Law Commons^™

Lifting Labor’S Voice: A Principled Path Toward Greater Worker Voice And Power Within American Corporate Governance, Leo E. Strine Jr., Aneil Kovvali, Oluwatomi O. Williams

All Faculty Scholarship

In view of the decline in gain sharing by corporations with American workers over the last forty years, advocates for American workers have expressed growing interest in allowing workers to elect representatives to corporate boards. Board level representation rights have gained appeal because they are a highly visible part of codetermination regimes that operate in several successful European economies, including Germany’s, in which workers have fared better.

But board-level representation is just one part of the comprehensive codetermination regulatory strategy as it is practiced abroad. Without a coherent supporting framework that includes representation from the ground up, as is provided …

La Privatización, La Desregulación Y El Interés Público: Un Análisis Comparado, Alfred C. Aman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Spanish-language paper analyzes the structural elements of Administrative Law in the United States of America, such as deregulation and privatization, which define the particular relationship between State and Society in that country. The analysis focuses on the limits to privatization in some sectors (prisons, water, health care) using a comparative approach with Spain. From a critical position with the marketization and hegemony of economics, alternatives are proposed for a reform of the Administrative Law that allows a more democratic and inclusive functioning of the governmental institutions.

Methodologies Of Comparative Constitutional Law: Functional Approach The Max Planck Encyclopedia Of Comparative Constitutional Law (Forthcoming), Francesca Bignami

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This encyclopedia entry conceptualizes methodology in comparative constitutional law as divided into consumption-side and production-side methodologies. Many of the labels in the field refer to types of consumption of comparative law by constitutional judges and constitution-writers—expressivist, universalist, functionalist. Other labels refer to types of production by scholars situated in the academy—black-letter, historical, contextual, classificatory, critical.

The functional approach, one form of consumption by constitutional judges and constitution-drafters, uses the law of other jurisdictions to explore various alternatives to solving common constitutional problems. Once the alternatives are exposed, the decision to adopt a foreign judicial doctrine or legal text is driven …

Comparative Legal Rhetoric, Lucy Jewel

Scholarly Works

This paper theorizes a new discipline, comparative legal rhetoric, which can accomplish two important goals. First, in a society broken down by intractable polarization and win/lose dichotomies, comparative legal rhetoric identifies alternative, nontraditional and non-Western ways to communicate and persuade. How we talk is deeply connected to how we see the world. If we take a break from the win/lose argument structure that defines Western legal communication, we can uncover opportunities for understanding and healing. Second, a study of comparative legal rhetoric can generate cross-cultural understanding. This new discipline contains a trove of knowledge about how persuasion works in different …

The Vulnerable Sovereign, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

The connection between sovereignty and law is fundamental for both domestic (internal sovereignty) and the international (external sovereignty) purposes. As the dominant forms of government have evolved over time, so has the way in which we think about sovereignty. Consideration of the historical evolution of the concept of sovereignty offers insight into how we think of sovereignty today. A term that was born to represent the relationship between the governor and the governed has become a term that is used to represent the relationships between and among states in the global legal order. This article traces the history of the …

A Hague Convention On Parallel Proceedings, Paul Herrup, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

The Hague Conference on Private International Law has engaged in a series of projects that, if successful, could provide the framework for critical aspects of trans-national litigation in the Twenty-first Century. Thus far, the work has resulted in the 2005 Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements and the 2019 Hague Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Judgments in Civil or Commercial Matters. Work now has begun to examine the need, desirability and feasibility of additional instruments in the area, with discussions of an instrument that would either require or prohibit the exercise of jurisdiction by national courts, and …

Do Legal Origins Predict Legal Substance?, Anu Bradford, Yun-Chien Chang, Adam S. Chilton, Nuno Garoupa

Faculty Scholarship

There is a large body of research in economics and law suggesting that the legal origin of a country – that is, whether its legal regime is based on English common law or French, German, or Nordic civil law – profoundly impacts a range of outcomes. However, the exact relationship between legal origin and legal substance has been disputed in the literature and not fully explored with nuanced legal coding. We revisit this debate while leveraging novel cross-country data sets that provide detailed coding of two areas of laws: property and antitrust. We find that having shared legal origins strongly …

Copyright And Parody: Touring The Certainties Of Intellectual Property And Restitution, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

The essay that follows examines the boundary between two sets of rules. The first set arises under the law of Restitution, particularly the rule that volunteers ordinarily need not be rewarded. (Another way to state this same Restitution rule is to say that the retention of benefit voluntarily conferred is ordinarily not "unjust enrichment".) The second set of rules are those of Intellectual Property law, which creates property in a special kind of volunteer. My argument is simply that the law of Restitution leads almost directly to the law of Intellectual Property, though the two areas are premised on diametrically …