Law Commons^™

Overvaluing Uniformity, Amanda Frost

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"E NSURING the uniform interpretation of federal law has long been considered one of the federal courts' primary objectives, and uniformity is regularly cited in some of the most intractable debates about the structure and function of the federal court system. For example, specialized courts are lauded for their ability to ensure uniformity in the areas of law over which they have jurisdic- tion. Similarly, proponents of exclusive federal jurisdiction contend that the federal courts provide greater consistency in the interpre- tation of federal law than could fifty different state courts. Some commentators claim that Congress' power to create exceptions …

The Past, Present, And Future Of The United Nations: A Comment On Paul Kennedy And The Parliament Of Man (El Pasado Como Prologo: El Futuro Glorioso Y El Turbio Presente De Las Naciones Unidas (Revista De Paul Kennedy, El Parlamento De La Humanidad)), Kenneth Anderson

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American University, WCL Research Paper No. 2008-72Abstract:This is the original Spanish language version of an essay (10,000 words) appearing in the Revista de Libros (Madrid), considering the history and future of the United Nations and global governance through the lens of Paul Kennedy's recent work, The Parliament of Man. The essay is highly skeptical of what it describes as platonism about the future of the UN as the seat of global governance. It offers an alternative view of how to consider the work of the UN, in three areas: security, economic development, and values. The essay argues that, particularly with …

'Dynamic Competition' Does Not Excuse Monopolization, Jonathan Baker

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This comment on a forthcoming article by Keith Hylton and David Evans explains why considerations of "dynamic competition" do not argue against antitrust enforcement. While the prospect of achieving monopoly may foster innovation, that observation misleads as to appropriate antitrust policy unless qualified by the observation that the push of competition generally spurs innovation more than the pull of monopoly. Moreover, the longstanding doctrinal rule that mere monopoly pricing is not illegal should not be read as demonstrating that antitrust law values monopolies for their role in promoting innovation.

The Inter-American System Of Human Rights: Challenges For The Future, Claudio Grossman

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The Inter-American system is a combination of human rights norms and supervisory institutions within the Americas. The applicable rules consist primarily of the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man ("American Declaration") and the American Convention on Human Rights ("American Convention"). The institutions involved are the organs responsible for supervising compliance with the established rules: the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ("the Commission") and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ("the Court"). The system performs supervisory functions basically through country reports adopted by the Commission which describe the overall human rights situation in a country and decisions in …

Banding Together: Reflections On The Role Of The Women's Bar Association Of The District Of Columbia And The Washington College Of Law In Promoting Women's Rights, Jamie Abrams, Daniela Kraiem

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The Washington College of Law and the Women's Bar Association of the District of Columbia share an important historical connection; Ellen Spencer Mussey and Emma Gillett founded both institutions together, in 1898 and 1917, respectively. Mussey and Gillett were pioneers in legal education, legal reform, and the development of women lawyers. 2 More significant than the work they performed during their lives, however, is the legacy of activism, reform, and support that they ignited by founding two institutions that advance women in the law. These institutions have trained and supported generations of women lawyers through world wars and depressions, through …

Patient-Tailored Medicine, Part One: The Impact Of Race And Genetics On Medicine, Corrine Parver

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One of the more controversial elements of advancing technology is the use of race and genetics to help create more specific types of medicines that will help combat diseases and conditions that appear to be more prevalent within certain races or ethnic groups than in others. Considering the history of discrimination and inadequate treatment of individuals on the bases of race and gender in the United States, there is justifiable concern that race or gender-based treatment could be used to legitimate discrimination. On the other hand, there is substantial proof that the current method of creating medicines for the general …

Paper Trail: Working Papers And Recent Scholarship, Jonathan Baker

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Editor’s Note: In this edition we review two papers by leading government economists, past, present, and perhaps future. The first paper, by Dennis Carlton and Ken Heyer, takes a cautious policy approach to single-firm conduct based on theory, empirical evidence, and “considerations of administrability and consistency with general and widely held presumptions” and sets out four “underlying principles” that should govern policy toward single-firm conduct. The second paper, on the role of market concentration in modern economic analysis of horizontal mergers, is by Jonathan Baker, in which he explains how market concentration can sensibly be used for merger analysis. Send …

The Prison Rape Elimination Act: Implementation And Unresolved Issues, Brenda V. Smith

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In September 2003, the United States Congress unanimously passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). The Act was the culmination of a collaborative effort between human rights, faith-based, and prison rape advocacy. The aim of the Act is to create zero tolerance for prison rape by using a variety of tools or mechanisms including data collection; grants to the states; technical assistance to the states to improve their practices; research; the development of national standards; and the diminution of federal criminal justice assistance to states who fail to comply with the standards. This article aims to provide a brief background …

Tribute To The Honorable Irma Raker Upon Her Retirement, Barlow Burke

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In this article the author pays tribute to Judge Raker’s pre-law school tour de force citizen testimony in Eger v. Stone, 253 A.2d 372 (Md. 1969), which established the standard for credibility of lay witnesses in zoning cases, acceptance of citizen testimony as establishing the basis for an application’s denial, and acceptance of hearsay in an administrative forum in Maryland.

Judge Raker was a student of the author, who taught a course in modern land law at the Washington College of Law during Judge Raker’s tenure in law school. The article discusses two of Judge Raker’s real estate transaction opinions, …

Digitus Impudicus: The Middle Finger And The Law, Ira Robbins

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The middle finger is one of the most commonly used insulting gestures in the United States. The finger, which is used to convey a wide range of emotions, is visible on streets and highways, in schools, shopping malls, and sporting events, in courts and execution chambers, in advertisements and on magazine covers, and even on the hallowed floor of the United States Senate. Despite its ubiquity, however, as a number of recent cases demonstrate, those who use the middle finger in public run the risk of being stopped, arrested, prosecuted, fined, and even incarcerated under disorderly conduct or breach of …

Reflections: The Honorable Irma S. Raker – Judge, Teacher, And Role Model, David E. Aaronson

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This article is a sketch of Judge Irma S. Raker’s career from her days as a law student at Washington College of Law to her distinguished career as a jurist and teacher. Judge Raker’s first legal job was as an Assistant State’s Attorney in Montgomery County, Maryland, where her appointment as the first woman litigator was a milestone in the local legal community. She was appointed in 1980 to serve as a judge on the District Court for Montgomery County and, in 1982, to serve on the Circuit Court for Montgomery County. Judge Raker decided a number of seminal cases, …

Reflections: The Honorable Irma S. Raker – Judge, Teacher, And Role Model, Elizabeth I. Boals

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This article is a sketch of Judge Irma S. Raker’s career from her days as a law student at Washington College of Law to her distinguished career as a jurist and teacher. Judge Raker’s first legal job was as an Assistant State’s Attorney in Montgomery County, Maryland, where her appointment as the first woman litigator was a milestone in the local legal community. She was appointed in 1980 to serve as a judge on the District Court for Montgomery County and, in 1982, to serve on the Circuit Court for Montgomery County. Judge Raker decided a number of seminal cases, …

Reflections: The Honorable Irma S. Raker – Judge, Teacher, And Role Model, Anthony C. Morella

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This article is a sketch of Judge Irma S. Raker’s career from her days as a law student at Washington College of Law to her distinguished career as a jurist and teacher. Judge Raker’s first legal job was as an Assistant State’s Attorney in Montgomery County, Maryland, where her appointment as the first woman litigator was a milestone in the local legal community. She was appointed in 1980 to serve as a judge on the District Court for Montgomery County and, in 1982, to serve on the Circuit Court for Montgomery County. Judge Raker decided a number of seminal cases, …

Complying With The National Institutes Of Health Public Access Policy: Copyright Considerations And Options, Michael Carroll

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This White Paper is written primarily for policymaking staff in universities and other institutional recipients of NIH support responsible for ensuring compliance with the Public Access Policy. The January 11, 2008, Public Access Policy imposes two new compliance mandates. First, the grantee must ensure proper manuscript submission. The version of the article to be submitted is the final version over which the author has control, which must include all revisions made after peer review. The statutory command directs that the manuscript be submitted to PMC “upon acceptance for publication.” That is, the author’s final manuscript should be submitted to PMC …

Hiding Behind Reciprocity: The Temporary Presence Exception And Patent Infringement Avoidance, Jonas Anderson

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No abstract provided.

Short Notes On Teaching About The Micro-Politics Of Class, With Examples From Torts And Employment Law Casebooks, Susan Carle

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INTRODUCTION: This short Essay explores several potential teaching moments in which one might raise issues concerning the micro-politics of socioeconomic class. I discuss cases found in popular casebooks for three course areas in which I teach: torts, employment, and employment discrimination law. All of these courses raise questions of distributive justice, in the sense that they all deal with issues about how economic and social resources, including legal rights or protections, get allocated between "haves" and "have nots." Tort law, as Guido Calabresi pointed out long ago, is at its center about the politics of distribution; its core questions are …

Food, Drugs, And Droods: A Historical Consideration Of Definitions And Categories In American Food And Drug Law, Lewis Grossman

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This article explores the development and interaction of the legal and cultural categories food and drug from the late nineteenth century to the present. It is based not only on legal and historical research, but also on theories of category formation from the fields of linguistics and psychology.The scope of the Food and Drug Administration's power is defined primarily by the list of product categories over which it has jurisdiction. The statutory definitions of these categories (food, drug, cosmetic, device, and human biological product) thus delineate the outer boundaries of the arena within which the agency operates. The definitions are …

Achieving Policymaking Consensus: The (Unfortunate) Waning Of Negotiated Rulemaking, Jeffrey Lubbers

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Introduction: As the ADR movement made its way from the courts to the agency hearing rooms in the 1980s, negotiated rulemaking (sometimes called "regulatory negotiation" or simply "reg-neg") also emerged on a parallel track as an alternative to traditional procedures for drafting proposed regulations. This exemplar of regulatory reform was based on two insights: (1) that the usual process of written notice-and-comment rulemaking has an intrinsic weakness because stakeholders engaged in it do not interact with each other or with the agency; and (2) in certain situations, it is possible to bring together representatives of the agency and the various …

Bosnia V. Serbia: Lessons From The Encounter Of The International Court Of Justice With The International Criminal Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia, Rebecca Hamilton, Richard J. Goldstone

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This article uses the recent judgment of the ICJ in Bosnia v. Serbia to highlight the potential problems that arise when international courts have to adjudicate on overlapping situations. It describes the dispute between the ICJ and the ICTY on the appropriate legal standard for the attribution of state responsibility, and finds that the ICJ’s approach in this case suggests that those keen to minimize the fragmentation of international law between adjudicative bodies should not overlook the need for consistency within those bodies.With regard to fact finding, this article raises serious concerns about the manner in which the ICJ relied …

Victims' Participation In The Investigations Of The International Criminal Court, Susana Sacouto, Katherine A. Cleary

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No abstract provided.

Structure And Integrity, Susan Carle

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In this Review Essay of David Luban's Legal Ethics and Human Dignity, I argue that although Professor Luban has not had much to say until now about "structural" concerns - namely, how lawyers' locations within institutions that organize access to power shape or should shape those lawyers' conduct - in his most recent work, another approach slips in as a supplement to his individualist framework. In this emerging supplement, structural concerns become increasingly important. Although individual integrity continues to matter most in Professor Luban's world view, it increasingly matters in the context of structural relations in which lawyers' ethical duties …

Radical Environmental Change In The Polar Regions, William Snape

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One need only to look at a comparison of summer Arctic ice extent from 1979 to 2007 to understand something significant is happening. In the span of a generation, the millennia-old Arctic has shrunk by roughly two-thirds and could easily be ice free in the summer within a decade. Or if that is not enough, consider that in the winter of 2008, a massive chunk of ice broke off from the Antarctic Peninsula, and another ice sheet the size of Northern Ireland (or Connecticut, if you prefer) hangs on by a thread. Over the past fifty years, the Arctic and …

O.J., Batson And Snyder: Lessons From An Intersecting Trilogy, Camille Nelson

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INTRODUCTION There are few cases that inform our collective understanding of the American jury system more than Batson v. Kentucky. This case serves as a touchstone in Equal Protection jurisprudence and can be viewed as "the [U.S. Supreme Court's] most ambitious attempt to impose meaningful prohibitions on the use of race-based peremptory challenges." This case and its progeny provide a framework for the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause and also implicate the Sixth Amendment's jury-trial guarantees. The Batson holding has been expanded to guard not only against the wrongful exclusion of jurors based upon race, but also …

Lessons From Hurricane Katrina: Prison Emergency Preparedness As A Constitutional Imperative, Ira P. Robbins

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Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst natural disasters ever to strike the United States, in terms of casualties, suffering, and financial cost. Often overlooked among Katrina’s victims are the 8,000 inmates who were incarcerated at Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) when Katrina struck. Despite a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, these men and women, some of whom had been held on charges as insignificant as public intoxication, remained in the jail as the hurricane hit, and endured days of rising, toxic waters, a lack of food and drinking water, and a complete breakdown of order within OPP. When the inmates …

Grand Jury Discretion And Constitutional Design, Roger Fairfax

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The grand jury possesses an unqualified power to decline to indict - despite probable cause that alleged criminal conduct has occurred. A grand jury might exercise this power, for example, to disagree with the wisdom of a criminal law or its application to a particular defendant. A grand jury might also use its discretionary power to send a message of disapproval regarding biased or unwise prosecutorial decisions or inefficient allocation of law enforcement resources in the community. This ability to exercise discretion on bases beyond the sufficiency of the evidence has been characterized pejoratively as grand jury nullification. The dominant …

The 'High Crime Area' Question: Requiring Verifiable And Quantifiable Evidence For Fourth Amendment Reasonable Suspicion Analysis, Andrew Ferguson, Damien Bernache

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This article proposes a legal framework to analyze the "high crime area" concept in Fourth Amendment reasonable suspicion challenges.Under existing Supreme Court precedent, reviewing courts are allowed to consider that an area is a "high crime area" as a factor to evaluate the reasonableness of a Fourth Amendment stop. See Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119 (2000). However, the Supreme Court has never defined a "high crime area" and lower courts have not reached consensus on a definition. There is no agreement on what a "high-crime area" is, whether it has geographic boundaries, whether it changes over time, whether it …

The Perils Of A Half-Built Bridge: Risk Perception, Shifting Majorities, And The Nuclear Power Debate, Amanda Leiter

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No abstract provided.

The Gravity Threshold Of The International Criminal Court, Susana Sácouto, Katherine A. Cleary

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From its inception, the world's first permanent International Criminal Court ("ICC" or "Court") was envisioned as a body that would preside over only those cases of most serious concern to the international community as a whole. Thus, the Court's subject matter jurisdiction is limited to the international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Moreover, Article 17(1)(d) of the Rome Statute provides that the Court shall determine that a case is inadmissible where the case is not of sufficient gravity to justify further action by the Court. This so-called "gravity threshold" has played a …

The Espionage Act And National Security Whisteblowing After Garcetti, Stephen I. Vladeck

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Should government employees ever have a right to disseminate classified national security information to the public? As a general matter, of course, the answer is "no." It is necessarily tautological that the central purpose of classifying information is to keep that information secret. But what if the information pertains to what we might describe as "unlawful secrets," and the individual in question has exhausted all possible non-public remedies, to no avail? Are there any circumstances in which the law enables the government employee to come forward? Should there be?

As this essay suggests, because of the broad language of the …

Paperless Litigation, Susan Bennett

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No abstract provided.