Law and Politics Commons^™

The Promise Of Democracy, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

War: Rhetoric And Norm-Creation In Response To Terror, Tawia Baidoe Ansah

Faculty Publications

Everything is very simple in war," said Carl von Clausewitz, "but the simplest thing is difficult." This essay will suggest that the resort to the language of war, as "natural" and "starkly simple" as it is, nevertheless has a profound impact on how the law's intervention is shaped, or how the laws governing the transnational use of force are interpreted to accommodate a "war" on terrorism. I argue that although "war" is absent from the principal international legal instruments by which states are guided (and obligated) in their relations with other states, the concepts suppressed by this elision have an …

Overhauling The Good Faith Reasonable Doubt Test: Unions Should Be Obligated To Provide Annual Mandatory Polls To Determine Continuing Union Majority Status, 36 J. Marshall L. Rev. 377 (2003), Eve T. Kraszewski

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Agenda Power In Brazil’S Camara Dos Deputados, 1989-98, Octavio Amorim Neto, Gary W. Cox, Mathew D. Mccubbins

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Reply--The Missing Portion, Pierre Schlag

Publications

No abstract provided.

Linking Low-Income Washingtonians With Health Care Financing Arrangements, Kenneth R. Wing, Michael G. Gordie

Seattle University Law Review

Following this introductory section, Part II presents a comprehensive description of the health financing arrangements available to low-income residents of Washington State, from federally funded Medicaid programs to state-subsidized insurance. The Article concludes in Part III, outlining the interrelationship between these arrangements and the political process, and suggesting that the Washington State Legislature should be aware of how policy actually affects people.

Campaign Finance Reform, Free Speech And The Supreme Court, Derek Langhauser

Maine Policy Review

In December 2003, the United States Supreme Court upheld all the key provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002. In their 5-4 decision, the justices deferred broadly to the limitations set by Congress on unregulated “soft money” and “issue ads” in political campaigns. Derek Langhauser, who worked in Senator Olympia Snow’s office as counsel in McConnell v FEC, as this case was called, gives a legal history of the challenge of balancing Congress’ interest in protecting the integrity of elections with the Constitution’s competitive rights of free speech and association. He describes in detail the Supreme …

Singapore: The Feel Good Factor - A Vital Element In The Meticulous Preparations For Leadership Change, Eugene Kheng Boon Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

Preventive Detention: Prisoners, Suspected Terrorists And Permanent Emergency, Jules Lobel

Articles

Central to the United States government’s strategy after the September 11th attacks has been a shift from punishing unlawful conduct to pre-empting possible or potential dangers. This strategy threatens to undermine fundamental principles of both constitutional law and international law which prohibit certain government action based on mere suspicion or perceived threat. The law normally requires that the government wait until a person or nation has committed or is attempting to commit a criminal act before it may employ force in response. The dangers of a policy of preventive detention have been analyzed from a number of perspectives. Historians have …

Politics, Pragmatism, And Human Rights, Todd Landman

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Human Rights Horizons: The Pursuit of Justice in a Globalizing World by Richard A. Falk. New York: Routledge, 2000. 288pp.

and

Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry by Michael Ignatieff (edited by Amy Guttman). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 187pp.

The Twenty-Eighth Amendment: Why The Constitution Should Be Amended To Grant Congress The Power To Legislate In Furtherance Of The General Welfare, 36 J. Marshall L. Rev. 327 (2003), Casey L. Westover

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Mixing Metaphors: Voting, Dollars, And Campaign Finance Reform (Review Essay), Guy-Uriel Charles

Faculty Scholarship

Reviewing, Bruce Ackerman & Ian Ayers, Voting with Dollars: A New Paradigm for Campaign Finance (2002)

The Constitutionality Of An Executive Spending Plan, Paul E. Salamanca

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Operation of government in the absence of appropriations has become relatively common in the United States, particularly when projected expenses exceed projected revenue, making adoption of a budget a difficult task for the legislature. This Article focuses on the budget crisis in the Commonwealth of Kentucky from 2002 through 2003. In Part I, this Article recapitulates the history of the spending plan, including the action filed in Franklin Circuit Court to affirm its constitutionality. In Part II, this Article discusses certain theoretical, historical, and legal principles that inform analysis of the plan. In Part III, it considers certain deviations and …

Presidential Power In Transitions, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

The transition between presidencies has long created controversies. Whether the issue is "midnight judges" or "midnight regulations," presidential action at the end of a term has long provoked scrutiny and criticism. Presidents have also raised eyebrows at the beginning of their terms when they assert their authority and try to undo what their predecessor in office left behind. More than one president has taken action aimed specifically at "midnight regulations," such as ordering a freeze on the issuance of new regulations, a review of regulations issued at the end of the prior administration and other similar action. This article looks …

Strategic Voting And African-Americans: True Vote, True Representation, True Power For The Black Community, Maxine Burkett

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

As long as American politics remain securely bound to the two-party system, Blacks will remain a voting block; a block that may shift, but a block nonetheless. And although this appears to be to our strategic disadvantage, allowing conviction to direct us, as well as a deep respect for the intense struggle for the franchise, will forever be a noble posture.

Why Is There So Little Money In U.S. Politics?, John M. De Figueiredo, Stephen Ansolabehere, James M. Snyder Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Placing The Adoptive Self, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

[A]doption law and practices are guided by enormous cultural changes in the composition and the meaning of family. As families become increasingly blended outside the context of adoption – with combinations of blood relatives, step-relatives, de facto relatives, and ex-relatives sitting down together for Thanksgiving dinner as a matter of course – birth families and adoptive families knowing one another may not seem so very strange or threatening at all. There will simply be an expectation across communities that ordinary families will be mixed and multiple. With that in mind, we should hesitate before establishing embeddedness as the source of …

Proposed Legislation On Judicial Election Campaign Finance, Roy A. Schotland

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In light of the recent extraordinary rise in judicial campaign spending, illustrated in Ohio's 2000 judicial elections (and elsewhere, and in Ohio again in 2002), we must consider improving the Model Code of Judicial Conduct. The 1999 amendments to the Code addressed campaign finance, but did not address two major problems. The first one is the absence of limits on aggregate contributions from law firms; only Texas has such limits. This gap allows large contributions from law firms to go to judges presiding in cases in which those firms participate, circumventing the recusal and disqualification triggers. The second problem is …

A Different Kind Of "Republican Moment" In Environmental Law, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The purpose of this Essay is to propose and discuss the possibility that the nation currently faces another, albeit very different, "republican moment" that may well test the future of environmental protection laws in the United States. This new "moment" has as its modifier an uppercase "Republican" rather than a lowercase "republican." While the latter "republican" invokes the political tradition referred to as "civic republicanism," the former "Republican" refers instead to the current National Republican Party. The "moment" facing environmental law is the virtually unprecedented ascendancy of the Republican Party in all three branches of the federal government.

The Politics Of Public Health: A Response To Epstein, Lawrence O. Gostin, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Conservatives are taking aim at the field of public health, targeting its efforts to understand and control environmental and social causes of disease. Richard Epstein and others contend that these efforts in fact undermine people’s health and well-being by eroding people’s incentives to create economic value. Public health, they argue, should stick to its traditional task—the struggle against infectious diseases. Because markets are not up to the task of controlling the transmission of infectious disease, Epstein says, coercive government action is required. But market incentives, not state action, he asserts, represent our best hope for controlling the chronic illnesses that …

The Art Of Legislative Lawyering And The Six Circles Theory Of Advocacy, Chai R. Feldblum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A "legislative lawyer" is a person who exists in Washington, D.C., and in almost every city and state in this country where legislation and administrative regulations are developed. But most people do not know who that person is or what that person does. In fact, most advocacy organizations that should be hiring legislative lawyers have no idea who a legislative lawyer is.

The author coined the term "legislative lawyer" when she created a Federal Legislation Clinic at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. over a decade ago. The author needed to explain to her faculty colleagues what type …

Alarmism Versus Moderation In Responding To The Rehnquist Court, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I begin in Part I by offering a description of the Supreme Court's recent decisions as a less substantial repudiation of prior principles than many think them to be, and as leaving Congress with the means to achieve a quite substantial proportion of the policy goals it pursued in the statutes the Court invalidated. Part II explains why Congress is unlikely to do so, in light of our apparent commitment to divided government, and parties that are organized around distinctive ideologies because of divided government. Part III turns to the prospect for continued policy transformation, identifying the conditions under which …

The Trouble With Shadow Government, Howard M. Wasserman

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Fundamentalism From The Perspective Of Liberal Tolerance, Leslie C. Griffin

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Latina/O And Apia Vote Post-2000: What Does It Mean To Move Beyond “Black And White” Politics?, Sylvia R. Lazos

Scholarly Works

This Article frames the challenges to LatCrit theory and activism posed by voting rights, electoral process, and minority politics. In order to focus on the key challenges, The Article poses this question: What does a LatCrit theorist mean when she proposes to move beyond the "Black-White" paradigm? The Article discusses the changes in the U.S. electorate that in post-2000 have made the Latina/o and APIA vote the darling of both major parties. In the process of being perceived as an important electoral group, Latinas/os and Asian Pacific Islands Americans are at times being depicted as "model minorities." The Article concludes …

Malignant Democracy: Core Fallacies Underlying Election Of The Judiciary, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

There is no requirement of democratic theory that mandates that all public offices be filled by election. This is particularly true in modern democratic states, which are simply too large to justify the administrative burden of electing everyone who has significant responsibilities in our society.

Examples of this are everywhere in modern democracies, such as the United States and Europe. In England, for example, the Prime Minister is not directly elected by the people. Does this mean Great Britain has ceased to be a democracy? In most large, sophisticated nation-states, national cabinet officers have great power but are the political …

Trust Me, I’M A Judge: Why Binding Judicial Notice Of Jurisdictional Facts Violates The Right To Jury Trial, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

The conventional model of criminal trials holds that the prosecution is required to prove every element of the offense beyond the jury's reasonable doubt. The American criminal justice system is premised on the right of the accused to have all facts relevant to his guilt or innocence decided by a jury of his peers. The role of the judge is seen as limited to deciding issues of law and facilitating the jury's fact-finding. Despite these principles,judges are reluctant to submit to the jury elements of the offense that the judge perceives to be . routine, uncontroversial or uncontested.

One such …

Politicizing The Crime Against Humanity: The French Example, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

The advantages of world adherence to universally acceptable standards of law and fundamental rights seemed apparent after the Second World War, as they had after the First. Their appeal seems ever greater and their advocates ever more persuasive today. The history of law provides evidence that caution may be in order, however, and that the human propensity to ignore what transpires under the surface of law threatens to dull and silence the ongoing self-examination and self-criticism required in perpetuity by the law if it is to be correlated with justice.

This Essay presents one side, the dark side, of the …

The Bush Administration's Response To The International Criminal Court, Jean Galbraith

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Justice White And Judicial Review, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

No abstract provided.