Law Commons^™

The Odious Debt Doctrine After Iraq, Jai Damle

Law and Contemporary Problems

The odious debt doctrine has experienced renewed popularity in the past few years; it has been heralded by academics, political commentators, economists, and politicians as a mechanism to alleviate burdens imposed by illegitimate rulers. In its classic formulation, the doctrine provides that a regime's debt is odious, and thus unenforceable, if the state's people did not consent to the debt, the proceeds from the debt were not used for the benefit of the people, and the regime's creditors had knowledge of the first two conditions. In 2003, the newly instated Iraqi regime began negotiations to restructure that country's debt, much …

Odious Debt In Retrospect, Daniel K. Tarullo

Law and Contemporary Problems

In the eighty years since Alexander Sack coined the phrase "odious debt," academics and activists have periodically rediscovered Sack's idea, often arguing for its application or extension-to this point, in vain. Here, Tarullo reveals the degree to which current interest in the problem of odious debt is intertwined with other problems that strike more critically at the well-being of developing-and emerging-market countries. He reasons that the necessarily complex effort needed to institutionalize a doctrine of odious debt is a potentially effective organizing principle for generating the political will to address these other persistent, debilitating problems.

Sovereign Debt Restructuring, Odious Debt, And The Politics Of Debt Relief, Robert K. Rasmussen

Law and Contemporary Problems

Odious debt is more of a literature than a doctrine. Going back to at least the 1920s, one can find arguments that countries should not have to pay back debts that are labeled "odious." The central intuition is that the citizens of a country should not have to pay for the debts incurred by a prior "odious" regime when those funds did not benefit these citizens. It is simply not right to ask people to pay for funds from which they did not benefit, especially when the lender knew of this fact when it made its loan. Here, Rasmussen comments …

Religious V. Secular Ideologies And Sex Education: A Response To Professors Cahn And Carbone, Vivian E. Hamilton

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Deep Purple: Religious Shades Of Family Law, Naomi Cahn, June Carbone

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Richard Matthew On Pakistan’S Drift Into Extremism: Allah, The Army, And America’S War On Terror By Hassan Abbas. London: M. E. Sharpe, 2005. 276 Pp., Richard Matthew

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America’s War on Terror by Hassan Abbas. London: M. E. Sharpe, 2005. 276 pp.

The Anarchist In The Coffee House: A Brief Consideration Of Local Culture, The Free Culture Movement, And Prospects For A Global Public Sphere, Siva Vaidhyanathan

Law and Contemporary Problems

Jürgen Habermas' influential historical work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, describes a moment in the social and political history of Europe in which a rising bourgeoisie was able to gather in salons and cafes to discuss matters of public concern. The public sphere represented a set of sites and conventions in the eighteenth century in which (almost exclusively male) members of the bourgeoisie could forge a third space to mediate between domestic concerns and matters of state. Here, Vaidhyanathan examines one particular Public Sphere experiment--the rise of a global Free Culture Movement that aims to limit the spread …

Property, Contracts, And Politics, Mark Tushnet

Michigan Law Review

Rebecca Scott is a historian, not an economist. Describing how a dispute over a mule's ownership was resolved, Professor Scott reproduces a receipt two claimants left when they took the mule from the plantation whose manager claimed it as well (p. 185). By contrast, analyzing property relations in the pre-Civil War American South, economic historian Jenny Wahl observes, "[E]conomic historians tend to [use] ... frequency tables, graphs, and charts." The differences in visual aids to understanding indicate the various ways historians and economists approach a single topic-the relation between markets and politics, the latter defined to include the deployment of …

Keeping The State Out: The Separation Of Law And State In Classical Islamic Law, Lubna A. Alam

Michigan Law Review

The implementation and enforcement of Islamic law, especially Islamic criminal law, by modem-day Muslim nation-states is fraught with controversy and challenges. In Pakistan, the documented problems and failures of the country's attempt to codify Islamic law on extramarital sexual relations have led to efforts to remove rape cases from Islamic law courts to civil law courts. In striking contrast to Pakistan's experience, the Republic of the Maldives recently commissioned a draft of a penal law and sentencing guidelines based on Islamic law that abides by international norms. The incorporation of Islamic law into the legal systems of various countries around …

An Essay For Keisha (And A Response To Professor Ford), Barbara J. Flagg

Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy

In chapter 3 I build on this conclusion and argue that political solidarity based on a common relationship to oppression and domination is the appropriate focus of (racial) identity politics and legal rights assertion; by contrast cultural claims are more contestable on both descriptive and normative terms and should be left to more fluid domains of conflict resolution such as social dialogue, the democratic process and the market economy . . . . With respect to the "foreseeable effects" model, the 1995 test for the first prong, the existence of a foreseeable impact, clearly encompasses more than cultural difference.94 In …

The Double Standard In Judicial Selection, Edwin Meese Iii

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Protecting The Polity: Strategies For Reform, Dana Gold, Solange Bitol-Hansen, Charlie Cray, Bruce Freed

Seattle University Law Review

This session is Protecting the Polity: Strategies for Reform, and we frame this as additional strategies that are actually percolating in a concrete way out in the real world, not just in the world of academic theory, to promote citizen participation in a democracy that countenances corporate influence in the political process.

The D'Oh! Of Popular Constitutionalism, Neal Devins

Michigan Law Review

This Review will be divided into three parts. Part I will both summarize The Most Democratic Branch and highlight some of the difficulties that the Supreme Court would face in implementing Rosen's decision-making model. In particular, by allowing the Court to invalidate laws for a host of "antidemocratic" reasons, Rosen's matrix does not constrain the Court in a predictable way. Part II will examine some of the empirical evidence about public attitudes toward the Supreme Court, including public awareness of Supreme Court decisions. I will contend that the Court cannot look to the people to sort out the Constitution's meaning …