Law Commons^™

From Privacy To Liberty: The Fourth Amendment After Lawrence, Thomas P. Crocker

Faculty Publications

This Article explores a conflict between the protections afforded interpersonal relations in Lawrence v. Texas and the vulnerability experienced under the Fourth Amendment by individuals who share their lives with others. Under the Supreme Court's third-party doctrine, we have no constitutionally protected expectation of privacy in what we reveal to other persons. The effect of this doctrine is to leave many aspects of ordinary life shared in the company of others constitutionally unprotected. In an increasingly socially networked world, the Fourth Amendment may fail to protect precisely those liberties-to live in the company of others free from state surveillance and …

Religious Establishment And Autonomy, Andrew Koppelman

Faculty Working Papers

Kent Greenawalt claims that one rationale for nonestablishment of religion is personal autonomy. If, however, the law is barred from manipulating people in religious directions (and thus violating their autonomy), while it remains free to manipulate them in nonreligious directions (and thus violate their autonomy in exactly the same way), autonomy as such is not what is being protected. The most promising alternative is to understand religion as a distinctive human good that is being protected from government interference.

Self-Representation In The International Arena: Removing A False Right Of Spectacle, Eugene Cerruti

Articles & Chapters

Recent historical scholarship has demonstrated that the practice of self-representation at common law was developed and promoted not to secure a valued right to the accused but rather to compromise the defendant’s ability to present an effective defense - by denying him an effective right to be represented by counsel. The Supreme Court in Faretta v. California stood this history on its head in order to read into the Sixth Amendment an implied right to self-representation equal to the now preeminent right to counsel. The Faretta doctrine was carelessly adopted yet has been resolutely defended by the Supreme Court, to …

Social Factoring The Numbers With Assisted Reproduction, Bridget J. Crawford, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

In early 2009 the airwaves came alive with sensational stories about Nadya Suleman, the California mother who gave birth to octuplets conceived via assisted reproductive technology. Nadya Suleman and her octuplets are vehicles through which Americans express their anxiety about race, class and gender. Expressions of concern for the health of children, the mother's well-being, the future of reproductive medicine or the financial drain on taxpayers barely conceal deep impulses towards racism, sexism and classism. It is true that the public has had a longstanding fascination with multiple births and with large families. This is evidenced by a long history …

Social Factoring The Numbers With Assisted Reproduction, Lolita Buckner Inniss, Bridget J. Crawford

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In early 2009 the airwaves came alive with sensational stories about Nadya Suleman, the California mother who gave birth to octuplets conceived via assisted reproductive technology. Nadya Suleman and her octuplets are vehicles through which Americans express their anxiety about race, class and gender. Expressions of concern for the health of children, the mother's well-being, the future of reproductive medicine or the financial drain on taxpayers barely conceal deep impulses towards racism, sexism and classism. It is true that the public has had a longstanding fascination with multiple births and with large families. This is evidenced by a long history …

Lawyering In The Academy: The Intersection Of Academic Freedom And Professional Responsibility, Peter A. Joy

Scholarship@WashULaw

The legal academy has given little thought to how practicing law within law schools affects professional responsibilities and is different from representing clients in a traditional law firm or how notions of academic freedom affect lawyering in law schools. Yet repeated attempts to interfere with law clinic representation starkly illustrate how lawyering in the academy might be different, under notions of professional responsibility and academic freedom, from other lawyering or typical law teaching.

Scholarship on interference in clinical programs has focused primarily on the impropriety of interference on the institutional autonomy of law schools by those outside the university, such …

The First Amendment And Commercial Speech, C. Edwin Baker

All Faculty Scholarship

After a quick summary of constitutional treatment of commercial speech, this essay outlines four reasons why commercial speech should be denied First Amendment protection. Working from the claim that the primary rationale for constitutional protection of speech is the mandate that government respect individual freedom or autonomy, the essay argues: 1) that the individual does not choose, but rather the market dictates the content of commercial speech; 2) that the commercial speech should be attributed to an artificial, instrumentally entity – the business enterprise – rather than the flesh and blood person whose liberty merits protection; 3) market exchanges involve …

Reproductive Rights As Health Care Rights, B. Jessie Hill

Faculty Publications

U.S. legal scholarship concerning reproductive rights has largely revolved around the poles of decisional autonomy, privacy, and equality, with a concomitant a tendency to de-emphasize the medical aspect of abortion rights. The medical approach has been particularly disfavored by feminist scholars, largely due to concerns about undermining the equality rationale for reproductive rights and placing too much power in the hands of physicians. In addition, American constitutional law has tended to treat reproductive-rights cases differently from other cases raising challenges to government restrictions on individuals’ rights to access certain forms of medical treatment, granting heightened judicial scrutiny to the former …

Dilemmas Of Cultural Legality: A Comment On Roger Cotterrell's 'The Struggle For Law' And A Criticism Of The House Of Lords' Opinions In Begum, John Mikhail

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In “The Struggle for Law: Some Dilemmas of Cultural Legality,” Professor Roger Cotterrell argues that the law’s most distinctive aspiration is to promote a respectful exchange of ideas among different parts of a multicultural society. He illustrates his thesis with the House of Lords’ decision in Begum, describing it as “a relatively successful contribution to the process by which battlefields of rights are turned into areas of routine structuring” and finding much to admire in the messages communicated by the Lords in this case. I am more troubled by the Lords’ opinions in Begum and less convinced than Cotterrell seems …

The Correspondence Of Contract And Promise, Jody S. Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

Correspondence accounts of the relationship between contract and promise hold either that contract law is justified to the extent it enforces a corresponding moral responsibility for a promise or unjustified to the extent it undermines promissory morality by refusing to enforce a corresponding moral responsibility for a promise. In this Article, I claim that contract scholars have mistakenly presumed that they can assess the correspondence between contract and promise without first providing a theory of self-imposed moral responsibility that explains and justifies the promise principle. I argue that any plausible theory of self-imposed moral responsibility is inconsistent with a strong …