Law Commons^™

Making Treaty Implementation More Like Statutory Implementation, Jean Galbraith

Michigan Law Review

Both statutes and treaties are the “supreme law of the land,” and yet quite different practices have developed with respect to their implementation. For statutes, all three branches have embraced the development of administrative law, which allows the executive branch to translate broad statutory directives into enforceable obligations. But for treaties, there is a far more cumbersome process. Unless a treaty provision contains language that courts interpret to be directly enforceable, they will deem it to require implementing legislation from Congress. This Article explores and challenges the perplexing disparity between the administration of statutes and treaties. It shows that the …

Transatlantic Perspective On Judicial Deference In Administrative Law, Maciej Bernatt

Maciej Bernatt

The U.S. concept of judicial deference in administrative law limits the scope of judicial review of administrative agencies’ actions in the light of agencies’ superior expertise and separation of powers arguments. It may serve as an interesting point of reference for the European discussion about adequate institutional balance between administration and courts. The paper analyzes whether there are grounds for the validity of the concept of judicial deference in Continental Europe and in what areas (law, facts or both). As a starting point it is observed that it remains generally accepted in Europe that it is a role of courts …

Nature Or Nurture? Judicial Lawmaking In The European Court Of Justice And The Andean Tribunal Of Justice, Laurence R. Helfer, Karen J. Alter

Faculty Scholarship

Are international courts power-seeking by nature, expanding the reach and scope of international rules and the courts’ authority where permissive conditions allow? Or, does expansionist lawmaking require special nurturing? We investigate the relative influences of nature versus nurture by comparing expansionist lawmaking in the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ), the ECJ’s jurisdictional cousin and the third most active international court. We argue that international judges are more likely to become expansionist lawmakers where they are supported by substate interlocutors and compliance constituencies, including government officials, advocacy networks, national judges, and administrative agencies. This …

Islands Of Effective International Adjudication: Constructing An Intellectual Property Rule Of Law In The Andean Community, Laurence R. Helfer, Karen J. Alter, M. Florencia Guerzovich

Faculty Scholarship

The Andean Community - a forty-year-old regional integration pact of small developing countries in South America - is widely viewed as a failure. In this Article, we show that the Andean Community has in fact achieved remarkable success within one part of its legal system. The Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ) is the world's third most active international court, with over 1400 rulings issued to date. Over 90% of those rulings concern intellectual property (IP). The ATJ has helped to establish IP as a rule of law island in the Andean Community where national judges, administrative officials, and private parties …

Sending The Bureaucracy To War, Elena Baylis, David Zaring

Articles

Administrative law has been transformed after 9/11, much to its detriment. Since then, the government has mobilized almost every part of the civil bureaucracy to fight terrorism, including agencies that have no obvious expertise in that task. The vast majority of these bureaucratic initiatives suffer from predictable, persistent, and probably intractable problems - problems that contemporary legal scholars tend to ignore, even though they are central to the work of the writers who created and framed the discipline of administrative law.

We analyze these problems through a survey of four administrative initiatives that exemplify the project of sending bureaucrats to …

Regulatory Cooperation Between The European Commission And U.S. Administrative Agencies, George Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the policies and practices of the European Commission toward various forms of bilateral regulatory cooperation with administrative agencies of the United States. To place this Article's findings in a proper perspective, it is essential to understand both (A) the selection of the European Community (E.C.) as an appropriate overseas regulatory jurisdiction for such cooperation and (B) the reasons for focusing on the European Commission among the various E.C. institutions. Those questions are taken up in this Introduction. Part I describes in some detail the organization and functioning of the Commission. Part II – the core of this …