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Mormons, Muslims, And Multiculturalism: The Deeply Dispiriting Romney-Huckabee Religion Showdown, Kenneth Anderson Dec 2007

Mormons, Muslims, And Multiculturalism: The Deeply Dispiriting Romney-Huckabee Religion Showdown, Kenneth Anderson

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American University, WCL Research Paper No. 2008-AbstractThis essay (6,000 words), which appeared in the Weekly Standard ostensibly as a comment on Mitt Romney's religion speech of December 2007, contains something to offend nearly everyone. It bluntly attacks presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and his evangelical followers for their demand for a Christian president, and calls them religious bigots.The essay also rejects, however, a central claim of Romney's religion speech, that all religious doctrines are beyond criticism or political argument - asserting that Romney, in the attempt to insulate himself from any questions of religion, has endorsed what might be called conservative …


Empirically Evaluating Claims About Investment Treaty Arbitration, Susan Franck Dec 2007

Empirically Evaluating Claims About Investment Treaty Arbitration, Susan Franck

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With the blossoming of empirical legal scholarship, there is an increased appreciation for the insights it offers issues of international importance. One area that can benefit from such inquiry is the resolution of disputes from investment treaties, which affects international relations, implicates international legality of domestic government conduct, and puts millions of taxpayer dollars at risk. While suggesting there has been a "litigation explosion", commentators make untested assertions about investment treaty disputes. Little empirical work transparently explores this area, however. As the first research that explains its methodology and results, this article is a modest attempt to evaluate claims about …


Integrating Investment Treaty Conflict And Dispute Systems Design, Susan Franck Nov 2007

Integrating Investment Treaty Conflict And Dispute Systems Design, Susan Franck

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With the debate on the renewal of the Trade Promotion Authority Act, the proper terms of investment treaties - including dispute resolution provisions - have become an issue of public scrutiny. In a so-called litigation explosion, investors resolve disputes against host governments through international arbitration mechanisms in investment treaties; and there is little evidence of reliance on other processes like mediation. This escalation has lead to a teething period where parties and non-parties have expressed divergent views as to the efficacy, efficiency and fairness of the dispute resolution process. With billions of dollars and sovereignty at stake, the dispute resolution …


Reparations: A Comparative Perspective, Fernanda G. Nicola Aug 2007

Reparations: A Comparative Perspective, Fernanda G. Nicola

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This article focuses on the treatment of reparations in recent jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and the European Court of Justice (ECJ). In the so-called “prisoner cases,” Assanidze v. Georgia and Ilascu and Others v. Moldova and Russia, the ECHR moved beyond its previously limited approach to reparations by finding that continued detention of the lawsuit applicants would entail a prolonged violation of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and then asking the States to immediately release the prisoners. The author then turns to ECJ immigration cases Zhu v. Sec’y of …


Reparations Of The Inter-American Human Rights System In Cases Of Gross And Systemic Violations Of Human Rights: The Colombian Case, Diego Rodriguez-Pinzon Aug 2007

Reparations Of The Inter-American Human Rights System In Cases Of Gross And Systemic Violations Of Human Rights: The Colombian Case, Diego Rodriguez-Pinzon

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The author uses the case of Colombia, a country with which the inter-American human rights system has dealt in the last twenty-five years, as an example to try to illustrate how the Inter-American Human Rights Commission and Inter-American Court for Human Rights have balanced the issue of remedies and reparations with the difficult task of repairing gross and systematic violations. The case of Colombia provides some insight on how international mechanisms are implemented in this region and, particularly, how some of Colombia’s official institutions and non-governmental organizations are trying to engage in a dialogue at the international level in order …


Reparations: A Remedies Law Perspective, Darren L. Hutchinson Aug 2007

Reparations: A Remedies Law Perspective, Darren L. Hutchinson

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This article provides a general overview of reparations discourse in the United States and offers suggestions concerning how advocates of reparations might frame their claims. The author discusses how remedies law might be a useful means of redress for litigants and examines some of the political and legal barriers to reparations in the United States. The barriers include the failure of opponents to treat remedies for gross human rights or civil rights deprivations as a public good, rather than as a series of private transactions that benefit or burden individuals. The author ultimately sets the litigation model aside as providing …


Thinking About Conflicting Gravitational Pulls Litcs: The Academy And The Irs, Nancy S. Abramowitz Jun 2007

Thinking About Conflicting Gravitational Pulls Litcs: The Academy And The Irs, Nancy S. Abramowitz

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This article addresses the tension between educational and public service goals in the immediate term for tax clinics receiving funding from the Low Income Taxpayer Clinic (“LITC”) program under Internal Revenue Code §7526. The author expresses concern that the LITC Program Office will over emphasize the “number-of-taxpayers served” factor in program evaluation, thereby putting academic clinics at a distinct disadvantage in seeking and/or retaining program funds. By imposing these types of “productivity” measures, there is a tendency to force that particular type of activity, thereby significantly disrupting what otherwise might be a better or different educational model for the use …


Professor Janet Spragens: In Memory Of A Friend, In Celebration Of An Idea, Nancy S. Abramowitz Jun 2007

Professor Janet Spragens: In Memory Of A Friend, In Celebration Of An Idea, Nancy S. Abramowitz

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This article is a tribute to the career and contributions of Professor Janet Spragens, who created the Federal Tax Clinic at the American University, Washington College of Law (WCL). During testimony before the historic Internal Revenue Service Restructuring Commission, Prof. Spragens advised the Commission to create better education of the public and greater availability of free advocacy for low-income taxpayers through federal funding of more clinics. In its landmark legislation of 1998, Congress responded to this testimony with the enactment of 26 U.S.C. §7526, which authorized a program to fund academic and pro bono clinics working to educate non-native English …


No Wealthy Parent Left Behind: An Analysis Of Tax Subsidies For Higher Education, Andrew Pike Jun 2007

No Wealthy Parent Left Behind: An Analysis Of Tax Subsidies For Higher Education, Andrew Pike

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This article analyzes the status in 2007 of higher education costs in relation to U.S. taxation policy and the declining real income and ability of lower and middle income taxpayers to pay tuition and fees. Then-current tax policy lessened support for families with the greatest financial need while providing much greater levels of support to those with greater financial resources. To enhance distributional fairness, the author proposes that Congress repeal tax provisions that have this effect and consolidate the separate sources of federal financial aid grants into one program--an expanded Pell Grant program. He also advises that Congress make the …


Wal-Mart Bank In Mexico: Money To The Masses And The Home-Host Hole, Anna Gelpern May 2007

Wal-Mart Bank In Mexico: Money To The Masses And The Home-Host Hole, Anna Gelpern

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In November 2006 Wal-Mart's Mexican subsidiary received approval to open a bank. The application faced little opposition in Mexico, unlike the company's failed effort to start a bank in the United States. This was partly because in Mexico, Wal-Mart's entry was generally regarded as increasing competition in a historically concentrated banking sector. With over three-quarters of all Mexicans unbanked, the authorities also looked to Wal-Mart to reach the underserved. Along with the promise, Wal-Mart's entry presents a transnational regulatory dilemma with implications beyond Wal-Mart and Mexico. Because it is Wal-Mart's only banking venture, the new institution will have its Mexican …


Fixing Fair Use, Michael W. Carroll Apr 2007

Fixing Fair Use, Michael W. Carroll

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The fair use doctrine in copyright law balances expressive freedoms by permitting one to use another's copyrighted expression under certain circumstances. The doctrine's extreme context-sensitivity renders it of little value to those who require reasonable ex ante certainty about the legality of a proposed use. In this Article, Professor Carroll advances a legislative proposal to create a Fair Use Board in the U.S. Copyright Office that would have power to declare a proposed use of another's copyrighted work to be a fair use. Like a private letter ruling from the IRS or a “no action” letter from the SEC, a …


Patent Injunctions And The Problem Of Uniformity Cost, Michael W. Carroll Apr 2007

Patent Injunctions And The Problem Of Uniformity Cost, Michael W. Carroll

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In eBay v. MercExchange, the Supreme Court correctly rejected a one-size-fits-all approach to patent injunctions. However, the Court's opinion does not fully recognize that the problem of uniformity in patent law is more general and that this problem cannot be solved through case-by-case analysis. This Essay provides a field guide for implementing eBay using functional analysis and insights from a uniformity-cost framework developed more fully in prior work. While there can be no general rule governing equitable relief in patent cases, the traditional four factor analysis for injunctive relief should lead the cases to cluster around certain patterns that often …


Goodbye To All That? A Requiem For Neoconservatism, Kenneth Anderson Mar 2007

Goodbye To All That? A Requiem For Neoconservatism, Kenneth Anderson

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American University, WCL Research Paper No. 2008-74Abstract:The war on terror and the war in Iraq have occasioned a ferocious debate over the Bush administration's commitment to neo-conservatism as the guiding philosophy behind war aiming at democratic transformation. Two recent, widely noticed 2006 books have attacked neo-conservatism - one, by a former neoconservative, Francis Fukuyama (After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads), and a second, by a centrist liberal, Peter Beinart (The Good Fight). Each seeks to anatomize neo-conservatism and what, in each author's view, has gone wrong with it; each seeks to offer an alternative foreign policy.This review essay examines …


Immigration Relief For Survivors Of Domestic Absue, Sexual Assault, Human Trafficking, And Other Crimes: A Violence Against Women Act 2005 Update, Leslye Orloff, Joanne Lin, Ericka Echavarria Feb 2007

Immigration Relief For Survivors Of Domestic Absue, Sexual Assault, Human Trafficking, And Other Crimes: A Violence Against Women Act 2005 Update, Leslye Orloff, Joanne Lin, Ericka Echavarria

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005 (VAWA 2005), which President Against and Department Women Bush signed into law on January 5, 2006, built on the 1994 Violence Against Women Act (Title IV of the Violence Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994) and the 2000 Battered Immigrant Women Protection Act (part of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act) by expanding immigration relief to new categories of crime victims.' In this article we discuss the eligibility requirements for VAWA self-petitioning, VAWA cancellation of removal, "U" interim relief for certain immigrant crime victims, …


Obligations Of Privilege, Ezra Rosser Jan 2007

Obligations Of Privilege, Ezra Rosser

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Little attention is paid to the nature of the high incomes of the rich or to the legal or norm-based obligations the rich owe society. This popular and scholarly inattention reflects the general acceptance of the idea that the rich have earned their high incomes and owe society little. By looking at income equations revealing society's role in high incomes and the obligations of the rich, the Article urges a strengthening of the obligations of the rich and rejects the argument that the legal community ought not consider the moral demands associated with high incomes.


Quantum Meruit And The Restatement (Third) Of Restitution And Unjust Enrichment, Candace Kovacic-Fleischer Jan 2007

Quantum Meruit And The Restatement (Third) Of Restitution And Unjust Enrichment, Candace Kovacic-Fleischer

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INTRODUCTION: Thirty years ago, Professor Graham Douthwaite said that restitution can "arise in a bedazzling variety of situations."' He also said that practitioners usually are not aware of "the restitutionary implications or potential" of their clients' problems. Over 50 years ago, Professor John Dawson said that "[i]t is doubtful even now whether most lawyers have an adequate conception of the range and resources of the remedy." About twenty years ago, I said of Professor Dawson's statement, "It is doubtful whether the situation has much improved in the last thirty years." Unfortunately, I can still repeat that concern.


Lovin’ The Man: Examining The Nexus Of Irony, Hypocrisy And Curiosity, Camille Nelson Jan 2007

Lovin’ The Man: Examining The Nexus Of Irony, Hypocrisy And Curiosity, Camille Nelson

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INTRODUCTION I had just finished reading The Legends Who Lunch: A Weekend of Glory at Promised Land, an article in Oprah Winfrey's magazine.' The article gave an account of a weekend at Oprah's place in California-a weekend in which Oprah honored the black women who paved the way for her success.2 The weekend was devoted to those courageous black women who allowed for the possibility of realizing potential and who simply opened fans to the possibility of allowing ourselves to believe, if only for a second, that we could do anything. This article resonated with me. I sat crying on …


The Legal Profession's Failure To Discipline Unethical Prosecutors, Angela J. Davis Jan 2007

The Legal Profession's Failure To Discipline Unethical Prosecutors, Angela J. Davis

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This article explores the legal profession's failure to hold prosecutors accountable for misconduct and other ethical violations. Part I introduces the piece, providing several examples of prosecutorial power and abuse in the criminal justice system. Part II discusses prosecutorial misconduct and the inadequacy of current legal remedies. Part III argues that the Model Rules of Professional Responsibility have not provided adequate guidance to prosecutors, and that the disciplinary process has not been effective in disciplining prosecutors when they have abused their power and discretion. Part IV contends that the disbarment of Mike Nifong – the prosecutor in the Duke lacrosse …


Racial Fairness In The Criminal Justice System: The Role Of The Prosecutor, Angela J. Davis Jan 2007

Racial Fairness In The Criminal Justice System: The Role Of The Prosecutor, Angela J. Davis

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In this article, Davis analyzes discusses efforts to involve prosecutors in the elimination of racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Part II explains how prosecutors unintentionally contribute to disparities through the arbitrary, unsystematic exercise of discretion. Part III argues that the U.S. Supreme Court has failed to provide an effective legal remedy for victims of race-based selective prosecution. Finally, in Part IV, Davis endorses the use of racial impact studies and task forces and discusses a model reform effort spearheaded by the Vera Institute of Justice.


Friday Night Lite: How De-Racialization In The Motion Picture Friday Night Lights Disserves The Movement To Eradicate Racial Discrimination From American Sport, N. Jeremi Duru Jan 2007

Friday Night Lite: How De-Racialization In The Motion Picture Friday Night Lights Disserves The Movement To Eradicate Racial Discrimination From American Sport, N. Jeremi Duru

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No abstract provided.


Internal Displacement: The Guiding Principles On Internal Displacement-Normative Status, And The Need For Effective Domestic Implementation, Robert K. Goldman Jan 2007

Internal Displacement: The Guiding Principles On Internal Displacement-Normative Status, And The Need For Effective Domestic Implementation, Robert K. Goldman

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No abstract provided.


A 'Social Dimension' In European Private Law? The Call For Setting A Progressive Agenda, Fernanda Nicola, Ugo Mattei Jan 2007

A 'Social Dimension' In European Private Law? The Call For Setting A Progressive Agenda, Fernanda Nicola, Ugo Mattei

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.


Counterintuitive Thoughts On Legal Scholarship And Secured Transactions, Heather Hughes Jan 2007

Counterintuitive Thoughts On Legal Scholarship And Secured Transactions, Heather Hughes

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No abstract provided.


The Social Security Administration's New Disability Adjudication Rules: A Significant And Promising Reform, Jeffrey Lubbers Jan 2007

The Social Security Administration's New Disability Adjudication Rules: A Significant And Promising Reform, Jeffrey Lubbers

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.


Advances And Missed Opportunities In The International Prosecution Of Gender-Based Crimes, Susana Sacouto Jan 2007

Advances And Missed Opportunities In The International Prosecution Of Gender-Based Crimes, Susana Sacouto

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INTRODUCTION: In the past decade, and particularly since 1998, there has been an incredible transformation in the treatment of sex-based and gender- based violence' in the fields of international humanitarian law and international criminal law. Before this, crimes committed exclusively or disproportionately against women and girls, in times of conflict, were largely either ignored, or at most, treated as secondary to other crimes. Despite the fact that rape and other forms of sexual violence had been widely reported during World War HI, for instance, the crime of rape was not expressly included in either the London Charter, establishing the International …


Beyond Schumpeter Vs. Arrow: How Antitrust Fosters Innovation, Jonathan Baker Jan 2007

Beyond Schumpeter Vs. Arrow: How Antitrust Fosters Innovation, Jonathan Baker

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The relationship between competition and innovation is the subject of a familiar controversy in economics, between the Schumpeterian view that monopolies favor innovation and the opposite view, often associated with Kenneth Arrow, that competition favors innovation. Taking their cue from this debate, some commentators reserve judgment as to whether antitrust enforcement is good for innovation. Such misgivings are unnecessary. The modern economic learning about the connection between competition and innovation helps clarify the types of firm conduct and industry settings where antitrust interventions are most likely to foster innovation. Measured against this standard, contemporary competition policy holds up well. Today's …


Molecular Federalism And The Structures Of Private Lawmaking, David Snyder Jan 2007

Molecular Federalism And The Structures Of Private Lawmaking, David Snyder

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No abstract provided.


Catching Up With The Past: Recent Decisions Of The Inter-American Court Of Human Rights Addressing Gross Human Rights Violations Perpetrated During The 1970-1980s, Claudia Martin Jan 2007

Catching Up With The Past: Recent Decisions Of The Inter-American Court Of Human Rights Addressing Gross Human Rights Violations Perpetrated During The 1970-1980s, Claudia Martin

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No abstract provided.


El Desarrollo Del Arbitraje Comercial Internacional: Sofisticacion O Complejdad, Horacio A. Grigera Naón Jan 2007

El Desarrollo Del Arbitraje Comercial Internacional: Sofisticacion O Complejdad, Horacio A. Grigera Naón

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No abstract provided.


Inter-American System, Claudia Martin Jan 2007

Inter-American System, Claudia Martin

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No abstract provided.