Digital Commons Network^™

Foreword, Philip C. Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

In every state of which the international system is composed, the constitution is necessarily involved in the making and exe­cution of the state’s strategy. The nature of that involvement is one dimension by which we determine the character of a par­ticular state. The subordination of the professional military to elected representatives of the state; the making of legal regula­tions governing land and naval forces by the lawmaking body; the fashioning of rules of engagement by an elected executive; and above all, the parliamentary control of the decision to go to war that characterize states of consent — which in the …

Cyberwar, International Politics, And Institutional Design, Daniel Abebe

Faculty Scholarship

In the United States, the breadth of the president’s warmaking authority has been governed by the Constitution, the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, and, over time, historical practice; in short, the president’s powers are constrained by a well-developed body of US foreign relations law. But the prospect of a new kind of conflict — cyberwar — potentially challenges the existing regulatory regime, which rests on assumptions that are common to traditional, conventional war. For some, the complexities of cyberwar generate new foreign relations–law questions about the president’s authority to engage in offensive cyberoperations, and they thus necessitate a new regulatory framework. For …

What Once Was Lost Must Now Be Found: Rediscovering An Affirmative Action Jurisprudence Informed By The Reality Of Race In America, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

This academic year has seen college and university students across America calling on their institutions to do more to create campus cultures supportive of African American students and other underrepresented minorities. There have been demands to increase faculty and student diversity, change curricular requirements, and adopt mandatory cultural sensitivity trainings. There have been efforts to rename buildings, remove images, and abandon symbols associating schools with major historic figures who were also proponents of slavery, segregation, or other forms of racism. As in all tumultuous periods for higher education, these events have provoked useful discussions about fundamental principles and brought to …

Climate Litigation Scores Successes In The Netherlands And Pakistan, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Most U.S. climate change litigation falls into one of two categories. The vast majority of cases — which receive the bulk of the attention — are based on the Clean Air Act and other statutes. These include Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (2007) and the current litigation over the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Clean Power Plan. The second category, and the focus of this article, comprises cases based on common law and the Constitution.

Nonmarital Families And The Legal System's Institutional Failures, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

As along-time critic of family law, I find it odd to be singing the system's praises. And yet I am. Sort of. In this issue of the Family Law Quarterly, which addresses cohabitation and nonmarital families, I want to focus on what happens when relationships end. For all its shortcomings, family law provides an institution to help divorcing couples restructure their families following the end of relationships. For nonmarital families, not so much. Unmarried parents theoretically can go to court when they separate, but most do not. Thus., as a practical matter, the legal system leaves unmarried parents without an …

Preparing Clients For Climate Change, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015 was rightly hailed as a diplomatic triumph. After years of preparation and two weeks of hard bargaining, 195 nations agreed on a framework for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and heading off the worst impacts of climate change. Two implications of the Paris agreement were less heralded:

1. If nations (including the United States) fulfill the voluntary pledges they made, they will embark on a massive transition away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy, including programs of unprecedented magnitude to build renewable energy facilities.
2. Even if all nations do …

The Constitutionalization Of Indian Private Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter examines the relationship between private law and constitutional law in India, with particular emphasis on tort law. It considers the Indian Supreme Court’s expansion of its fundamental rights jurisprudence over the past thirty years, as well as its effort to transcend the public law/private law divide. It also explains how the Court’s fusion of constitutional law and tort law has affected the independent efficacy, normativity, and analytical basis of equivalent private law claims in India. It argues that the Court’s efforts have only undermined the overall legitimacy of private law mechanisms in the country, and that this phenomenon …

Auer As Administrative Common Law, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

To some, Auer deference stands apart from the rest of administrative law. On the one hand, Auer is distinguished from other forms of deference as uniquely constitutionally problematic, because it grants agencies deference for their own interpretations of their own regulations. This, according to Justice Scalia (accepting an argument raised by his former law clerk, John Manning), violates “fundamental principles of separation of powers” by “permit[ing] the person who promulgates a law to interpret it as well.” On the other, Auer deference is also seen as uniquely at odds with the Administrative Procedure Act. Thus, Scalia criticized Auer not simply …

The Oira Transparency Problem, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

This article critiques the opacity of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), arguing that its centralized review process allows former officials to exploit loopholes in post-employment ethics statutes and asserts that this dynamic undermines regulatory integrity and democratic accountability by allowing privileged access to influence high-stakes federal rulemakings.

A Right To Participate In The Electoral Process, Jessica Bulman-Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

In McCutcheon v. FEC, Chief Justice Roberts described campaign contributions as a form of participation in electoral politics. His plurality opinion invalidating aggregate limits on contributions to federal candidates concluded that “[c]onstituents have the right to support candidates who share their views and concerns” and that representatives’ responsiveness to such concerns “is key to the very concept of self-governance through elected officials.” As commentators quickly noticed, there was something curious about this paean to democratic representation: the “constituents” the Chief Justice described were not eligible to vote for most of the candidates they were funding. They were not, in other …

Family Defense And The Disappearing Problem-Solving Court, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

Problem-solving courts began to flourish in the early 1990s with the creation of criminal drug courts as alternatives to standard criminal court practices. In the drug courts, defendants would receive treatment rather than incarceration and be monitored closely within the court. Family Court Treatment Parts (FCTPs) were developed in the late 1990s in New York State, fully embracing the three key components of the problem-solving drug court model: (1) an activist judge who helps to fashion, and then closely monitor, dispositions; (2) a team of lawyers, social workers, and court personnel who try to identify and then work toward commons …

Constitutional Rhetoric, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

For close to a century, students of judicial behavior have suggested that what judges think is not altogether the same as what they say. Within the legal academy, this claim has long been associated with legal realists who have argued that the formal legal rules explicated in judicial opinions are at least partly epiphenomenal, masking the influence that the personal characteristics and dispositions of adjudicators exercise over legal outcomes. Political scientists have argued, variously, that such outcomes are determined by ideology, social background, or political, professional, or other institutional constraints.

The notion that at least some “extralegal” factors influence judicial …

Maximinimalism, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

When John Roberts became Chief Justice of the United States more than a decade ago, commenters frequently described him as a minimalist. Although Chief Justice Roberts himself resisted this label, he fairly inspired it by advocating for more consensus among his colleagues and by famously recounting to a Georgetown Law Commencement audience his view that “[i]f it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case ... it is necessary not to decide more.” The suggestion that the Court decide significant issues one case at a time recalls the work of Cass Sunstein, the American academy’s most articulate …

A Response To Professor Rascoff's Presidential Intelligence, Philip C. Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Samuel Rascoff’s Presidential Intelligence reflects both the conceptual and research strengths of the author, which are formidable, and the practical difficulties of intelligence reform, which are no less so. Rascoff is certainly right that to be effective – in the still-unfolding constitutional environment that must contend with terror groups armed with unprecedented weapons and communications technology – the intelligence community (IC) must act within the law and the rules governing that community must be reformed to make this possible. He is inclined to believe that the answer lies in heightened presidential management. I’m not so sure. The actual presidential …

Wedlocked: The Perils Of Marriage Equality – The Author Meets Her Readers, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

You write a book and you wonder: “will anyone read it?” This Boston University Law Review Annex Symposium on Wedlocked answers my question. Not only did “someone” read the book, but those “someones” are some of the scholars I admire most, and they took the time and thought to engage Wedlocked’s arguments in this symposium. Thank you to each of the scholars who participated in this symposium, thank you to Professor Linda McClain for inviting their participation, and thank you to James Tobin, the Online Editor for the BU Law Review, for providing a home for this conversation about …

Executive Federalism Comes To America, Jessica Bulman-Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

This Article proposes a different way of thinking about contemporary American governance, looking to an established foreign practice. Executive federalism – “processes of intergovernmental negotiation that are dominated by the executives of the different governments within the federal system” – is pervasive in parliamentary federations, such as Canada, Australia, and the European Union. Given the American separation of powers arrangement, executive federalism has been thought absent, even “impossible,” in the United States. But the partisan dynamics that have gridlocked Congress and empowered both federal and state executives have generated a distinctive American variant.

Viewing American law and politics through the …

Worth More Than A Thousand Words, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

Sherally Munshi has written a thoughtful and moving article about the relationship among race, citizenship, immigration, and the visual imagery of assimilation and difference. In “You Will See My Family Became So American,” she tells the story of Dinshah Ghadiali, a Parsi Zoroastrian born and raised in India who immigrated to the United States in 1911, became a U.S. citizen in 1917, and prevailed over the federal government’s effort to strip him of that citizenship in 1932. Along with Ghadiali himself – proud American, soldier, erstwhile inventor, political activist, and all in all memorable character with a larger-than-life personality – …

The Digital Revolution And The Future Of Law Reviews, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Let me begin by congratulating the Marquette Law Review on reaching the threshold of its 100th anniversary. As you may know, Harvard established the first student-edited law review in 1887. Once the Harvard experiment was seen to be a success, other schools followed suit. Marquette was an early adopter, establishing its law review in 1916. By comparison, the school I attended, the University of Chicago, did not start a law review until 1933.

The title of my remarks could be “Will the Marquette Law Review Survive Another Hundred Years?” Or, perhaps, “Will the Marquette Law Review Survive Another Hundred Years, …

The New Nature, Jedediah S. Purdy, Jo Guildi, Jairus Grove, Robert Paarlberg, Andreas Malm, David Keith, Anna Tsing, Ugo Mattei, Vandana Shiva, Paul Waldau, Roy Scranton

Faculty Scholarship

First came the insight that politics was not an outgrowth of organic hierarchy or divine ordination but instead an artifice – an architecture of power planned only by human beings. [...] was the recognition that economic order does not arise from providential design, natural rights to property and contract, or a grammar of cooperation inherent, like language, in the human mind. First is the Anthropocene condition: the massive increase in human impacts on everything from the upper atmosphere to the deep sea and the DNA of the world's species. [...] closely related, is the movement's interest not just in the …

Minimum Fees For The Self-Employed: A European Response To The "Uber-Ized" Economy?, Eva Grosheide, Mark Barenberg

Faculty Scholarship

In advanced market economies in Europe and North America, a large and growing percentage of the workforce is self-employed. This group earns a contractual fee from clients, rather than a wage or salary from employers, one form of the so-called "Uberization" of the labor market. Through an analysis of the Court of Justice of the European Union's (CJEU) rulings, this Article explores whether minimum fees for the self-employed could be implemented without infringing European Union (EU) competition law. In particular, it lays out four possible legal mechanisms – what the paper dubs "U-turns" – that swerve around the social harms …

Building Labor's Constitution, Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

This essay begins with a puzzle: scholars have built a robust set of constitutional claims about labor rights, claims with deep roots in the labor movement’s own past struggles and its own traditions of constitutional claim-making. Yet, workers’ movements today have made no use of these claims, Andrias reports. The reason, she suggests, has to do with the deep mutual hostility between workers’ movements and the courts. If past were prologue, workers could at least use such arguments outside the courts, but, she argues, “in our [contemporary] legal culture, constitutional arguments are primarily judicial arguments,” and have a way of …

Is There Really A Sex Bureaucracy?, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

This essay identifies several features of the higher-education context that can enrich The Sex Bureaucracy‘s account of why colleges and universities have adopted new policies and trainings to address sexual assault on their campuses. These features include: 1) schools’ preexisting systems for addressing student conduct; 2) the shared interest of schools in reducing impediments to education, including nonconsensual sexual contact; and 3) the pedagogical challenges of developing trainings that are engaging and effective. Taking these three factors into account, we can see that while federal Title IX intervention has had a profound effect, it is also important not to …

Overcoming The Great Forgetting: A Comment On Fishkin And Forbath, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Fishkin and Forbath’s (F&F’s) manuscript is a project of recovery. It portrays the present as a time marked by a “Great Forgetting” of a tradition of constitutional political economy. F&F name what has been forgotten the “democracy of opportunity” tradition. Recovering it would mean again treating the following three principles as linked elements at the core of our Constitution: (1) an anti-oligarchy principle that works to prevent wealth from producing grossly unequal political power; (2) a commitment to a broad middle class with secure, respected work; and (3) a principle of inclusion that opens participation in both citizenship and the …

Regulating Public Offerings Of Truly New Securities: First Principles, Merritt B. Fox

Faculty Scholarship

The public offering of truly new securities involves purchases by investors in sufficient number and in small enough blocks that each purchaser’s shares can reasonably be expected to be freely tradable in a secondary market that did not exist before the offering. Increasing the ability of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to make such offerings has been the subject of much recent discussion.

At the time that a firm initially contemplates such an offering, unusually large information asymmetries exist between its insiders and potential investors. These can lead to severe adverse-selection problems that prevent a substantial portion of worthy offerings …

Trade, Social Preferences, And Regulatory Cooperation: The New Wto-Think, Thomas J. Bollyky, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

This paper advocates changes in the corporate governance of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to reflect the decline in tariffs and other border restraints to commerce and the emerging challenges of advancing freer trade and better regulation cooperation in a world economy dominated by global value chains. Together, these changes form an integration strategy that we refer to as the new WTO Think. This strategy remains rooted in the original rationale of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) of reducing the negative externalities of unilateral action and solving important international coordination challenges, but is more inclusive of regulators …

The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight: The Not So Magnificent Seven Of The Wto Appellate Body, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The WTO Appellate Body (AB) has produced a volume-wise important body of case law, which is often difficult to penetrate, never mind classify. Howse (2016) has attempted a very lucid taxonomy of the case law using the standard of review as benchmark for it. His conclusion is that the AB is quite cautious when facing nondiscriminatory measures, especially measures relating to the protection of human life and health, while it has adopted a more intrusive (into national sovereignty) standard when dealing with trade measures (like antidumping), which are by definition discriminatory as they concern imports only. In my response, I …

Mfn Clubs And Scheduling Additional Commitments In The Gatt: Learning From The Gats, Bernard Hoekman, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

Scheduling additional commitments for policies affecting trade in goods in the GATT has been plagued by two sources of ambiguity: the treatment of changes introduced unilaterally by members subsequent to an initial commitment, and the treatment of new commitments by WTO members pertaining to nontariff policy measures affecting trade in goods. This is not the case for trade in services, as the GATS makes explicit provision for additional commitments to be scheduled. Neither secondary law, in the form of decisions formally adopted by the WTO membership, nor case law has clarified the situation for trade in goods. This matter is …

Dispute Settlement In The Wto: Mind Over Matter, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The basic point I advocate in this paper is that the WTO Dispute Settlement System aims to curb unilateralism. No sanctions can be imposed, unless if the arbitration process is through, the purpose of which is to ensure that reciprocal commitments entered should not be unilaterally undone through the commission of illegalities. There are good reasons though, to doubt whether practice guarantees full reciprocity. The insistence on calculating remedies prospectively, and not as of the date when an illegality has been committed, and the ensuing losses for everybody that could or could not be symmetric, lend support to the claim …

Ask For The Moon, Settle For The Stars: What Is A Reasonable Period To Comply With Wto Awards?, Petros C. Mavroidis, Niall Meagher, Thomas J. Prusa, Tatiana Yanguas

Faculty Scholarship

The World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement process allows a defending Member a “reasonable period of time” (RPT) to implement any findings that its contested measures are inconsistent with WTO law. If agreement on this RPT cannot be reached, Article 21.3(c) of the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes (DSU) provides for the possibility of arbitration on the length of the RPT. The DSU provides limited guidelines on the RPT, stating only that it should not normally exceed 15 months. In practice, Arbitrators have developed the standard that the RPT should reflect the shortest possible period …

The Age Of Scalia, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

During periods of apparent social dissolution the traditionalists, the true believers, the defenders of the status quo, turn to the past with an interest quite as obsessive as that of the radicals, the reformers, and the revolutionaries. What the true believers look for, and find, is proof that, once upon a time, things were as we should like them to be: the laws of economics worked; the streams of legal doctrine ran sweet and pure; order, tranquility, and harmony governed our society. Their message is: turn back and all will be well.