Law Commons^™

The Questions Of Authority, Frederick Schauer

Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture

In 1992, Professor, Frederick Schauer of Harvard University, delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s twelfth Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: "Two Cheers for Authority: Should Officials Obey the Law?."

Frederick Schauer is a David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. Previously he served for 18 years as Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, where he has served as academic dean and acting dean, and before that was a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Law …

On Writ Of Certiorari To The United States Court Of Appeals For The Ninth Circuit, Brief Of Product Liability Advisory Council, Inc., National Association Of Manufacturers, Business Roundtable, And Chemical Manufacturers Association As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondent, William Daubert And Joyce Daubert, Individually And As Guardians Ad Litem For Jason Daubert, And Anita De Young, Individually And As Gaurdian Ad Litem For Eric Schuller V. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Paul F. Rothstein, Victor E. Schwartz, Robert P. Charrow, Scott L. Winkelman, Edward C. Wu, Richard Duesenberg, David F. Zoll, Donald D. Evans, Jan S. Amundson, Edward P. Good

U.S. Supreme Court Briefs

The Federal Rules of Evidence exclude expert scientific testimony when it has been developed without regard for accepted scientific methods.

This case focuses on expert scientific evidence. Such evidence plays a vital and often dispositive role in modern litigation. For scientific evidence to be helpful to the factfinder it must meet some minimal threshold of reliability. To hold otherwise would be to allow a system of adjudication based more on chance than on reason.

Thurgood Marshall: Tax Lawyer, Stephen B. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

During his twenty-four years on the Supreme Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote better opinions on the law of federal income taxation than any of his fellow Justices. This is, of course, a subjective appraisal which others may dispute. Nevertheless, from two decades of teaching federal income taxation, I am convinced of the quality of Marshall's work.

Environment And Trade As Partners In Sustainable Development: A Commentary, Edith Brown Weiss

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Trade is not an end in itself; rather, it is a means to an end. The end is environmentally sustainable economic development. So viewed, there are legitimate constraints on trading patterns and practices that are necessary to ensure that the "instrument of trade" leads to environmentally sustainable development. Measures needed to protect the environment cannot be forsworn simply because they may adversely affect free trading relationships.

Life After Hardwick, Nan D. Hunter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Unless or until it is narrowed or overruled, Bowers v. Hardwick will dominate the law concerning government regulation of sexuality. In Hardwick the Supreme Court upheld as constitutional a Georgia sodomy statute that made oral or anal intercourse a felony punishable by up to twenty years in prison. The Court ended its long reluctance to assess the constitutionality of limitations on sexuality as distinct from contraception by ruling that the protected zone created by the privacy right stops short of covering private consensual sexual relations between adults. In so ruling, the Court left in place a patchwork of prohibitory laws …

When Is An Amendment Not An Amendment? Modification Of Arms Control Agreements Without The Senate, David A. Koplow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The tempest over the proposed "reinterpretation" of the Anti- Ballistic Missile Treaty has only barely been stilled, and the full impact of the dissolution and reorganization of the Soviet Union is far from clear. But already we can detect early warnings about the next probable source of intense constitutional conflict between the American executive branch and the Congress in their ongoing struggle for primacy in the conduct of United States foreign relations. This imminent battle-again arising in the context of disarmament treaties, perhaps the most controversial and crucial aspect of America's international public policy-has not yet been fully joined. But …

Constitutional Scepticism, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Interpretive constitutional debate over the last few decades has centered on two apparently linked questions: whether the Constitution can be given a determinate meaning, and whether the institution of judicial review can be justified within the basic assumptions of liberalism. Two groups of scholars have generated answers to these questions. The "constitutional faithful" argue that meaning can indeed be determinately affixed to constitutional clauses, by reference to the plain meaning of the document, the original intent of the drafters, evolving political and moral norms of the community, or the best political or moral philosophical theory available and that, because of …

Introductory Remarks: Brown V. Board Of Education And Its Legacy: A Tribute To Justice Thurgood Marshall, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This issue of the Fordham Law Review presents Fordham Law School's tribute to one of the giants of American law and American history on the occasion of his retirement from the Supreme Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall. Because he decided to make the law his career and because of the way in which he pursued that career, the United States today is a remarkably different place than it was in 1933 when he began practice, and ours is a far more just society.

Justice Marshall made history repeatedly--as Chief Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as Judge of the United …

Thurgood Marshall: Courageous Advocate, Compassionate Judge, Susan Low Bloch

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Thurgood Marshall's life has spanned virtually the entire twentieth century, allowing him to witness its worst and its best. When he was born in 1908, segregation was legal and pervasive, and racial hatred extreme; in the year of his birth alone, eighty-nine black men were lynched. A grandson of slaves on both sides of his family, Marshall knew, from an early age, both the ugliness and the tenacity of racism. Determined to fight it, Marshall disregarded the difficulties and the dangers, and spent his life battling discrimination, earning the nickname "Mr. Civil Rights." His efforts, coupled with those of others …

Conflicting Visions: A Critique Of Ian Macneil’S Relational Theory Of Contract, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Perhaps the leading contemporary critic of placing consent at the center of contract law has been Ian Macneil. In his book The New Social Contract as well as in a series of complex and richly textured articles spanning nearly two decades, Macneil has eloquently presented and defended his now well-known relational theory of contract. It is a tribute to the important core of previously neglected truth in Macneil's theory that, for all its complexity, the theory can be summarized succinctly.

Macneil presents nothing less than a "holistic" "social theory" of human exchange--with particular emphasis on the human activity of "projecting …

The Sound Of Silence: Default Rules And Contractual Consent, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this article, the author challenges the received wisdom of "gap-filling in the absence of consent" by showing how the concept of default rules bolsters the theoretical importance of consent. He accomplishes this by expanding and refining his analysis of a "consent theory of contract." The author proposes that the concept of default rules reveals consent to be operating at two distinct levels of contract theory. First, the presence of consent to be legally bound is essential to justify the legal enforcement of any default rules. Second, nested within this overall consent to be legally bound, consent also operates to …

Some Problems With Contract As Promise, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The promise theory views the origin of contract in the making of a promise. This means that it views the creation of contracts as arising, in an important part, from the voluntary acts of promisors rather than from third parties like the State. In this regard, the theory facilitates the classical liberal value of freedom to contract. The promise theory also supports the notion that contracts should be interpreted according to the terms of the promise rather than by imposing terms on the parties. In this regard, the theory facilitates the classical liberal value of freedom from contract. These strengths …

Ex Post Facto In The Civil Context: Unbridled Punishment, Jane H. Aiken

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article outlines the historical background of the Ex Post Facto Clause, focusing on the intent of the framers and the Supreme Court's narrowing of the Clause to apply only to criminal statutes and any civil statutes that are unmistakably punitive in nature. The focus then shifts to the problem of mixed motives in legislative acts.

Corporate Takeover Of Teaching Hospitals, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article explores the potential and the dangers of this novel form of collaboration between academic medicine and the for-profit world. The author focuses on those arrangements--purchases and leasing agreements--by which investor-owned corporations operate, for a profit, hospitals that serve as major medical teaching and research sites. He begins by reviewing how the evolving needs of academic medical centers and for-profit hospital chains have generated mutual interest in such arrangements. The author then considers some frequently expressed ethical, economic, and other public policy objections to the provision of hospital services by for-profit firms. Opponents of the acquisition and leasing of …

Reconstructing Liberty, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is commonly and rightly understood in this country that our constitutional system ensures, or seeks to ensure, that individuals are accorded the greatest degree of personal, political, social, and economic liberty possible, consistent with a like amount of liberty given to others, the duty and right of the community to establish the conditions for a moral and secure collective life, and the responsibility of the state to provide for the common defense of the community against outside aggression. Our distinctive cultural and constitutional commitment to individual liberty places very real restraints on what our elected representatives can do, even …

Murdering The Spirit: Racism, Rights, And Commerce, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Patricia Williams' The Alchemy of Race and Rights: The Diary of a Law Professor, is an eloquent, profoundly original, and often brilliant collection of interdisciplinary essays and stories concerning the impact of racism and poverty on the human spirit; the historic and continuing role of law and legal institutions in defining, facilitating, and perpetuating those harms; and the possibilities and dangers imminent in the attempt to use law to effect a remedy for them. This is a book that we should celebrate: it reminds us that books are occasionally very, very important, that reading can be transformative, and that writing …

The "Gag Rule" Revisited: Physicians As Abortion Gatekeepers, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

To the surprise of many and the dismay of some, the U.S. Supreme Court took it upon itself last term to proclaim a national compromise on the question of abortion. The Court's announced truce, an elaboration on Justice O'Connor's "undue burden" idea, is pragmatic in design but unlikely to prove stable in practice. The three justices who spoke for the Court disparaged Roe with reluctant praise, then upheld its outer shell on the ground that social expectations and the need to sustain the appearance of the rule of law made it impolitic to do otherwise. This awkward doctrinal invention seems …

Treaty-Based Rights And Remedies Of Individuals, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Treaties are frequently described as contracts between nations. As instruments of international law, they establish obligations with which international law requires the parties to comply. In the United States, treaties also have the status of law in the domestic legal system. The Supremacy Clause declares treaties to be the "supreme Law of the Land" and instructs the courts to give them effect. The status of treaties as law in two distinct legal orders has given rise to unusual conceptual problems. In recent years, it has produced confusion among the courts regarding the enforceability of treaties in the courts by individuals. …

Book Review: The Aspirin Wars: Money, Medicine, And 100 Years Of Rampant Competition, Joseph A. Page

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The recent identification of a possible link between the long-term use of aspirin and a reduced incidence of colon and rectal cancer has directed renewed attention to a familiar household medication whose origins reach back to antiquity.

Competition from other painkillers had begun to cut deeply into the market once dominated by aspirin-based products when studies indicated the possibilities, first that the regular consumption of aspirin might prevent second heart attacks, and later that it might lower the risk of heart attacks in healthy individuals. If these two discoveries, as well as the new finding about colon and rectal cancers, …

Rational Bargaining Theory And Contract: Default Rules, Hypothetical Consent, The Duty To Disclose, And Fraud, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author begins by responding to Coleman's rational choice approach to choosing default rules. In part I, he applies the expanded analysis of contractual consent and default rules that he had recently presented elsewhere to explain how rational bargaining, hypothetical consent, and actual consent figure in the determination of contractual default rules. Whereas Coleman advocates the centrality of rational bargaining analysis to this determination, the author explains why rational bargaining theory's role must be subsidiary to that of consent.

The author then turns his attention to Coleman's appraisal of contracting parties' duty to disclose information concerning the resources that are …

The Jurisprudence Of Non-Proliferation: Taking International Law Seriously, David A. Koplow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay is about the power of the international law of nonproliferation- its mounting power in the world today and its properly augmented power in an enlightened future. The article focuses on three primary areas in which international law may play a greater role than is commonly appreciated in affecting the behavior of potential proliferators, their suppliers, and their resolute opponents. The three topics-areas in which the essay pleads for law to be taken even more seriously, and by a wider audience of governments and the international public-are: (a) treaties (especially the provisions of those treaties that commit the parties …