Digital Commons Network^™

Prohibited Discrimination In International Law, Dinah L. Shelton

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This essay assesses how the prohibition of discrimination is understood in contemporary international human rights law. The essay aims to determine whether human rights bodies apply coherent theories when deciding which distinctions are permitted and which are invidious. The essay begins by surveying the provisions of human rights instruments such as the U.N. Charter that call for non-discrimination and equality. Next, the essay examines the jurisprudence of international tribunals and monitoring bodies, including judgments, advisory opinions, general comments, and observations on state periodic reports. The conclusion draws from this body of law a general approach to discrimination in international human …

Accidental Incest: Drawing The Line - Or The Curtain? - For Reproductive Technology, Naomi R. Cahn

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This article calls for setting limits on the number of offspring born from any one individual's gametes, and for continuing to sanction incest, even when it comes to adult, inter-sibling consensual behaviour. The article examines the issues of inadvertent consanguinity raised by third-party gamete use through a feminist lens on both incest and reproductive technology. The central questions concern regulation of reproductive technology, such as whether legal restrictions on the fertility market might diminish the possibilities of accidental incest, as well as whether criminal and civil sanctions of intrafamilial sexual behavior should apply to relationships created through reproductive technology; these, …

Embryo Exchanges And Adoption Tax Credits, Naomi R. Cahn, Sarah B. Lawsky

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The “Option of Adoption Act,” a Georgia law that was introduced by a staunchly anti-abortion Georgia state representative, establishes procedures for genetic donors to relinquish their rights to embryos before birth and permits, but does not require, embryo recipients to petition a court for recognition that they are the legal parents of a child born to them as a result of an embryo transfer. This article clears up what seems to be widespread confusion about a fairly straightforward question of tax law related to such embryo “adoptions.” Notwithstanding various sources' claims to the contrary, neither a Georgia adoption tax credit …

Eight Is Enough, Naomi R. Cahn, Jennifer M. Collins

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

On January 26, 2009, the nation's second set of live-born octuplets was delivered. The public fascination with this event quickly turned ugly when the media revealed that the mother was thirty-three year-old Nadya Suleman, who is single, unemployed, and already caring for six children under the age of eight.

The cultural backlash against Suleman has focused on three separate issues. The first revolves around Suleman herself, and her ability as a single, unemployed mother to parent fourteen young children successfully. A second set of concerns revolves around the medical procedures at her fertility clinic. How could the clinic agree to …

Family Classes: Rethinking Contraceptive Choice, Naomi R. Cahn, June Carbone

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The political attention paid to moral values - in the context of the high profile fights over abortion, homosexuality, and abstinence education - has developed over the past quarter century in ideological terms as though race and class no longer existed. In fact, the changing understandings that attend family formation reflect a long term shift in the pathways to middle class life which has created a new technocratic elite - an elite that invests heavily in both men and women’s advanced degrees, and has remade family life to its advantage. The success of the new model, which we call the …

Teaching Criminal Law From A Critical Perspective, Angela P. Harris, Cynthia Lee

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Recent turmoil in the marketplace has led to a massive attorney layoffs and the folding of several major law firms. Current prospective law students are fast becoming aware of the fact that having a law degree is no guarantee that one will be employed after graduation. Many parents, who have seen their retirement accounts shrink over the last three years can no longer afford to send their kids to law schools that charge $40,000 or more per year in tuition. This state of events in turn has prompted law students to take a hard look at proposals for curriculum reform …

Form, Function, And The Powers Of International Courts, Dinah L. Shelton

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

At the end of the nineteenth century, the international community began creating its first tribunals with the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Since then, numerous courts and tribunals have been created on the international stage. This Article examines the interplay of form, function, and the powers exercised by international courts. It first considers the functions or attributes of any institution that carries the name "court" or "tribunal" and reflects upon whether there are powers that must be deemed inherent in such an institution to allow it to fulfill the judicial function, irrespective of limitations placed on the court's …

Clearing The Smoke From Philip Morris V. Williams: The Past, Present, And Future Of Punitive Damages, Thomas Colby

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In Philip Morris v. Williams, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution does not permit the imposition of punitive damages to punish a defendant for harm caused to third parties. This Article critiques the reasoning, but seeks ultimately to vindicate the result, of this landmark decision. It argues that, although the Court's procedural due process analysis does not stand up to scrutiny, punitive damages as punishment for third-party harm do indeed violate procedural due process, but for reasons far more profound than those offered by the Court. To reach that conclusion, the Article confronts the most basic and fundamental questions …

Judeo-Christian Principles And Their Influence On Business Ethics In 21st Century America, Charles Benjamin Clark

Honors Theses

In today’s economic climate, people are constantly faced with making decisions that blur the lines of sound ethical principles. Business owners are faced with the dilemma of adopting questionable business practices, or allowing their competitors to gain a competitive advantage over them by abusing the system. This thesis will explain how the United States of America might go about solving some of the problems that thrust it into the current recession by advocating the implementation of a national code of ethics based on Judeo-Christian principles. The thesis will begin by citing some examples of previous research in business ethics. Next, …

America's New Climate Unilateralism: A Better Approach To Copenhagen, Steve Charnovitz

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This article criticizes the American Clean Energy and Security Act, a bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in June 2009 that effectively taxes importers of various projects from specific countries. Although the House tried to justify this fee as the best way to avoid carbon leakage, defined as a significant increase in the release of greenhouse gases in other countries, I argue that this bill is protectionist and creates unrealistic expectations as to how other countries will react to the United States’ attempt to establish unilateral control over such charges. I predict that a WTO dispute panel would …

The Victim-Informed Prosecution Project: A Quasi-Experimental Test Of A Collaborative Model For Cases Of Intimate Partner Violence, Laurie S. Kohn, Laura Bennett Cattaneo, Lisa A. Goodman, Deborah Epstein, Holly A. Zanville

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Article describes the Victim-Informed Prosecution Project (VIP), a program that, over its 6-year tenure, aimed to amplify the voice of the victim in the handling of interpersonal violence (IPV) prosecutions in Washington, D.C. The Article discusses the rationale for and design and implementation of VIP and then explores whether it increased the victim’s sense of influence over the justice system response. While some VIP services, including legal advocacy and civil protection order representation, were associated with increased perceived victim voice, the program as a whole reflected more limited levels of perceived victim voice in the area of criminal prosecution. …

Risk And Culture: Is Synthetic Biology Different?, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, Gregory N. Mandel

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Cultural cognition refers to the influence that individuals' values have on their perceptions of technological risk. We conducted a study to assess the cultural cognition of synthetic biology risks. Examining the attitudes of a large and diverse sample of Americans (N = 1,500), we found that hierarchical, conservative, and highly religious individuals - persons who normally are most skeptical of claims of environmental risks (including those relating to nuclear power and global warming) - are the persons most concerned about synthetic biology risks. We attribute this inversion of the normal cultural profile of risk perceptions to the seemingly anti-religious connotations …

Whose Eyes Are You Going To Believe? Scott V. Harris And The Perils Of Cognitive Illiberalism, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, David A. Hoffman

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This paper accepts the unusual invitation to see for yourself issued by the Supreme Court in Scott v. Harris, 127 S. Ct. 1769 (2007). Scott held that a police officer did not violate the Fourth Amendment when he deliberately rammed his car into that of a fleeing motorist who refused to pull over for speeding and instead attempted to evade the police in a high-speed chase. The majority did not attempt to rebut the arguments of the single Justice who disagreed with its conclusion that no reasonable juror could find the fleeing driver did not pose a deadly risk to …

Object Reuse And Exchange, Michael L. Nelson, Carl Lagoze, Herbert Van De Sompel, Pete Johnston, Robert Sanderson, Simeon Warner, Jürgen Sieck (Ed.), Michael A. Herzog (Ed.)

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The Open Archives Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) project defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources. The OAI-ORE abstract data model is conformant with the Architecture of the World Wide Web and leverages concepts from the Semantic Web, including RDF descriptions and Linked Data. In this paper we provide a brief review of a motivating example and its serialization in Atom.

The Doctrine Of Equivalents In Various Patent Regimes: Does Anybody Have It Right?, Martin J. Adelman

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The doctrine of equivalents is arguably one of the most important aspects of patent law. The protection a patent confers is meaningless if its scope is determined to be so narrow that trivial changes to a device bring it out of the bounds of the patent. One of the greatest challenges courts and legislatures therefore face in patent law is to create rules for determining patent scope that maintain the protection a patent is meant to confer while still keeping the patent monopoly within reasonable bounds. Despite the general unity in patent laws among developed countries, the difficulty of this …

Judicial Citation To Legislative History: Contextual Theory And Empirical Analysis, Michael B. Abramowicz, Emmerson H. Tiller

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Judge Leventhal famously described the invocation of legislative history as "the equivalent of entering a crowded cocktail party and looking over the heads of the guests for one's friends." The volume of legislative history is so great and varied, some contend, that judges cite it selectively to advance their policy agendas. In this article, we employ positive political and contextual theories of judicial behavior to examine how judges use legislative history. We consider whether opinion-writing judges, as Judge Leventhal might suggest, cite legislative history from legislators who share the same political-ideological perspective as the opinion-writing judge? Or do judges make …

The Transformation Of Originality In The Progressive-Era Debate Over Copyright In News, Robert Brauneis

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In the 1991 case of Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc., the Supreme Court held unanimously that only those aspects of works which exhibited a "modicum of creativity" could be protected by copyright, and hence that factual matter was not copyrightable. Feist confirmed and expanded on the Court's statements in the 1918 case of International News Service v. Associated Press that news was not copyrightable apart from its literary form. Yet for the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, the notion that copyright incorporated an originality requirement which excluded factual matter from protection was unknown to Anglo-American …

Cultural Cognition Of The Risks And Benefits Of Nanotechnology, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, Paul Slovic, John Gastil, Geoffrey L. Cohen

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

We conducted an experimental public opinion study of the effect of balanced information on nanotechnology risk-benefit perceptions. The study found that subjects did not react in a uniform, much less a uniformly positive manner, but rather polarized along lines consistent with cultural predispositions toward technological risk generally.

Criminal Law: Cases And Materials, Cynthia Lee, Angela Harris

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This casebook addresses the fundamental topic of criminal law. It examines how various justifications define their criminal offenses, as well as the basic elements common to crimes in the Anglo-American tradition. This casebook includes extensive discussion of the elements of, and defenses against, particular crimes such as murder, rape, and burglary.

The authors also examine criminal law’s role within the American legal system. In doing so, the casebook introduces readers to the interplay between criminal law and issues of morality. As such, the authors approach criminal law as a system of cultural meaning, and more specifically, Anglo-American criminal law as …

The Private Attorney-General In China: Potential And Pitfalls, Donald C. Clarke

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Book Review Of Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise Of The Most Powerful Mercenary Army (2007/2008) And From Mercenaries To Market: The Rise And Regulation Of Private Military Companies (Simon Chesterman & Chia Lehnardt, Eds., 2008), Gregory E. Maggs

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This is a review of two books: Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: the Rise of the Most Powerful Mercenary Army (2007/2008) and From Mercenaries to Market: the Rise and Regulation of Private Military Companies (Simon Chesterman & Chia Lehnardt, eds., 2008). Each book concerns the increasing use of contractors in military operations.

Tempering 'Buy American' In The Recovery Act - Steering Clear Of A Trade War, Steven L. Schooner, Christopher R. Yukins

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The controversial 'Buy American requirements in Section 1605 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 threaten to stir protectionism leading to an outright trade war. This could be catastrophic in the current economic crisis, particularly since the Obama administration does not appear to beleive that additional domestic preferences are needed for U.S. procurement. The pending challenge for federal regulators, therefore, will be to craft a rule that contains the Recovery Act's international impact, while implementing Congress' intent. The authors suggest that the optimal approach seems to be the most simple: to fold new procurement under the Recovery Act …

Test Tube Families: Why The Fertility Market Needs Legal Regulations, Naomi R. Cahn

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This book focuses on the dilemmas of applying conflicting values to egg and sperm donation, arguing that the law must develop an integrated approach to the otherwise distinct aspects of technology, families, markets, and relationships. The thesis of this book is that sperm and egg donors are not simply selling “spare” body parts but are instead providing hope to recipients, genetic identity to the resulting children, and profits within the marketplace.

This book argues that private regulation has not responded to these competing demands, and it examines the historical circumstances that brought about the current lackadaisical approach to legal regulation …

Living Originalism, Peter J. Smith, Thomas Colby

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Originalists routinely argue that originalism is the only coherent and legitimate theory of constitutional interpretation. This Article endeavors to undermine those claims by demonstrating that, despite the suggestion of originalist rhetoric, originalism is not a single, coherent, unified theory of constitutional interpretation, but is rather a disparate collection of distinct constitutional theories that share little more than a misleading reliance on a common label. Originalists generally agree only on certain very broad precepts that serve as the fundamental underlying principles of constitutional interpretation: specifically, that the “writtenness” of the Constitution necessitates a fixed constitutional meaning, and that courts that see …

Creation Of A Topoisomerase I-Efgp Cell Line Using Recent Knock-In Technology, James Wayne Delancey

Honors Theses

Topoisomerase I (TOPI) is a nuclear enzyme that relieves torsional strain in DNA during transcription or replication. Furthermore, TOPl is the target enzyme for camptothecin antitumor drugs. Traditional immunohistochemical methods of studying TOPl expression require cell fixation, which arrests cellular metabolism at an instance in time. In efforts where TOPl studies rely on a function of time, cell fixation must occur at many finite intervals so that researchers may take many data points to simulate a real time assessment. To study TOPl activity continuously in cells, we are implementing recent gene targeting/knock-in technology to create a natively expressed TOP 1-EGFP …

Assessment Of Eating Disorder Knowledge Among College Students & The Effectiveness Of A Primary Prevention Program, Patricia Eileen Edwards

Honors Theses

Objective: To assess the current knowledge of eating disorders among college students and to determine the effectiveness of a prevention program in increasing eating disorder knowledge. Participants: College students enrolled in the University of Mississippi and in a Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) 311 Nutrition course. Methods: Participants in attendance of an FCS 311 Nutrition course were administered a 21 question survey to assess a baseline knowledge level of eating disorders. Participants were later educated on eating disorders through a primary prevention program “Eating Disorders 101”. The previous survey was administered again to assess the knowledge gained and the effectiveness …

By Any Means Necessary? The Fcc's Implementation Of Net Neutrality, Dawn C. Nunziato

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) removed common carriage obligations from Internet cable broadband providers in 2002, free speech and open access advocates have been lamenting the FCC’s market-oriented, laissez-faire approach and have called for net neutrality regulation to remedy the problems brought about by an unregulated market for Internet communications. Such regulation would reimpose some of the common carriage/non-discrimination obligations historically imposed on telecommunications providers and would prohibit broadband providers from censoring, blocking, or otherwise discriminating against any legal content or applications that users sought to communicate via broadband pipes. In August 2008, however, the FCC reversed its laissez-faire …

A Cross-Cultural Content Analysis Of The 2008 American Presidential Election, Willow Beverly Nero

Honors Theses

Agenda-setting theory, based on the idea that journalism has a strong correlation to audience opinion and evaluation of issue salience, shows the unportance of how the media present the news. Naturally, media values vary across cultures, wherein some news outlets serve only to inform and others approach news through partisan positions or evaluative tactics. Especially during a time of media upset in the United States, it is important to examine U.S. media values and those of other cultures. This thesis looks at some of the dominant and documented differences in newspaper reporting in France and the United States, using Patterson’s …

Hadwiger's Conjecture Applied To Mycielski And Kneser Graphs, Anne Marie Nicholas

Honors Theses

Graph theory is the study of graphs that represent a specific relation between pairs of objects from a collection. The objects are represented by vertices that are connected by edges defining the existence of such relation ship. A crucial result in graph theory, the Four Color Theorem, was first proposed in 1852 by Francis Guthrie but was not proven until 1976 by Ken neth Appel and Wolfgang Haken. The Four Color Theorem says that any graph on a plane is four colorable. Then in 1943 Hugo Hadwiger presented generalization of the Four Color Theorem which is still an important and …

The End Of Corporate Law, Dalia Tsuk Mitchell

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This article examines how corporate law, specifically the rules applicable to the allocation of power among directors, executives, and shareholders, has become ineffective as a means of regulating corporate power. I argue that in the course of the twentieth century corporate law has been used first to legitimate corporate power and then to exempt those exercising it from liability. The article focuses on jurists’ responses to the growth of the publicly held corporation in the early twentieth century, their midcentury attempts to create corporate democracy, and their ultimate turn to markets as the means of regulating corporate power.