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G-Day, Donald Green

Mighty Pen Project Anthology & Archive

A young Marine artilleryman and his gun crew chase Saddam’s forces across the Kuwaiti desert.

Articles, stories, and other compositions in this archive were written by participants in the Mighty Pen Project. The program, developed by author David L. Robbins, and in partnership with Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia War Memorial in Richmond, Virginia, offers veterans and their family members a customized twelve-week writing class, free of charge. The program encourages, supports, and assists participants in sharing their stories and experiences of military experience so both writer and audience may benefit.

Trust Lands For The Native Hawaiian Nation: Lessons From Federal Indian Law Precedents, Lane Kaiwi Opulauoho

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

Corporate Cybersecurity: The International Threat To Private Networks And How Regulations Can Mitigate It, Eric J. Hyla

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Cyberattacks are occurring at an accelerating pace. Foreign nations are increasingly utilizing hacking as a tool for economic gain, acts of aggression, or international political expression. At risk are US consumers'personal data, private firms' bottom line, and the economies'integrity. In response, federal and state lawmakers have issued a series of disparate, uncoordinated policies seeking to strengthen cybersecurity practices. However, recent events indicate that these policies are less than ideal. This Note suggests that a unified response to cybersecurity is required and calls for the establishment of a single, central federal agency with authority over all cybersecurity regulations. Such an agency …

Legal Jurisdiction And The Deterritorialization Of Data, Paul Schiff Berman

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Electronic data—everything from e-mails and text messages to Facebook and Instagram posts to Twitter pronouncements to drone warfare data to search algorithms to financial transactions to cloud data storage—travels around the globe with little relationship to physical territory. In addition, all of this data is often in the custody and control of data intermediaries such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, private military contractors, and so on.

Three important consequences flow from this ubiquitous technology-enabled, data-driven global societal activity. First, the territorial location of data becomes increasingly arbitrary and substantively unimportant. If I, as a U.S. citizen based in …

Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems: The Overlooked Importance Of Administrative Accountability, Laura T. Dickinson

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The rise of lethal autonomous weapons systems creates numerous problems for legal regimes meant to insure public accountability for unlawful uses of force. In particular, international humanitarian law has long relied on enforcement through individual criminal responsibility, which is complicated by autonomous weapons that fragment responsibility for decisions to deploy violence. Accordingly, there may often be no human being with the requisite level of intent to trigger individual responsibility under existing doctrine. In response, perhaps international criminal law could be reformed to account for such issues. Or, in the alternative, greater emphasis on other forms of accountability, such as tort …

Copyrightability Of Artworks Produced By Creative Robots And Originality: The Formality-Objective Model, Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid, Luis Antonio Velez- Hernandez

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology

No abstract provided.

Indigenous Rights To Water & Environmental Protection, Robert T. Anderson

Articles

This article examines the rights of Indian nations in the United States to adequate water supplies and environmental protection for their land and associated resources. Part I of this article provides a brief background on the history of federal-tribal relations and the source and scope of federal obligations to protect tribal resources. Part II reviews the source and nature of the federal government’s moral and legal obligations to Indian tribes, which are generally referred to as the trust responsibility. Indian reserved water rights and the difficulty tribes experience in protecting habitat needed for healthy treaty resources is discussed in Part …

Critical Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, And Market Failure, John J. Chung

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Legal Jurisdiction And The Deterritorialization Of Data, Paul Schiff Berman

Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc

No abstract provided.

Event Horizon: Examining Military And Weaponization Issues In Space By Utilizing The Outer Space Treaty And The Law Of Armed Conflict, Ryan M. Esparza

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

This article takes the position that any lingering ambiguities surrounding the militarization and weaponization of outer space should be analyzed via the joint scope of the Outer Space Treaty and the Law of Armed Conflict. This article pulls key provisions from Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions because of Additional Protocol I’s application in international conflicts and affirmation of the four Geneva Conventions. After an examination of key Additional Protocol I provisions and their application to space, this article conducts a joint analysis of the Outer Space Treaty and the Law of Armed Conflict. This joint analysis examines three …

Civil War Congress And The Creation Of Modern America: A Revolution On The Home Front, Paul Finkelman, Donald R. Kennon

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Most literature on the Civil War focuses on soldiers, battles, and politics. But for every soldier in the United States Army, there were nine civilians at home. The war affected those left on the home front in many ways. Westward expansion and land ownership increased. The draft disrupted families while a shortage of male workers created opportunities for women that were previously unknown.

The war also enlarged the national government in ways unimagined before 1861. The Homestead Act, the Land Grant College Act, civil rights legislation, the use of paper currency, and creation of the Internal Revenue Service to collect …

Counter-Critical Theory: An Intervention In Contemporary Critical Thought And Practice, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht's short-lived project for a critical theory journal, Krise und Kritik, foundered in 1931 on the shoals of positivism. Since then, a series of anti-foundational challenges to traditional critical theory has fragmented the landscape of critical theory and, especially, critical praxis, leaving us disarmed today, in these unprecedented times. This essay offers a way forward by means of what it calls “counter-critical theory”: a critical method that indexes the original impulse of critical theory, but liberates it from its foundation in order to allow for a more open-ended and permanent re-examination of how power circulates …

A Drone’S Eye View: Why And How The Federal Aviation Administration Should Regulate Hobbyist Drone Use, Alexandria Tomanelli

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Applied Anti-Semitism: The Bds Movement And The Abuse Of Corporate Social Responsibility, Alexander B. Traum

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Ganesh Sitaraman’S Idealized American History, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

A popular theme among patriots is to celebrate America’s special virtues, which distinguish it radically from European models. Ganesh Sitaraman tells us that political constitutions have generally been designed to prevent socially destabilizing class warfare between the rich, who seek greater domination, and the poor, who would like to redistribute the former’s wealth. America’s Constitution is distinctive because it was consciously designed for a society in which the middle class is large enough to preserve social stability. That is why Sitaraman calls it a “middle-class constitution.”

The Popular But Unlawful Armed Reprisal, Mary Ellen O'Connell

Journal Articles

The United States and Iran carried out armed reprisals in Syria during 2017 in the wake of chemical and terror attacks. Despite support for their actions even by countries such as Germany and France, retaliatory uses of force are clearly prohibited under international law. International law generally prohibits all use of armed force with narrow exceptions for self-defense, United Nations Security Council authorization, and consent of a government to participate in a civil war. Military force after an incident are reprisals, which have been expressly forbidden by the UN. Prior to the Trump administration, the U.S. consistently attempted to justify …

Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball, Joseph Fishkin, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Many have argued that the United States' two major political parties have experienced "asymmetric polarization" in recent decades: The Republican Party has moved significantly further to the right than the Democratic Party has moved to the left. The practice of constitutional hardball, this Essay argues, has followed a similar – and causally related – trajectory. Since at least the mid-1990s, Republican officeholders have been more likely than their Democratic counterparts to push the constitutional envelope, straining unwritten norms of governance or disrupting established constitutional understandings. Both sides have done these things. But contrary to the apparent assumption of some legal …

Presidents And War Powers, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Constitution vests the president with “executive power” and provides that “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy,” while it endows Congress with the power “To declare War.” These provisions have given rise to two major questions about presidential war powers: first, what should be the president’s role in taking the country to war, and, second, what are the president’s powers to direct its conduct. Historian Michael Beschloss’s new book, “Presidents of War,” examines how presidents have responded to each of these questions across two hundred years of U.S. history.

The major argument of …

Promoting International Cybersecurity Cooperation: Lessons From The Proliferation Security Initiative, Duncan B. Hollis, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

Global efforts by states to cooperate through international rules in combating cyber threats have generated mixed results, at best. In this paper, we examine the architecture of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) as a possible model for future cybersecurity cooperation among interested states. We identify several features of PSI’s architecture (rather than its substantive focus on non-proliferation) for further analysis, including PSI’s low entry costs, tiered structure, and flexibility, as well as its leveraging of both territorial jurisdiction and state consent. We conclude that, despite several hurdles visible in the scope of its membership and its legal framework, PSI still …

America’S Relation To World Order: Two Indictments, Two Thought Experiments, And A Misquotation, Philip C. Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

The State is undergoing a crisis of legitimacy owing to its inability to cope with novel problems of weapons proliferation, transnational threats including climate change, a fragile global financial infrastructure, cultural influences carried by electronic communications, and an undemocratic regime of human rights law. These fatal inadequacies are summoning forth a new constitutional order, the latest in a series of century-spanning archetypal regimes that have arisen since the Renaissance and the collapse of feudalism. A backlash against the harbingers of this new order, however, is crippling the development of those modes of action that are required to deal with the …

Sparking King's Revolution, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., protested our country’s counterinsurgency war in Vietnam. King passionately decried the bombings and civilian deaths, the destruction of families and villages, and the herding of the population into “concentration camps.” King denounced our imperialist arrogance and urged “a radical revolution of values.” From the pulpit at Riverside Church in New York City, King declared: “These are revolutionary times.” Indeed they were. And if anything, they have become even more so today.

A Reader’S Guide To John Milton’S Areopagitica, The Foundational Essay Of The First Amendment Tradition, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Fittingly, the most imaginative and densely suggestive of the classic arguments for free speech was written by a poet. Had his career unfolded as he wished, John Milton would never have produced his renowned Areopagitica of 1644. It was only with great reluctance that he undertook to engage in prose polemics during the English Civil War, sacrificing his “calm and pleasing solitariness” to “embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes.” He described pamphleteering as something he did “with the left hand” all the while “knowing myself inferior to myself.” Posterity, always a Miltonic concern, has begged to …

Critique & Praxis: A Pure Theory Of Illusions, Values, And Tactics, And An Answer To The Question: "What Is To Be Done?", Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

We are going through an unprecedented period of political instability. With the rise of the alt-right and of xenophobic sentiment, and the fallout of neoliberal government policies, our political future is at stake. These times call for the type of critical theory and praxis that gave rise to the Frankfurt School in the 1920s and to the critical ferment of the 1970s. Yet, in the face of our crises today, contemporary critical theory seems disarmed.

Critical theory is in disarray because of a wave of anti-foundational challenges in the 1960s that shattered the epistemological foundations of the Frankfurt School. The …

The First Congressional Debate On Public Carry And What It Tells Us About Firearm Regionalism, Mark Anthony Frassetto

Campbell Law Review

In the aftermath of District of Columbia v. Heller, a prominent issue remains unresolved: whether, or to what extent, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms outside of the home. This Article explores this unresolved issue through a newly uncovered source, the congressional debates surrounding the District of Columbia's public carry law in the 1890s.

These debates provide new insights into the understanding of the right to keep and bear arms in the years following the drafting and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Two conclusions can be drawn from the debate. First, there was no …

When Terrorists Govern: Protecting Civilians In Conflicts With State-Building Armed Groups, Mara R. Revkin

Faculty Scholarship

Many existing U.S. counter-terrorism policies, including those governing targeting and detention, rely on an empirical assumption that terrorist groups are primarily military organizations. This assumption may be appropriate in the case of al-Qaeda, but it fails to describe terrorist groups that engage not only in warfare but also in governance and state-building such as the Islamic State, a self-declared “caliphate” that—at the height of its expansion in 2014—claimed sovereignty over an estimated 34,000 square miles and 10 million civilians. This Article identifies a category of “state-building” terrorist groups that can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) the presence of …

Targeting Of Persons: The Contemporary Challenges, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Duty To Disobey Illegal Nuclear Strike Orders, Anthony J. Colangelo

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article argues there is a legal duty to disobey illegal nuclear strike orders. Failure to carry out this duty may result in criminal and civil liability.Because nuclear weapons are quantitatively and qualitatively different from conventional weapons, typical legal calculations regulating their use under the laws of war or humanitarian law, as well as human rights law, change along with the change in weaponry. At least five “unique characteristics” of nuclear weapons ominously distinguish them from conventional weapons in ways that promise only to increase civilian death and suffering. First, quantitatively, the blast power, heat, and energy generated far outstrip …

Stop Defending Discrimination: Anti-Boycott, Divestment, And Sanctions* Statutes Are Fully Constitutional, Mark Goldfeder

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Securing The Internet Of Healthcare, Michael Mattioli, Scott J. Shackelford, Steve Myers, Austin Brady, Yvette Wang, Stephanie Wong

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Cybersecurity, including the security of information technology (IT), is a critical requirement in ensuring society trusts, and therefore can benefit from, modern technology. Problematically, though, rarely a day goes by without a news story related to how critical data has been exposed, exfiltrated, or otherwise inappropriately used or accessed as a result of supply chain vulnerabilities. From the Russian government's campaign to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election to the September 2017 Equifax breach of more than 140-million Americans' credit reports, mitigating cyber risk has become a topic of conversation in boardrooms and the White House, on Wall Street and …

Limitless Discretion In The Wars On Drugs And Terror, Wadie E. Said

University of Colorado Law Review

The wars on terror and drugs have been defined, largely, by what they lack: a readily identifiable opponent, a clear end goal, a timeline, and geographical boundaries. Based on that understanding, this Article discusses the increasingly expansive discretion of American authorities to prosecute individuals where the wars on terror and drugs intersect. Through laws such as the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act, the ban on providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations, and the narco-terrorism statute, the United States exercises a kind of universal jurisdiction to pursue anyone, anywhere it believes its laws are being violated. Wielding the power of …