Law Commons^™

Geduldig V. Aiello, 417 U.S. 484 (1974) (Judgment), Lucinda M. Finley

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Published as part of Chapter 10 in Feminist Judgments, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Linda L. Berger & Bridget J. Crawford, eds.

In Geduldig, the Court was asked to decide whether California invidiously discriminated against women in violation of equal protection doctrine by excluding disabilities related to “normal” pregnancy and childbirth from its otherwise comprehensive employment disability insurance program. At the time, the U.S. Supreme Court had not yet clearly articulated that heightened scrutiny must apply for sex-based classifications, although it had strongly suggested as much in two recent cases, Reed v. Reed and Frontiero v. Richardson. The Court had …

The Asean–Australia–New Zealand Fta (Aanzfta), Meredith Kolsky Lewis

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Published as Chapter 6 in 2 Bilateral and Regional Trade Agreements: Case Studies (2d ed.), Simon Lester, Bryan Mercurio & Lorand Bartels, eds.

The ASEAN–Australia–New Zealand FTA (AANZFTA) combines two different pre-existing country groupings of long-standing. The first of these is ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which was founded in 1967 by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. This grouping has expanded over the years, with Brunei Darussalam joining in 1984, followed by Vietnam in 1995, Laos and Myanmar in 1997, and Cambodia in 1999. While ASEAN has existed for nearly 50 years, for most of that …

The Regulatory Life Of Threatened Species Lists, Irus Braverman

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Published as Chapter 1 in Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively Legalities, Irus Braverman, ed.

“The Regulatory Life of Threatened Species Lists” explores a prominent technology for the legal regulation of nonhuman life: the threatened species list. I argue that threatened species lists are biopolitical technologies: they produce and reinforce underlying species ontologies by creating, calculating, and governing the boundaries between various nonhuman species. Such a differentiated treatment of the life and death of nonhuman species through their en-listing, down- and up-listing, multi-listing, and un-listing translates into the positive protection and active governance of such species. Listing threatened species thus becomes a …

When Popular Decisions Rest On Shaky Foundations: Systemic Implications Of Selected Wto Appellate Body Trade Remedies Jurisprudence, Meredith Kolsky Lewis

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Published as Chapter 9 in International Economic Law and Governance: Essays in Honour of Mitsuo Matsushita, Julien Chaisse & Tsai-yu Lin, eds.

This chapter argues that the WTO Appellate Body has not been consistent in applying Article 31 of the VCLT and considering the context of the relevant treaty text in light of its object and purpose. It has instead either been overly mechanistic in its textual interpretation or has strayed from the text, sometimes with the appearance of preferring an outcome-based result. Part I of the chapter discusses the appropriate role context should play in interpreting the WTO agreements. …

The Changing Landscape Of Trademark Law In Tinseltown: From Debbie Does Dallas To The Hangover, John Tehranian, Mark Bartholomew

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This Essay, a chapter published in the book Hollywood and the Law (Palgrave Macmillan / British Film Institute, 2015), explores how courts have sought to balance the competing interests at stake when filmmakers make unauthorized uses of trademarks in their work and brand owners threaten liability for infringement. Using the seminal Rogers v. Grimaldi decision as a key pivot point, the Essay traces the remarkable change in approaches that courts have taken to First Amendment defenses in trademark cases in the past few decades. In presenting case studies of two opinions -- Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Inc. v. Pussycat Cinema, Ltd. …

Personal Responsibility For Systemic Inequality, Martha T. Mccluskey

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Published as Chapter 15 in Research Handbook on Political Economy and Law, Ugo Mattei & John D. Haskell, eds.

Equality has faded as a guiding ideal for legal theory and policy. An updated message of personal responsibility has helped rationalize economic policies fostering increased inequality and insecurity. In this revised message, economic “losers” should take personal responsibility not only for the harmful effects of their individual economic decisions, but also for the harmful effects of systemic failures beyond their individual control or action. In response to the 2008 financial crisis, this re-tooled message of personal responsibility promoted mass austerity in …

Is The Puerto Rican Parrot Worth Saving? The Biopolitics Of Endangerment And Grievability, Irus Braverman

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Published as Chapter 5 in Economies of Death: Economic Logics of Killable Life and Grievable Death, Patricia J. Lopez & Kathryn A. Gillespie, eds.

“Is the Puerto Rican Worth Saving? The Biopolitics of Endangerment and Grievability” describes how threatened species lists elevate listed nonhuman species from the realm of biological life into that of a political life that is both worth saving and worth grieving. The chapter provides a novel perspective on the biopolitics of lists that highlights both their affirmative properties and their acute relevance for understanding the governance of entire nonhuman species.

En-Listing Life: Red Is The Color Of Threatened Species Lists, Irus Braverman

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Published as Chapter 11 in Critical Animal Geographies: Politics, Intersections and Heirarchies in a Multispecies World, Kathryn Gillespie & Rosemary-Claire Collard, eds.

The idea that every species should be assessed, ranked, and listed according to its projected risk of extinction is now a commonly accepted practice in conservation. Threatened species lists rank species in a linear progression from the least to the most endangered. This chapter explores the biopolitical nature of such lists. It shows how listing threatened species becomes a way to affirm — and justify — that life which is more and most important to save. The chapter …

Property Constructs And Nature's Challenge To Perpetuity, Jessica Owley

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Published as Chapter 4 in Environmental Law and Contrasting Ideas of Nature: a Constructivist Approach, Keith H. Hirokawa, ed.

Animals And Law In The American City, Irus Braverman

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Published as Chapter 6 in Environmental Law and Contrasting Ideas of Nature: a Constructivist Approach, Keith H. Hirokawa, ed.

Whereas a large and growing scholarly literature is dedicated to studying human populations in the city, not much has been written about nonhuman animals in this space. This essay explores the presence of nonhuman animals in the American city through a legal lens. I begin with a few general contemplations about the legal classification of animals in American cities, and then move to explore specific legal classifications of animals in cities: domestic and companion animals, agriculture or livestock animals, wild animals, …

Order And Disorder In The Urban Forest: A Foucauldian-Latourian Perspective, Irus Braverman

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Published as Chapter 9 in Urban Forests, Trees, and Greenspace: A Political Ecology Perspective, L. Anders Sandberg, Adrina Bardekjian & Sadia Butt, eds.

We pass by street trees everyday. Their existence as well as their particular location in the city seems obvious, innocuous, natural. But, as is the case with most taken-for-granted "things" (Brown, 2011), some excavation is bound to reveal a more complicated and even ideological story. This study focuses on such a story: the story of the clandestine governance of nature and of humans by way of nature - all through the construction and regulation of city street …

Buddhism And Law In Tibet, Rebecca Redwood French

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Published as Chapter 17 in Buddhism and Law: An Introduction, Rebecca Redwood French & Mark A. Nathan, eds.

The Tibetan plateau is an immense high-altitude desert that, except for a few larger towns, was very sparsely populated with agriculturalists, nomadic herders, and merchant traders prior to 1960. The small population and minimal urbanization are the most important distinguishing features of this Buddhist country because concentrated populations are commonly connected to the development of government administration, law, and intellectual production. Despite this, Tibetan culture is known for its long history of enormous production of literary, scholarly, and religious works. Books on …

An Eye Toward Effective Enforcement: A Technical-Comparative Approach To The Drafting Negotiations, Tara J. Melish

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Published as Chapter 5 in Human Rights and Disability Advocacy, Maya Sabatello & Marianne Schulze, eds.

The unprecedented level of civil society participation that took place in the drafting of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) constitutes a major key to its success -- laying a solid foundation for the much longer and harder process of implementation ahead. This piece addresses how one civil society organization -- Disability Rights International (DRI) -- approached the negotiation process. Part I explains the strategic approach DRI adopted, highlighting its methodology, the guiding principles it embraced, and the resulting …

Captive For Life: Conserving Extinct In The Wild Species Through Ex Situ Breeding, Irus Braverman

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Published as Chapter 12 in The Ethics of Captivity, Lori Gruen, ed.

Are there “fates worse than death,” to use Kurt Vonnegut’s title? Is captivity one such fate? Captive for Life examines these questions through the lens of conservation biology’s ex situ models of captive management — and captive breeding in particular — for wild animals, and especially for species that have been designated as Critically Endangered or as Extinct in the Wild. Drawing on interviews with leading conservation biologists, the chapter describes the erosion of the distinctions between species management in captivity and in wild nature, often referred to …

Comparative Criminal Law, Luis E. Chiesa

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Published as Chapter 47 in The Oxford Handbook of Criminal Law, Markus Dubber & Tatjana Hörnle, eds.

Criminal law is a parochial discipline. Courts and scholars in the English speaking world seldom take seriously the criminal statutes, cases and scholarly writings published in the non-English speaking world. The same is true the other way around. This is unfortunate. Much can be learned from comparing the way in which the world’s leading legal systems approach important questions of criminal theory.

This Chapter introduces the reader to comparative criminal law with the aim of demonstrating how comparative analysis can enrich both domestic …

Legal Tails: Policing American Cities Through Animals, Irus Braverman

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Published as Chapter 8 in Policing Cities: Urban Securitization and Regulation in a 21st Century World, Randy K. Lippert & Kevin Walby, eds.

“I don’t worry about the four-legged animals,” Officer Armatys tells me as I scramble to catch up when he enters a backyard with a fierce-looking dog. “It’s the two-legged animals I am concerned about.” I interviewed Officer Armatys twice, first in his office in the Erie County’s Society for the Protection of Animals (ESPCA) and, a few months later, on a ride-along during a routine workday. Based on these encounters and numerous others with members of the …

Public Interest Litigation And The Transformation Of The Supreme Court Of India, Manoj Mate

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Published as Chapter 10 in Consequential Courts: Judicial Roles in Global Perspective, Diana Kapiszewski, Gordon Silverstein & Robert A. Kagan, eds. (2013).

The Supreme Court of India today is arguably one of the most powerful constitutional courts in the world. The Court has taken on an active and central role in the governance of the Indian polity through its activity in public interest litigation cases, and in some cases, has virtually taken over functions that were once the domain of Parliament and the Executive. Within the past two decades, the Indian Court wrested control over judicial appointments from the Executive, …

The Culture Of Financial Institutions: The Institution Of Political Economy, David A. Westbrook

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Published as Chapter 1 in Integrity, Risk and Accountability in Capital Markets: Regulating Culture, Justin O'Brien & George Gilligan, eds.

The 19th century legal historian Henry Maine famously defined progress, and by extension, liberal modernity, as the substitution of relations based on status (especially family and title), to relations based on contract, especially trade and employment. The article suggests that Maine's assertion, however comforting as a political matter, simply does not hold with regard to the credit relations central to contemporary society. Credit transactions, even retail transactions, are based on trust and interlocking webs of obligation across agents (until recently …

Achieving A Free Trade Area Of The Asia-Pacific: Does The Tpp Present The Most Attractive Path?, Meredith Kolsky Lewis

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Published as Chapter 15 in The Trans-Pacific Partnership : A Quest for a Twenty-First Century Trade Agreement, C.L. Lim, Deborah K. Elms & Patrick Low, eds.

This chapter examines the prospects for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to expand into a Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP). It does so by comparing the TPP to other potential models for Asian economic integration, and by identifying what factors might enhance or diminish the possibility of the TPP serving as the FTAAP model.

First, the chapter briefly traces the history of the TPP and its linkage to a potential FTAAP. Second, it …

Tribes As Conservation Easement Holders: Is A Partial Property Interest Better Than None?, Jessica Owley

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Published as Chapter 8 in Tribes, Land, and the Environment, Sarah Krakoff & Ezra Rosser.

Priests In The Temple Of Justice: The Indian Legal Complex And The Basic Structure Doctrine, Manoj Mate

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Published as Chapter 3 in Fates of Political Liberalism in the British Post-Colony: The Politics of the Legal Complex, Terence C. Halliday, Lucien Karpik & Malcolm M. Feeley, eds. (2012).

Importing Democracy: Promoting Participatory Decision Making In Russian Forest Communities, Maria Tysiachniouk, Errol E. Meidinger

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Published in Environmental Democracy Facing Uncertainty, Cécilia Claeys & Marie Jacqué, eds.

This paper describes how the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) jump-started democratic institutions in Russian rural communities to create a basis for social, environmental, and economic modernization within the Russian forestry sector. In Russia’s post-soviet markets and institutions, a host of multinational companies and large transnational environmental organizations sought to promote the restructuring of Russia’s legal and economic infrastructure and active subsidiaries in Russia. In order for modern forestry approaches to be imported, management practices that had developed in the West needed to be adapted to Russia’s …

The Politics And Indirect Effects Of Asymmetrical Bargaining Power In Free Trade Agreements, Meredith Kolsky Lewis

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Published as Chapter 2 in The Politics of International Economic Law, Tomer Broude, Marc L. Busch & Amelia Proges, eds.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) has been, and continues to be, shaped in its agreements and institutional foci in significant part by political pressures emanating from its members, particularly those able to wield the most influence. Rather than being an institution with the singular focus of achieving free trade among all members, the WTO comprises a complex set of agreements, many of which represent a politically driven compromise among members as to how to manage trade rather than to liberalize …

How And Why Do Lawyers Misbehave? Lawyers, Discipline, And Collegial Control, Lynn M. Mather

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Published as Chapter 6 in The Paradox of Professionalism: Lawyers and the Possibility of Justice, Scott L. Cummings, ed.

A fundamental principle of professional labor is that the members of a specialized occupation, as professionals, enjoy autonomy. In sociologist Elliot Freidson's words, professionals “control their own work.” The practitioners themselves decide what constitutes acceptable or appropriate behavior. Professions establish rules and systems of self-regulation to teach and enforce the expected standards of conduct on their members. One way, then, to assess legal professionalism is to ask how well lawyers regulate themselves. The extensive literature on lawyer regulation paints a negative …

From The Welfare State To The Militarized Market: Losing Choices, Controlling Losers, Martha T. Mccluskey

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Published as Chapter 1 in Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and Dispossession in the Making of Everyday Life, Shelley Feldman, Charles Geisler & Gayatri A. Menon, eds.

Beneath a libertarian surface, free market economic ideas and policies have helped rationalize the strengthening of anti-democratic moral and political fundamentalism. The triumph of market freedom has been accompanied by increasing authoritarian government control in many spheres.

This chapter explains how a two-step rhetorical move in prevailing economic ideology turns authoritarianism and austerity into the route to freedom and growth. First, free market ideology constructs the increasingly limited and bad economic choices of a declining …

A Critique Of Rights In Transitional Justice: The African Experience, Makau Wa Mutua

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Published in Rethinking Transitions: Equality and Social Justice in Societies Emerging from Conflict, Gaby Oré Aguilar & Felipe Gómez Isa, eds.

This chapter interrogates the concept and application of transitional justice as a medium for the reclamation of post-conflict states in Africa. While it argues that transitional justice is an important – often indispensable – process in reconstructing post-despotic and battered societies, it nevertheless casts a jaundiced eye at traditionalist human rights approaches. It contends that individualist, non-collective, or non-community, approaches to transitional justice have serious limitations. It posits that the Nuremberg model, on which the ICTR and ICTY were …

Stability, Integration And Political Modalities: Some American Reflections On The European Project After The Financial Crisis, David A. Westbrook

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Published as Chapter 22 in Making Transnational Law Work in the Global Economy: Essays in Honour of Detlev Vagts, Pieter H. F. Bekker, Rudolf Dolzer & Michael Waibel, eds.

To those of us concerned with transnational law, and especially the role of German law on the global stage, it does not need saying that Professor Detlev Vagts is highly deserving of that Germanic and traditional scholarly honour, a Festchrift. (In this context, ‘does not need saying’ of course means ‘should be said repeatedly’.) We all owe Detlev Vagts, and as a Germanic traditionalist, I would be delighted to contribute to …

Safety Standards And Indigenous Products: What Role For Traditional Knowledge?, Meredith Kolsky Lewis

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Published as Chapter 8 in International Economic Law and National Autonomy, Meredith Kolsky Lewis & Susy Frankel, eds.

Indigenous communities have used native plants as foods and for medicinal purposes for thousands of years. Some of these indigenous products have proven sufficiently popular that individuals outside the indigenous community have sought to consume, purchase and market them. In certain instances, new products have been derived from the indigenous plant and sold outside the indigenous community. In other cases, the indigenous product has been exported in its original form, but utilized in non-traditional ways in the export market. In recent years, …

Why Federalism And Constitutional Positivism Don't Mix, James A. Gardner

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Published as Chapter 4 in New Frontiers of State Constitutional Law: Dual Enforcement of Norms, James A. Gardner & Jim Rossi, eds.

This chapter places the book's approach in its interpretational context by linking the federal structure of constitutional norm production to the ever-present problem of interpretational methodology. It begins by arguing that previous approaches to the interpretation of subnational constitutions have failed because they improperly attempted to apply the dominant jurisprudence of national constitutional interpretation—constitutional positivism—to the constitutions of the states. Yet constitutional positivism as a technique only makes sense where subnational units are autonomous, as independent nations are. …

From Paradox To Subsidiarity: The United States And Human Rights Treaty Bodies, Tara J. Melish

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Published as Chapter 8 in The Sword and the Scales: The United States and International Courts and Tribunals, Cesare P.R. Romano, ed.

It is frequently said that the United States has a paradoxical human rights policy. This Article takes a closer look at this vision from the perspective of U.S. engagement with international human rights treaty bodies, the quasi-adjudicatory expert committees or commissions that exercise supervisory jurisdiction over the U.S. human rights record. Contrary to popular perception that the U.S. thumbs its nose at these bodies, the U.S. in fact engages quite actively with their human rights procedures.

To untangle …