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Faculty Scholarship

Comparative and Foreign Law

Columbia Law School

Columbia Journal of European Law

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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Political Economy Of Recognition: Affirmative Action Discourse And Constitutional Equality In Germany And The U.S.A., Kendall Thomas Jan 1999

The Political Economy Of Recognition: Affirmative Action Discourse And Constitutional Equality In Germany And The U.S.A., Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

This paper undertakes a comparative exploration of affirmative action discourse in German and American constitutional equality law. The first task for such a project is to acknowledge an important threshold dilemma. The difficulty in question derives not so much from dissimilarities between the technical legal structures of German and American affirmative action policy. The problem stems rather from the different social grounds and groupings on which those legal structures have been erected. Because German "positive action"' applies only to women, gender and its cultural meanings have constituted the paradigmatic subject of the policy. The legal discussion of positive action has …


Regulatory Federalism: A Reprise And Introduction, George A. Bermann Jan 1996

Regulatory Federalism: A Reprise And Introduction, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

This colloquium, like its predecessor, proceeds on the basis of a series of assumptions. First, it assumes that the federalism dimension of the regulatory state is an important one Gust as is the regulatory dimension of the federal state). In introducing our first colloquium, I suggested that, although determining the content of public policy is critical in a democratic society, also critical is determining the level of government at which the choice of policy is made. Ingolf Pernice remarked then that a federal system is "any legal entity [which is] comprised of states for the purpose of pursuing certain common …


Regulatory Decisionmaking In The European Commission, George A. Bermann Jan 1995

Regulatory Decisionmaking In The European Commission, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

As an institution variously described as the "motor" or "engine" of European integration and as the European Union's "executive branch," the Commission of the European Communities finds itself at the center of Community decisionmaking. Yet its decisional processes are still quite poorly understood, at least in the United States. The relatively poor grasp of Commission decisionmaking is certainly not due to any general lack of interest in procedure within the American audience. The problem lies more in the highly restrictive view of decisionmaking that traditionally dominates procedural accounts of the Community institutions. Those accounts have tended to reflect three preoccupations. …