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The Past, Present, And Future Of The United Nations: A Comment On Paul Kennedy And The Parliament Of Man (El Pasado Como Prologo: El Futuro Glorioso Y El Turbio Presente De Las Naciones Unidas (Revista De Paul Kennedy, El Parlamento De La Humanidad)), Kenneth Anderson

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American University, WCL Research Paper No. 2008-72Abstract:This is the original Spanish language version of an essay (10,000 words) appearing in the Revista de Libros (Madrid), considering the history and future of the United Nations and global governance through the lens of Paul Kennedy's recent work, The Parliament of Man. The essay is highly skeptical of what it describes as platonism about the future of the UN as the seat of global governance. It offers an alternative view of how to consider the work of the UN, in three areas: security, economic development, and values. The essay argues that, particularly with …

Overvaluing Uniformity, Amanda Frost

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"E NSURING the uniform interpretation of federal law has long been considered one of the federal courts' primary objectives, and uniformity is regularly cited in some of the most intractable debates about the structure and function of the federal court system. For example, specialized courts are lauded for their ability to ensure uniformity in the areas of law over which they have jurisdic- tion. Similarly, proponents of exclusive federal jurisdiction contend that the federal courts provide greater consistency in the interpre- tation of federal law than could fifty different state courts. Some commentators claim that Congress' power to create exceptions …

'Dynamic Competition' Does Not Excuse Monopolization, Jonathan Baker

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This comment on a forthcoming article by Keith Hylton and David Evans explains why considerations of "dynamic competition" do not argue against antitrust enforcement. While the prospect of achieving monopoly may foster innovation, that observation misleads as to appropriate antitrust policy unless qualified by the observation that the push of competition generally spurs innovation more than the pull of monopoly. Moreover, the longstanding doctrinal rule that mere monopoly pricing is not illegal should not be read as demonstrating that antitrust law values monopolies for their role in promoting innovation.

The Inter-American System Of Human Rights: Challenges For The Future, Claudio Grossman

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The Inter-American system is a combination of human rights norms and supervisory institutions within the Americas. The applicable rules consist primarily of the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man ("American Declaration") and the American Convention on Human Rights ("American Convention"). The institutions involved are the organs responsible for supervising compliance with the established rules: the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ("the Commission") and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ("the Court"). The system performs supervisory functions basically through country reports adopted by the Commission which describe the overall human rights situation in a country and decisions in …

Banding Together: Reflections On The Role Of The Women's Bar Association Of The District Of Columbia And The Washington College Of Law In Promoting Women's Rights, Jamie Abrams, Daniela Kraiem

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The Washington College of Law and the Women's Bar Association of the District of Columbia share an important historical connection; Ellen Spencer Mussey and Emma Gillett founded both institutions together, in 1898 and 1917, respectively. Mussey and Gillett were pioneers in legal education, legal reform, and the development of women lawyers. 2 More significant than the work they performed during their lives, however, is the legacy of activism, reform, and support that they ignited by founding two institutions that advance women in the law. These institutions have trained and supported generations of women lawyers through world wars and depressions, through …

Patient-Tailored Medicine, Part One: The Impact Of Race And Genetics On Medicine, Corrine Parver

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One of the more controversial elements of advancing technology is the use of race and genetics to help create more specific types of medicines that will help combat diseases and conditions that appear to be more prevalent within certain races or ethnic groups than in others. Considering the history of discrimination and inadequate treatment of individuals on the bases of race and gender in the United States, there is justifiable concern that race or gender-based treatment could be used to legitimate discrimination. On the other hand, there is substantial proof that the current method of creating medicines for the general …

Paper Trail: Working Papers And Recent Scholarship, Jonathan Baker

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Editor’s Note: In this edition we review two papers by leading government economists, past, present, and perhaps future. The first paper, by Dennis Carlton and Ken Heyer, takes a cautious policy approach to single-firm conduct based on theory, empirical evidence, and “considerations of administrability and consistency with general and widely held presumptions” and sets out four “underlying principles” that should govern policy toward single-firm conduct. The second paper, on the role of market concentration in modern economic analysis of horizontal mergers, is by Jonathan Baker, in which he explains how market concentration can sensibly be used for merger analysis. Send …

The Prison Rape Elimination Act: Implementation And Unresolved Issues, Brenda V. Smith

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In September 2003, the United States Congress unanimously passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). The Act was the culmination of a collaborative effort between human rights, faith-based, and prison rape advocacy. The aim of the Act is to create zero tolerance for prison rape by using a variety of tools or mechanisms including data collection; grants to the states; technical assistance to the states to improve their practices; research; the development of national standards; and the diminution of federal criminal justice assistance to states who fail to comply with the standards. This article aims to provide a brief background …

Reflections: The Honorable Irma S. Raker – Judge, Teacher, And Role Model, Elizabeth I. Boals

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This article is a sketch of Judge Irma S. Raker’s career from her days as a law student at Washington College of Law to her distinguished career as a jurist and teacher. Judge Raker’s first legal job was as an Assistant State’s Attorney in Montgomery County, Maryland, where her appointment as the first woman litigator was a milestone in the local legal community. She was appointed in 1980 to serve as a judge on the District Court for Montgomery County and, in 1982, to serve on the Circuit Court for Montgomery County. Judge Raker decided a number of seminal cases, …

Digitus Impudicus: The Middle Finger And The Law, Ira Robbins

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The middle finger is one of the most commonly used insulting gestures in the United States. The finger, which is used to convey a wide range of emotions, is visible on streets and highways, in schools, shopping malls, and sporting events, in courts and execution chambers, in advertisements and on magazine covers, and even on the hallowed floor of the United States Senate. Despite its ubiquity, however, as a number of recent cases demonstrate, those who use the middle finger in public run the risk of being stopped, arrested, prosecuted, fined, and even incarcerated under disorderly conduct or breach of …

Reflections: The Honorable Irma S. Raker – Judge, Teacher, And Role Model, David E. Aaronson

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This article is a sketch of Judge Irma S. Raker’s career from her days as a law student at Washington College of Law to her distinguished career as a jurist and teacher. Judge Raker’s first legal job was as an Assistant State’s Attorney in Montgomery County, Maryland, where her appointment as the first woman litigator was a milestone in the local legal community. She was appointed in 1980 to serve as a judge on the District Court for Montgomery County and, in 1982, to serve on the Circuit Court for Montgomery County. Judge Raker decided a number of seminal cases, …

Reflections: The Honorable Irma S. Raker – Judge, Teacher, And Role Model, Anthony C. Morella

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This article is a sketch of Judge Irma S. Raker’s career from her days as a law student at Washington College of Law to her distinguished career as a jurist and teacher. Judge Raker’s first legal job was as an Assistant State’s Attorney in Montgomery County, Maryland, where her appointment as the first woman litigator was a milestone in the local legal community. She was appointed in 1980 to serve as a judge on the District Court for Montgomery County and, in 1982, to serve on the Circuit Court for Montgomery County. Judge Raker decided a number of seminal cases, …

Tribute To The Honorable Irma Raker Upon Her Retirement, Barlow Burke

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In this article the author pays tribute to Judge Raker’s pre-law school tour de force citizen testimony in Eger v. Stone, 253 A.2d 372 (Md. 1969), which established the standard for credibility of lay witnesses in zoning cases, acceptance of citizen testimony as establishing the basis for an application’s denial, and acceptance of hearsay in an administrative forum in Maryland.

Judge Raker was a student of the author, who taught a course in modern land law at the Washington College of Law during Judge Raker’s tenure in law school. The article discusses two of Judge Raker’s real estate transaction opinions, …

Complying With The National Institutes Of Health Public Access Policy: Copyright Considerations And Options, Michael Carroll

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This White Paper is written primarily for policymaking staff in universities and other institutional recipients of NIH support responsible for ensuring compliance with the Public Access Policy. The January 11, 2008, Public Access Policy imposes two new compliance mandates. First, the grantee must ensure proper manuscript submission. The version of the article to be submitted is the final version over which the author has control, which must include all revisions made after peer review. The statutory command directs that the manuscript be submitted to PMC “upon acceptance for publication.” That is, the author’s final manuscript should be submitted to PMC …

Inter-American System, Claudia Martin

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No abstract provided.

Detecting And Reversing The Decline In Horizontal Merger Enforcement, Jonathan Baker, Carl Shapiro

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Evaluating the Accuracy of Horizontal Merger Enforcement. There is no easy way to evaluate horizontal merger enforcement in the courts and at the DOJ and the FTC. As explained below, our approach is to rely on several different categories of evidence. The most compelling way to evaluate the accuracy of merger enforcement policy would be through merger retro-spectives—detailed studies evaluating the actual effects of consummated mergers on market prices, product variety, or innovation. The most revealing mergers to study in depth are those that went forward despite presenting serious antitrust concerns. Armed with a large number of such studies , …

Risky Business: Massachusetts V. Epa, Risk-Based Harm, And Standing In The D.C. Circuit, Amanda Leiter

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No abstract provided.

Clinical Legal Education And The Public Interest In Intellectual Property Law, Christine Haight Farley, Peter Jaszi, Victoria Phillips, Joshua D. Sarnoff, Ann Shalleck

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Clinical legal education provides a powerful methodology for students to learn about the relationships among intellectual property law theories, policies and practices; to encounter the experiences of persons who seek protection or who feel the legal regimes of intellectual property impinging on their ability to engage in educational, creative, innovative and culturally significant work; and to develop as lawyers. We describe in this article our motivations for forming an intellectual property law clinic at the American University Washington College of Law, the goals that we seek to achieve, and the tripartite pedagogical structure that we adopted - (1) a seminar …

Transatlanticisms: Constitutional Asymmetry And Selective Reception Of U.S. Law And Economics In The Formation Of European Private Law, Fernanda Nicola

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The recurrent claim made by judges, scholars, and lawyers shaping the debate on European private law is that there is a constitutional asymmetry in the European Union (EU). The asymmetry lies in the fact that European Community competences mostly encompass market and economic matters at the expense of social issues, while Member States have full jurisdiction over social matters but only limited jurisdiction over economic matters. Thus, the European constitutional structure leads to a market/technocratic orientation in its supranational institutions, as opposed to the social/political orientation of Member State governments. The pervasiveness of this claim allows jurists critiquing European adjudication …

The 'High Crime Area' Question: Requiring Verifiable And Quantifiable Evidence For Fourth Amendment Reasonable Suspicion Analysis, Andrew Ferguson, Damien Bernache

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This article proposes a legal framework to analyze the "high crime area" concept in Fourth Amendment reasonable suspicion challenges.Under existing Supreme Court precedent, reviewing courts are allowed to consider that an area is a "high crime area" as a factor to evaluate the reasonableness of a Fourth Amendment stop. See Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119 (2000). However, the Supreme Court has never defined a "high crime area" and lower courts have not reached consensus on a definition. There is no agreement on what a "high-crime area" is, whether it has geographic boundaries, whether it changes over time, whether it …

The Perils Of A Half-Built Bridge: Risk Perception, Shifting Majorities, And The Nuclear Power Debate, Amanda Leiter

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No abstract provided.

Grand Jury Discretion And Constitutional Design, Roger Fairfax

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The grand jury possesses an unqualified power to decline to indict - despite probable cause that alleged criminal conduct has occurred. A grand jury might exercise this power, for example, to disagree with the wisdom of a criminal law or its application to a particular defendant. A grand jury might also use its discretionary power to send a message of disapproval regarding biased or unwise prosecutorial decisions or inefficient allocation of law enforcement resources in the community. This ability to exercise discretion on bases beyond the sufficiency of the evidence has been characterized pejoratively as grand jury nullification. The dominant …

Harmless Constitutional Error And The Institutional Significance Of The Jury, Roger Fairfax

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Appellate harmless error review, an early twentieth-century innovation prompted by concerns of efficiency and finality, had been confined to nonconstitutional trial errors until forty years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court extended the harmless error rule to trial errors of constitutional proportion. Even as criminal procedural protections were expanded in the latter half of the twentieth century, the harmless error rule operated to dilute the effect of many of these constitutional guarantees-the Sixth Amendment right to jury trial being no exception. However, while a tradeoff between important process values and the Constitution's protection of individual rights is inherent in the …

Lyrical Assault: Dancehall Versus The Cultural Imperialism Of The North- West, Camille Nelson

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I would go to Jamaica, but there is so much "gay-bashing." For the first time in my life, I was ashamed to be Jamaican. I have come to realize the power of music. We all remember the lyrics of some songs verbatim, despite the passage of time, recalling where we were, who we were with, and what we were doing when we first listened. Music crosses borders-it generates emotions and feelings which transport us to a different place and time. Moreover, music has insurgent sociopolitical power-among other things, it can rally the masses, encourage affiliations, and demarcate normative boundaries. As …

The Espionage Act And National Security Whisteblowing After Garcetti, Stephen I. Vladeck

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Should government employees ever have a right to disseminate classified national security information to the public? As a general matter, of course, the answer is "no." It is necessarily tautological that the central purpose of classifying information is to keep that information secret. But what if the information pertains to what we might describe as "unlawful secrets," and the individual in question has exhausted all possible non-public remedies, to no avail? Are there any circumstances in which the law enables the government employee to come forward? Should there be?

As this essay suggests, because of the broad language of the …

Writer's Block, David Spratt

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No abstract provided.

More Views From The Ivory Tower: The Kiss Principle - Keep It Simple, Solicitor, David Spratt

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No abstract provided.

Mary Beth Tinker, Stephen Wermiel

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No abstract provided.

Contract Regulation, With And Without The State: Ruminations On Rules And Their Sources, David Snyder

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This paper, commenting on the work of Jýrgen Basedow, addresses the legal regulation of economic relations in the context of globalization. The paper applies the idea of the mixed jurisdiction, traditionally focused on legal systems that partake of both the common law and the civil law, to the complex of privately made law and publicly made law that governs contemporary economic relations. Differing criteria that might be used to assess and choose between competing rules or competing systems of rule generation are evaluated, and normative considerations are raised. The paper proposes a model to demonstrate how privately made law, though …

Civil Society's Involvement In Post-Conflict Peacebuilding, Corinne Parver, Rebecca Wolf

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War is a way of life – in some parts of the world it is an on-going struggle with no end in sight. Years of perpetual conflict have adversely affected the way in which political, socioeconomic, and cultural components of society have developed. Indeed, armed conflict negatively affects all aspects of society: not only does it destroy buildings and societies, but it also leaves surviving individuals and communities with deep wounds that can last a lifetime.

Many efforts have been employed around the world to build peace following a conflict. Some interventions have proven quite successful, while others have not. …