Law Commons^™

The Federal Criminal "Code" Is A Disgrace: Obstruction Statutes As Case Study, Julie R. O'Sullivan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Any discussion of federal penal law must begin with an important caveat: There actually is no federal criminal "code" worthy of the name. A criminal code is defined as "'a systematic collection, compendium, or revision' of laws." What the federal government has is a haphazard grab-bag of statutes accumulated over 200 years, rather than a comprehensive, thoughtful, and internally consistent system of criminal law. In fact, the federal government has never had a true criminal code. The closest Congress has come to enacting a code was its creation of Title 18 of the United States Code in 1948. That "exercise, …

What The Shutts Opt-Out Right Is And What It Ought To Be, Brian Wolfman, Alan B. Morrison

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article discusses the ramifications of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Phillips Petroleum Co. v. Shutts, 472 U.S. 797 (1985), regarding the right of an absent class member to opt out of a class action. The article addresses both the current prevailing understanding of Shutts, which is based on the personal jurisdiction strain of due process jurisprudence, and what the authors believe is a more useful understanding, based on the property rights strain of due process jurisprudence. As an addendum to the article, the authors propose a new civil procedure rule governing class actions that would implement …

Natural Justice, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Justice is a natural virtue. Well-functioning humans are just, as are well-ordered human societies. Roughly, this means that in a well-ordered society, just humans internalize the laws and social norms (the nomoi)--they internalize lawfulness as a disposition that guides the way they relate to other humans. In societies that are mostly well-ordered, with isolated zones of substantial dysfunction, the nomoi are limited to those norms that are not clearly inconsistent with the function of law--to create the conditions for human flourishing. In a radically dysfunctional society, humans are thrown back on their own resources--doing the best they can in …

Sosa V. Alvarez-Machain And Human Rights Claims Against Corporations Under The Alien Tort Statute, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Contrary to the claims of some observers, the Supreme Court's decision in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain does not sound the death knell for the use of the Alien Tort Statute to maintain human rights claims against private corporations in the U.S. courts. The decision clarifies the nature of claims under the Alien Tort Statue to some extent, and places some limits on the theories available in actions against private corporations, but for the most part such suits remain as viable after Sosa as they were before. That is not to say, however, that victims of corporate human rights violations in developing …

Legislatures, Agencies, Courts And Advocates: How Laws Are Made, Interpreted And Modified, Chai R. Feldblum, Robin Appleberry

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This chapter explains the nature and practice of lawmaking, legal advocacy, and legal research as they relate to the field of work and family. Through reference to the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 as a case study, the authors explain the dynamic processes by which laws are made, interpreted and modified by legislatures, administrative agencies and courts, with the help of legal advocates. Their goal is not to provide substantive analysis of laws related to work and family, but rather to enable researchers from a range of disciplines to understand and access the legal system, as it currently …

What The Internet Age Means For Female Scholars, Rosa Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Is the Internet-driven transformation of legal scholarship good for the girls, or bad for the girls?

Will it remove some of the handicaps that have dogged women's efforts to join the ranks of scholarly "superstars"? Or will it only increase the professional obstacles still faced by women in legal academia? In this short Essay, the author tries to predict some of the promises and perils that the Internet holds for women in the legal academy.

The Story Of Upjohn Co. V. United States: One Man's Journey To Extend Lawyer-Client Confidentiality, And The Social Forces That Affected It, Paul F. Rothstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The attorney-client privilege protects information a client provides an attorney in confidence for the purpose of securing legal advice. But suppose the client is not a person but a corporation and can only speak through its agents and employees. What then are the contours of the privilege? If the corporation's attorney asks an employee for information relating to pending litigation or other legal matters, is the conversation privileged? Some courts said that no communications to a corporate attorney were privileged unless they came from members of the corporate control group, loosely those people who had authority to direct the attorney's …

It's A Bird, It's A Plane, No, It's Super Precedent: A Response To Faber And Gerhardt, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The normative case for originalism is based, in large measure, on the superiority of the enacted text over the opinions of members of the government whom it is supposed to govern and limit-including members of the Supreme Court. The author does not see how an originalist can accept that the Supreme Court could change the meaning of the text from what it meant as enacted and still remain an originalist. In other words, once it becomes appropriate for the Supreme Court to discard original meaning and the original meaning of the text is thereby reduced to a factor among many …

Restoring The Lost Constitution, Not The Constitution In Exile, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Constitution we have now is redacted. Any practicing lawyer will tell you that you cannot go into court and argue the Ninth Amendment. You cannot go into court and argue the Privileges or Immunities Clause. Until United States v. Lopez you could not argue the Commerce Clause; after Gonzales v. Raich, it is not clear you can argue the Commerce Clause anymore. You cannot argue the Necessary and Proper Clause. You cannot argue the Republican Guarantee Clause. You cannot argue the Second Amendment outside the Fifth Circuit. Whole sections of the Constitution are now gone. This is the …

Desperately Seeking A Moralist, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In a recent issue of “Unbound”, Janet Halley reviews my book “Caring for Justice”, criticizing it for exhibiting a broad range of the problems she sees in all forms of "identitarian" legal writing, and therefore worthy of detailed critique. Halley begins her review by listing the representative missteps she finds in both my book and in identitarian politics generally, including, although certainly not limited to, an identification of the site of the subordinated group's injuries-for women, reproduction and sexuality with the site of its ethical lives and insights; a tendency to differentiate and present the interests of subordinate and dominant …

Copyright, Commodification, And Culture: Locating The Public Domain, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The relationship between increased commodification and the public domain in copyright law is the subject of considerable controversy, both political and theoretical. The paper argues that beliefs about what legal definition the public domain requires depend crucially on implicit preconceptions about what a public domain is. When considered in broader historical context, the term public domain has a specific set of denotative and connotative meanings that constitute the artistic, intellectual, and informational public domain as a geographically separate place, portions of which are presumptively eligible for privatization. This idea meshes well with the current push toward commodification in copyright. The …

New Rules For Promissory Fraud, Gregory Klass, Ian Ayres

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article summarizes the authors’ recommended reforms to the law of promissory fraud. These recommendations are presented as a Draft Prestatement of the Law of Insincere Promising. The basic propositions of the Prestatement are taken, with some modification, from the authors’ book, Insincere Promises: The Law of Misrepresented Intent (2005). This article adds extensive comments, in the style of the Restatements, and a prose introduction identifying three reforms we deem most important. First, courts should drop their insistence that every promise represents an intent to perform, and treat that representation instead as a default. Second, courts faced with claims of …

Referring To Foreign Law In Constitutional Interpretation: An Episode In The Culture Wars, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As Judge Messitte's essay demonstrates, recent references in Supreme Court decisions to non-U.S. legal materials have generated a great deal of controversy. Those who make such references say that doing so is no big deal. I have called the controversy a tempest in a teapot. My topic here is the disjuncture between the perception on one side that something important and troubling has happened - or, as I will argue, may be about to happen - and the perception on the other that there is nothing to be concerned about. After describing in Section I the practice that has given …

Philosophy V. Rhetoric In Legal Education: Understanding The Schism Between Doctrinal And Legal Writing Faculty, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author argues that although legal writing faculty know that what they teach is absolutely essential to their students' success, yet it continues to be grossly, even embarrassingly, undervalued in legal education. Doctrinal legal faculty perpetuate the view that legal education is a philosophical endeavor that focuses on the truth about the nature of law and, in the twenty-first century, on the law's ability to serve justice in a multicultural America. Because of their political power, however, doctrinal faculty are able to preserve the task of truth finding for themselves. Since the nature of truth is independent of its practical …

Clauses Not Cases, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Clauses Not Cases is a Response to Robert Post and Reva Siegel, Questioning Justice: Law and Politics in Judicial Confirmation Hearings, Yale L.J. (The Pocket Part), Jan. 2006.

In Questioning Justice, Robert Post and Reva Siegel make three claims. First, that the Constitution authorizes the Senate to rest its judgement, in part, on the constitutional philosophy of nominees to the Supreme Court; second, that this practice is justified on grounds of democratic legitimacy; and third, that it is best implemented by asking nominees “to explain the grounds on which they would have voted in past decisions of the …

Blogging And The Transformation Of Legal Scholarship, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Does blogging have anything to do with legal scholarship? Could blogging transform the legal academy? This paper suggests that these are the wrong questions. Blogs have plenty to do with legal scholarship--that's obvious. But what blogs have to do with legal scholarship isn't driven by anything special about blogs qua weblogs, qua collections of web pages that share the form of a journal or log. The relationship between blogging and the future of legal scholarship is a product of other forces--the emergence of the short form, the obsolesce of exclusive rights, and the trend towards the disintermediation of legal scholarship. …

Interpretative Theory And Tax Shelter Regulation, Brian Galle

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article responds to an important recent essay in the Columbia Law Review by Marvin Chirelstein and Larry Zelenak. Chirelstein and Zelenak propose a dramatic change in tactics in the way that the government attempts to combat tax shelters - that is, efforts by corporations and high-earning individuals to avoid tax by clever manipulations of the technical terms of the Tax Code. For the past seventy years or so, the IRS has responded to these manipulations by urging courts to read the tax statutes purposively, rather than literally, and thus to deny favorable tax treatment to business transactions entered into …

Beyond Unconscionability: Class Action Waivers And Mandatory Arbitration Agreements, J. Maria Glover

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

We live in an age of convenience. From financial transactions to electronic correspondence, we frequently deal with large corporations that provide services in our daily lives. One of the prices we pay for the convenience of these transactions, however, is that our commercial relationships increasingly are based on standard form contracts written by large corporations. While these standard form contracts are necessary to an economically efficient society, the growing use of mandatory arbitration provisions and clauses that prohibit class actions in these contracts raises the spectre of corporate abuse.

Internal Separation Of Powers: Checking Today's Most Dangerous Branch From Within, Neal K. Katyal

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The standard conception of separation of powers presumes three branches with equivalent ambitions of maximizing their powers. Today, however, legislative abdication is the reigning modus operandi. Instead of bemoaning this state of affairs, this piece asks how separation of powers can be reflected within the Executive Branch when that branch, not the legislature, is making much law today. The first-best concept of legislature v. executive checks-and-balances has to be updated to contemplate second-best executive v. executive divisions.

A critical mechanism to promote internal separation of powers is bureaucracy. Much maligned by both the political left and right, bureaucracy serves crucial …

The Third Moment In Law And Development Theory And The Emergence Of A New Critical Practice, David M. Trubek, Alvaro Santos

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The study of the relationship between law and economic development goes back at least to the nineteenth century. It is a question that attracted the attention of classical thinkers like Marx and Weber. And there were some early efforts to craft policy in this area; for example, under the Raj, some English Utilitarians tried to put Jeremy Bentham’s ideas about law and economic progress into practice in India. But it was only after World War II that systematic and organized efforts to reform legal systems became part of the practice of international development agencies.

Initially, development agencies turned to law …

Political Power And Judicial Power: Some Observations On Their Relation, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Essay summarizes and perhaps extends slightly some important recent work, mostly by political scientists, on the structural relation between the array of political power in a nation's nonjudicial branch or branches and the way in which judicial review is exercised in relatively stable democracies. Robert Dahl's classic article identified one such relation. According to Dahl, "[e]xcept for short-lived transitional periods when the old alliance is disintegrating and the new one is struggling to take control of political institutions, the Supreme Court is inevitably a part of the dominant national alliance." What, though, if there is no "dominant" national political …

Aristotle’S Tried And True Recipe For Argument Casserole, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I thoroughly enjoyed John Schunk’s article— “What Can Legal Writing Students Learn from Watching Emeril Live?”—in the Winter 2006 issue. We are big Emeril fans in our family, and we too have heard him distinguish the art of baking casseroles from the art of baking cakes. Baking a casserole is more art than science, because although there are basic ingredients, a creative cook can vary the recipe to please a variety of palettes. Baking a cake, on the other hand, is more science than art, because if the cook eliminates a necessary egg or adds too much baking powder, the …

"A Decent Respect To The Opinions Of Mankind": Referring To Foreign Law To Express American Nationhood, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Why might a court refer to non-U.S. law? Justice Stephen Breyer's pragmatic defense of the practice is probably the most widely known, as are its defects. Here, I want to sketch a counterintuitive explanation for the practice. Referring to non-U.S. law in Supreme Court opinions might be a way in which Supreme Court Justices participate in the dissemination of a distinctively American self-understanding. By this I do not mean that Justices who refer to non-U.S. law necessarily endorse the (reasonable) interpretive theory that the U.S. Constitution instantiates universally true propositions of political morality. Rather, I mean that references to non-U.S. …

Constitutional Culture Or Ordinary Politics: A Reply To Reva Siegel, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Reva Siegel's lecture, ‘Constitutional Culture, Social Movement Conflict and Constitutional Change: The Case of the de Facto ERA,’ explores the interaction between the courts and social movements in creating constitutional meaning. In the primary part of this response I focus my comments on Siegel's three major contributions: First, the historical explanation of the source of the Court's authority in the development of the so-called de facto ERA; second, the articulation of a general, jurisprudential thesis regarding social contestation as a source of constitutional authority apart from text, history, and principle; and third, the quasi-sociological descriptive account of the form social …

Cutter And The Preferred Position Of The Free Exercise Clause, Steven Goldberg

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Cutter v. Wilkinson (2005) allowed Congress to give religious exercise a status superior to that given to free speech. In upholding RLUIPA, a statute protecting inmate religious freedom, the Court explicitly held that statutes can allow prisoners to “assemble for worship, but not for political rallies.” Religion, which lost in Smith (1990) the traditional “preferred position” courts have accorded First Amendment rights, can now regain that position through legislation notwithstanding the Establishment Clause. Indeed, religion has not just regained parity with free speech, it now receives greater protection in the prison setting. This striking …

Beyond Coercion: Justice Kennedy's Aversion To Animus, Steven Goldberg

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In evaluating the constitutionality of religious displays, Justice Kennedy adheres to the coercion test. A crèche on the courthouse steps is acceptable because it does not coerce anyone to support or participate in a religious exercise. He rejects the endorsement test, which asks whether the display makes reasonable nonadherents feel like outsiders, finding it to be “flawed in its fundamentals and unworkable in practice.” Yet in the free exercise context, Kennedy has focused on whether a community shows hostility to minority faiths, and his opinions in Romer and Lawrence stress that legislatures acted unconstitutionally in showing animus to gays. Suppose …

What Does Social Justice Require For The Public’S Health? Public Health Ethics And Policy Imperatives, Lawrence O. Gostin, Madison Powers

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Justice is so central to the mission of public health that it has been described as the field's core value. Our account of justice stresses the fair disbursement of common advantages and sharing of common burdens. It captures the twin moral impulses that animate public health: to advance human well-being by improving health and to do so particularly by focusing on the needs of the most disadvantaged. This commentary explores how social justice sheds light on major ongoing controversies in the field, and it provides examples of the kinds of policies that public health agencies guided by a robust conception …

Statutory Interpretation In The Era Of Oira, Lisa Heinzerling

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In recent years, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has asserted a remarkable degree of authority over administrative agencies' rulemaking processes. One of the ways in which OIRA has exercised power over agencies has been to foist upon them its own views about the requirements of the statutes under which they operate. The most notable trend in this area has been OIRA's insistence on converting technology-based environmental laws into cost-benefit laws. In OIRA's hands, for example, the Clean Water Act ("the Act") is being transformed from a technology- based regime …

Judicial Enforcement Of Treaties: Self-Execution And Related Doctrines, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This morning we will be discussing the judicial enforcement of treaties in the United States. In particular, I would like to focus on the relationship between a treaty's status as self-executing or not, and the question of its judicial enforceability.

Public Legal Reason, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay develops an ideal of public legal reason--a normative theory of legal reasons that is appropriate for a society characterized by religious and moral pluralism. One of the implications of this theory is that normative theorizing about public and private law should eschew reliance on the deep premises of deontology or consequentialism and should instead rely on what the author calls public values--values that can be affirmed without relying on the deep and controversial premises of particular comprehensive moral doctrines.

The ideal of public legal reason is then applied to a particular question--whether welfarism (a particular form of normative …