Law Commons^™

Neo-Orthodoxy In Academic Freedom, J. Peter Byrne

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This review essay analyzes two recent books that advance neo-orthodox theories of academic freedom: Matthew Finkin and Robert Post, For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom, and Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time. Both books develop principles articulated in the American Association of University Professors 1915 Declaration, which emphasize the role of faculty in advancing knowledge and the need to insulate professional evaluation of academic work from lay, political interference. This review essay defends the return to protection of the scholarly search for truth as the touchstone of academic freedom, offers critiques of the authors’ …

Fighting Freestyle: The First Amendment, Fairness, And Corporate Reputation, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

There are three distinct groups who might want to engage in speech about commercial entities or to constrain those commercial entities from making particular claims of their own. Competitors may sue each other for false advertising, consumers may sue businesses, and government regulators may impose requirements on what businesses must and may not say. In this context, this Article will evaluate a facially persuasive but ultimately misguided claim about corporate speech: that because consumers regularly get to say nasty things about corporations under the lax standards governing defamation of public figures, corporations must be free to make factual claims subject …

The Next Generation: Creating New Peace Processes In The Middle East, Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Irena Nutenko

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay describes how Israeli students in a course on mediation and consensus building taught in an Israeli university law department by and American law professor and an Israeli instructor analyzed and studied the conflict in the Middle East. It describes the suggestions they made for process design for the next stages of whatever peace process might emerge for the region. In light of the students' suggestions, the authors present some ideas as to how different approaches to reconciliation and peace might be used, managed, and coordinated.

From Choice To Reproductive Justice: De-Constitutionalizing Abortion Rights, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Essay argues that the right to abortion constitutionalized in Roe v. Wade is by some measure at odds with a capacious understanding of the demands of reproductive justice. No matter its rationale, the constitutional right to abortion is fundamentally a negative right that rhetorically keeps the state out of the domain of family life. As such, the decision privatizes not only the abortion decision, but also parenting, by rendering the decision to carry a pregnancy to term a choice. It thereby legitimates a minimalist state response to the problems of pregnant women who carry their pregnancies to term and …

Updating The Merger Guidelines: Comments, Steven C. Salop, Serge Moresi

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

These comments (originally submitted to the DOJ and FTC in November 2009) make a number of comments relevant to revising the Merger Guidelines. The comments focus on the use of the GUPPI (gross upward pricing pressure index) in unilateral effects analysis. They also comment on the deterrence and incipiency standard, exclusionary effects of horizontal mergers and market definition when there are multi-product firms or pre-merger coordination, among other issues.

Economies Of Desire: Fair Use And Marketplace Assumptions, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

At the moment that “incentives” for creation meet “preferences” for the same, the economic account of copyright loses its explanatory power. This piece explores the ways in which the desire to create can be excessive, beyond rationality, and free from the need for economic incentive. Psychological and sociological concepts can do more to explain creative impulses than classical economics. As a result, a copyright law that treats creative activity as a product of economic incentives can miss the mark and harm what it aims to promote. The idea of abundance—even overabundance—in creativity can help define the proper scope of copyright …

Chronicling The Complexification Of Negotiation Theory And Practice, Carrie Menkel-Meadow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The essay reviews the content of twenty-five years of the Harvard Program on Negotiation's Negotiation Journal, identifying themes and issues explored on its pages in the past, the current issues challenging the field’s scholars and practitioners, and the issues likely to confront us in the future. It argues that while we in the field hoped for simple, elegant, and universal theories of negotiation and conflict resolution, the last twenty-five years have demonstrated the increasing complexification of negotiation theory and practice, from increased numbers of parties and issues, and dilemmas of intertemporal commitments, ethics, accountability, and relationships of private action to …

Cruelty, Prison Conditions, And The Eighth Amendment, Sharon Dolovich

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, but its normative force derives chiefly from its use of the word cruel. For this prohibition to be meaningful in a society where incarceration is the primary mode of criminal punishment, it is necessary to determine when prison conditions are cruel. Yet the Supreme Court has thus far avoided this question, instead holding in Farmer v. Brennan that unless some prison official actually knew of and disregarded a substantial risk of serious harm to prisoners, prison conditions are not “punishment” within the meaning of the Eighth Amendment. Farmer’s reasoning, however, does not …

Intent To Contract, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

There is a remarkable difference between black-letter contract laws of the United States and England. In England, the existence of a contract is supposedly conditioned on the parties' intent to be legally bound, while section 21 of the Second Restatement of Contracts states that "[n]either real nor apparent intention that a promise be legally binding is essential to the formation of a contract." There are also differences within U.S. law on the issue. While section 21 describes courts' approach to most contracts, the parties' intent to contact can be a condition of validity of preliminary agreements, domestic agreements and social …

Punishing Pharmaceutical Companies For Unlawful Promotion Of Approved Drugs: Why The False Claims Act Is The Wrong Rx, Vicki W. Girard

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article criticizes the shift in focus from correction and compliance to punishment of pharmaceutical companies allegedly violating the Food, Drug, & Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act) prohibitions on unlawful drug promotion. Traditionally, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has addressed unlawful promotional activities under the misbranding and new drug provisions of the FD&C Act. Recently though, the Justice Department (DOJ) has expanded the purview of the False Claims Act to include the same allegedly unlawful behavior on the theory that unlawful promotion “induces” physicians to prescribe drugs that result in the filing of false claims for reimbursement. Unchecked and unchallenged, …

Incarceration American-Style, Sharon Dolovich

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the United States today, incarceration is more than just a mode of criminal punishment. It is a distinct cultural practice with its own aesthetic and technique, a practice that has emerged in recent decades as a catch-all mechanism for managing social ills. In this essay, I argue that this emergent carceral system has become self-generating—that American-style incarceration, through the conditions it inflicts, produces the very conduct society claims to abhor and thereby guarantees a steady supply of offenders whose incarceration the public will continue to demand. I argue, moreover, that this reproductive process works to create a class of …

Ernst Freund, Felix Frankfurter And The American Rechtsstaat: A Transatlantic Shipwreck, 1894-1932, Daniel R. Ernst

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

From the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 through the New Deal, American legislators commonly endowed administrative agencies with broad discretionary power. They did so over the objections of an intellectual founder of the American administrative state. The American-born, German-educated lawyer and political scientist Ernst Freund developed an Americanized version of the Rechtsstaat—a government bound by fixed and definite rules—in an impressive body of scholarship between 1894 and 1915. In 1920 he eagerly took up an offer from the Commonwealth Fund to finance a comprehensive study of administration in the United States. Here was his chance to show …

The International Response To Climate Change: An Agenda For Global Health, Lindsay F. Wiley, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As the international community negotiates a successor to the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), there is new reason to hope that meaningful action might be taken to prevent devastating climate change. Even the more ambitious mitigation targets currently under negotiation, however, will not be sufficient to avoid a profound effect on the public's health in coming decades, with the world's poorest, most vulnerable populations bearing the disproportionate burden. The influence of historic and current emissions will be so substantial that it is imperative to reduce global emissions while at the same time preparing …

Healthy Planet, Healthy People: Integrating Global Health Into The International Response To Climate Change, Lindsay F. Wiley

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The potentially groundbreaking negotiations currently underway on the international response to climate change and national implementation of commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) include a number of hotly contested issues: (1) what degree of climate change is acceptable as a basis for emissions targets, (2) to what extent and in what ways climate change mitigation should incorporate emissions reductions or increased sinks for developing countries, (3) whether the legal regime governing mitigation can take advantage of the huge mitigation potential of changed practices in the land use and agricultural sectors, (4) how adaptation should be …

The Torture Memos: The Case Against The Lawyers, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

How (Not) To Think Like A Punisher, Alice G. Ristroph

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article examines the several and sometimes contradictory accounts of sentencing in proposed revisions to the Model Penal Code. At times, sentencing appears to be an art, dependent upon practical wisdom; in other instances, sentencing seems more of a science, dependent upon close analysis of empirical data. I argue that the new Code provisions are at their best when they acknowledge the legal and political complexities of sentencing, and at their worst when they invoke the rhetoric of desert. When the Code focuses on the sentencing process in political context, it offers opportunities to deploy both practical wisdom and empirical …

Pierson V. Post: The New Learning, Daniel R. Ernst

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Pierson v. Post, 3 Caines 175 (N.Y. 1805), one of the most commonly assigned cases in the first-year Property course, was a dispute over the ownership of a fox discovered at large “upon a certain wild and uninhabited, unpossessed and waste land, called the beach.” For a very long time, all that was known about the case, other than the report itself, was a vivid but antiquarian account published in the Sag Harbor Express of October 24, 1895, by the judge and local historian Henry Parsons Hedges (1817-1911). Hedges claimed to have met Jesse Pierson (1780-1840) and Lodowick Post …

Legal Obligations: The Proper Role Of White House Lawyers, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

An opinion issued on Aug. 1, 2002, by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel held that the federal statute that makes it a crime to commit torture outside the United States should not be read to “apply to the President’s detention and interrogation of enemy combatants pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority.” The opinion further concluded that if the statute did criminalize interrogations ordered by the president, it was unconstitutional.

The memorandum, which has become known as the “torture memo,” figures prominently in the ongoing public debate about whether there should be …

The Same-Sex Future, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

A Law Library Development Project In Iraq: Looking Back Two Years Later, Kimberli Kelmor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Sometimes you get a chance to work on a project so complex, even you don't come to fully understand its impact until years later. At least that has been the experience for me regarding the opportunity I had to work in Iraq with the International Human Rights Law Institute (IHRLI) from February 2004 to January 1, 2006. As I reported in a previous essay, IHRLI, an institute of the DePaul University College of Law headed by Cherif Bassiouni, received a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Higher Education and Development (HEAD) contract to work with three Iraqi law schools.' …

Wyeth V. Levine And Its Implications, Brian Wolfman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Wyeth v. Levine sharply limited the availability of implied preemption as a defense in pharmaceutical cases. In this Analysis & Perspective, attorney Brian Wolfman discusses the decision and its implications for prescription drug litigation as well as litigation in other areas that are regulated by the federal government.

After Wyeth, Wolfman says, a defendant in a prescription drug case must demonstrate a ‘‘tight fit between the labeling change proposed by the manufacturer (and rejected by the FDA) and the labeling change that the plaintiff contends would have prevented her injuries.’’ Moreover, he says, …

The Perilous Dialogue, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The master metaphor in the national security dialogue is, indeed, “security or freedom”. It dominates the counterterrorist discourse both in the United States and abroad. Transcripts from debates in Ireland’s Dáil Éireann, Turkey’s Büyük Millet Meclisi, and Australia’s Parliament are filled with reference to the need to weigh the value of liberty against the threat posed by terrorism. Perhaps nowhere is this more pronounced than in the United Kingdom, where, for decades, counterterrorist debates have turned on this framing. Owing in part, though, to different constitutional structures, what “security or freedom” means in America differs from what it means in …

What To Do About The Torturers?, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Whom Do You Trust? A Reply To Prof. Kahn, Stephen B. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In his 2008 opinion in Knight v. Commissioner, Chief Justice John Roberts harshly criticized then Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor, writing that her approach to the Internal Revenue Code “flies in the face of the statute.” In the August 3 issue of Tax Notes, I argued that Roberts’ criticism of Sotomayor was “logically flawed and unwarranted.” In the September 21 issue of Tax Notes, Prof. Douglas Kahn defended Robert’s criticism of Sotomayor as “persuasive and accurate” and attacked Sotomayor’s opinion in the case and my defense of what she wrote. I believe that Prof. Kahn’s arguments in defense of …

Postracial Discrimination, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Claims of racial injustice can be challenged by arguing that the culture makes it possible for minorities to compete with whites on a level playing field. Under this reasoning, racial disparities that continue to inhere in the allocation of societal benefits and burdens must be caused by the attributes of individual minority group members themselves, rather than by any invidious consideration of their race. The election of President Obama now gives this argument more apparent plausibility than it has had in the past. Indeed, if one were inclined to preserve the nation’s tradition of privileging white interests over the interests …

Human Dignity, Humiliation, And Torture, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Modern human rights instruments ground human rights in the concept of human dignity, without providing an underlying theory of human dignity. This paper examines the central importance of human dignity, understood as not humiliating people, in traditional Jewish ethics. It employs this conception of human dignity to examine and criticize U.S. use of humiliation tactics and torture in the interrogation of terrorism suspects.

Managers, Shareholders, And The Corporate Double Tax, Michael Doran

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The United States generally imposes two levels of federal income tax on corporate profits. The first level taxes income to the corporation; the second level taxes dividends to the shareholders. Academics and policymakers have long considered this double tax to be "unusual, unfair, and inefficient." Legislators from both political parties have proposed integration of the corporate and individual income taxes on many occasions, but the proposals consistently fail. Prior academic analyses have struggled to explain the failure of integration. This paper demonstrates how certain managers, shareholders, and collateral interests rationally favor certain integration proposals and oppose other integration proposals, while …

Financial Crisis Containment, Anna Gelpern

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article maps financial crisis containment - extraordinary measures to stop the spread of financial distress - as a category of legal and policy choice. I make three claims.

First, containment is distinct from financial regulation, crisis prevention and resolution. Containment is brief; it targets the immediate term. It involves claims of emergency, rule-breaking, time inconsistency and moral hazard. In contrast, regulation, prevention and resolution seek to establish sound incentives for the long term. Second, containment decisions deviate from non-crisis norms in predictable ways, and are consistent across diverse countries and crises. Containment invariably entails three kinds of choices: choices …

Making Sense Of The Establishment Clause, Jeffrey Shulman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

While the jurisprudence of the Establishment Clause may not make much sense (common or otherwise) as a substantive legal matter, it does make sense as a series of jurisprudential maneuvers by which the Court has sought to make more room for religion in civic life. In fact, there is a method to the “massive jumble... of doctrines and rules” that forms the law of church-state relations. It is the method of a somewhat disorderly retreat from the Constitution’s foundational principle of disestablishment. The accommodations made by the Court to religious belief and conduct have allowed for discrimination against non-religion, edging …

Does Brummeria Sweep Clean? A U.S. Tax-Law Perspective, Stephen B. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The title of this article draws on the sixteenth-century Irish proverb, 'a new broom sweeps clean'. It asks whether the recent judgment in Commissioner for the South African Revenue Service v Bruinmeria Renaissance Ltd sweeps clean in the sense of improving the income tax.

The taxpayer, Brummeria Renaissance Ltd, operated a retirement village. A resident of the village would provide a loan to the company interest-free, that is, with zero stated interest. In return, the company would provide the resident with the right to occupy housing in the retirement village. When the resident vacated the housing, the company was obligated …