Law Commons^™

Anti-Modalities, David E. Pozen, Adam Samaha

Faculty Scholarship

Constitutional argument runs on the rails of “modalities.” These are the accepted categories of reasoning used to make claims about the content of supreme law. Some of the modalities, such as ethical and prudential arguments, seem strikingly open ended at first sight. Their contours come into clearer view, however, when we attend to the kinds of claims that are not made by constitutional interpreters – the analytical and rhetorical moves that are familiar in debates over public policy and political morality but are considered out of bounds in debates over constitutional meaning. In this Article, we seek to identify the …

Legal Internalism In Modern Histories Of Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Taisu Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

Legal internalism refers to the internal point of view that professional participants in a legal practice develop toward it. It represents a behavioral phenomenon wherein such participants treat the domain of law (or a subset of it) as normative, epistemologically self-contained, and logically coherent on its own terms regardless of whether the law actually embodies those characteristics. Thus understood, legal internalism remains an important characteristic of all modern legal systems. In this Review, we examine three recent interdisciplinary histories of copyright law to showcase the working of legal internalism. We argue that while their interdisciplinary emphasis adds to the conversation …

An Everyday Lawyer’S Shakespeare, Carl J. Circo

Arkansas Law Notes

This summer, I enjoyed a unique opportunity to explore Shakespeare’s critique of law with a small group of students and a dear colleague in a study abroad program at the University of Arkansas Rome Center. I want to share my reflections on this singularly rewarding experience.

Preparing Legal Frameworks For Environmental Disasters: Practical Considerations For Host States, Brooke Guven, Perrine Toledano, Lise Johnson

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Projects in the extractives sector carry risks of lasting, and sometimes irreversible, damage to the environment. Nonetheless, these projects are important for accelerating the economic development of host countries. Governments seeking to mitigate the adverse effects of foreign investment often face pushback from investors that are unwilling to change their practices in order to avert environmental disaster. This report sets forth certain steps that host-governments can take during the pre-investment, operation, and enforcement phases of extractives projects to provide financial and other protection in the context of environmental disasters associated with private sector investments.

Upon comparative review of five Case …

Beholding Law: Amadeo On The Argentine Constitution, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus, Erin F. Delaney

Faculty Scholarship

This essay introduces an online edition of Santos P. Amadeo’s Argentine Constitutional Law to be published by the Academia Puertorriqueña de Jurisprudencia y Legislación. Tracing the book to its origins in a paper Amadeo wrote for a seminar in comparative constitutional law at Columbia Law School in the 1930s, we discuss the intellectual context that gave rise to the book and assess its author’s methodological choices. We then examine one particular substantive choice: Whereas the paper specifically draws attention to the importance of understanding every form of political subdivision in a federalist system – identifying Argentina’s as the provinces, the …

Cyberattacks And The Constitution, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

Contrary to popular view, cyberattacks alone are rarely exercises of constitutional war powers – and they might never be. They are often instead best understood as exercises of other powers pertaining to nonwar military, foreign affairs, intelligence, and foreign commerce, for example. Although this more fine-grained, fact-specific conception of cyberattacks leaves room for broad executive leeway in some contexts, it also contains a strong constitutional basis for legislative regulation of cyber operations.

Aligning Investment Treaties With Sustainable Development Goals, Lise Johnson, Lisa E. Sachs, Nathan Lobel

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Policy makers and other stakeholders are currently asking fundamental questions about whether and to what extent international investment agreements (IIAs) are consistent with and are helping to advance sustainable development objectives at home and abroad.

A 2019 paper from CCSI examines the alignment of IIAs with the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, arguing that while FDI will play an important role in advancing development outcomes, existing treaties must be reformed and future IIAs reimagined in order to achieve deep alignment with the sustainable development goals.

The paper proposes that IIAs should be designed and evaluated with respect to their ability to …

Public Interest Litigation & Women’S Rights: Cases From Nepal & India, Jordan E. Stevenson

2019 Symposium

As a complex, diverse and dynamic region with diverging, constantly changing constitutional and jurisprudential contexts as well as lasting legacies of patriarchy, South Asia’s traditions of public interest litigation are one of the most well-studied institutions by Western audiences due to their contradictory progressive and innovative nature. Particularly in India, where public interest litigation gives ordinary citizens extraordinary access to the highest courts of justice, questions have been raised as to the effectiveness of public interest litigation as a tool to address gender disparities across the region. Although Supreme Court justices have been a key ally in eliminating legal barriers …

One Rule Of Law Project In Post-Soviet Russia, Albert E. Scherr

Law Faculty Scholarship

"One Rule of Law Project in Post-Soviet Russia" is published as Chapter 9 of the book At Home Abroad: Friendship First - A Look at Rule of Law Projects and Other International Insights, (ed. Joseph Nadeau, New York: Austin Macauley Publishers LLC, 2019). This book provides personal insights into an international cooperative effort to promote the rule of law in emerging democracies around the world. Professor Scherr's chapter examines the cultural context within a study of the rule-of-law project that was conducted between 1999 and 2004 in Vologda, Russia.

Private Law Statutory Interpretation, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

While scholars routinely question the normative significance of the distinction between public law and private law, few – if any – question its conceptual basis. Put in simple terms, private law refers to bodies of legal doctrine that govern the horizontal interaction between actors, be they individuals, corporate entities, or on occasion the state acting in its private capacity. Public law on the other hand refers to doctrinal areas that deal with vertical interaction between the state and non-state actors, wherein the state exerts a direct and overbearing influence on the shape and course of the law. The latter is …

Divergence And Convergence At The Intersection Of Property And Contract, Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci, Carmine Guerriero

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, we study rules that solve the conflict between the original owner and an innocent buyer of a stolen or embezzled good. These rules balance the protection of the original owner’s property and the buyer’s reliance on contractual exchange, thereby addressing a fundamental legal and economic trade-off. Our analysis is based on a unique, hand-collected dataset on the rules in force in 126 countries. Using this data, we document and explain two conflicting trends. There is a large amount of first-order divergence: both rules that apply to stolen goods and those that apply to embezzled goods vary widely …

Conceptions Of Authority And The Anglo-American Common Law Divide, Dan Priel

Articles & Book Chapters

This essay seeks to explain the puzzle of the divergence of American law from the rest of the common law world through the lens of legal theory. I argue that there are four competing ideal-type theories of the authority of the common law: reason, practice, custom, and will. The reason view explains the authority of the common law in terms of correspondence to the demands of pure practical reason; the practice view sees the authority of the common law as derived from the expertise of practitioners (especially judges and practice-oriented academics) who try to develop the common law as a …

Vermeule Unbound, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

My book asks Is Administrative Law Unlawful? Adrian Vermeule answers “No.” In support of his position, he claims that my book does not really make arguments from the U.S. Constitution, that it foolishly denounces administrative power for lacking legislative authorization, that it grossly misunderstands this power and the underlying judicial doctrines, and ultimately that I argue “like a child.”

My book actually presents a new conception of administrative power, its history, and its unconstitutionality; as Vermeule has noted elsewhere, it offers a new paradigm. Readers therefore should take seriously the arguments against the book. They also, however, should recognize that …

Early Prerogative And Administrative Power: A Response To Paul Craig, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

What does English experience imply about American constitutional law? My book, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, argues that federal administrative power generally is unconstitutional. In supporting this conclusion, the book observes that eighteenth-century Americans adopted their constitutions not only with their eyes on the future, but also looking over their shoulder at the past – especially the English past. This much should not be controversial. There remain, however, all sorts of questions about how to understand the English history and its relevance for early Americans.

In opposition to my claims about American law, Paul Craig lobs three critiques from across the …

Impact Of The “Nirbhaya” Rape Case: Isolated Phenomenon Or Social Change?, Tina P. Lapsia

Honors Scholar Theses

In December 2012, a twenty-three year old college student, who was given the pseudonym “Nirbhaya” (“fearless”), was fatally gang-raped on a private bus in Delhi, India, galvanizing the country to swiftly adopt new legislative measures and catapulting the issue of violence against women in India into the international spotlight. Although assault and rape cases have made India infamous for its high volume of crimes against women, the reaction to this particular incident was much different from before. This paper investigates whether the governmental and societal responses represent social change, as indicated by changing attitudes towards violence against women in India. …

The Pond Betwixt: Differences In The U.S.-Eu Data Protection/Safe Harbor Negotiation, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Faculty Publications

This article analyzes the differing perspectives that animate US and EU conceptions of privacy in the context of data protection. It begins by briefly reviewing the two continental approaches to data protection and then explains how the two approaches arise in a context of disparate cultural traditions with respect to the role of law in society. In light of those disparities, Underpinning contemporary data protection regulation is the normative value that both US and EU societies place on personal privacy. Both cultures attribute modern privacy to the famous Warren-Brandeis article in 1890, outlining a "right to be let alone." But …

Rights As Wrongs: Legality And Sacrality In Thailand, David M. Engel

Journal Articles

Interviews with injury victims in northern Thailand (Lanna) conveyed a pervasive sense of injustice in their daily lives but a notable absence of the language of rights. Despite the proliferation of rights-based discourses, organisations, and institutions in Thai society, interviewees tended to disfavour the pursuit of rights because they believed that resort to the legal system would subvert Lanna traditional practices and would add to the bad karma that caused their suffering in the first place. This article traces fundamental contradictions in northern Thai concepts of justice arising from the imposition of “modern” systems of law and religion by the …

Hollow Spaces, Charles H. Brower Ii

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Investor-State Contracts, Host-State “Commitments” And The Myth Of Stability In International Law, Lise Johnson, Oleksandr Volkov

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

A new de facto rule has emerged in international investment law that emphasizes and prioritizes investment stability, imposing liability on host governments for a wide range of public interest measures deemed to interfere with “commitments” given to foreign investors by host governments. The arbitral decisions from which this new rule has emanated in treaty-based investment disputes resolve types of claims that have long been familiar to domestic jurisdictions. Yet, as this article uncovers through a comparative law analysis of factually similar cases decided under United States law over roughly the past 200 years, the approaches taken and pronouncements issued by …

State-Sponsored Religious Displays In The U.S. And Europe: Introduction, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

On June 22, 2012, the Center for Law and Religion proudly hosted, together with the Department of Law at Libera Universita Maria SS. Assunta (LUMSA), an international conference, State-Sponsored Religious Displays in the U.S. and Europe. Held at LUMSA's campus in Rome, Italy, the conference brought together leading American and European scholars, judges, and government officials to address the legality of public religious displays in different nations. Professor Silvio Ferrari of the University of Milan delivered the Conference Introduction. Panels included Cultural or Religious? Understanding Symbols in Public Places; The Lautsi Case and the Margin of Appreciation; and State-Sponsored Religious …

Religious Legal Theory Symposium: Introduction, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

On November 5, 2010, the St. John's Center for Law and Religion proudly hosted the annual Religious Legal Theory Conference. The event, now in its second year and to be shared among different universities, brought together scholars from around the world to discuss this year's theme, "Religion in Law, Law in Religion." The Center chose this theme in order to include papers on traditional church-state issues—“Religion in Law"—as well as papers addressing the role that law plays in various religious traditions—“Law in Religion." In addition, because contemporary law and religion scholarship has moved beyond strictly domestic-law questions, and takes an …

The Functionalism Of Legal Origins, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

This article, written on request for the centennial issue of Ius Commune Europaeum, connects the economic literature on legal origins (La Porta et al) and the World Bank's Doing Business reports with discussions in comparative law about the functional method. It finds that a number of parallels and similarities exist, and that much of the criticism that has been voiced against functionalism should apply, mutates mutants, also to these more recent projects. The attraction that these projects have derive not, it is argued, from their methodological sophistication, but instead from "the strange lure of economics" and from the ostentatious objectivity …

Elusive Equality: The Armenian Genocide And The Failure Of Ottoman Legal Reform, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

I would like to thank the organizers for inviting me to deliver some remarks this morning. By way of background, I am not a historian or genocide scholar, but a law professor with an interest in comparative law and religion. Comparative law and religion is a relatively new field. It explores how different legal regimes reflect, and influence, the relationships that religious communities have with the state and with each other. My recent work compares Islamic and Christian conceptions of law, a subject that has engaged Muslims and Christians since their first encounters in the seventh century.

When I approach …

From Kosovo To Catalonia: Separatism And Integration In Europe, Christopher J. Borgen

Faculty Publications

In July 2010 the International Court of Justice rendered its Advisory Opinion on the legality of Kosovo's declaration of independence and the Constitutional Court of Spain rendered an opinion concerning the autonomy of Catalonia. Two very different cases, from very different places, decided by very different courts. Nonetheless, they each provide insights on the issue of separatism in the midst of European integration. Does the Kosovo opinion open the door for other separatist groups? Does the process of European integration increase or undercut separatism? In addressing these questions, this article proceeds in three main parts. Part A briefly recaps the …

Fair Measure Of The Right To Vote: A Comparative Perspective Of Voting Rights Enforcement In A Maturing Democracy, Janai S. Nelson

Faculty Publications

Constitutional text and government action are at times discordant in important ways. This discrepancy occurs in both mature and emerging democracies. It can result in the underenforcement of constitutional norms and implicate the rule of law. When the constitutional norm involves the right to vote, the gap between constitutions and governance inevitably triggers concerns about democracy as well. There is rich and ample debate within American legal scholarship over the effect of the underenforcement of constitutional norms on the scope and meaning of the norm. The arguments generally fall into one of two camps. One strand of argument suggests that …

Laïcité In Comparative Perspective (Conference): Foreword, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

On June 11, 2010, the Center for Law and Religion at St. John's University School of Law held its inaugural event, an academic conference at the University's Paris campus. "Laïcité in Comparative Perspective" brought together scholars from the United States and Europe to explore the French concept of laïcité and compare it with models of church-state relations in other countries, particularly the United States. Participants included Douglas Laycock (University of Virginia), who offered the Conference Introduction; Nathalie Caron (Université Paris-Est Créteil); Blandine Chelini-Pont (Université Paul Cézanne Aix-Marseille); Nina Crimm (St. John's University); Marc DeGirolami (St. John's University); Javier Martínez-Torrón Universidad …

Fiqh And Canons: Reflections On Islamic And Christian Jurisprudence, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

Although American scholarship has begun to address both Christian and Islamic jurisprudence in a serious way, virtually none of the literature attempts to compare the place of law in these two world religions. This Essay begins to compare Islamic and Christian conceptions of law and suggests some implications for contemporary debates about religious dispute settlement. Islam and Christianity are subtle and complex religions. Each has competing strands; each has evolved over millennia and expressed itself differently over time. Moreover, although systematic treatments of Islamic law are beginning to appear in English, much remains available only in languages, like Arabic, that …

Comparative Federalism And The Role Of Judiciary, Daniel Halberstam

Book Chapters

The distinctive feature of federalism is to locate the central and constituent governments' respective claims of organizational autonomy and jurisdictional authority within a set of privileged legal norms that are beyond the arena of daily politics. For the most part, the debate about the role of the judiciary as federal umpire has taken place within two separate disciplinary compartments: comparative politics and law. Building on recent e��orts to bring these two disciplines closer, this article provides a fresh look at three common criticisms of granting the central judiciary power to protect federalism. It argues that political safeguards of federalism are …

Measuring State Compliance With The Right To Education Using Indicators: A Case Study Of Colombia’S Obligations Under The Icescr, Sital Kalantry, Jocelyn Getgen, Steven A. Koh

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

The right to education is often referred to as a “multiplier right” because its enjoyment enhances other human rights. It is enumerated in several international instruments, but it is codified in greatest detail in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Despite its importance, the right to education has received limited attention from scholars, practitioners, and international and regional human rights bodies as compared to other economic, social and cultural rights (ECSRs). In this Article, we propose a methodology that utilizes indicators to measure treaty compliance with the right to education. Indicators are essential to measuring compliance …

Jurisdictions And Causes Of Action: Commercial Considerations In Dealing With Bullying, Stress And Harassment Cases-Part Ii, Niall Neligan

Articles

In the concluding part of this two part article, the author will
examine how the courts have developed rules for dealing with
tortious claims for psychiatric injuries arising out of bullying, stress
and harassment cases. The article will examine whether it is
desirable to consolidate and codify employment rights law in order
to provide clarity to prospective litigants. Finally, the author will
argue that if codification is required, then this will necessitate a
change in the nature of present jurisdictions for bringing claims
involving bullying, stress and harassment in the workplace.