Law Commons^™

The Practice - And Rule - Of Law, Stephen Ellmann

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Clinical Legal Education's Contribution To Building Constitutionalism And Democracy In South Africa: Past, Present, And Future, Peggy Maisel, Shaheda Mahomed, Meetali Jain

Faculty Scholarship

Clinical Legal Education (“CLE”) courses were first introduced in South Africa nearly fifty years ago. Since then, their role has changed from addressing legal problems perpetrated by an oppressive system, to strengthening South Africa’s transition to democracy. The end of apartheid has been accompanied by a transition of focus from private law to public law. South Africa currently has seventeen public universities, each of which has a law faculty and a legal clinic. Many clinical programs’ missions are primarily dedicated to community service and providing access to justice.

Although CLE programs have undertaken some human rights and law reform work, …

Habeas Data: Comparative Constitutional Interventions From Latin America Against Neoliberal States Of Insecurity And Surveillance, Marc Tizoc Gonzalez

Chicago-Kent Law Review

To cultivate the next twenty years of LatCrit theory, praxis, and community, the afterword looks back to LatCrit’s Critical Global Classroom (2003–04) (CGC), an ABA-accredited summer study-abroad program. The CGC invited U.S. law students to study comparative constitutionalism, law and society, and truth and reconciliation movements while sojourning Chile, Argentina, and South Africa under the question: “Shall the recent history of the Global South become the imminent fate of the Global North?” While enrolled in the 2004 CGC, the author learned about the extraordinary constitutional writ of habeas data, which various Latin American countries adopted as they reconstituted their …

(Anti)Canonizing Courts, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Within U.S. constitutional culture, courts stand curiously apart from the society in which they sit. Among the many purposes this process of alienation serves is to “neutralize” the cognitive dissonance produced by Americans’ current self-conception and the role our forebears’ social and political culture played in producing historic injustice. The legal culture establishes such dissonance in part by structuring American constitutional argument around anticanonical cases: most especially “Dred Scott v. Sandford,” “Plessy v. Ferguson,” and “Lochner v. New York.” The widely held view that these decisions were “wrong the day they were decided” emphasizes the role of independent courts in …

18th Annual Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. Lecture, Eric H. Holder Jr.

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Consumer Indebtedness Crisis: Law School Clinics As Laboratories For Generating Effective Legal Responses, Peggy Maisel

Faculty Scholarship

For the legal system to operate effectively, it must address problems arising from the absence of needed laws, or, if enacted, of laws that have been drafted poorly or are not being implemented in a fair and just manner. Since law schools are generally part of a larger university community, they are uniquely placed to serve as laboratories to find solutions to such problems, perhaps nowhere more so than in their legal clinics. The latter have in fact often played the role of legal innovators, but their contributions to the law and therefore to society at large have been little …

The Education And Licensing Of Attorneys And Advocates In South Africa, Peggy Maisel

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the current organization of the South African bar and describes the legal education system and the licensing requirements for both attorneys and advocates, as well as those for foreign attorneys. Interspersed throughout the article are discussions of the system’s strengths and weaknesses, particularly in light of the transformation required after the end of apartheid, including some of the key challenges still facing South Africa.

Marking The Path Of The Law, Stephen Ellmann

Articles & Chapters

This article, published in South Africa's Constitutional Court Review, focuses on the Constitutional Court of South Africa in order to discuss the nature of constitutional judging more generally. Looking to Brown v. Board of Education as an example, it argues that technical skill – though obviously important – is not the highest virtue of the constitutional judge, and that a central attribute of constitutional judging is commitment to the values of the constitution. But commitment to values is more than a matter of rational assent. As everyday experience and neurological evidence teach us, commitment naturally and unavoidably involves the judge’s …

People, Times, Law School Leadership Join To Launch South Africa Program, David L. Chambers

Articles

Professor Emeritus David Chambers launched Michigan Law’s South Africa externship program 10 years ago just as that country was emerging from apartheid and beginning to function under its new constitution, adopted in 1996. Here Chambers recalls how the externship program began. Now the Wade H. McCree Jr. Collegiate Professor Emeritus of Law, Chambers directed the program until his retirement from active teaching in 2003.

An Alternative Model To United States Bar Examinations: The South African Community Service Experience In Licensing Attorneys, Peggy Maisel

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the system of educating and licensing attorneys in South Africa to determine whether that country’s experience can provide guidance to jurisdictions in the United States that are considering proposals to reduce or eliminate the importance of bar examinations. The analysis set out here is supplemented by a companion article, providing a first-hand account of the South African system by Ms. Thuli Mhlungu, who was educated and sought admission to the bar during the last years of apartheid and the early years of the new democratic regime.

Examining the situation in South Africa makes particular sense because South …

Moral Responsibility Needed For 'Just Law'

William Harvey (1966-1971)

No abstract provided.