Law Commons^™

The Role Of Law And Lawyers In Japan And The United States, Isaac Shapiro, Michael K. Young

Michigan Journal of International Law

The issues raised in connection with delivery of legal services in Japan are complex and best understood against the backdrop of the development of the legal profession in Japan. Part I of this article discusses the history of the Japanese legal profession, especially its recent history. Part II shows how this development has shaped the issues in the current dispute. It recounts the development of the dispute, the arguments that have been made on the Japanese and American sides, and the course of the negotiations over legal services as part of the Japan-U.S. trade agenda. This article concludes with a …

Annex: Provisional Regulations On Lawyers Of The People's Republic Of China, Michigan Journal Of International Law

Michigan Journal of International Law

To some Western readers, the function of Chinese lawyers as described in translations of the Provisional Regulations will appear comparable to the function of lawyers in the United States and many Western European countries. In at least one news release following enactment of the law, however, the government of the People's Republic of China denied any apparent similarity. A reprint of the Regulations and the Chinese Government's position as published in the Renmin Ribao, the official government newspaper, follows.-eds.

The Practice Of Law By Foreign Lawyers In The Sultanate Of Oman, J. H. A. Mchugo

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article discusses the practice of foreign commercial lawyers operating through branch offices of foreign firms in the Sultanate of Oman. In order to see how the present situation has developed, it is necessary to consider the particular circumstances of modern Oman. Part I outlines some important aspects of Oman's history. Part II focuses on the development of the Omani legal and judicial system since 1970 with regard to commercial law. Finally, part III examines the practice of the foreign lawyer operating in Oman, and illustrates the kind of legal work which he may carry out.

Legal Practice Shaped By Loyalty To Tradition: The Case Of Saudi Arabia, Carolyn R. Ruis

Michigan Journal of International Law

This note employs Saudi Arabia as an example of an Islamic country that has retained its religious traditions while being forced by economic necessity to adopt some Western commercial practices. Part I reviews the legal system of Saudi Arabia, highlighting the major differences and similarities between it and Western commercial law. Part II considers the legal requirements and cultural norms which Western attorneys should be prepared to observe while practicing in a traditional Islamic society. It suggests that strict adherence to custom and the Saudi Government's recent attempts to strengthen restrictions on both the professional and personal lives of expatriates …

Obstacles To The Implementation Of The Treaty Of Rome Provisions For Transnational Legal Practice, Gerald L. Greengard

Michigan Journal of International Law

This note argues that the Treaty of Rome has had, and will continue to have, little impact on legal practitioners within the European Community. Part I examines Community barriers to transnational legal practice among the EC nations. It looks first at the history and shortcomings of the 1977 Directive on Freedom of Lawyers to Provide Services. It then describes the effect of the failure of the Council of the European Community to enact a directive mandating mutual recognition of legal degrees. It concludes that neither the Council nor the European Court of Justice is likely to eliminate existing Community-wide barriers …

The Two-Way Mirror: International Arbitration As Comparative Procedure, Andreas F. Lowenfeld

Michigan Journal of International Law

In particular, by focusing on selected aspects of the international procedure of international arbitration, as well as on different approaches to the problem of choosing the source of the law to be applied, the author hopes to give the outsider some feeling for the process, and some perception of how international arbitration is different both from domestic arbitration and from litigation in national courts. The author has an additional purpose, as well, however, though: to be sure not to sound too pretentious about it. Focusing on the record, on discovery, on examination of witnesses, and on choosing a choice of …

Humanitarian International Law In Islam: A General Outlook, Ahmed Zaki Yamani

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article covers the following topics: humanitarian law and humanistic law, general concepts of humanitarian international law in Islam: armed conflict of a non-international nature and armed conflict of an international nature, and wars against polytheists and apostates.

Ethical Problems Of An International Human Rights Law Practice, David Weissbrodt

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article examines two sources of ethical constraint on U.S. lawyers practicing international human rights law: the Model Code of Professional Responsibility (CPR or Model Code), which was adopted by the American Bar Association (ABA) in 1969, and the Model Rules of Professional Conduct (Model Rules), which were adopted in 1983. Part I establishes that these sources apply to the U.S. lawyer regardless of whether or not the lawyer is in the United States and whether or not he is acting as an attorney. Attorneys who leave the countries where they practice law and travel to other nations to observe …

Safeguarding Due Process In A Hostile Environment: Foreign Lawyers In South Africa, David S. Abramowitz

Michigan Journal of International Law

Part I of this note briefly describes the effect of apartheid on human rights in South Africa. It then examines how liberal South African attorneys use procedural due process, as defined by the rule of law, to counter these effects. Part II discusses the methods used by foreign attorneys to support South African human rights lawyers. In particular, this section focuses on the activities of the International Commission of Jurists and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The note concludes that infusing fair process into the South African legal order is the most significant contribution foreign lawyers can …

Gatt As A Framework For Multilateral Negotiations On Trade In Legal Services, Dean N. Menegas

Michigan Journal of International Law

While a number of commentators have discussed the adaptability of the GATT to problems of trade in services, none have specifically addressed its applicability to lawyering or other professional services. Part I considers the GATT's progress on services issues to date. Part II identifies and classifies the barriers to transnational legal practice. Part III explores the possibility of liberalizing many of these barriers through the application of GATT substantive concepts and the use of GATT procedural mechanisms.

Legal Services And The Trade And Tariff Act Of 1984, Michael K. Grace

Michigan Journal of International Law

Part I of this note outlines the major nontariff barriers (NTBs) to trade in services. Part II discusses the provisions of the Trade and Tariff Act that are aimed at the reduction of those barriers. Part III examines the applicability of the TTA to legal services and the potential limitations on the provisions of an international agreement for that particular service industry. It concludes that concerns over state sovereignty, while no longer posing a constitutional obstacle to an international agreement on trade in services, will remain an important political force in the shaping of such an agreement.

U.S. Law Of Attorney-Client Privilege As Applied To Non-U.S. Lawyers: A Reciprocity Issue?, Hetty L. Richardson

Michigan Journal of International Law

Part I of this note considers whether U.S. federal and state law applies the attorney-client privilege equally to communications with U.S. and non-U.S. attorneys. It concludes that, contrary to the ILP's position, the law on this issue is not firm. In light of the policy issues raised by the AM & S decision, part II considers factors that may justify discriminating between U.S. and non-U.S. lawyers, or among non-U.S. lawyers. It concludes that the public interest may be served best by extending the attorney-client privilege to communications with some, but not all, non-U.S. lawyers. Part III presents a proposal for …

Appendix 1: Treaties Of Friendship, Commerce And Navigation And Their Treatment Of Service Industries, Emily A. Arikaki

Michigan Journal of International Law

The following excerpt is from a 1981 article reviewing the development and current status of friendship, commerce and navigation (FCN) treaties and their treatment of the service industries. The article itself is based on the author's survey of the FCN treaties in force between the United States and other nations as of 1981. In December 1985, the author updated the excerpt to reflect the effect on services of the recent, FCN-type program of bilateral investment treaties.-eds.

Appendix 2: Annotated Bibliography, Michigan Journal Of International Law

Michigan Journal of International Law

Additional reading related to the articles in this volume.

Index, Michigan Journal Of International Law

Michigan Journal of International Law

Index of terms used in this volume.

The Revision Of Employment-At-Will Enters A New Phase, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

The most significant development in the whole field of labor law during the past decade was the growing willingness of the courts to modify the traditional doctrine of employment-at-will. Applying either tort or contract theory, or both, judges in some thirty jurisdictions declared their readiness to blunt the worst rigors of the rule that an employment contract of indefinite duration can be terminated by either party at any time for any reason. These dramatic breakthroughs evoked almost universal acclaim from disinterested commentators, primarily on the grounds of simple justice. Now we may be entering a new phase of consolidation, refinement, …

The Wagner Act: Labor Law's Signal Event, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

There's no fun in stating the obvious. Sophisticated professionals bestow few kudos on those who declaim the conventional wisdom. Even so, one would have to be far more perverse than I, in this fiftieth anniversary year of the National Labor Relations Act, to suggest that the Wagner Act, wasn't the most important (and at the time of it- passage the most controversial) development in the last half-century of labor law.

The Funding Of Children's Educational Costs, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

A plan for reduction of educational costs should take federal transfer taxes into account. The method chosen for reducing income tax liability usually will involve making gifts. To the extent that it is convenient to do so, the transfer tax consequences of making such gifts should be minimized. This article will examine the estate and gift tax consequences of the income tax reduction arrangements described herein and will consider means of structuring the transactions so as to minimize those consequences.

Review Of The Justice Of The Western Consular Courts In Nineteenth Century Japan, Whitmore Gray

Reviews

Richard Chang attacks the generalization accepted by many historians that the Western consular tribunals in nineteenth-century Japan were so partial- toward West- erners and against Japanese-that they seldom rendered evenhanded justice. His study required two steps. First he tried to determine how many "mixed" cases came to trial-cases in which aJapanese brought a claim against a foreign resident in a consular court or was the complaining party in criminal proceedings against a foreigner. Between 1875 and 1895 there were five such cases that were widely reported and commented on at the time, and that have often been cited as examples. …

Review Of Njáls Saga: Rechtsproblematik Im Dienste Soziokultureller Deutung, William I. Miller

Reviews

There is little recommend this book. It is ill-conceived and poorly executed. The author's thesis is that the saga-writer intentionally distorted and varied his presentation of the law of the lawbooks in order to show a society being destroyed by uncontrolled egoism, pride, and envy, a society characterized by willful arbitrariness, disorder, and disarray, with few rules to respect and little respect for the few rules that were there. The validity of the thesis is never really tested because the law which the saga-writer distorts is not even minimally established, nor for that matter is the law the saga-writer does …

Computer-Aided Normalizing And Unpacking: Some Interesting Machine-Processable Transformations Of Legal Rules, Layman E. Allen, Charles S. Saxon

Book Chapters

One way of dealing with an important aspect of the natural language barrier that researchers m artificial intelligence have been wrestling with for more than two decades is to normalize the expression of the logical structure of legal rules.

The computer program, NORMALIZER, will enable a legal analyst to automatically generate Normalized Versions of legal rules and Outlines of them from Parenthesized Logical Expressions of their structure and Marked Versions of the Original Text of the rules. In brief:

Parenthesized Logical Expression & Marked Version = = > Outline & Normalized Version.

The Parenthesized Logical Expression of a normalized rule is …

Environmental Regulation And The Constitution, James E. Krier

Book Chapters

Indirectly, at least, the Constitution provides the federal government with power to regulate on behalf of environ-mental quality, but it also sets limits on the power. It sets limits, likewise, on the regulatory power of the states. What it does not do, at present, is grant the ‘‘constitutional right to a clean environment’’ so avidly sought in the hey-day of environmental concern, the decade of the 1970s. Thus, the one unique aspect of the general topic consid-ered here has no doctrinal standing; the remaining aspects are matters of doctrine, but they are not unique to envi-ronmental regulation. It is quite …

Privacy In Confucian And Taoist Thought, Christina B. Whitman

Book Chapters

Only three aspects of the broad concept "privacy" will be explored in this essay: privacy as providing a sphere for intimate personal relationships with family and friends, privacy as freedom from surveillance for purposes of gathering personal information, and privacy as freedom from interference by government or social controls. These concepts describe quite different concerns. They are often grouped together under the single term "privacy," but not without some strain... A comparison between a modern Western value and its counterpart, if any, in very early Confucian and Taoist belief is inevitably somewhat strained. But it serves a purpose. If nothing …

The Supreme Court's Misconstruction Of A Procedural Statute-A Critique Of The Court's Decision In Badaracco, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

When a taxpayer files an honest' federal income tax return for a taxable year, section 6501(a) of the Internal Revenue Code2 limits the period of time during which the Government can assess a tax for that year to a three-year period commencing with the date that the return was filed. The three-year limitations period is extended for an additional three years by section 6501(e)(1)(A) if the taxpayer's return omits properly includible gross income in an amount in excess of twenty-five percent of the gross income that was reported. If a taxpayer fails to file a return for a taxable year …

Black Innocence And The White Jury, Sheri Lynn Johnson

Michigan Law Review

Racial prejudice has come under increasingly close scrutiny during the past thirty years, yet its influence on the decisionmaking of criminal juries remains largely hidden from judicial and critical examination. In this Article, Professor Johnson takes a close look at this neglected area. She first sets forth a large body of social science research that reveals a widespread tendency among whites to convict black defendants in instances in which white defendants would be acquitted. Next, she argues that none of the existing techniques for eliminating the influence of racial bias on criminal trials adequately protects minority-race defendants. She contends that …

Disparate Tax Treatment Of Different Types Of Business Organizations: Where Should We Go From Here?, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

If several persons wish to join together in a common enterprise in order to pool their capital or labor or some of each, they may choose among a variety of available organizational structures that will serve that purpose. The most common entity forms are partnerships (including joint ventures), corporations, and trusts. While, in its typical structure, each of those entity forms has its own distinct characteristics, the structure of such organizations often is modified by agreement so as to adopt attributes of another type of entity. Because of this, the substantive distinction between entity types is blurred.

On Preferences And Promises: A Response To Harsanyi, Donald H. Regan

Articles

John C. Harsanyi sketches an entire normative and metaethical theory in under twenty pages. Combining breadth and brevity, his essay is useful and interesting. It reveals the interrelations between Harsanyi's positions on various issues as no longer work or series of articles could do. But by virtue of its programmatic nature, the essay creates a dilemma for a commentator, at least for one who finds many things to disagree with. If I responded to Harsanyi in the same sweeping terms in which he argues, we would end up with little more than opposing assertions. At the other extreme, I could …

Federal Regulation Of The Workplace In The Next Half Century, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Even the general circulation press, from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times to Business Week, has taken to examining the current malaise of the labor movement and the increased emphasis upon ensuring the safety, health, and economic security of employees through direct governmental regulation rather than through collective bargaining. What accounts for this upsurge of scholarly and popular interest in labor relations and labor law? There are undoubtedly multiple causes but I should like to focus on a couple of reasons that seem preeminent to me.

A Rejoinder By Professor Waggoner, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

Since the patience of the reader and the space in this issue of the Law Review are nearing their limits, I wish to publish only two points in response to what Professor Dukeminier has written.. These points further support my position that Dukeminier's proposed statute would lead almost anyone to conclude that A, not X, is the causal relationship measuring life in Example 1 of my article.1 By implication, these points, along with the others made in my article, corroborate my overall thesis: Professor Dukeminier's proposed one-sentence statute2 cannot be counted a responsible way of identifying the measuring lives for …

James A. Martin: A Man Of Grand Strengths, Delightful Foibles, James J. White

Articles

Jim Martin was my student, my colleague, and my close friend. His was a mind of independent ideas and uncommon sharpness. He was a scholar of national reputation, not just in one subject, but in three. Books that he authored or co-authored in Conflict of Laws, Civil Procedure, and Commercial Law are used in courses from coast to coast. He was a principal draftsman of a new statute, the Uniform Personal Property Leasing Act, that will soon be proposed for adoption in every state of the United States. He was a drafter of and a commentator on the Michigan Court …