Jurisprudence Commons^™

The Process Of International Law-Making: The Relationship Between The International Court Of Justice And The International Law Commission, Marija Dordeska

Marija Dordeska

When the International Court of Justice (ICJ) resolves disputes between States, it relies on various draft articles of the International Law Commission (ILC), sometimes declaring them to be customary international law. The ICJ thereby elevates some draft articles into the sphere of customary international law, transforming them into instruments binding for the international community as a whole. However, the ICJ tends to rely on the ILC’s work only when the ILC bases its findings on ICJ or Permanent Court of International Justice’s precedents. As an alternative method of international law-making, the relationship between the ICJ and the ILC ...

Arbitration - Arbitrability Of Antitrust Claims Arising From An International Commercial Contract - Mitsubishi Motors Corp. V. Soler Chrysler-Plymouth, Inc., 105 S. Ct. 3346 (1985)., William L. Blagg

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Third Preference Status (Professionals) On Immigrants As Created By The 1965 Amendment To The Immigration And Nationality Act - Retraction Of Expansion Of Degree Equivalency - Matter Of Portugues Do Atlantico Information Bureau, Inc., Debra A. Egger

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The European Commission's Ecs/Akzo Standard For Predatory Pricing In The E.E.C.: Deterrence Or Disorder?, Thomas G. Ehr

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Immigration - Due Process - The Availability Of Constitutional Safeguards To Detained Cuban Aliens, Garcia-Mir V. Meese, 788 F.2d 1446 (11th Cir. 1986), Cert. Denied, 107 S. Ct. 289 (1986)., Elizabeth G. Marlowe

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

A Typology Of Judging Styles, Corey Rayburn Yung

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Proportionality And The Social Benefits Of Discovery: Out Of Sight And Out Of Mind?, Stephen B. Burbank

Faculty Scholarship

In this short essay, based on remarks delivered at the 2015 meeting of the AALS Section of Litigation, I use a recent paper by Gelbach and Kobayashi to highlight the risk that, in assessing the proportionality of proposed discovery under the 2015 amendments to Rule 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, federal judges will privilege costs over benefits, and private over public interests. The risk arises from the temptation to focus on (1) the interests of those who are present to the detriment of the interests of those who are absent (“the availability heuristic”), and (2) variables that ...

Stiffing The Arbitrators: The Problem Of Nonpayment In Commercial Arbitration, Brian Farkas, Neal M. Eiseman

Brian Farkas

Commercial arbitration is a creature of contract; the parties are there because they choose to be, either including an arbitration clause in their written agreement or, after a dispute developed, electing to avoid litigation all together. Arbitration also comes with an up-front cost non-existent in litigation: the arbitrators. Taxpayers pay for their state and federal judges, but the parties themselves pay for their arbitrators.

But what happens if one party refuses (or is otherwise unable) to pay the arbitrator? If the arbitrator then refuses to proceed, as is likely, should the dispute revert to court, in derogation of the prior ...

Trial By Google: Judicial Notice In The Information Age, Jeffrey Bellin, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Northwestern University Law Review

This Article presents a theory of judicial notice for the information age. It argues that the ease of accessing factual data on the Internet allows judges and litigants to expand the use of judicial notice in ways that raise significant concerns about admissibility, reliability, and fair process. State and federal courts are already applying the surprisingly pliant judicial notice rules to bring websites ranging from Google Maps to Wikipedia into the courtroom, and these decisions will only increase in frequency in coming years. This rapidly emerging judicial phenomenon is notable for its ad hoc and conclusory nature—attributes that have ...

All Together Now: Using Principles Of Group Dynamics To Train Better Jurors, Sara G. Gordon

Scholarly Works

We ask juries to make important decisions that have a profound impact on people’s lives. We leave these decisions in the hands of groups of laypeople because we hope that the diverse range of experiences and knowledge in the group will lead to more thoughtful and informed decisionmaking. Studies suggest that diverse groups of jurors have different perspectives on evidence, engage in more thorough debate, and more closely evaluate facts. At the same time, there are a variety of problems associated with group decisionmaking, from the loss of individual motivation in group settings, to the vulnerability of groups to ...

Dualism And Doctrine, Alex Stein, Dov Fox

Alex Stein

What kinds of harm among those that tortfeasors inflict are worthy of compensation? Which forms of self-incriminating evidence are privileged against government compulsion? What sorts of facts constitute a criminal defendant’s intent? Existing doctrine pins the answer to all of these questions on whether the injury, facts, or evidence at stake are “mental” or “physical.” The assumption that operations of the mind are meaningfully distinct from those of the body animates fundamental rules in our law.

A tort victim cannot recover for mental harm on its own because the law presumes that he is able to unfeel any suffering ...

Systemic Lying, Julia Simon-Kerr

Julia Simon-Kerr

This Article offers the foundational account of systemic lying from a definitional and theoretical perspective. Systemic lying involves the cooperation of multiple actors in the legal system who lie or violate their oaths across cases for a consistent reason that is linked to their conception of justice. It becomes a functioning mechanism within the legal system and changes the operation of the law as written. By identifying systemic lying, this Article challenges the assumption that all lying in the legal system is the same. It argues that systemic lying poses a particular threat to the legal system. This means that ...

Believe It Or Not: Mitigating The Negative Effects Personal Belief And Bias Have On The Criminal Justice System, Sarah A. Mourer

Sarah Mourer

This article examines the prosecutor’s and defense attorney’s personal pre-trial beliefs regarding the accused’s guilt or innocence. This analysis suggests that when an attorney does hold pretrial beliefs, such beliefs lead to avoidable bias and errors. These biases may alter the findings throughout all stages of the case. The procedure asking that the prosecution seek justice while having nothing more than probable cause results in the prosecutor’s need to have a belief in guilt before proceeding to trial. While this belief is intended to foster integrity and fairness in the criminal justice system, to the contrary ...

Disappearing Claims And The Erosion Of Public Law, J. Maria Glover

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court’s arbitration jurisprudence in the last five years represents the culmination of a three-decade long expansion of the use of private arbitration as an alternative to court adjudication in the resolution of disputes of virtually every type of justiciable claim. As scholars have traced, privatizing disputes that would otherwise be public may well erode public confidence in public institutions and the judicial process. Accordingly, many observers have linked this decades-long privatization of dispute resolution to an erosion of the public realm. In this piece I argue that the Court’s recent arbitration jurisprudence undermines the public law ...

Ambiguous-Purpose Statements Of Children And Other Victims Of Abuse Under The Confrontation Clause, Paul F. Rothstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author examines in this paper two kinds of ambiguous-purpose out-of-court statements that are especially problematic under current Confrontation law--problematic in ways that we hope will be solved directly or indirectly by the Supreme Court when it renders its decision in Ohio v. Clark. The statements he examines are:

(1) Statements made by abused children concerning their abuse, for example to police, physicians, teachers, welfare workers, baby sitters, or family members, some of whom may be under a legal duty to report suspected abuse to legal authorities. At least some of these statements will be directly addressed by the Court ...

Catalogs, Alex Stein, Gideon Parchomovsky

Alex Stein

It is a virtual axiom in the world of law that legal norms come in two prototypes: rules and standards. The accepted lore suggests that rules should be formulated to regulate recurrent and frequent behaviors, whose contours can be defined with sufficient precision. Standards, by contrast, should be employed to address complex, variegated, behaviors that require the weighing of multiple variables. Rules rely on an ex ante perspective and are therefore considered the domain of the legislator; standards embody a preference for ex post, ad-hoc, analysis and are therefore considered the domain of courts. The rules/standards dichotomy has become ...

Do Corporations Have Religious Beliefs?, Jason Iuliano

Indiana Law Journal

Despite two hundred years of jurisprudence on the topic of corporate personhood, the Supreme Court has failed to endorse a philosophically defensible theory of the corporation. In this Article, I attempt to fill that void. Drawing upon the extensive philosophical literature on personhood and group agency, I argue that corporations qualify as persons in their own right. This leads me to answer the titular question with an emphatic yes. Contrary to how it first seems, that conclusion does not warrant granting expansive constitutional rights to corporations. It actually suggests the opposite. Using the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate as ...

Tactical Totalization, Adam Macleod

Adam MacLeod

The article explains why private law norms pose a threat to totalitarian projects. It examines the totalization of law accomplished by segregationist regimes in the mid-twentieth century, comparing and contrasting those regimes with totalitarian regimes. Then it turns to examine instances of what I call “tactial totalization” in our own day. Examining totalitarianism as a jurisprudential, rather than political, phenomenon reveals how the totalization of legal norms can and does occur in Western liberal democracies. In support of my thesis that tactical totalization occurs with some frequency in contemporary liberal democracies, the article makes and defends several original claims. For ...

Fundamental Rights And Concessions Of Privilege, Adam Macleod

Adam MacLeod

On the eve of its final triumph, has the cause of marriage equality fallen short? This essay discusses persistent differences in the incidents that attach to same-sex marriages versus man-woman marriages. It examines these in light of the distinction between fundamental rights and concessions of privilege in marriage law, and in common law constitutionalism generally. It suggests that proponents of marriage equality and courts would do well to give more attention to this distinction, and that lawmakers would do well to consider how additional concessions of privilege can best serve the interests of all.

The Corporate Conspiracy Vacuum (Formerly "Corporate Conspiracy: How Not Calling A Conspiracy A Conspiracy Is Warping The Law On Corporate Wrongdoing"), Josephine Sandler Nelson

J.S. Nelson

The intracorporate conspiracy doctrine immunizes an enterprise and its agents from conspiracy prosecution based on the legal fiction that an enterprise and its agents are a single actor incapable of the meeting of two minds to form a conspiracy. The doctrine, however, misplaces incentives in contravention of agency law, criminal law, tort law, and public policy. As a result of this absence of accountability, harmful behavior is ordered and performed without consequences, and the victims of the behavior suffer without appropriate remedy.

This vacuum at the center of American conspiracy law has now warped the doctrines around it. Especially in ...