Law Commons^™

Human Rights, Civil Wrongs And Foreign Relations: A "Sinical" Look At The Use Of U.S. Litigation To Address Human Rights Abuses Abroad, Jacques Delisle

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Misunderstood, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Pluralism And Democratic Politics: Reflections On The Interpretive Approach Of Baker V. Carr, Guy-Uriel Charles

Faculty Scholarship

Baker v. Carr is one of the Supreme Court's most important opinions, not least because its advent signaled the constitutionalization of democracy. Unfortunately, as is typical of the Court's numerous forays into democratic politics, the decision is not accompanied by an apparent vision of the relationship among democratic practice, constitutional law, and democratic theory. In this Article, Professor Charles revisits Baker and provides several democratic principles that he argues justifies the Court's decision to engage the democratic process. He examines the decision from the perspective of one of its chief contemporary critics, Justice Frankfurter. He sketches an approach, described as …

Book Review, Donald L. Horowitz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Positive Political Theory Of Cost-Benefit Analysis: A Comment On Johnston, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Gender Contests, Susan Frelich Appleton

Scholarship@WashULaw

This contribution for the “Law, Ethics, and Gender in Medicine” column in the Journal of Gender Specific Medicine interrogates the understanding of gender itself, at a time when transgender and intersex issues were just beginning to “come out” in both popular culture and case law. Against this background, the column explores the roles that physicians have played in such gender contests and considers how evolving medical attitudes can help achieve reform.

Clinton's Foreign Policy And The Politics Of Intervention: Cases Of Ethnic Cleansing And Democratic Governance, Daneta G. Billau

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines the sources of U.S. President Bill Clinton's foreign policy, with special attention to understudied political elements of intervention. The basis of this study is the Clinton Doctrine, in which Clinton opposed ethnic cleansing, and supported democratic governance worldwide. The primary research question asks to what extent and why was there a variation in Clinton's application of his own doctrine in the specific cases of Rwanda in 1994, Haiti in 1994, and East Timor in 1999. To address this question, the following five hypotheses are posited:

H1: The more vital interests are at stake, and the closer the …

Constitutional Design: Proposals Versus Processes, Donald L. Horowitz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Democracy And Legitimation: A Response To Professor Guinier, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay is a response to Supreme Democracy: Bush v. Gore Redux, an essay by Lani Guinier (2002).

The author critiques Professor Lani Guinier’s essay through a discussion of the maldistribution of wealth in American society, which he argues is accepted by American people thanks to the existence complex structures that allow them to distance themselves from it. He discusses four legitimation structures as he critiques this essay.

Professor Guinier focuses on the belief in meritocracy. For our purposes, we might define a believer in meritocracy as someone who thinks that, in a given society, people get more or less …

Alternatives To Economic Sanctions, Christine M. Chinkin

Book Chapters

Considering the merits of non-coercive alternatives to economic sanctions inevitably risks the charges of idealism and naIvete. However a number of speakers in this conference have raised considerable doubts about the efficacy of sanctions: even on their own terms sanctions rarely work and the material costs to non-targeted states and the implications for human rights make their justification problematic, even when they can in some sense be said to have worked. It therefore makes sense at least to give consideration to some non- coercive alternatives, either in conjunction with sanctioning policies or separate from them. The other alternative is the …

Comments On The Symposium: Expanding Research Opportunities On The Federal Criminal Justice System, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

A full understanding of how the federal enforcement bureaucracy will elude us without a rich understanding of what makes prosecutors (or agents) tick. However, I suspect that the best way to reach that goal is not to start with this ultimate question. After all, to look closer to home, what do professors “maximize” when they grade papers? Progress is much more likely to be made if we follow Jim Eisenstein and focus on, first, identifying the most salient features of the bureaucratic environment, and, second, getting a handle on their relative influences.

Natural Law And Public Reasons, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In this Lecture I shall discuss the reasons that officials and citizens should rely upon in American politics. In recent years, various theorists have claimed that people in liberal democracies should rely in politics on "public reasons," reasons that are accessible to all citizens. Others have objected that such a counsel is unreasonable, if not incomprehensible. I shall concentrate on two facets of this issue. First, does the law exemplify a structure of public reasons – that is, do judges deciding cases draw on a stock of public reasons that is narrower than all the reasons one might give for …

Punishment Theory: Moral Or Political?, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

This article argues that the justification of punishment is best conceived as a problem of political theory rather than moral philosophy. Noting the familiar charge that utilitarianism permits framing the innocent, it argues that retributivism is equally vulnerable to the charge that it permits lynching the guilty. It argues that both critiques unfairly attribute lawlessness and dishonesty to the respective punishment theories. As a result, they mischaracterize both as theories about what individuals should do, rather than what acts legitimate government should authorize. In so doing, they disregard how committed the founders of the respective theories were to the rule …

Legal Theory And The Rule Of Law, Noel B. Reynolds

Noel B Reynolds

In "Legal Theory and the Rule of Law" Noel Reynolds maintains that the rule of law can be understood as a set of conditions that rational actors would impose on any authority they would create to act in their stead in creating and administering legally binding rules. The authority and obligation associated with law derive from this fundamental convention, and the principles of the rule of law are the conditions of that agreement, which become thereby governing principles to which legislatures, judges, and enforcement agencies can be held in their official actions. These generally recognized standards are inherent in this …

Constitutional Courts And Parliamentary Democracy (Special Issue On Delegation), Alec Stone Sweet

Alec Stone Sweet

No abstract provided.

The European Convention On Human Rights: A Threat To United States-European Security Relations And The United States Military Justice System?, Darla W. Jackson

Darla W. Jackson

No abstract provided.