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Full-Text Articles in Public Law and Legal Theory

An Originalist Argument For A Sixth Amendment Right To Competent Counsel, Erica J. Hashimoto Jul 2014

An Originalist Argument For A Sixth Amendment Right To Competent Counsel, Erica J. Hashimoto

Scholarly Works

The Treason Act of 1696 provided a right to counsel in treason cases in England and laid the framework for the right to counsel both in England and in the United States. Evidence suggests that the Treason Act may have influenced the Framers of the Constitution; thus, any historical understanding of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel should consider the quality of representation treason defendants received. If, as appears to be the case, treason defendants had competent, experienced lawyers representing them, then the Sixth Amendment right to counsel may well include that right to such representation. This Essay suggest that …


State Action Problems, Christian Turner Jan 2013

State Action Problems, Christian Turner

Scholarly Works

The state action doctrine is a mess. Explanations for why federal courts sometimes treat the private actions of private parties as public actions subject to the Constitution, like the Supreme Court did in Shelley v. Kraemer, are either vastly overinclusive or fail to explain our law and values. A better approach is to understand the state action doctrine in institutional terms. I introduce a two-step, institutionally focused state action theory that is a natural consequence of a broader public/private theory of legal systems. In the first step, a court identifies a “state action problem,” meaning a privately made law that …


Law's Public/Private Structure, Christian Turner Jul 2012

Law's Public/Private Structure, Christian Turner

Scholarly Works

Often derided for its incoherence or uselessness, the public/private distinction is rarely studied explicitly outside the state action doctrine in Constitutional Law. To ignore this distinction, however, is to miss the most fundamental sorting criterion in our law. Distinguishing whether public or private entities control (a) law creation and definition and (b) prosecution leads to a simple yet powerful taxonomy of legal systems. The taxonomy characterizes legal systems in terms of control over decisionmaking by our most basic institutional forms: the public and private. Thus, the proper categorization of laws within the system, for example whether a policy should be …


Fair Use In American And Continental Laws, Omar M.A. Obeidat Jan 1997

Fair Use In American And Continental Laws, Omar M.A. Obeidat

LLM Theses and Essays

Intellectual property, unlike tangible property, does not exclusively occupy one place at a designated time. Instead, intellectual property is composed of information which can be reproduced or used in multiple places at any given time. This fundamental difference between intellectual and tangible property is reflected in the legal provisions that regulate these types of property. There are two dominant theories that justify the legal protection of intellectual property: the individualistic European approach, and the commercial Anglo-American approach. Under the European approach, the protection of the creation is a natural right guaranteed to the author. In other words, natural law guarantees …


Permissible Accommodation Of Religion And The Alternative Burden, Ei Ichiro Takahata Jan 1997

Permissible Accommodation Of Religion And The Alternative Burden, Ei Ichiro Takahata

LLM Theses and Essays

In this thesis, the author discusses the extent to which the government can afford to give accommodation within the limits of the Establishment Clause. In Chapter II, the author reviews the theory of the permissible accommodation referred to in the Supreme Court of the United States. In Chapter III, the author examines scholarly debates on the accommodation. Then, the author discusses German and Japanese law of the accommodation in Chapter IV. There, those cases suggest the possibility of alternative burdens on religious believers. The alternative burdens are considered the price of the accommodation. The author concludes that the government has …