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Sovereignty Considerations And Social Change In The Wake Of India's Recent Sodomy Cases, Deepa Das Acevedo Sep 2016

Sovereignty Considerations And Social Change In The Wake Of India's Recent Sodomy Cases, Deepa Das Acevedo

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American constitutional law scholars have long questioned whether courts can really drive social reform, and this position remains largely unchallenged even in the wake of recent landmark decisions affecting the LGBT community. In contrast, court watchers in India — spurred by developments in a special type of legal action developed in the late 1970s known as “public interest litigation,” or “PIL” — have only recently begun questioning the judiciary’s ability to promote progressive social change. Indian scholarship on this point has veered between despair that PIL cases no longer reliably produce good outcomes for India’s most disadvantaged, and optimism that …


Presidential War Powers As An Interactive Dynamic: International Law, Domestic Law, And Practice-Based Legal Change, Curtis A. Bradley, Jean Galbraith Jan 2016

Presidential War Powers As An Interactive Dynamic: International Law, Domestic Law, And Practice-Based Legal Change, Curtis A. Bradley, Jean Galbraith

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There is a rich literature on the circumstances under which the United Nations Charter or specific Security Council resolutions authorize nations to use force abroad, and there is a rich literature on the circumstances under which the U.S. Constitution and statutory law allows the President to use force abroad. These are largely separate areas of scholarship, addressing what are generally perceived to be two distinct levels of legal doctrine. This Article, by contrast, considers these two levels of doctrine together as they relate to the United States. In doing so, it makes three main contributions. First, it demonstrates striking parallels …


Procedure And Pragmatism, Stephen B. Burbank Jan 2016

Procedure And Pragmatism, Stephen B. Burbank

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In this essay, prepared as part of a festschrift for the Italian scholar, Michele Taruffo, I portray him as a pragmatic realist of the sort described by Richard Posner in his book, Reflections on Judging. Viewing him as such, I salute Taruffo for challenging the established order in domestic and comparative law thinking about civil law systems, the role of lawyers, courts and precedent in those systems, and also for casting the light of the comparative enterprise on common law systems, particularly that in the United States. Speaking as one iconoclast of another, however, I also raise questions about Taruffo’s …