Law Commons^™

Designing For Justice: Pandemic Lessons For Criminal Courts, Cynthia Alkon

Faculty Scholarship

March 2020 brought an unprecedented crisis to the United States: COVID-19. In a two-week period, criminal courts across the country closed. But, that is where the uniformity ended. Criminal courts did not have a clear process to decide how to conduct necessary business. As a result, criminal courts across the country took different approaches to deciding how to continue necessary operations and in doing so many did not consider the impact on justice of the operational changes that were made to manage the COVID-19 crisis. One key problem was that many courts did not use inclusive processes and include all …

Negotiating Social Change: Backstory Behind The Repeal Of Don’T Ask, Don’T Tell, Linell A. Letendre, Hal Abramson

Scholarly Works

This Article is about negotiating social change in the largest U.S.institution, the Military and its five Services. Inducing social change in any institution and society is notoriously difficult when change requires overcoming clashing personal values among stakeholders. And, in this negotiation over the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT), clashing values over open service by gays and lesbians were central to the conflict.

In response to President Obama’s call to repeal DADT, the Secretary of Defense selected a Working Group to undertake studies, surveys and focus groups to inform the debate. During the nine-month process of gathering a massive …

Introduction To Symposium On "Adr's Place In Navigating A Polarized Era", Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

Ours is a nation built for conflict, for friction. Such conflict, while painful, can be good. It can signal newfound agency, and it can be a catalyst for dialogue, customized and creative solutions, and ultimately progress. This is what many dispute resolution academics teach their students. But we are caught in such an extraordinarily polarized time, and many wonder what role ADR can and should play in navigating a polarized era. That was the question addressed by Texas A&M School of Law's March 2020 symposium, with the resulting articles - by Baruch Bush & Peter Miller, Jonathan Cohen, Jill DeTemple, …

Legitimate Interpretation – Or Legitimate Adjudication?, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Current debate about the legitimacy of lawmaking by courts focuses on what constitutes legitimate interpretation. The debate has reached an impasse in that originalism and textualism appear to have the stronger case as a matter of theory while living constitutionalism and dynamic interpretation provide much account of actual practice. This Article argues that if we refocus the debate by asking what constitutes legitimate adjudication, as determined by the social practice of the parties and their lawyers who take part in adjudication, it is possible to develop an account of legitimacy that produces a much better fit between theory and practice. …

Everything Old Is New Again: Does The '.Sucks' Gtld Change The Regulatory Paradigm In North America?, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

In 2012, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN”) took the unprecedented step of opening up the generic Top Level Domain (“gTLD”) space for entities who wanted to run registries for any new alphanumeric string “to the right of the dot” in a domain name. After a number of years of vetting applications, the first round of new gTLDs was released in 2013, and those gTLDs began to come online shortly thereafter. One of the more contentious of these gTLDs was “.sucks” which came online in 2015. The original application for the “.sucks” registry was somewhat contentious with …

The Circulation Of Judgments Under The Draft Hague Judgments Convention, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

The 2018 draft of a Hague Judgments Convention adopts a framework based largely on what some have referred to as “jurisdictional filters.” Article 5(1) provides a list of thirteen authorized bases of indirect jurisdiction by which a foreign judgment is first tested. If one of these jurisdictional filters is satisfied, the resulting judgment is presumptively entitled to circulate under the convention, subject to a set of grounds for non-recognition that generally are consistent with existing practice in most legal systems. This basic architecture of the Convention has been assumed to be set from the start of the Special Commission process, …

Decriminalizing Violence: A Critique Of Restorative Justice And Proposal For Diversionary Mediation, M. Eve Hanan

All Faculty Scholarship

The movement to reduce over-prosecution and mass incarceration has focused almost exclusively on non-violent offenders despite data showing that over half of all prisoners incarcerated within the United States are sentenced for crimes of violence. As a consequence of the focus on nonviolent offenses, the majority of current and future defendants will not benefit from initiatives offering alternatives to criminal prosecution and incarceration.

A discussion of alternatives to the criminal justice system in cases of violent crime must begin by acknowledging that violent crime is not monolithic. Many incidents meet the statutory elements of a violent crime, that is, the …

The Machinery Of Criminal Justice, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

Two centuries ago, the American criminal justice was run primarily by laymen. Jury trials passed moral judgment on crimes, vindicated victims and innocent defendants, and denounced the guilty. But over the last two centuries, lawyers have taken over the process, silencing victims and defendants and, in many cases, substituting a plea-bargaining system for the voice of the jury. The public sees little of how this assembly-line justice works, and victims and defendants have largely lost their day in court. As a result, victims rarely hear defendants express remorse and apologize, and defendants rarely receive forgiveness. This lawyerized machinery has purchased …

The Rome I Regulation Rules On Party Autonomy For Choice Of Law: A U.S. Perspective, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

This chapter was presented at a conference in Dublin on the (then) new Rome I Regulation of the European Union in the fall of 2009. It contrasts the Rome I rules on party autonomy with those in the United States. In particular, it considers the rules in the Rome I Regulation that ostensibly protect consumers by discouraging party agreement on a pre-dispute basis to the law governing a consumer contract. These rules are compared with the absence of private international law restrictions on choice of forum and choice of law in the United States, even in consumer contracts. The result …

Private Rights And Collective Governance: A Functional Approach To Natural Resources Law, Eric T. Freyfogle

The Future of Natural Resources Law and Policy (Summer Conference, June 6-8)

4 pages.

"Eric T. Freyfogle, Max L. Rowe Professor of Law, University of Illinois College of Law"

European Union's New Role In International Private Litigation, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Pervasiveness Of Culture In Conflict, Pat K. Chew

Articles

Law faculty and scholars are increasingly cognizant of the role of culture in dispute resolution. This essay offers a beginning roadmap for exploring the cultural context of conflict. It begins by considering how to assess our own cultural profiles, highlighting some useful social science constructs for this purpose. It then discusses how our interactive perception of others' cultural profiles makes a difference. The essay also explores the tensions between, on one hand, the pervasiveness of culture in conflict and, on the other hand, American legal traditions that appear contrary to the incorporation of culture into dispute resolution processes.

International Trade Law And The Arbitration Of Administrative Law Matters: Farrel V. U.S. International Trade Commission, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

With support from the executive branch, Congress, and the courts, arbitration has become an increasingly popular method of international dispute resolution. While agreements to arbitrate traditionally were frowned upon, particularly when the dispute involved certain “public law” or “statutory” matters, the situation has changed dramatically in the past few decades. United States courts now routinely order arbitration of disputes implicating important policy issues in securities, antitrust, Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (“RICO”), and employment law matters. By the end of the 1980’s, the presence of a public or “statutory” issue seemed no longer to be a distinguishing factor; arbitration, when …

Making A Commitment To Social Change: Extending The Canon Of Dispute Processing Research, Frank W. Munger

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

The Division Of Legal Labor In Rural Haiti, Pnina Lahav

Faculty Scholarship

This paper explores the institutional facilities available to Haitian peasants for the settlement of their disputes. More specifically, it compares the institution of the Chef de Section - the lowest administrative appointee in the Haitian countryside and the Justice of the Peace - the lowest ranking judicial institution provided by the Haitian legal system. The paper further advances the hypothesis that at the present time there is a shift in the division of labor between the two institutions, in favor of the Justice of the Peace, and that this shift may be attributed to processes of social differentiation currently detectable …