Law Commons^™

Statutory Interpretation In The Roberts Court's First Era: An Empirical And Doctrinal Analysis, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the Roberts Court's statutory cases from its 2005-2008 Terms, beginning with cases decided after January 31, 2006, when Justice Alito joined the Court, and concluding with cases decided on June 29, 2009, when Justice Souter retired. The Article's approach is both empirical and doctrinal, in that it (1) presents descriptive statistics illustrating the Court's and individual Justices' rates of reliance on fourteen different tools of statutory construction, and (2) engages in doctrinal analysis of the Court's statutory cases, highlighting discernable patterns in the individual Justices' interpretive approaches. The Article makes two significant contributions to the field of …

Elusive Equality: The Armenian Genocide And The Failure Of Ottoman Legal Reform, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

I would like to thank the organizers for inviting me to deliver some remarks this morning. By way of background, I am not a historian or genocide scholar, but a law professor with an interest in comparative law and religion. Comparative law and religion is a relatively new field. It explores how different legal regimes reflect, and influence, the relationships that religious communities have with the state and with each other. My recent work compares Islamic and Christian conceptions of law, a subject that has engaged Muslims and Christians since their first encounters in the seventh century.

When I approach …

Beyond The Polemics: Realistic Options To Help Divorcing Families Manage Domestic Violence, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

Children, adult survivors, and their batterers who remain engaged in violence, even after they live apart, are living legacies of the historical perniciousness of domestic violence, a legacy that must change. True, over the past thirty years the politicization of domestic violence has raised public awareness, spurred legislative reforms, and propelled court innovations. However, the children, survivors, and batterers who still live domestic violence after divorce know all too well that all of our political advancements, legal victories, court innovations, and social awareness have not stopped the violence they live within their day-to-day lives. For many of these families, an …

Dispute Resolution Lessons Gleaned From The Arrest Of Professor Gates And "The Beer Summit", Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

America's fantasy of a post-racial society was shattered on July 16,2009, when a white police officer arrested Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, a well-respected African-American academic, in his own home. Our historical racial fissure was widened. Once again, our thoughts were plagued with tortured images of our system of racialized law enforcement: the torture of Abner Louima, the beating of Rodney King, the killing of Amadou Diallo. Predictably, Americans became further polarized, as they simultaneously blamed and defended responses to racism.

In what was perceived by some as a dramatic and unanticipated turn of events, and perceived by others as …

From Kosovo To Catalonia: Separatism And Integration In Europe, Christopher J. Borgen

Faculty Publications

In July 2010 the International Court of Justice rendered its Advisory Opinion on the legality of Kosovo's declaration of independence and the Constitutional Court of Spain rendered an opinion concerning the autonomy of Catalonia. Two very different cases, from very different places, decided by very different courts. Nonetheless, they each provide insights on the issue of separatism in the midst of European integration. Does the Kosovo opinion open the door for other separatist groups? Does the process of European integration increase or undercut separatism? In addressing these questions, this article proceeds in three main parts. Part A briefly recaps the …

That Guy's A Batterer!: A Scarlet Letter Approach To Domestic Violence In The Information Age, Elaine M. Chiu

Faculty Publications

Despite the remarkable reliance on the Internet as a source of information, we have yet to fully take advantage of it in our movement against domestic violence. Information is used as a weapon in the battle against domestic violence in several limited ways. Yet there is still more we can do with information and, specifically, the Internet, in combating domestic violence. The Scarlet Letter proposal seeks to empower potential victims of domestic violence with information so that they themselves can make choices that will avoid years of suffering and abuse. The idea is to allow public access to the data …

The Excitement Of Interdictory Ideas: A Response To Professor Anders Walker, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

The very first time that I taught criminal law, I would occasionally tell my six-year-old son, Thomas, about selected cases and situations that I had come across. Thomas enjoyed these discussions—more than I would have guessed: he was captivated by the horror of Dudley & Stephens, he was uncomfortably intrigued by shaming punishments, he was appropriately outraged at all manner of outcomes that seemed to him too harsh or too lenient. But most of all, he wanted to test his own burgeoning intuitions about right and wrong, good and evil, the permitted and the forbidden, against my "criminal law stories." …

Fair Measure Of The Right To Vote: A Comparative Perspective Of Voting Rights Enforcement In A Maturing Democracy, Janai S. Nelson

Faculty Publications

Constitutional text and government action are at times discordant in important ways. This discrepancy occurs in both mature and emerging democracies. It can result in the underenforcement of constitutional norms and implicate the rule of law. When the constitutional norm involves the right to vote, the gap between constitutions and governance inevitably triggers concerns about democracy as well. There is rich and ample debate within American legal scholarship over the effect of the underenforcement of constitutional norms on the scope and meaning of the norm. The arguments generally fall into one of two camps. One strand of argument suggests that …

The Myth Of The Level Playing Field: Knowledge, Affect, And Repetition In Public Debate, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

The industrialization of the channels and scale of communication has led some well-meaning reformers to try to regulate the ability of powerful private actors to leverage economic inequality into political inequality, particularly in the area of campaign finance. Such reform efforts are ostensibly intended to further the deliberative democratic ideal of rational, informed public decision making by preventing well-funded private interests from improperly influencing democratic debate and, by extension, political outcomes. This Article examines empirical findings in political science, psychology, and marketing and argues that, in the context of contemporary American society, the normative principles of deliberative democracy and formal …

Laïcité In Comparative Perspective (Conference): Foreword, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

On June 11, 2010, the Center for Law and Religion at St. John's University School of Law held its inaugural event, an academic conference at the University's Paris campus. "Laïcité in Comparative Perspective" brought together scholars from the United States and Europe to explore the French concept of laïcité and compare it with models of church-state relations in other countries, particularly the United States. Participants included Douglas Laycock (University of Virginia), who offered the Conference Introduction; Nathalie Caron (Université Paris-Est Créteil); Blandine Chelini-Pont (Université Paul Cézanne Aix-Marseille); Nina Crimm (St. John's University); Marc DeGirolami (St. John's University); Javier Martínez-Torrón Universidad …

Fiqh And Canons: Reflections On Islamic And Christian Jurisprudence, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

Although American scholarship has begun to address both Christian and Islamic jurisprudence in a serious way, virtually none of the literature attempts to compare the place of law in these two world religions. This Essay begins to compare Islamic and Christian conceptions of law and suggests some implications for contemporary debates about religious dispute settlement. Islam and Christianity are subtle and complex religions. Each has competing strands; each has evolved over millennia and expressed itself differently over time. Moreover, although systematic treatments of Islamic law are beginning to appear in English, much remains available only in languages, like Arabic, that …