Law Commons^™

Transdisciplinary Conflict Of Laws Foreword: Cavers's Double Legacy, Karen Knop, Ralf Michaels, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

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A New Agenda For The Cultural Study Of Law: Taking On The Technicalities, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

This article urges humanistic legal studies to take the technical dimensions of law as a central focus of inquiry. Using archival and ethnographic investigations into developments in American Conflict of Laws doctrines as an example, and building on insights in the anthropology of knowledge and in science and technology studies that focus on technical practices in scientific and engineering domains, it aims to show that the technologies of law - an ideology that law is a tool and an accompanying technical aesthetic of legal knowledge - are far more central and far more interesting dimensions of legal practice than humanists …

Real Time: Unwinding Technocratic And Anthropological Knowledge, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

“The Bank of Japan is our mother,” bankers in Tokyo sometimes said of Japan's central bank. Drawing on this metaphor as an ethnographic resource, and on the example of central bankers who sought to unwind their own technocratic knowledge by replacing it with a real-time machine, I retrace the ethnographic task of unwinding technocratic knowledge from those anthropological knowledge practices that critique technocracy. In so doing, I draw attention to special methodological problems—involving the relationship between ethnography, analysis, and reception—in the representation and critique of contemporary knowledge practices.

The New Bureaucracies Of Virtue: Introduction, Marie-Andree Jacob, Annelise Riles

Annelise Riles

No abstract provided.

Pax Arabica?: Provisional Sovereignty And Intervention In The Arab Uprisings, Asli Bâli, Aziz Rana

Aziz Rana

No abstract provided.

Responses To The Ten Questions, Aziz Rana

Aziz Rana

This essay responds to a question posed by the William Mitchell Law Review for its annual national security issue: Has Obama Improved Bush's National Security Policies? I maintain that Obama Administration practices have been marked by striking continuities with those of the previous Administration. I then attempt to explain these continuities by discussing how American policymakers across the political spectrum share basic assumptions about the concept of national security and the need for an aggressive and interventionist foreign policy.

Settlers And Immigrants In The Formation Of American Law, Aziz Rana

Aziz Rana

This paper argues that the early American republic is best understood as a constitutional experiment in “settler empire,” and that related migration policies played a central role in shaping collective identity and structures of authority. Initial colonists, along with their 19th century descendants, viewed society as grounded in an ideal of freedom that emphasized continuous popular mobilization and direct economic and political decision-making. However, many settlers believed that this ideal required Indian dispossession and the coercive use of dependent groups, most prominently slaves, in order to ensure that they themselves had access to property and did not have to engage …

Barack Obama, Implicit Bias, And The 2008 Election, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Gregory S. Parks

Jeffrey J Rachlinski

The election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States suggests that the United States has made great strides with regard to race. The blogs and the pundits may laud Obama’s win as evidence that we now live in a “post-racial America.” But is it accurate to suggest that race no longer significantly influences how Americans evaluate each other? Does Obama’s victory suggest that affirmative action and antidiscrimination protections are no longer necessary? We think not. Ironically, rather than marking the dawn of a post-racial America, Obama’s candidacy reveals how deeply race affects judgment.

ظهور پيدايش قدرت هاى نهادی در دولت ایران وتأثير آن در مذاكرات با ايالات متحده, Ahmed Souaiaia

Ahmed E SOUAIAIA

The Culture Of Citizenship, Leti Volpp

Leti Volpp

The headscarf debate in France exemplifies what is widely perceived as the battle between a culture-free citizenship and a culturally-laden other. This battle, however, presumes the existence of a neutral state that must either tolerate or ban particular cultural differences. In this Article, I challenge that presumption by demonstrating how both cultural difference and citizenship are imagined and produced. The citizen is assumed to be modern and motivated by reason; the cultural other is assumed to be traditional and motivated by culture. Yet citizenship is both a cultural and anti-cultural institution: citizenship positions itself as oppositional to culture, even as …

Breaking The Shackled Silence: Unheard Voices Of Women From Kandhamal, Saumya Uma

Dr. Saumya Uma

The Geography Of Racial Stereotyping: Evidence And Implications For Vra Preclearance After Shelby County, Christopher Elmendorf, Douglas Spencer

Douglas M. Spencer

The Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) effectively enjoined the preclearance regime of the Voting Rights Act. The Court deemed the coverage formula, which determines the jurisdictions subject to preclearance, insufficiently grounded in current conditions. This paper proposes a new, legally defensible approach to coverage based on between-state differences in the proportion of voting age citizens who subscribe to negative stereotypes about racial minorities and vote accordingly. The new coverage formula could also account for racially polarized voting and minority population size, but, for constitutional reasons, subjective discrimination by voters is the essential criterion. We demonstrate that the …

The Conventional Option, Gregory Koger

Gregory Koger

The International Regulation Of Climate Engineering: Lessons From Nuclear Power, Jesse Reynolds

Jesse Reynolds

Anonymous Speech And Section 527 Of The Internal Revenue Code, Donald B. Tobin

Donald B. Tobin

No abstract provided.

Citizen Engagement In The Shrinking City: Toward Development Justice In An Era Of Growing Inequality, Barbara L. Bezdek

Barbara L Bezdek

What are the aims of the revitalization conducted by local officials: for which social goods? Good for whom? By what means can the city’s people understand and influence the tradeoffs made by their government in the redevelopment of city blocks already occupied by residents. This is more than a matter of development finance or physical redevelopment. It is a question of social justice, of whose reality counts in the legal process utilized to reach development decisions and approve significant public subsidy for the projects that are remaking American cities. Sherry Arnstein, writing in 1969 about citizen involvement in planning processes …

Book Review: Policing And The Poetics Of Everyday Life., Rodger E. Broome Phd

Rodger E. Broome

Policing and the poetics of everyday life. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. 256 pp. ISBN 978-0-252-03371-1 (cloth). $42.00. Policing and the Poetics of Everyday Life is a hermeneutical-aesthetic analysis within a human scientific approach of modern policing in the United States. It is an important study of police-citizen encounters informed by hermeneutic aesthetic thought and the author’s professional experience as a veteran with a Seattle area police department in Washington, USA.

Is ‘Human Rights’ The Right Approach For Protecting The Interests Of Forest-Dependent People?, Prakash Kashwan

Prakash Kashwan

Nature conservation is often promoted in the name of the greater good of humanity. However, in a large number of cases, nature conservation is associated with increased militarization of resource control (see the select bibliography below). International conservation organizations have responded to such concerns by developing proposals for what they refer to as ‘rights-based approaches to conservation’. Some of the biggest conservation organizations have also come together to form the Conservation Initiative on Human Rights (CIHR), which is a consortium of international conservation NGOs that seek to improve the practice of conservation by promoting integration of human rights in conservation …

The Paradoxes Of National Self-Determination, Brian Slattery

Brian Slattery

Some have argued that the right of national self-determination gives every national group the power to decide for itself whether to remain part of an existing state or to secede unilaterally and form its own state. Such a theory underpins the claim that Quebec is entitled to decide on its own whether or not to leave Canada. This paper examines the main philosophical arguments for the theory and finds them one-dimensional and inadequate; they fail to take account of the full range of complex issues arising in actual cases of proposed secession. If the right of national self-determination is understood …

Citizens United, States Divided: An Empirical Analysis Of Independent Political Spending, Douglas Spencer, Abby Wood

Douglas M. Spencer

What effect has Citizens United v. FEC had on independent spending in American politics? Previous attempts to answer this question have focused solely on federal elections where there is no baseline for comparing changes in spending behavior. We overcome this limitation by examining the effects of Citizens United as a natural experiment on the states. Before Citizens United about half of the states banned corporate independent expenditures and thus were “treated” by the Supreme Court’s decision, which invalidated these state laws. We rely on recently released state-level data to compare spending in “treated” states to spending in the “control” states …

The Prohibition On The Use Of Force For Arms Control: The Case Of Iran’S Nuclear Program, Mary Ellen O'Connell, Reyam El Molla

Mary Ellen O'Connell

International law does not permit the use of military force against Iran to attempt to end its nuclear program. The resort to military force in international relations is covered first and foremost by Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter. Article 2(4) is a general prohibition on resort to force that includes resort to military force for arms control, including nuclear weapons control. The Charter has two express but limited exceptions to the ban on military force. A state that is the victim of a significant armed attack may use force in necessary and proportional self-defense; the United Nations Security …

Epilogue: Some Sober Second Thoughts, Christopher Hoebeke

Christopher H Hoebeke

No abstract provided.

The Paradox Of Popular Sovereignty: An Introductory Essay, Christopher Hoebeke

Christopher H Hoebeke

No abstract provided.

Healthy, Wealthy, And Wise: How Corporate Power Shaped The Affordable Care Act, Kevin A. Young, Michael Schwartz

Kevin Young

No abstract provided.

Book Review Of The Law And Practice Of Piracy At Sea: European And International Perspectives, Chris Rahman

Chris Rahman

No abstract provided.

Indigenous Knowledge, Sam Grey

Sam Grey

Indigenous knowledge (IK) includes the expressions, practices, beliefs, understandings, insights, and experiences of Indigenous groups, generated over centuries of profound interaction with a particular territory. Its iterations and mechanisms are unique to each community, even where it shares certain features across groups by virtue of being embedded in a wider, common culture. In all locations IK is the foundation of Indigenous governance, ecological stewardship, social, ethical, linguistic, spiritual, medical, food, and economic systems, so that the continual production and reproduction of local, land-based knowledge is the basis of Indigenous identity and sense of place in the world, as well as …

Proportionality, General Principles Of Law, And Investor-State Arbitration: A Response To Jose Alvarez, Alec Stone Sweet

Alec Stone Sweet

No abstract provided.

Microfoundations Of The Rule Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry R. Weingast

Gillian K Hadfield

Many social scientists rely on the rule of law in their accounts of political or economic development. Many however simply equate law with a stable government capable of enforcing the rules generated by a political authority. As two decades of largely failed efforts to build the rule of law in poor and transition countries and continuing struggles to build international legal order demonstrate, we still do not understand how legal order is produced, especially in places where it does not already exist. We here canvas literature in the social sciences to identify the themes and gaps in the existing accounts. …

Constitutions As Coordinating Devices, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry R. Weingast

Gillian K Hadfield

Why do successful constitutions have the attributes characteristically associated with the rule of law? Why do constitutions involve public reasoning? And, how is such a system sustained as an equilibrium? In this paper, we adapt the framework in our previous work on “what is law?” to the problem of constitutions and their enforcement (see Hadfield and Weingast 2012, 2013a,b). We present an account of constitutional law characterized by two features: a system of distinctive reasoning and process that is grounded in economic and political functionality; and a set of legal attributes such as generality, stability, publicity, clarity, non-contradictoriness, and consistency. …

Battered And Betrayed: A Report Of Visit To Muzaffarnagar Camps, Saumya Uma, Hasina Khan

Dr. Saumya Uma