Law Commons^™

Unprecedented? Judicial Confirmation Battles And The Search For A Usable Past, Josh Chafetz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Recent years have seen intense conflicts over federal judicial appointments, culminating in Senate Republicans' 2016 refusal to consider the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, Senate Democrats' 2017 filibuster of Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the same seat, and Republicans' triggering of the "nuclear option" to confirm Gorsuch. At every stage in this process, political actors on both sides have accused one another of "unprecedented" behavior.

This Essay, written for the 2017 Supreme Court issue of the Harvard Law Review, examines these disputes and their histories, with an eye toward understanding the ways in which discussions of (un)precedentedness …

Did Russian Cyber Interference In The 2016 Election Violate International Law?, Jens David Ohlin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

When it was revealed that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election by hacking into the email system of the Democratic National Committee and releasing its emails, international lawyers were divided over whether the cyber-attack violated international law. President Obama seemingly went out of his way to describe the attack as a mere violation of “established international norms of behavior,” though some international lawyers were more willing to describe the cyber-attack as a violation of international law. However, identifying the exact legal norm that was contravened turns out to be harder than it might otherwise appear. To …