Digital Commons Network^™

Jurisdictional Standards (And Rules), Adam L. Muchmore

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This Article uses the jurisprudential dichotomy between two opposing types of legal requirements--"rules" and "standards"--to examine extraterritorial regulation by the United States. It argues that there is natural push toward standards in extraterritorial regulation because numerous institutional actors either see standards as the best option in extraterritorial regulation or accept standards as a second-best option when their first choice (a rule favorable to their interests or their worldview) is not feasible.

The Article explores several reasons for this push toward standards, including: statutory text, statutory interpretation theories, the nonbinary nature of the domestic/foreign characterization, the tendency of extraterritorial regulation to …

Lexis Nexus Complexus: Comparative Contract Law And International Accounting Collide In The Iasb-Fasb Revenue Recognition Exposure Draft, Kurt S. Schulzke, Gerlinde Berger-Walliser, Pier L. Marchini

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

U.S. and international accounting-standard setters plan to launch a new, global revenue accounting standard, Revenue from Contracts with Customers, in 2013. Poised at the nexus of comparative contract law and international accounting, the proposal's contract-based revenue recognition model creates new legal risks and opportunities for accountants, lawyers, clients, and financial statement users. Despite its focus on legally enforceable contracts, the proposed standard was drafted without input from the legal community. This Article models the proposal's complex contract-analysis process, demonstrating that its revenue outcomes may vary materially because of seemingly minor interjurisdictional differences in law applicable to "open-price" contracts; offers practice …

Hate Speech And Persecution: A Contextual Approach, Gregory S. Gordon

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Scholarly work on atrocity-speech law has focused almost exclusively on incitement to genocide. But case law has established liability for a different speech offense: persecution as a crime against humanity (CAH). The lack of scholarship regarding this crime is puzzling given a split between the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on the issue of whether hate speech alone can serve as an actus reus for CAH-persecution. This Article fills the gap in the literature by analyzing the split between the two tribunals and concluding that hate speech alone may be the …

Beyond Regulation: A Comparative Look At State-Centric Corporate Social Responsibility And The Law In China, Virginia H. Ho

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is often understood as the voluntary actions firms take beyond legal compliance. However, in recent years, governments around the world have also begun to actively promote CSR, reflecting broader governance trends that embrace "soft law," quasi-voluntary standards, and other novel incentives to move companies toward and beyond minimum regulatory goals. Comparative legal scholarship has only recently begun to consider the intersections of these mechanisms with positive law, formal institutions, and traditional regulatory enforcement structures. The adoption of these policies in historically weak regulatory environments raises puzzling questions about their motivation, scope, and potential. As a leader …

Towards A Declaratory School Of Government Recognition, Joshua Downer

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Recognition of governments has historically been a political matter. Governments could choose to recognize or not to recognize any other government, free from the auspices of international law. However, in the wave of prodemocracy optimism after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a group of international legal scholars declared the existence of a universal democratic entitlement, which implied that recognition of governments had legal significance. These scholars, known collectively as the Manhattan school, are generally regarded as having vastly overstated the legal implications of the shift toward democratic governance. While it is true that there is scant evidence of a …

Stateless In The United States: Current Reality And A Future Prediction, Polly J. Price

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Statelessness exists in the United States--a fact that should be of concern to advocates of strict immigration control as well as those who favor a more welcoming policy. The predominant reasons for statelessness include the presence of individuals who are unable to prove their nationality and the failure of their countries of origin to recognize them as citizens. Migrants with unclear nationality, already a problem for the United States, obstruct efforts to control immigration by the deportation of unauthorized aliens. These existing problems of national identity will increase exponentially if birthright citizenship in the United States is amended to exclude …

Solving "The Gravest Natural Resource Shortage You've Never Heard Of": Applying Transnational New Governance To The Phosphate Industry, Chelsae R. Johansen

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Experts believe that global reserves of phosphates, an essential and irreplaceable ingredient in fertilizers, will only last another fifty to one hundred years. Although the consequences of a phosphate shortage include a global famine and decreased world population, the phosphate industry today operates with little concern for sustainable mining and use of the resource. Because the current system of international governance is neither raising awareness of the looming phosphate shortage nor incentivizing phosphate-industry members to act sustainably, the future of phosphates and of food security depend on a decentralized system of internal industry governance known as Transnational New Governance. This …

Proportionality In Military Force At War's Multiple Levels: Averting Civilian Casualties Vs. Safeguarding Soldiers, Ziv Bohrer, Mark Osiel

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

To what lengths may a state go to protect its soldiers in war? May it design its military operations to further that goal if this significantly increases civilian casualties? International law currently offers no clear answers. Because recent wars have seen many states prioritize soldier safety over avoiding civilian casualties, spirited debate has arisen over the legal defensibility of this practice. This debate currently focuses on an ethics code proposed by two influential Israeli thinkers and allegedly embodied in Israel's conduct of its 2008-2009 Gaza war with Hamas. This Article shows that current discussion fails to appreciate how judgments about …

Is Seasteading The High Seas A Legal Possibility? Filling The Gaps In International Sovereignty Law And The Law Of The Seas, Ryan H. Fateh

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Seasteading--homesteading of the modern era--is a desire to develop above-water settlements in international waters known as seasteads. Once a fleeting dream, seasteading has entered the realm of possibility with the technological advancements and financial contributions of The Seasteading Institute (TSI). TSI's ultimate goal is ambitious: to establish permanent seasteads as sovereign states recognized by the United States and eventually by other members of the United Nations. Because international law promulgated by the United Nations addresses only state actors and TSI is a nonstate actor, this Note argues that international law does not prohibit the seastead communities from merely existing in …

A Behavioral Economic Approach To Nuclear Disarmament Advocacy, Alexander S. Rinn

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Nuclear disarmament advocates have provided a strong moral voice for the total disarmament of nuclear weapons, but if they are to remain credible participants in the disarmament process, they must redouble their efforts to assist in the difficult technical and political obstacles that stand in the way of a world without nuclear weapons. This Note first outlines impediments to disarmament towards which advocates could helpfully direct their attention, such as: conventional force imbalances; developing "proliferation-safe" civil nuclear technologies; enforcing nonproliferation obligations; and verifying nuclear disarmament. Second, it explains how tools from behavioral economics and negotiation theory could inform a more …

Reverse-Rhetorical Entrapment: Naming And Shaming As A Two-Way Street, Suzanne Katzenstein

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

"Naming and shaming," the process of exposing, publicizing, and condemning human rights abuses, is one of the most important and common strategies used by human rights advocates. In an international political system where power is typically defined in terms of military strength and market size, advocacy groups draw on a mixture of moral and legal means to pressure governments to improve their human rights behavior. In general, the mere act of naming and shaming can promote human rights norms by reinforcing the shared understanding that some types of government conduct are beyond the pale.'

Naming and shaming may also work …

Cognitive Conflicts And The Making Of International Law: From Empirical Concord To Conceptual Discord In Legal Scholarship, Jean D'Aspremont

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The international legal scholarship, in its quest for a paradigm able to apprehend international norm-generating processes qualifying as lawmaking, has been oscillating between static approaches and dynamic approaches. The former are based on the author of the norm (subjecthood) or its formal origin (pedigree) whilst the latter (e.g., participation) try to capture and explain the intricate and multidimensional fluxes between the authors of the norms and the norms themselves (impact or dynamic pedigree). International legal scholars have thus been resorting to various and diverging paradigms to make sense of international lawmaking. All of these approaches will be described in further …

Lawyers And Precedent, Harlan G. Cohen

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

What role do lawyers, as lawyers, play in the creation, development, and maintenance of the international legal order? This is an oddly underexplored question. It has become increasingly popular to look at the role various non-state actors--nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), grassroots activists, scientists, insurgent groups, among many others--play in the shaping of international law. It has also become common to talk in terms of the "disaggregated state," and of how various substate actors--central bankers, regulators, judges, and military personnel--shape international law and policy through their interactions with each other. Nor have international lawyers ever been particularly shy about their importance to …

Constraining Global Corporate Power: A Short Introduction, Peter J. Spiro

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This Essay sets out three models of institutional constraint of global corporate power. First is private lawmaking, in which the non-state power of firms is countered by the non-state power of civil society organizations. Second are nonlegalized processes under public institutional umbrellas, in which public entities host standards-setting mechanisms. Finally, there is the prospect of fully legalized regimes, the equivalent of global regulation. These models have been emerging bottom-up rather than as part of a grand scheme. After describing the three models, this Essay considers the future of global regimes aimed at constraining corporate conduct. Distinct institutional approaches could persist. …

Optimal Asylum, Shalini B. Ray

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The U.S. asylum system is noble but flawed. Scholars have long recognized that asylum is a "scarce" political resource, but U.S. law persists in distributing access to asylum based on an asylum seeker's ability to circumvent migration controls rather than the strength of the asylum seeker's claim for protection. To apply for asylum, an asylum seeker must either arrange to be smuggled into the United States or lie to the consulate while abroad to obtain a nonimmigrant visa. Nonimmigrant visa requirements effectively filter the pool of asylum applicants according to wealth, educational attainment, and intent not to remain in the …

220 Years Later And The Commonwealth Is Still Imposing Laws On The United States, Michael P. Geiger

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The United States has been combating the bribery of foreign officials for 35 years through the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Both domestic and international prosecutions for bribery remained almost nonexistent for decades. In recent years, the United States experienced an explosion of enforcement actions under the FCPA. Broad enforcement theories and increased prosecutorial effort have greatly expanded the scope of the FCPA. Moreover, the passage of the UK Bribery Act in 2010 has forced many U.S. organizations to face additional and conflicting antibribery regimes. Although the United States remains the world leader in prosecuting the bribery of foreign officials, …

Expanding The Vienna Convention On Consular Relations, Sarah G. Mccroskey

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Article 37 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR) aims to protect the interests of foreign national children by requiring consular notification whenever these children come into the custody of the state. Consular assistance can be invaluable for foreign national parents and children who may not understand the language or the culture and who may be subject to discrimination based on their nationality. However, the VCCR is currently inadequate in two major ways. First, the protections of Article 37 are only triggered when the child in custody is a foreign national, leaving vulnerable to unfair treatment families in which …

Geography And Justice: Why Prison Location Matters In U.S. And International Theories Of Criminal Punishment, Steven A. Koh

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This Article is the first to analyze prison location and its relationship to U.S. and international theories of criminal punishment. Strangely, scholarly literature overlooks criminal prison designation procedures--the procedures by which a court or other institution designates the prison facility in which a recently convicted individual is to serve his or her sentence. This Article identifies this gap in the literature--the prison location omission--and fills it from three different vantage points: (1) U.S. procedural provisions governing prison designation; (2) international procedural provisions governing prison designation; and (3) the relationship between imprisonment and broader theories of criminal punishment. Through comparison of …

The 6th Computational Structural Bioinformatics Workshop Introduction, Jing He, Amarda Shehu, Nurit Haspel, Brian Chen

Computer Science Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Image-Level And Group-Level Models For Drosophila Gene Expression Pattern Annotation, Quian Sun, Sherin Muckatira, Lei Yuan, Shuiwang Ji, Stuart Newfeld, Sudhir Kumar, Jieping Ye

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Background: Drosophila melanogaster has been established as a model organism for investigating the developmental gene interactions. The spatio-temporal gene expression patterns of Drosophila melanogaster can be visualized by in situ hybridization and documented as digital images. Automated and efficient tools for analyzing these expression images will provide biological insights into the gene functions, interactions, and networks. To facilitate pattern recognition and comparison, many web-based resources have been created to conduct comparative analysis based on the body part keywords and the associated images. With the fast accumulation of images from high-throughput techniques, manual inspection of images will impose a serious impediment …

Dinosolve: A Protein Disulfide Bonding Prediction Server Using Context-Based Features To Enhance Prediction Accuracy, Ashraf Yaseen, Yaohang Li

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Background: Disulfide bonds play an important role in protein folding and structure stability. Accurately predicting disulfide bonds from protein sequences is important for modeling the structural and functional characteristics of many proteins.

Methods: In this work, we introduce an approach of enhancing disulfide bonding prediction accuracy by taking advantage of context-based features. We firstly derive the first-order and second-order mean-force potentials according to the amino acid environment around the cysteine residues from large number of cysteine samples. The mean-force potentials are integrated as context-based scores to estimate the favorability of a cysteine residue in disulfide bonding state as well as …

Computational Genetic Neuroanatomy Of The Developing Mouse Brain: Dimensionality Reduction, Visualization, And Clustering, Shuiwang Ji

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Background: The structured organization of cells in the brain plays a key role in its functional efficiency. This delicate organization is the consequence of unique molecular identity of each cell gradually established by precise spatiotemporal gene expression control during development. Currently, studies on the molecular-structural association are beginning to reveal how the spatiotemporal gene expression patterns are related to cellular differentiation and structural development.

Results: In this article, we aim at a global, data-driven study of the relationship between gene expressions and neuroanatomy in the developing mouse brain. To enable visual explorations of the high-dimensional data, we map the in …

Segmented Settlements Are Not The Answer: A Response To Professor Squire’S Article, How Collective Settlements Camouflage The Costs Of Shareholder Lawsuits, Christopher C. French

Faculty Scholarship

In his recent article, Professor Richard Squire offers a provocative theory in which he claims the underlying claimants in shareholder litigation against corporate policyholders are overcompensated due to what he describes as “cramdown” settlements, under which insurers are forced to settle due to the “duty to contribute” that arises under multi-layered directors and officers (“D&O”) insurance programs. He also offers a novel idea regarding how this problem could be fixed by what he refers to as “segmented” settlements in which each insurer and the policyholder would be allowed to settle separately and consider only its own interests in doing so. …

Using Contract Law To Tackle The Coaching Carousel, Stephen F. Ross, Lindsay A. Berkstresser

Faculty Scholarship

This Article suggests that student-athletes can protect themselves (and, indirectly, fans and students at the university at which they are about to enroll) by securing a binding promise from the coach that he will not voluntarily leave the university throughout the student-athlete's career. This promise could be in a legally binding contract directly between the coach and student-athlete, or by adding to the coach's employment contract with the university a proviso expressly designating student-athletes as third party beneficiaries. Part I briefly describes the problems resulting from the coaching carousel and describes the potential for contracts that limit a coach's mobility …

When Bad Guys Are Wearing White Hats, Catherine A. Rogers

Faculty Scholarship

Allegations of ethical misconduct by lawyers have all but completely overshadowed the substantive claims in the Chevron case. While both sides have been accused of flagrant wrongdoing, the charges against plaintiffs’ counsel appear to have captured more headlines and garnered more attention. The primary reason why the focus seems lopsided is that plaintiffs’ counsel were presumed to be the ones wearing white hats in this epic drama. This essay postulates that this seeming irony is not simply an example of personal ethical lapse, but in part tied to larger reasons why ethical violations are an occupational hazard for plaintiffs’ counsel …

The Genealogy Detectives: A Constitutional Analysis Of 'Familial Searching', David H. Kaye

Faculty Scholarship

“Familial searching” in law enforcement DNA databases has been pilloried as a step “towards eugenics and corruption of blood” and “lifelong genetic surveillance” that is “inconsistent with a basic pillar of American political thought.” Courts have yet to address the issue fully, but several commentators contend that the practice is unwise, unjust, or unconstitutional. This Article examines the more significant constitutional claims. It concludes that although kinship matching should not be implemented simply because it is technologically seductive, neither should it be removed from the realm of permissible law enforcement information gathering on constitutional grounds. In reaching this conclusion, the …

Anti-Corruption Internationally: Challenges In Procurement Markets Abroad—Part Ii:The Path Forward For Using Procurement Law To Help With Development And The Fight Against Corruption, Daniel I. Gordon

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This paper, presented at the West Government Contracts Year in Review Conference (covering 2012), discusses developing issues in international public procurement. Among other things, the paper suggests that there is growing recognition of the role that procurement can play in national development and the fight against corruption. In the paper the author points out that, while there is a worldwide trend toward more and more similar procurement systems, that trend does not mean that procurement systems are becoming, or should become, uniform. Moreover, the author contends in the paper that procurement law has only a limited role in national development …

Book Review Of The Max Planck Encyclopedia Of Public International Law (Rüdiger Wolfrum, Ed., Oxford University Press, 2012), Sean D. Murphy

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In 2004, the Max Planck Institute launched yet another generation of its widely-used encyclopedia on public international law, this time entitled the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law (MPEPIL), under the direction of Rüdiger Wolfrum. As befits a new century, the MPEPIL was first unveiled in an online version in 2008, followed in 2012 by a print version in ten volumes plus an index volume. Even a cursory comparison with the previous version reveals that this compendium is a whole new ball game. In terms of content, only 12 of the prior edition’s articles were taken verbatim into the …

Jus Ad Bellum, Values, And The Contemporary Structure Of International Law, Sean D. Murphy

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In “Religion, Violence, and Human Rights: Protection of Human Rights as Justification for the Use of Armed Force,” 41 Journal of Religious Ethics 1 (2013), James Johnson discusses an important dilemma for contemporary society: when should transnational military force be permitted to protect human rights? Professor Johnson uses the relatively recent doctrine of a “responsibility to protect” as the centerpiece of his paper, characterizing it as a reaction to legal concepts that emerged in the “Westphalian system.” Yet the doctrine, at least as it relates to the use of military force, is not a reaction to that system but, rather, …

National Treatment In Copyright And Related Rights: How Much Work Does It Do?, Robert Brauneis

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The obligation of national treatment makes an appearance in all five of the major active multilateral treaties concerning copyright and related rights, including the Berne Convention, the Rome Convention, the TRIPS Agreement, the WIPO Copyright Treaty (“WCT”), and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (“WPPT”), a group I will collectively call the “five CRR treaties.” It is principally lauded for its substantive bite, as a rule requiring that treaty parties extend protection to non-nationals on the same terms as they do to their own nationals. Yet there are reasons to question whether the national treatment obligations imposed by the five …