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Folktales Of International Justice, David Luban
Folktales Of International Justice, David Luban
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
When Laura Dickinson asked me to participate on this panel, she very nicely said that she hoped I could bring a different perspective to the discussion. I thought I knew what she meant. The other panelists share a profound knowledge of how international criminal-law institutions work. My "different perspective" would therefore be the perspective of abject ignorance.
Taking comfort from the Socratic dictum that there is wisdom in knowing what you do not know, I accepted the invitation because it gives me the opportunity to pose questions rather than proposing answers. I will raise my questions by examining some stories …
The Priority Of Morality: The Emergency Constitution's Blind Spot, David Cole
The Priority Of Morality: The Emergency Constitution's Blind Spot, David Cole
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Three aspects of Bruce Ackerman’s thesis, which is a proposal to legitimate the practice of suspicionless preventive detention during emergencies, are discussed in this essay—its premises, its efficacy, and its morality. Part I critiques three of Ackerman’s premises—his underestimation of courts and overestimation of legislatures as guardians of liberty, his misguided belief that the supermajoritarian escalator provides a one-size-fits-all solution to the conundrum of emergency powers, and his contention that the short-lived character of emergencies makes it sensible to cede to a minority of our popular representatives control over critically important and largely unpredictable decisions concerning the appropriate duration of …