Law Commons^™

Sentencing In An Era Of Plea Bargains, Jeffrey Bellin, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The literature offers inconsistent answers to a question that is foundational to criminal law: Who imposes sentences? Traditional narratives place sentencing responsibility in the hands of the judge. Yet, in a country where 95 percent of criminal convictions come from guilty pleas (not trials), modern American scholars center prosecutors – who control plea terms – as the decider of punishment. This Article highlights and seeks to resolve the tension between these conflicting narratives by charting the pathways by which sentences are determined in a system dominated by plea bargains.

After reviewing the empirical literature on sentence variation, state and federal …

Russia, Ukraine, And The Challenge Of Wartime Accountability, Jeffrey D. Kahn

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

There has been a notable shift in the emerging Russian perspective on international law and international organizations, a trend that began nearly a decade prior to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Over this period, Russia has made substantial alterations to its laws, constitution, and international commitments, effectively withdrawing from previously accepted legal obligations. Furthermore, Russia has increasingly rejected fundamental international legal norms and principles with growing fervor.

In the keynote remarks delivered during the Texas Tech Law Review 2023 Criminal Law Symposium, the author delves into this significant shift, providing illustrative examples.

North American Energy In The Crossfire, Guillermo J. Garcia Sanchez, James W. Coleman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

North America is the beating heart of global energy markets undergoing a terrible energy crisis that threatens to upend both the economy and global security. The clearest path out of this global crisis is increasing energy supplies from North America, which can restore energy security and drive a transition to cleaner energy sources. The U.S., Mexico, and Canada have abundant and varied resources to surmount this challenge but are in dire need of stronger cooperation across borders, and between private and public actors to achieve this goal. This Article shows how energy law changes in the U.S. and Mexico present …

Procedural Jus Cogens, Anthony J, Colangelo

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Jus cogens are a species of supernorm in international law. They are universally binding and trump all contrary rules—such as treaties and customary international law. They are typically framed in terms of substantive prohibitions: no genocide, no slavery, no crimes against humanity, etc. This Article seeks to identify a procedural jus cogens; namely, the right to due process of law made up of notice, a hearing, and an impartial and independent decisionmaker. To do so, it draws from what are called “general principles of international law”; that is, principles common to legal systems around the world, which make up a …

Deep In The Heart Of North America: Texas And The Future Of North American Energy Trade, Guillermo J. Garcia Sanchez, James W. Coleman

Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center Research

Texas, the heart of North American energy markets, has recently emerged from history’s biggest oil boom, and is becoming the crossroads for an increasingly two-way trade in oil and gas. Texas and Mexico, in particular have much to gain from expanded energy trade. This report shows how energy law changes in the U.S. and Mexico present under-studied dangers to cross-border energy trade and will set an agenda for legal reform to enable mutually beneficial fuel and power trade.

An International Approach To Maritime Conflicts Of Law, Anthony J. Colangelo

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Essay seeks to answer two interrelated questions about regnant maritime choice of law analysis in the United States: Does it descriptively capture international law as the United States claims? And, if so, is such an approach a good one? In so doing, it aims principally to provide national and international decision makers with a robust and fresh resource for resolving these disputes in a manner, I argue, beneficent to overall social welfare and peaceful relations among states. For only by analyzing the United States’ claim can we tell whether it is true and thus, whether it needs to be …

Defense Perspectives On Fairness And Efficiency At The International Criminal Court, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Over the last several years, states parties of the International Criminal Court (ICC) have put increasing pressure on the court to become more efficient. Proceedings are seen as unduly slow, and judges have been urged to rein in the parties and expedite the process.

The emphasis on efficiency can advance important goals of the ICC. It can help ensure defendants’ right to a speedy trial, promote victims’ interests in closure, and allow the court to process more cases with limited resources. But as the experience of earlier international criminal tribunals shows, an unrelenting pursuit of efficiency could also interfere with …

An International Tribunal For The Use Of Nuclear Weapons, Anthony J, Colangelo, Peter Hayes

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Although offenses against international law have been proscribed at a certain level of generality, nobody hitherto has examined closely the scientific and ecological damages that would be imposed by nuclear strikes in relation to resulting possible law-ofwar violations. To correct that information deficit and institutional shortfall, the first Part of this Article constructs a hortatory proposal for a tribunal for the use of nuclear weapons under international law. The second Part of the Article shows how such a tribunal statute would have a real-world effect on those charged with launching nuclear strikes and determining the legality of the strike orders. …

Pluralism In International Criminal Procedure, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Over the last two decades, international criminal procedure has become a recognized body of law, with textbooks, treatises, and law review articles discussing its rules and principles and theorizing its goals and methods. The term refers to the procedures used at the international criminal courts and tribunals created to address some of the most serious offenses, such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Some of these courts are fully international, like the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC). Others are “hybrid courts,” …

The Gathering Swarm: The Path To Increasingly Autonomous Weapons Systems, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Unbeknownst to many, Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWS) have existed for decades, but they have largely been defensive and anti-material. However, as increasingly advanced defensive LAWS, such as complex swarming systems, become more prominent, states will assuredly develop ways to counter, including offensive LAWS. Certainly, the near-term developmental focus of such systems will be on operational environments in which there are relatively low risk of injury or death to civilians or untoward incidents in general, but it is a matter of when, not if, these systems will be widely used in direct combat situations. As such, LAWS are a frequent topic …

A Matter Of Policy: United States Application Of The Law Of Armed Conflict, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

To what extent does the law of armed conflict (LOAC) apply to the United States military fighting in armed conflicts? Though the question seems straightforward enough, the answer is anything but. This article explains, in general, why the answer is imprecise and unsatisfying as applied to the most prevalent type of contemporary armed conflict, non-international. More specifically, this article argues that the U.S. government's primary response of claiming to apply LOAC as a matter of policy when and where that law wouldn't otherwise apply is superficially persuasive but not substantively responsive.

Plea Bargaining And International Criminal Justice, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Over the last two decades, plea bargaining has spread beyond the countries where it originated — the United States and other common law jurisdictions — and has become a global phenomenon. Plea bargaining is spreading rapidly to civil law countries that previously viewed the practice with skepticism. And it has now arrived at international criminal courts.

While domestic plea bargaining is often limited to non-violent crimes, the international courts allow sentence negotiations for even the most heinous offenses, including genocide and crimes against humanity. Its use remains highly controversial, and debates about plea bargaining in international courts continue in court …

A Systems Theory Of Fragmentation And Harmonization, Anthony J. Colangelo

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

International law’s accelerating “fragmentation” presents the international legal system with what looks like a multilayered existential threat. Theoretically, how can we conceive of international law as a unitary system if its rules are becoming progressively frayed and pixilated to the point of incoherence? Doctrinally, what is “the law” if different, purportedly authoritative, bodies interpret it so differently? And practically, how are actors increasingly subject to the ever-expanding universe of international law supposed to behave when the law itself is so splintered that it may point them in many, perhaps contradictory, directions at once?

The prevailing view so far among international …

False Rubicons, Moral Panic & Conceptual Cul-De-Sacs: Critiquing & Reframing The Call To Ban Lethal Autonomous Weapons, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Casting into the indeterminate future and projecting visions of so-called killer robots, The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots (The Campaign) has incited moral panic in an attempt to stimulate a discussion and ultimately a ban on lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS). Their efforts have been superficially successful but come at a self-defeating substantive cost. In the hope of shifting the dialogue from the hyperbolic to a constructive dialogue on the interaction between human and machine abilities in both current and future weapon systems, this article explores the conceptual paradox implicit in The Campaign and proposes an alternative.

Having provoked the international …

Self-Interest Or Self-Inflicted? How The United States Charges Its Service Members For Violating The Laws Of War, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This chapter explores the aspects of self-interest implicated by the US military prosecuting its own service members who violate the laws of war under different criminal charges than it prosecutes enemy belligerents who commit substantially similar offences. The chapter briefly explains how the US asserts criminal jurisdiction over its service members before turning to how the US military reports violations of the laws of war. It then sets out the US methodology for charging such violations as applied to its service members, and compares this methodology to that applied to those tried by military commissions. The chapter then discusses the …

Law And Development In West And Central Africa (Ohada), Peter Winship

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This seminar paper considers whether OHADA - an experiment in unifying business law in African countries - has been a success. Following a prologue that explains the origins of the paper, the first part of the paper sets out basic information about the Organisation pour l’Harmonisation du Droit des Affaires en Afrique (“Organization for the Harmonization of Business Law in Africa,” known by the acronym OHADA). This part is followed by a review of law and development literature to assess the value of this literature for an evaluation of the success (or not) of OHADA. A third part then focuses …

The Hague Principles, The Cisg, And The 'Battle Of Forms', Peter Winship

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This paper considers the relation of the Hague Principles on Choice of Law in International Commercial Contracts to the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) when parties to an international contract of sales refer during negotiations to their standard terms and these standard terms include choice-of-law terms that conflict.

What Is Extraterritorial Jurisdiction?, Anthony J. Colangelo

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The phenomenon of extraterritorial jurisdiction, or the exercise of legal power beyond territorial borders, presents lawyers, courts, and scholars with analytical onions comprising layers of national and international legal issues; as each layer peels away, more issues are revealed. U.S. courts, including the Supreme Court, have increasingly been wrestling this conceptual and doctrinal Hydra. Any legal analysis of extraterritorial jurisdiction leans heavily on the answers to two key definitional questions: What do we mean by “extraterritorial”? And, what do we mean by “jurisdiction”? Because the answer to the first question is often conditional on the answer to the second, the …

An 'I Do' I Choose: How The Fight For Marriage Access Supports A Per Se Finding Of Persecution For Asylum Cases Based On Forced Marriage, Natalie Nanasi

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

There is something special about marriage. The U.S. Supreme Court, in striking down anti-miscegenation laws, restrictions on the right to marry for disadvantaged groups, and most recently, the Defense of Marriage Act, has long recognized the marital union to be "sacred" and "fundamental to…existence." Yet this analysis is dramatically different when courts consider asylum law, where a woman who is seeking refuge in the United States to protect her from a forced marriage abroad will likely be denied protection because the harm she fears is not considered to be a "persecutory" act. She may therefore be forced to spend a …

Moral Touchstone, Not General Deterrence: The Role Of International Criminal Justice In Fostering Compliance With International Humanitarian Law, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This article contends that international criminal justice provides minimal general deterrence of future violations of international humanitarian law (IHL). Arguments that international courts and tribunals deter future violations – and that such deterrence is a primary objective – assume an internally inconsistent burden that the processes cannot bear, in essence setting international criminal justice up for failure. Moreover, the inherently limited number of proceedings, the length of time required, the dense opinions generated, the relatively light sentences and the robust confinement conditions all erode whatever limited general deterrence international criminal justice might otherwise provide. Bluntly stated, thousands of pages of …

The Janus Moon Rising - Why 2014 Heralds United States' Detention Policy On A Collision Course...With Itself, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

2014 will serve as a test of the United States’ claims that its detention policy is consistent with the law of armed conflict (LOAC). If, as President Obama has repeatedly stated, U.S. involvement in the armed conflict in Afghanistan will end this year, then any LOAC based detention of belligerents linked solely to that conflict ends as well. That should mean the release or transfer of members of the Taliban currently detained at Guantanamo. It won’t.

Jurisdiction, Immunity, Legality, And Jus Cogens, Anthony J. Colangelo

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Immunities in international law expose multifaceted tensions between goals of international stability and legal accountability. This Article seeks to clarify the law in this area by providing conceptual and doctrinal coherence to relationships between immunity and jurisdiction. It first explains that foreign sovereign immunity and official status-based immunity are jurisdictional in that they block the exercise of adjudicative jurisdiction by foreign states’ courts. The Article then explains that these immunities do not block the prescriptive jurisdiction of foreign states’ laws to regulate conduct, even conduct inside other states, if a basis of prescriptive jurisdiction exists in international law.

The Article …

Prosecutor V. Perišić, Case No. It-04-81-A, International Criminal Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This note introduces a controversial ICTY decision which attempted to clarify the requisite elements required to convict the former head of the Army of Yugoslavia with aiding and abetting war crimes committed by other organizations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. The Perišić judgment serves as a reminder of the still unsettled nature of international criminal law on even threshold issues like the elements for a mode of liability. Given that the Special Court for Sierra Leone has already affirmatively rejected the Perišić formulation the case may, sadly, signal the fragmentation of international criminal law.

Policing International Prosecutors, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

A recurring question in international criminal procedure is how to ensure that prosecutors are held accountable for their errors and misconduct. When International Criminal Court (ICC) judges encountered the first serious error by the prosecution in Prosecutor v. Lubanga, they opted for an absolutist approach to remedies: the judges stayed the proceedings and ordered the release of the defendant. Although termination of the case was avoided through the intervention of the Appeals Chamber, the standoff between the judges and the prosecution highlighted the dilemmas that the ICC faces in these circumstances. To protect the integrity of its proceedings, the court …

Indefinite Detention Under The Laws Of War, Chris Jenks, Eric Talbot Jensen

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The recent acquittal of the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to stand trial in U.S. federal court on all but one of the 286 charges he faced stemming from the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa has reinvigorated the discussion on indefinite detention under the laws of war. While the issue has been raised in the past, the discussion hasn’t extended beyond stating that the law of war, or law of armed conflict (LOAC) as it is often called, provides a legal basis for detention, including detention for the duration of hostilities. In fact, the Obama Administration has made …

An Empirical Analysis Of Wealth Disparities In Wto Disputes:
 Do Poorer Countries Suffer From Strategic Delay During Dispute Litigation?, Geoffrey Antell, James W. Coleman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

A long-standing debate questions whether the World Trade Organization’s (“WTO”) formal dispute settlement procedures level the playing field for lower income countries in international trade disputes, or instead, merely give opportunistic and sophisticated countries complex rules that they can use to exploit these lower income countries. Using a database of cases decided under the WTO, this article examines whether there is evidence that developing countries suffer strategic delay when they sue developed countries. Strategic delay is a crucial consideration in WTO proceedings because, unlike in typical litigation, the WTO dispute settlement process does not offer backward-looking remedies. As a result, …

A Unified Approach To Extraterritoriality, Anthony J. Colangelo

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article develops a unified approach to extraterritoriality. It uses the source of lawmaking authority behind a statute to discern the proper canon for construing that statute’s geographic reach and to evaluate whether application of the statute violates due process.

The approach holds important implications for a variety of high-stakes issues with which courts are presently wrestling, including: the proper role of the presumption against extraterritorial application of U.S. law, whether international law or federal common law should supply the rule of decision in Alien Tort Statute cases, the scope of U.S. jurisdiction over terrorism offenses, and the viability of …

The Foreign Commerce Clause, Anthony J. Colangelo

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article comprehensively addresses Congress’s powers under the Constitution’s Foreign Commerce Clause. Congress has increasingly used the Clause to pass laws of unprecedented and aggressive reach over both domestic and foreign activity. Yet despite the Clause’s mounting significance for modern U.S. regulatory regimes at home and abroad, it remains an incredibly under-analyzed source of constitutional power. Moreover, faced with an increasing number of challenges under the Clause lower courts have been unable to coherently articulate the contours of Congress’s legislative authority. When courts have tried, their efforts have largely been wrong. The Article explains why they have been wrong and …

Legal Ethics In International Criminal Defense, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This paper examines the new and complex dilemmas facing defense attorneys who represent clients before international criminal courts. It argues that the unique features and goals of international criminal trials demand a distinct approach to resolving some of these ethical dilemmas. In particular, the goals of international trials are broader and often more political than those of ordinary domestic trials, and the applicable procedures are a unique hybrid of the inquisitorial and adversarial traditions. Moreover, some of the justifications for aggressive defense at the domestic level - such as discouraging disengaged advocacy and protesting overly harsh punishments - are less …

The 'Santiago Principles' And The International Forum Of Sovereign Wealth Funds: Evolving Components Of The New Bretton Woods Ii Post-Global Financial Crisis Architecture And Another Example Of Ad Hoc Global Administrative Networking And Related 'Soft' Rulemaking?, Joseph J. Norton

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Beginning in the latter part of 2007, the proposed establishment of Chinese and Russian Sovereign Wealth Funds ("SWFs") sparked considerable governmental, intergovernmental and private financial and business sector interest in, and countervailing concerns as to, SWFs. This concern evolved into a growing realization that the cumulative asset size of SWFs was beginning to represent an increasingly significant (though not yet systemically significant) component of the international capital markets. This significance became further magnified when one considered the separate but related proliferation of other state-owned entities operating and investing globally. In addition, in the latter part of 2007, the U.S. and …