Law Commons^™

Lawyering The Presidency, Deborah Pearlstein

Articles

Among its many profound effects on American life, the Trump presidency has triggered a surge of interest in the project of law reform to better check the exercise of presidential power. Yet these reform efforts arise against a wholly unsettled debate about the function and effectiveness of existing checks, perhaps none more so than the role of executive branch legal counsel. With courts often deferential, and Congress hamstrung by partisan polarization, scholars have drawn on the experiences of executive branch lawyers to assess whether counsel functions as part of an “internal separation of powers” form of constraint. Yet while these …

Disaggregating Slavery And The Slave Trade, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum

Articles

International law prohibits slavery and the slave trade as peremptory norms, customary international law prohibitions and crimes, humanitarian law prohibitions, and non-derogable human rights. Human rights bodies, however, focus on human trafficking, even when slavery and the slave trade—and not human trafficking—are enumerated within their mandates. International human rights law has conflated human trafficking with slavery and the slave trade. Consequently, human trafficking has subsumed the slave trade and, at times, slavery prohibitions, increasing perpetrator impunity for slavery and the slave trade abuses and denying full expressive justice to survivors.

This Article disaggregates slavery from the slave trade and slavery …

Yom Ha’Shoah In An Even More Special Context, Richard Weisberg

Online Publications

This always precious day of mournful memory is linked in 2022 to the 80^th anniversary of the event that gave birth to all that unutterable sadness: the Wannsee Conference of 1942. In an otherwise innocuous building you can visit anytime you are in Berlin, a handful of men, over cakes and liqueur, devised the “Final Solution”. It took them around two days, well heated and protected from the ice and snow outdoors, to list mechanically their estimates of how many Jews lived in Europe’s various countries and how these Jews might be – though their written minutes never use …