Law Commons^™

A Guide To Mireille Delmas-Marty's “Compass”, Diane Marie Amann

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This essay appears as the Afterword (pp. 55-64) to a volume featuring an important work by the late Mireille Delmas-Marty (1941-2022) titled A Compass of Possibilities: Global Governance and Legal Humanism. A Collège de France de Paris law professor and one of the pre-eminent legal thinkers of her generation, Delmas-Marty and the essay’s author were longtime colleagues and collaborators. The volume contains an English translation of a 2011 lecture by Delmas-Marty, originally titled “Une boussole des possibles: Gouvernance mondiale et humanismes juridiques.” Amann’s essay surveys that writing, in a manner designed to acquaint non-francophone lawyers and academics with Delmas-Marty’s …

Comparative Legal Rhetoric, Lucille A. Jewel

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This paper theorizes a new discipline, comparative legal rhetoric, which can accomplish two important goals. First, in a society broken down by intractable polarization and win/lose dichotomies, comparative legal rhetoric identifies alternative, nontraditional and non-Western ways to communicate and persuade. How we talk is deeply connected to how we see the world. If we take a break from the win/lose argument structure that defines Western legal communication, we can uncover opportunities for understanding and healing. Second, a study of comparative legal rhetoric can generate cross-cultural understanding. This new discipline contains a trove of knowledge about how persuasion works in different …

Unravelling The Us Presidential Election, Lori A. Ringhand

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One of the most perplexing things about US elections is the extent to which we litigate what in much of the rest of the world are routine nuts and bolts questions about how elections work. I had first-hand experience with this during the 2000 presidential election when I was living in the UK. Why, I constantly was asked, is the US Supreme Court deciding your presidential election?

It’s a good question, and also a timely one given how the current presidential election is unfolding.

Chevron Abroad, Kent H. Barnett, Lindsey Vinson

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This Article presents our comparative findings of how courts in five other countries review agency statutory interpretation. These comparisons permit us to understand and participate better in current debates about the increasingly controversial Chevron doctrine in American law, whereby courts defer to reasonable agency interpretations of statutes that an agency administers. Those debates concern, among other things, Chevron 's purported inevitability, functioning and normative propriety. Our inquiry into judicial review in Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia provides useful and unexpected findings. Chevron, contrary to some scholars' views, is not inevitable because only one of these countries has …

Book Review: "Die Gemeinfreiheit: Begriff, Funktion, Dogmatik (The Public Domain: Concept, Function, Dogmatics)" By Alexander Peukert, Marketa Trimble

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The reviewer considers a recent book by Alexander Peukert, the professor of civil and commercial law who specializes in international intellectual property law at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Peukert has devoted the book to defining the limits of the public domain – the realm of intellectual activity in which works are free for anyone to use because the works are not protected by intellectual property rights, are protected but the protection has expired, are subject to an exception to the rights under the law, or are unprotected because the owner of the rights chooses not to enforce …

The Role Of Foreign Authorities In U.S. Asylum Adjudication, Fatma E. Marouf

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U.S. asylum law is based on a domestic statute that incorporates an international treaty, the U.N. Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. While Supreme Court cases indicate that the rules of treaty interpretation apply to an incorporative statute, courts analyzing the statutory asylum provisions fail to give weight to the interpretations of our sister signatories, which is one of the distinctive and uncontroversial principles of treaty interpretation. This Article highlights this significant omission and urges courts to examine the interpretations of other States Parties to the Protocol in asylum cases. Using as an example the current debate over social …

Law, Language, Crime, And Culture: The Value And Risks Of Comparative Law, Christopher L. Blakesley

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Words, language, culture, and literature are so important to us human beings that it should come as little surprise that they are part of our law. This article considers language and law in general with a focus on issues of criminal justice, both domestic and international. I examine how and why comparative law is valuable in a criminal procedure course, and generally for domestic and international criminal justice. My examination begins by looking back to our common roots in crime, punishment, and expiation, with a special focus on the role of torture and its impact on current criminal justice systems. …

Book Review - Richard Hyland's Gifts: A Study In Comparative Law, Iris Goodwin

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This essay is a lengthy review of Richard Hyland's Gifts: A Study in Comparative Law (OUP, 2009), a masterpiece of comparative law scholarship.

International Law And Rehnquist-Era Reversals, Diane Marie Amann

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In the last years of Chief Justice Rehnquist's tenure, the Supreme Court held that due process bars criminal prosecution of same-sex intimacy and that it is cruel and unusual to execute mentally retarded persons or juveniles. Each of the later decisions not only overruled precedents set earlier in Rehnquist's tenure, but also consulted international law as an aid to construing the U.S. Constitution. Analyzing that phenomenon, the article first discusses the underlying cases, then traces the role that international law played in Atkins, Lawrence, and Simmons. It next examines backlash to consultation, and demonstrates that critics tended to overlook the …

The Religion-State Relationship And The Right To Freedom Of Religion Or Belief: A Comparative Textual Analysis Of The Constitutions Of Predominantly Muslim Countries, Robert C. Blitt

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This study analyzes the constitutional provisions in 44 predominantly Muslim countries addressing the relationship between religion and the state, freedom of religion or belief, and other related human rights as measured against recognized international human rights standards. The geographic diversity of the Muslim world mirrors a central finding of the study, that predominantly Muslim countries encompass a variety of constitutional arrangements - ranging from Islamic republics with Islam as the official state religion, to secular states with strict separation of religion and state. Key findings of the survey include: More than half of the world's Muslim population (estimated at over …

The Economics Of Uniform Laws And Uniform Law Making, John Linarelli

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Uniform law making has a substantial history in the twentieth century. It seems to be continuing with some force into the twenty-first century. A significant American law and economics literature, however, questions its merit. By contrast, there have been limited rational choice oriented investigations of unification or centralization of law in Europe. Critics of the uniform law movement in the United States use methods of analysis influenced by public choice theory, political economics and positive political theory. The paper does not call into question the methods and assumptions of these approaches. The paper claims that economic analysis supports public policy …

Capital Punishment And Religious Arguments: An Intermediate Approach, Samuel J. Levine

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Determining the place and use of capital punishment in the American legal system is a challenging affair and one that is closely associated with and determined by religion's role in American legal decision-making. Both capital punishment and religion are controversial issues, and tend to challenge legal scholars and practitioners about whether they should function together or alone as valid parts of the legal system in the United States. Professor Levine argues that religious arguments should be employed to interpret and explain American legal thought when the need or proper situation arises. He uses capital punishment as an example of how …

Teaching Jewish Law In American Law Schools: An Emerging Development In Law And Religion, Samuel J. Levine

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In recent years, religion has gained an increasing prominence in both the legal profession and the academy. Through the emergence of the "religious lawyering movement," lawyers and legal scholars have demonstrated the potential relevance of religion to many aspects of lawyering. Likewise, legal scholars have incorporated religious thought into their work through books, law journals and classroom teaching relating to various areas of law and religion. In this Essay, Levine discusses one particular aspect of these efforts, namely, the place of Jewish law in the American law school curriculum. Specifically, he outlines briefly three possible models for a course in …

Curses, Oaths, Ordeals And Tials Of Animals, Alan Watson

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To the outsider, a foreign legal system may at times appear irrational, with a belief in the efficacy, usually with supernatural assistance, of curses, oaths and ordeals, and that animals may properly be punished, even restrained from anti-human behaviour, after a criminal trial. But caution must be exercised. There may be little real belief that the deity will intervene-for instance, that the ordeal will reveal guilt or innocence. Rather, the society may be faced with an intolerable problem, with no reasonable solution, and the participants may resort to extraordinary legal measures as a "Last Best Chance", or "The Second Best". …

Comparative Law: Its Purposes And Possibilities, Christopher L. Blakesley

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Comparative law is much more than “matching laws.” Professor Grossfield’s short, lively book will certainly awaken its German reader to the value, indeed necessity, of comparative law and comparative insights in his or her own practice or scholarly work. This, he aims at the skeptic who may think of comparative law or foreign legal systems as arcane and useless fluff, too luxurious for the hard working “practical-minded” practitioner. Professor Grossfield throws the cold water of realization into this skeptic’s face. The message being that considering comparative approaches and theory about similar problems may indeed be as practical as one can …