Digital Commons Network^™

Provocateurs For Justice, Jane H. Aiken

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Clinical legal education offers unique opportunities to inspire law students to commit to justice. Merely providing a justice experience is not enough. We must provoke a desire to do justice in our students. As provocateurs, we determine where our students are in the developmental process toward "justice readiness." This article outlines those developmental stages and suggests interventions to assist students in their transition from stage to stage. Being "justice ready" requires sensitivity to the ways in which assumptions color all aspects of our cases. The article closes with suggestions and examples of how to critically reflect on assumptions that hinder …

Calibrated Commitment: The Legal Treatment Of Marriage And Cohabitation, Milton C. Regan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A couple of points are worth making at the outset of my argument. First, I speak in this Essay primarily about the extension of benefits to domestic partners, rather than the imposition of duties upon them. That is because this has been the focus of most of the debate about the legal treatment of married and unmarried couples. I readily acknowledge, however, that a fuller debate would consider not only when domestic partners should be given rights, but also when they should assume certain responsibilities. Indeed, as I will make clear, one reason for rejecting certain claims by unmarried couples …

Privacy And Power, Rosa Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Something has gone wrong in modem America, argues Jeffrey Rosen in The Unwanted Gaze. Our medical records are bought and sold by health care providers, drug companies, and the insurance industry. Our e-mails are intercepted and read by our employers. Amazon.com knows everything there is to know about our reading and web-browsing habits. Poor Monica Lewinsky's draft love letters to President Bill Clinton were seized by the villainous Ken Starr, and ultimately plastered all over the nation's newspapers.

To Rosen, the nature of the problem is clear: These examples are all part of a troubling "phenomenon that affects all …

To Our Children's Children's Children: The Problems Of Intergenerational Ethics, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay serves as the introduction to the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review's symposium on intergenerational justice. The importance of this topic cannot be overstated. Intergenerational ethics bears on questions of environmental policy, health policy, intellectual property law, international development policy, social security policy, telecommunications policy, and a variety of other issues.

Part II, Clarifying the Problems of Intergenerational Ethics, is a first sketch of the scope and nature of intergenerational justice, introducing a variety of cases and contexts in which issues of intergenerational ethics arise and distinguishing between the political and moral dimensions of these issues. Part …

Out Of The Ordinary: Law, Power, Culture, And The Commonplace, Naomi Mezey

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Review of The Common Place of Law: Stories From Everyday Life by Patricia Ewick & Susan S. Silbey (1998).

Sometimes a work's intellectual influences reveal both its strengths and its shortcomings. This is certainly the case with Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey's The Common Place of Law: Stories From Everyday Life, and its indebtedness to the thinking of Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau. Taken together, Foucault and de Certeau's work suggests that investigations of law's power are most fruitful not at the level of legal institutions and the state but at the level of lived experience, where we …

The Market For Medical Ethics, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

At the core of Kenneth Arrow’s classic 1963 essay on medical uncertainty is a claim that has failed to carry the day among economists. This claim—that physician adherence to an anti-competitive ethic of fidelity to patients and suppression of pecuniary influences on clinical judgment pushes medical markets toward social optimality—has won Arrow near-iconic status among medical ethicists (and many physicians). Yet conventional wisdom among health economists, including several participants in this symposium, holds that this claim is either naïve or outdated. Health economists admire Arrow’s article for its path-breaking analysis of market failures resulting from information asymmetry, uncertainty, and moral …

Law As Culture, Naomi Mezey

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Essay is an attempt to theorize the relationship of law to culture and culture to law beyond the intuitive, commonplace sense that law partakes of culture - by reflecting it as well as by reacting against it - and that culture refracts law. It proposes a theory of law as culture that, in detailing the mutually constitutive nature of the relationship, distinguishes itself from the way law and culture have been conceived by realist and critical legal scholars, as well as by social norms writers. The Essay concludes by speculating about one possible method by which this theorizing might …

Embryonic Stem Cell Research As An Ethical Issue: On The Emptiness Of Symbolic Value, Kevin P. Quinn

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The debate over human embryonic stem cell research-scientific and clinical prospects as well as ethical implications-became front-page news only after two teams of university researchers reported in November 1998 that they had isolated and cultured human pluripotent stem cells. The discovery caused a flurry of excitement among patients and researchers and drew attention from President Clinton, who instructed the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) to "conduct a thorough review of the issues associated with. .. human stem cell research, balancing all medical and ethical issues.”

Rights, Capabilities, And The Good Society, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Part I this essay explores and then criticizes the two major arguments behind the conventional wisdom that rights undermine efforts to secure a state role in ensuring the material preconditions for a good society, and therefore, the material preconditions for the development of those human capabilities essential to a fully human life. I conclude in this part that this understanding of rights is mistaken. In Part II, I urge that the pragmatic argument put forward by rights critics and some welfare advocates for forgoing rights-talk and rights-rhetoric also fails: there are very real costs, both in theory and in …

Romer, Hurley, And Dale: How The Supreme Court Languishes With "Special Rights", Christopher S. Hargis

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

A Family Affair: Constitutional And Prudential Interests Implicated When Homosexuals Seek To Preserve Or Create Parent-Child Relationships, Kif Skidmore

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Pharmaceutical Patent Protection: More Generic Favored Legislation May Cause Pioneer Drug Companies To Pull The Plug On Innovation, Mandy Wilson

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

A "Clanging Silence": Same-Sex Couples And Tort Law, John G. Culhane

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Law And Military Interventions: Preserving Humanitarian Values In 21st Conflicts, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Step At A Time: New Zealand's Progress Toward Homonid Rights, Rowan Taylor

Animal Law Review

All members of the Homindae Family (humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans) share complex cognitive aptitudes not shared by most other animals. Yet only human hominids have legal rights to life and personal security. The campaign to win fundamental rights for all hominids took a small but significant step forward in 1999 when New Zealand's Animal Welfare Act banned the use of non-human hominids in research, testing, and teaching except where such uses are in the hominids' best interests. In preventing human interests from trumping non-human ones, the Act took a first step toward dismantling speciesism within the hominid family. …

Will The Heavens Fall? De-Radicalizing The Precedent-Breaking Decision, Paul Waldau

Animal Law Review

This article offers an extended analogy for the purpose of posing basic questions about proposals for granting legal rights to some nonhuman animals. The analogy is drawn from the precedent-breaking eighteenth century English case Somerset v. Stewart, which liberated an African slave. The article argues that one can identify features of the eighteenth century debate which illuminate features of today's debate over proposed uses of centrally important legal concepts for some nonhuman animals. Using the comparison for the limited task of highlighting the complex cultural backdrop in each situation, the article suggests that the comparison helps one see the nature …

Legal Trade In African Elephant Ivory: Buy Ivory To Save The Elephant?, Sam B. Edwards Iii

Animal Law Review

Trade in endangered species is a complicated issue. The trade in ivory creates tensions between western conservation-driven beliefs and developing countries' reliance on wildlife as a resource. This article examines the recent decision under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to conduct a one-time sale of ivory from Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Botswana to Japan. Since trade in endangered species involves many different disciplines, this paper touches on biology, international law, economics, and public policy. In theory, limited trade in African elephant ivory is possible and even advantageous for the various actors. However, in practice, the management controls …

Foreword, Edward D. Spurgeon, Charles P. Sabatino, Nancy M. Coleman, Stephen R. Mcconnell, Rebecca C. Morgan

Georgia Law Review

The Joint Conference on Legal/Ethical Issues in the Progression of Dementia grew out of the pressing need to address the very real legal and ethical dilemmas that arise in situations like the one of Marie McDonough Larson and her family. Five groups joined forces to sponsor the Conference: the Borchard Foundation Center on Law and Aging; the Alzheimer's Association; the American Bar Association's Commission on Legal Problems of the Elderly; the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys; and the University of Georgia School of Law. Held at the Center for Continuing Education at the University of Georgia, the Conference spanned …

Recommendations Of The Joint Conference

Georgia Law Review

Health-care and financial planning for the client with diminished capacity requires a holistic approach that includes consideration of the realities of dementia progression, cultural and linguistic diversity, capacity that may vary over time, issues of surrogate decision making, and recognition of the client's vulnerability to abuse, neglect, exploitation and undue influence. A goal of legal planning should be to limit the use of guardianship to the greatest extent possible.

Dementia And Alzheimer's Disease: An Overview, Peter V. Rabins

Georgia Law Review

Dementia is a syndromic diagnosis defined by three criteria: cognitive decline, multiple impairments, normal level of consciousness. It is an acquired disorder characterized by multiple impairments of cognition (distinct elements of intellectual processing such as memory, abstraction, judgment, and language) occurring in an individual who is fully alert and attentive. It is now known that at least seventy-five distinct diseases can present as this syndrome and that most of these diseases have specific syndromic patterns that allow clinicians to distinguish among them.

Dementia Research: Ethics And Policy For The Twenty-First Century, Rebecca Dresser

Georgia Law Review

People in developed countries rank dementia among the most feared threats to human health and life. With an increasing portion of the U.S. population living into the seventh, eighth, and ninth decades, the incidence of dementia is on the rise. So is the incidence of dementia research. In an effort to lighten the burdens on future patients and caregivers, government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and philanthropic organizations are devoting abundant resources to the study of dementia. Like most human endeavors, dementia research can yield both benefits and harms. On the positive side, research holds out the possibility of better medications and …

Thinking About Life-Sustaining Treatment Late In The Life Of A Demented Person, Thomas Finucane

Georgia Law Review

This paper will consider a specific clinical situation: an elderly patient with dementia who becomes seriously ill, where treatment would likely be burdensome but might prolong life. Generic questions are described and the lawyerly Standard Paradigm is developed. Questions are raised about every step of the Standard Paradigm. Finally, there is a discussion of two treatment decisions that are commonly faced late in the course of advanced dementia: tube feeding and attempted cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Predictive Genetic Testing For Alzheimer's Disease In Long-Term Care Insurance, Mark A. Rothstein

Georgia Law Review

The promise of new genetic research is the ability to prevent, treat, and cure a wide range of physical and mental disorders-both monogenic and complex disorders. While astonishing progress has been made in gene discovery and the development of genetic tests, progress has been much slower in developing medicalinterventions. Consequently, there is likely to be a gap of varying and indetermi- nate time-lasting years or decades-between the ability to identify and predict genetic risk and the ability to prevent, treat, or cure the condition. The gap between the ability to predict genetic risk and the ability to ameliorate the risk …

Culture, Cloaked In Mens Rea, Doriane Lambelet Coleman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Cleaning Up The Tracks: Superfund Meets Rails-To-Trails, Clifford J. Villa

Faculty Scholarship

For more than one hundred years, railroad cars rumbled and roared along tracks in the Coeur d'Alene River Basin, serving the mining industry in the Panhandle of northern Idaho. As in many parts of the American West, the history of railroads in northern Idaho largely reflects the history of mining in the region. The first gold was discovered in this area in 1883, the same year that the area saw its first line of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In 1885, the Bunker Hill mine was established near the present town of Kellogg. Four years later, the first rail line of …

Mary Daily V. Boston College: The Impermissibility Of Single-Sex Classes In Private Universities, Maryam Ahranjani

Faculty Scholarship

This Comment discusses the rationale underlying single-sex education and the diversity in its implementation. This Comment argues that not only are single-sex classrooms withing private undergraduate institutions legally unsound, but also that this approach fails to address long-term public policy concerns about the situation of women in education. As the United States grapples with education reform, it is far too easy to initiate Band-Aid solutions. Single-sex education, ranging from single-sex classrooms to single-sex public schools, should exist as an option, but Title IX and equal protection standards must be satisfied. The first section of this article discusses the historical perspective …

Learning Through Service In A Clinical Setting: The Effect Of Specialization On Social Justice & Skills Training, Antoinette M. Sedillo Lopez

Faculty Scholarship

Arguing against the trend toward specialization in clinical legal education, this essay addresses potential limitations of specialized legal clinics in furthering the dual mission of clinical legal education: social justice and skills training. It points out that specialized clinics limit access to justice by leaving the myriad needs of clients partially unmet. They limit students' learning about the complex needs of clients and students' ability to discover broad inequities in the legal system. Specialization makes it more difficult to train students to be creative problem solvers, and affects their professional socialization

Family Law: Whose Kids Are They, Anyway?: Analyzing Troxel V. Granville And The Current State Of Oklahoma's Grandparent Visitation Statute, Natania M. Soto

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Torts: Nealis V. Baird: The Oklahoma Supreme Court Extends Fetal Rights In Wrongful Death Suits But Leaves Important Questions Unanswered, Cory Hicks

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Limits Of Gaylaw, Dale Carpenter

Articles

The world into which Gaylaw arrives is one whose poles are very far apart. At one pole, a man fatally fractures his dog's skull by beating him with a plastic vacuum cleaner accessory and then throwing the dog against a tree trunk. 3 Why? The man concluded the dog was homosexual after he saw the poodle-Yorkshire terrier mix repeatedly attempt sexual activity with another male terrier. 4 At the man's subsequent trial for animal cruelty, a veterinarian testified that such behavior in dogs is a common way for them to assert dominance, rather than necessarily a sexual act, much less …