper’s article, Redefining “Particularly Serious Crimes” in Refugee Law, makes an important contribution to the literature by showing how the historical trajectory of the PSC definition mirrors the “severity …

Introduction To Symposium On Unauthorized Military Interventions For The Public Good, Monica Hakimi

Faculty Scholarship

On April 6, 2017, the United States launched fifty-nine Tomahawk missiles against an air base in Syria, after evidence surfaced that Bashar Al-Assad’s regime had again used chemical weapons against its people. President Trump announced that the strikes were intended “to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.” But as of this Symposium’s publication, the United States has not articulated a formal legal justification for the strikes. Instead, it reportedly circulated a document that listed several case-specific considerations that, in its view, justified the use of force. Yet the global reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Many states …