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La Responsabilisation De L'Economie: What The United States Can Learn From The New French Law On Consumer Overindebtedness, Jason J. Kilborn Jan 2017

La Responsabilisation De L'Economie: What The United States Can Learn From The New French Law On Consumer Overindebtedness, Jason J. Kilborn

Jason Kilborn

This Article on the French law continues a study of European consumer debt-relief systems, which the author began previously in an article on the German system. With rapid legal and practical developments in consumer debt-relief law, Europe provides an excellent comparative legal laboratory for observing the potential benefits and pitfalls of consumer bankruptcy reforms. In particular, French and German experiences with long-term payment plans shed useful light on the great debate raging in the United States over similar plans.


Statutory Progress And Obstacles To Achieving An Effective Criminal Legislation Against The Modern Day Forms Of Slavery: The Case Of France, Bénédicte Bourgeois Jan 2017

Statutory Progress And Obstacles To Achieving An Effective Criminal Legislation Against The Modern Day Forms Of Slavery: The Case Of France, Bénédicte Bourgeois

Michigan Journal of International Law

In August 2013, the French Parliament passed a statute meant to bring domestic law into conformity with several European legal instruments recently adopted. The statute explicitly addressed for the first time contemporary forms of slavery, servitude, and forced labor by establishing a set of four offenses that criminalize these three types of severe labor exploitation. For lawmakers as well as for many stakeholders in the fight against modern-day slavery, that achievement marked the culmination of a series of piecemeal amendments to criminal law and narrow advances in case law, which gradually enhanced the penal repression of modern-day slavery over the …


Sex Quotas And Burkini Bans, Darren Rosenblum Jan 2017

Sex Quotas And Burkini Bans, Darren Rosenblum

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Essay recounts how feminist theorists and activists managed to write their ideals into the fabric of French law and culture, and how nonfeminists began to appropriate those ideals. Parité, the 2000 law that requires half of all candidates for public office be women, saw French feminists first engineer a change in French universalism to respect sex difference; although not wholly successful, Parité advanced women's political inclusion. Then, like a drop of water in a pond, these feminist ideas disappeared in plain sight: they became intrinsic to French state norms and public values. As they became woven into such norms, …


France Bans The Veil: What French Republicanism Has To Say About It, Stéphane Mechoulan Dec 2016

France Bans The Veil: What French Republicanism Has To Say About It, Stéphane Mechoulan

Stéphane Mechoulan

In 2011, France banned the wearing of face-veils in public.  This criminalization of face covering was criticized by the U.S. State Department, prominent NGOs, and legal academics of the Anglo-liberal tradition as an improper violation of freedom of religion and expression.  Against this backdrop, the 2014 decision of the European Court of Human Rights upholding the ban provides a timely opportunity to better understand the republican rationale behind it.  Through reconsidering the competing conceptions of the common good produced by Anglo-liberalism and French republicanism I explore how the ban aims to preserve an organizing principle of the Rousseauist social contract.  …


The French Prosecutor As Judge. The Carpenter’S Mistake?, Mathilde Cohen Dec 2016

The French Prosecutor As Judge. The Carpenter’S Mistake?, Mathilde Cohen

Mathilde Cohen

In France as elsewhere, prosecutors and their offices are seldom seen as agents of democracy. A distinct theoretical framework is itself missing to conceptualize the prosecutorial function in democratic states committed to the rule of law. What makes prosecutors democratically legitimate? Can they be made accountable to the public? Combining democratic theory with original qualitative empirical data, my hypothesis is that in the French context, prosecutors’ professional status and identity as judges determines to a great extent whether and how they can be considered democratic figures.
 
The French judicial function is defined more broadly than in the United States, …