Criminal Law Commons^™

Mental Torture: A Critique Of Erasures In U.S. Law, David Luban, Henry Shue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Both international and federal law criminalize mental torture as well as physical torture, and both agree that “severe mental pain or suffering” defines mental torture. However, U.S. law provides a confused and convoluted definition of severe mental pain or suffering—one that falsifies the very concept and makes mental torture nearly impossible to prosecute or repress. Our principal aim is to expose the fallacies that underlie the U.S. definition of mental torture: first, a materialist bias that the physical is more real than the mental; second, a substitution trick that defines mental pain or suffering through a narrow set of causes …

Fundamental Norms, International Law, And The Extraterritorial Constitution, Jules Lobel

Articles

The Supreme Court, in Boumediene v. Bush, decisively rejected the Bush Administration's argument that the Constitution does not apply to aliens detained by the United States government abroad. However, the functional, practicality focused test articulated in Boumediene to determine when the constitution applies extraterritorially is in considerable tension with the fundamental norms jurisprudence that underlies and pervades the Court’s opinion. This Article seeks to reintegrate Boumediene's fundamental norms jurisprudence into its functional test, arguing that the functional test for extraterritorial application of habeas rights should be informed by fundamental norms of international law. The Article argues that utilizing international law’s …

Waiting For Justice

Dr. Saumya Uma