Digital Commons Network^™

A Brief History Of Information Privacy Law, Daniel J. Solove

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This book chapter provides a brief history of information privacy law in the United States from colonial times to the present. It discusses the development of the common law torts, Fourth Amendment law, the constitutional right to information privacy, numerous federal statutes pertaining to privacy, electronic surveillance laws, and more. It explores how the law has emerged and changed in response to new technologies that have increased the collection, dissemination, and use of personal information.

A Model Regime Of Privacy Protection, Daniel J. Solove

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

A series of major security breaches at companies with sensitive personal information has sparked significant attention to the problems with privacy protection in the United States. Currently, the privacy protections in the United States are riddled with gaps and weak spots. Although most industrialized nations have comprehensive data protection laws, the United States has maintained a sectoral approach where certain industries are covered and others are not. In particular, emerging companies known as "commercial data brokers" have frequently slipped through the cracks of U.S. privacy law. In this article, the authors propose a Model Privacy Regime to address the problems …

A Tale Of Two Bloggers: Free Speech And Privacy In The Blogosphere, Daniel J. Solove

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This short essay was written for the symposium, Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship, held at Harvard Law School on April 27-28, 2006. In this essay, Professor Solove examines Glenn Reynold's new book, An Army of Davids, which champions little guy bloggers (the Davids) who are taking on mainstream media entities (the Goliaths).

Who exactly is David? We have a rather romantic conception of bloggers; we envision Eugene Volokh, but most bloggers are probably more akin to Jessica Cutler, the U.S. Senate staffer who blogged about sex gossip. The average blogger is a teenager writing an online diary, not …

The Multistate Bar Exam As A Theory Of Law, Daniel J. Solove

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

What if the Bar Exam were read as a work of jurisprudence? What is its theory of law? How does the Bar Exam compare to works of jurisprudence by H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, Karl Llewellyn, and others? This short tongue-in-cheek book review of the Bar Exam seeks to answer these questions. Each year, thousands of lawyers-to-be ponder over it, learning its profound teachings on the meaning of the law. They study it for months, devoting more time to it than practically any other jurisprudential text. It therefore comes as a great surprise that such a widely read and studied work …

Restoring (And Risking) Interest In International Law, Edward T. Swaine

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago Law School articulate a comprehensive and engaging theory of state behaviors in their new book, “The Limits of International Law,” but with several internal flaws. Their book uses rational choice theory to explain how states act rationally to maximize their interests, and how, in doing so, states align themselves (sometimes) with international law. This book review argues that while Limits is a skilled and pioneering work that deserves to be taken seriously, it also suffers from tensions and over-generalizations that undermine its claims. As a result, …

Federalism And Faith, Ira C. Lupu, Robert W. Tuttle

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Should the U.S. constitution afford greater discretion to states than to the federal government in matters affecting religion? In recent years, a number of commentators have been asserting that the Establishment Clause should not apply to the states. Justice Thomas has embraced this view, while offering his own refinements to it. Moreover, the Supreme Court's decision in Locke v. Davey (2004) ruled that a state did not run afoul of the Free Exercise Clause when it refused to subsidize religious studies, in a context in which the Establishment Clause would have permitted the subsidy.

This paper offers a focused (re)consideration …

A Case Study In Comparative Procurement Law: Assessing Uncitral's Lessons For U.S. Procurement, Christopher R. Yukins

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) has commissioned a working group, with delegations from many industrialized and developing nations, to reform and update the UNCITRAL Model Law on Procurement of Goods, Construction and Services. The working group is currently reviewing reforms on a number of fronts. This essay focuses on three areas of reform in particular - electronic communications, electronic reverse auctions, and unrealistically low bidding - to gauge whether lessons from the UNCITRAL debate may be useful for reform in the U.S. procurement system. As the essay reflects, the international debate surrounding UNCITRAL reform does in …

Occ V. Spitzer: An Erroneous Application Of Chevron That Should Be Reversed, Arthur E. Wilmarth Jr.

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This essay criticizes OCC v. Spitzer (S.D.N.Y. 2005), a recent federal court decision dealing with the application of state laws to national banks. The court upheld a regulation issued by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ("OCC"), the federal agency that supervises national banks. The OCC's regulation preempts the authority of state officials to file suit in state or federal courts to enforce state laws against national banks. The OCC's regulation asserts that any decision about whether to enforce state laws against national banks is a matter "within the OCC's exclusive purview."

Based on the OCC's regulation, the …

Protecting Privacy Against The Police In The European Union: The Data Retention Directive, Francesca Bignami

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This essay examines the European Union's new turn towards protecting personal data against the police. The first part explores the developments that have given rise to these policies: the dramatic possibilities of today's digital technologies for the police and the intensification of police cooperation in the European Union following the terrorist attacks in New York, Madrid, and London. The second part analyzes the piece of legislation with the most significant data protection ramifications to be enacted at the time of this writing: the Data Retention Directive. The essay concludes with some thoughts on how the largely positive rights experience of …

Is It Sometimes Good To Run Budget Deficits? If So, Should We Admit It (Out Loud)?, Neil H. Buchanan

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

There are bad deficits and there are good deficits. What makes a fiscal deficit good or bad depends on both the context in which the deficit is run and the reason that the deficit is rising. The belief that it is unquestionably foolish to adopt policies that directly or indirectly increase the government's annual borrowing on the financial markets - which is what it means to run a budget deficit - is not the universal truth that the current conventional wisdom might imply. Budget deficits are potentially dangerous and must be monitored carefully, but they are not always, inevitably, completely, …

The Jec's Estate Tax Report: Myths And Legends, Neil H. Buchanan

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Advocates of estate tax repeal often assert that family-run businesses and farms are broken up when heirs are unable to pay the estate tax. This claim has never been proven, but a recent Joint Economic Committee report claims to demonstrate that it is true. I assess the arguments and evidence presented in the JEC report and find that there is nothing in it that proves that the estate tax breaks up family-run businesses and farms. In fact, the most credible source cited by the report suggests that families might have adequate liquid resources to pay the estate tax or even …

Poor Children: Child Witches And Child Soldiers In Sub-Saharan Africa, Naomi R. Cahn

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This paper, written for a symposium on The Mind of a Child, examines two different aspects of the accountability of children: those children who are thrown away by their families because they are sorcerers, and those children who become soldiers and, through their involvement in armed conflict, inflict violence and death on others, including children. Like all other children, both sets of children are especially vulnerable because of their developmental (im)maturity. Indeed, as policy-makers struggle to develop strategies for responding to the needs of these children, the new neuroscientific literature provides yet another basis for arguing that children must be …

State Representation Of Children's Interests, Naomi R. Cahn

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The state's claim that it can represent children's interests plays a significant role in defining the structure of families, the relationships within families, and the development of children's interests. This paper explores three different contexts involving the state and the contested nature of how the interests of minors are represented in both national and international law: first, in restricting the abortion rights of minors, the state claims to be protecting them; second, in allowing parents to decide who will act as caretaker for their children if both parents are dead, the state defers to parents' wishes; and third, in dysfunctional …

The (Neglected) Employment Dimension Of The World Trade Organization, Steve Charnovitz

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

A key assumption underlying the World Trade Organization (WTO) is that its program of trade negotiations will strengthen the world economy and lead to more trade, investment, employment and income growth throughout the world. In the author's view, the WTO truly is strengthening the world economy and promoting trade and investment in many parts of the world. Yet the rest of the thesis is debatable. Is it necessarily true that the WTO and the trade negotiations it sponsors are increasing employment and income growth throughout the world? Indeed, even aggregating the world economy into one planetary unit, one wonders whether …

Taiwan's Wto Membership And Its International Implications, Steve Charnovitz

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In contrast to other international organizations, the World Trade Organization does not require its members to be states. This constitutional feature has allowed Taiwan to join the WTO alongside China. As a result, the WTO is now the only major international organization in which Taiwan can participate as a full member. This article explores some implications of this unique situation for Taiwan, for the WTO, and for international law. The article contends that Taiwan's membership in the WTO is not itself a bilateral treaty with China and does not itself change the legal relationship between Taiwan and China. What Taiwan's …

Setting The Record Straight: Three Concepts Of The Independent Director, Donald C. Clarke

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Despite the surprisingly shaky support in empirical research for the value of independent directors, their desirability seems to be taken for granted in policy-making circles. Yet important elements of the concept of and rationale for independent directors remain curiously obscure and unexamined. As a result, the empirical findings we do have may be misapplied, and judicial gap-filling may be harder than imagined when legislative intent cannot be divined or is contradictory.

This article attempts to unpack the concept broadly understood by the term independent director and to distinguish among its various concrete manifestations. In particular, I discuss the critical differences …

Lost In Translation? Corporate Legal Transplants In China, Donald C. Clarke

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This essay examines an old question - why it is often so difficult for transplanted legal norms and institutions to take - with the hope of shedding a bit of new light on it through a specific focus on institutions for corporate governance in China. Foreign norms and institutions are borrowed because they seem to the borrowers to serve some need. Very often they are borrowed in a time of rapid social change in which the home culture, so to speak, is lagging behind. But the problem of fit is real and severe.

First, although the borrowers may imagine their …

Predictive Decisionmaking, Michael B. Abramowicz

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In this Article, Professor Abramowicz identifies a regulatory strategy that he calls "predictive decisionmaking" and provides a framework for assessing it. In a predictive decisionmaking regime, public or private decisionmakers make predictions, often of future legal decisions, rather than engage in normative analysis. Several scholars, particularly in recent years, have offered proposals that fit within the predictive decisionmaking paradigm, but have not noted the connection among these proposals. The Article highlights five different mechanisms on which predictive decisionmaking regimes may rely, including predictive standards, enterprise liability, accuracy incentives, partial insurance requirements, and information markets. After identifying several advantages that predictive …

Punishment And Accountability: Understanding And Reforming Criminal Sanctions In America, Donald Braman

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The vast majority of Americans favor sanctions that require offenders to engage in responsible behavior - to work, pay restitution, or support dependents; to participate in a mandatory job training, literacy, or drug treatment program; or to meet some other prosocial obligation. While this intuitive preference crosses political and ideological divides, nothing in our classical theories of punishment properly accounts for or develops this intuition. In this Article, Donald Braman explores the popular preference for and the benefits that attach to these accountability-reinforcing sanctions. Reviewing existing and original ethnographic, interview, and survey data, he describes why these sanctions have such …

Emerging Policy And Practice Issues (2005), Steven L. Schooner, Christopher R. Yukins

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This paper, presented at the West Government Contracts Year in Review Conference (covering 2005), attempts to identify the key trends and issues for 2006 in U.S. federal procurement. In an effort to make sense of the current reforms, the paper focuses upon what seems to be the common imperative underlying the various initiatives: the need to bring order to a procurement function as it devolves away from the Government user - what some might call the "devolution" or "outsourcing" of the contracting function. The paper also addresses emerging issues including, among others, the death of competitive sourcing; the acquisition workforce …

Review Essay: 'Seeing Beyond The Limits Of International Law,' Jack L. Goldsmith And Eric A. Posner, 'The Limits Of International Law', Paul Schiff Berman

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In 'The Limits of International Law,' Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner use the simplifying assumptions of rational choice theory in an attempt to demonstrate that international law has no independent valence whatsoever. Rather, according to the authors, each state single-mindedly pursues its own rational interest and obeys international legal norms only to the extent that such norms serve those pre-existing interests. In this Review Essay, I argue that their vision of international law is deeply flawed. In particular, I take issue with the authors' assumption that states simply have pre-existing unitary interests that they then rationally pursue. First, I argue …

Dialectical Regulation, Territoriality, And Pluralism, Paul Schiff Berman

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Scholarly and policy debates about territoriality and nation-state sovereignty are turning to the ways in which such concepts might be changing in an increasingly interconnected world of interlocking governance structures and systems of communication. Robert Ahdieh's provocative and generative essay, Dialectical Regulation, 38 Conn. L. Rev. 863 (2005-2006), attempts a model for understanding this new plural order. He argues that intersystemic regulation is now a significant legal reality, and analyzes the types of interactions we would expect to see among these multiple regulatory authorities. Ahdieh aims to define dialectical regulation, in which regulators exist in some kind of formal structural …

Shareholders As Proxies: The Contours Of Shareholder Democracy, Dalia Tsuk Mitchell

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This article explores the long-standing suspicion of the individual shareholder and the corresponding ambivalence about shareholder democracy as it is seen in conversations about the shareholder's role in the modern public corporation throughout the twentieth century.

The article examines two competing conceptions of the shareholder's role in the corporation: one focuses on the role of shareholders as investors, the other emphasizes the role of shareholders as potential participants in corporate management. I argue that scholars and reformers who have conceived of shareholders as investors limited the locus of shareholder democracy to the market. The writings of Louis Brandeis, Henry Manne, …

Clogs In The Pipeline: The Mixed Data On Women Directors And Continued Barriers To Their Advancement, Lisa M. Fairfax

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The longstanding disparity between the percentage of women in the workforce and their membership on corporate boards indicates that women continue to face significant barriers to corporate board membership. Evidence drawn from an empirical study on women directors at Fortune 100 companies demonstrates that the mere passage of time does not eliminate these barriers. This empirical study confirms that women have made considerable progress since 1934, but the aggregate number of women directors is small when compared against their percentages in the workforce and school population.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 may have resulted in changes in board composition that …

Post-Katrina Reconstruction Liability: Exposing The Inferior Risk-Bearer, Steven L. Schooner, Erin Siuda-Pfeffer

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Article describes the doctrinal, functional, and moral flaws inherent in the Gulf Coast Recovery Act (GCRA), a United States Senate bill that would provide liability protection to government contractors engaged in disaster relief work in the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina, as well as in future disaster areas. First, the Article discusses the history of the government contractor defense and finds that the protection provided by the GCRA is quite unlike the traditional government contractor defense. This Article further argues that this doctrinal departure cannot be justified on grounds of efficiency or fairness, as the GCRA allocates risk away …

Constitutional Obstacles To Regulating Violence In The Media, Catherine J. Ross

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This chapter examines whether speech containing violent imagery that is made available to children can be subjected to government regulation that will survive constitutional scrutiny. The first section of this chapter reviews the general limits that the First Amendment places on the government’s power to regulate speech. The second section arguees that violent speech may not be regulated based on its content because “violence” is not one of the limited legal categories constituting “unprotected” speech, such as obscenity.

The third section examines the government’s burden to demonstrate that violent speech harms children before it can regulate such speech, and concludes …

Federalism, Instrumentalism, And The Legacy Of The Rehnquist Court, Peter J. Smith

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This paper starts from the proposition that although the Rehnquist Court imposed limits on federal power in the name of states' rights far more aggressively than did its post-1937 predecessors, it just as often chose not to impose limits in cases that otherwise fairly can be thought to have presented a question of federalism. The article then makes three claims. First, the article argues that any ultimately satisfying account of the Rehnquist Court's federalism doctrine must acknowledge that the decisions have often appeared to be driven as much by the Justices' policy preferences about the underlying substantive matters at issue …

The Marshall Court And The Originalist's Dilemma, Peter J. Smith

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In response to Anti-Federalist complaints that the Constitution was dangerous because it was ambiguous, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton argued that judges would construe the Constitution in the same manner that they construed statutes, and in the process would fix the meaning of ambiguous constitutional provisions. In other words, the original understanding was that constitutional ambiguities would be resolved, among other means, through adjudication. During his lengthy tenure, Chief Justice John Marshall had ample occasion to fix constitutional meaning, and he presided over a Court that resolved many constitutional ambiguities according to a nationalistic view of the relationship between the …

The 'Parisian Prowler': The Effects Of Modernity On Flanerie And Poetry Of Charles Baudelaire, Caroline Turner Dye

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the physical changes wrought in nineteenth century Paris that ushered the city into modernity, and led to the creation of a new figure, the flaneur. Through the eyes of one Parisian author specifically, Charles Baudelaire, I will the character of the flaneur in his historical context. examine Research was performed both in Paris during the summer of 2005, with walking tours of the city and reading original texts, and throughout the fall semester of 2005. Primary sources, maps, lithographs, photographs, and interviews were consulted as I uncovered the architectural modifications that occurred during the Second Empire under …

A Risk Analysis Of Ambrosia Furniture Company, Jared Foster Martin

Honors Theses

The following analysis was created upon request from Ambrosia Furniture Company in an attempt to fully identify, analyze, and address exposure to risk. In order to evaluate and identify specific areas of risk, the report takes into consideration financial records, history of losses, and reviews company policies. These areas of risk were then further examined and analyzed to determine what actions and managerial techniques would best minimize their costs and effects. With these principles in mind, this report has further delineated these exposures into five primary groups. These groups were then correlated so as to allow for a more efficient …