Law Commons^™

Por La Senda Ascendente Del Positivismo Naturalista Y De La Civilización: Aproximación Panorámica A Los Casos De Brasil Y Colombia En El Paso Del Siglo Xix Al Xx, Antonio Barreto Rozo

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Series Of Unfortunate Events In Rio, Or, What I Did On My Summer Vacation, Becky L. Jacobs

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

No abstract provided.

Criminal Constitutional Avoidance, William W. Berry Iii

William W Berry III

Just two terms ago in United States v. Skilling, the Supreme Court used the avoidance canon in response to a void-for-vagueness challenge to the federal criminal fraud statute. As explained below, the Court severely restricted the statute’s meaning, limiting its proscription against “deprivation of honest services” to bribery and kickbacks.

This article argues that, contrary to the Court’s decision in Skilling, the canon of constitutional avoidance is inappropriate in void-for-vagueness cases. This is because such cases do not present a statutory ambiguity that requires choosing between competing meanings or interpretations. Instead, void-for-vagueness challenges concern statutes that either have …

Reining In The Rogue Employee: The Fourth Circuit Limits Employee Liability Under The Cfaa, Danielle E. Sunberg

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

International Law's Erie Moment, Harlan Grant Cohen

Michigan Journal of International Law

The episode put the question starkly: Who fills the gaps in international law and how? A series of tribunals operating under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had adopted broader interpretations of vague treaty language than those recommended by the state parties. In response, government ministers from the three state parties, Mexico, Canada, and the United States, operating through the Free Trade Commission (FTC) established by the treaty, adopted "Notes of Interpretation" clarifying their view of the treaty's meaning. International tribunals are generally tasked with examining state practice, either to recognize rules of customary international law …

Ambiguity In The Sense Of Agency, Shaun Gallagher

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

In a variety of recent studies the concept of the sense of agency has been shown to be phenomenologically complex, involving different levels of experience, from the basic aspects of sensory-motor processing (e.g., Farrer et al. 2003; Tsakiris and Haggard 2005; Tsakiris, Bosbach, and Gallagher 2007) to the higher levels of intention formation and retrospective judgment (e.g., Pacherie 2006, 2007; Stephens and Graham 2000; Synofzik, Vosgerau, and Newen 2008; Gallagher 2007, 2010). After summarizing this complexity, I will argue, first, that the way that these various contributory elements manifest themselves in the actual phenomenology of agency remains ambiguous, and that …

Originalism And Constitutional Construction, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Constitutional interpretation is the activity that discovers the communicative content or linguistic meaning of the constitutional text. Constitutional construction is the activity that determines the legal effect given the text, including doctrines of constitutional law and decisions of constitutional cases or issues by judges and other officials. The interpretation-construction distinction, frequently invoked by contemporary constitutional theorists and rooted in American legal theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, marks the difference between these two activities.

This article advances two central claims about constitutional construction. First, constitutional construction is ubiquitous in constitutional practice. The central warrant for this claim is conceptual: …