Law Commons^™

The Gifts Of Mary Dunlap (1949-2003), Wendy Webster Williams

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I guess it never really occurred to me that Mary was mortal. It certainly never crossed my mind that I would somehow be around, alive and kicking, in a world without Mary in it. Mary Cynthia Dunlap, larger than life, a force of nature, who filled up a room with her presence, her tall solid self, her waving arms, her energy, her laugh, her voice, her words and words and more words, her hair that (of course) stood straight up on her head, electrified. Mary who, Saint Frances-like, rescued birds and fed them in her big palms, loved dogs and …

Panel Ii: Public Appropriation Of Private Rights: Pursuing Internet Copyright Violators, Rebecca Tushnet, Michael Carlinsky, Justin Hughes, Sonia Katyal

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It seems to me that the story of music on the Internet over the past five or six years is the story of two fantasies colliding. The first fantasy is that information wants to be free, that with the Internet we can throwaway all the bottles and just have the wine and the free flow of data, which apparently was generated from somewhere and then circulated forever. So, there was that fantasy, that we would not need copyright anymore because everything would be available to everyone. The other fantasy is the record companies' fantasy of perfect control, that there would …

Sars And International Legal Preparedness, Lawrence O. Gostin, Jason W. Sapsin, Jon S. Vernick, Stephen P. Teret, Scott Burris

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article does not advance arguments regarding the efficacy or circumstances under which governments should exercise personal control measures such as quarantine or isolation. A literature on this aspect of SARS disease control strategies is just starting to develop more fully. Instead, we highlight the legal aspects of personal control measures employed against SARS in order to emphasize the importance of understanding public health law's role in authorizing and constraining disease control strategies, as well as the importance of legal preparedness in nations governed under the rule of law. In the contemporary international environment, one nation's failure in legal preparedness …

Overcoming Resistance To Diversity In The Executive Suite: Grease, Grit, And The Corporate Tournament, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Once we open the corporate governance/human resources nexus to deeper inquiry, mutual scholarly interest in diversity and discrimination follows naturally. Firms have complex motives to take nondiscrimination and the promotion of diversity seriously. First, at least certain forms of discrimination are both unlawful and socially illegitimate and hence present threats of potential liability and injury to reputation. Second, human resources demands are such that attracting and motivating a diverse workforce is a competitive imperative. At the same time, however, offsetting economic forces may exist that favor subtle forms of discrimination and hostility to diversity, even if intentional and overt racial …

Sexual Orientation And The Paradox Of Heightened Scrutiny, Nan D. Hunter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court performed a double move, creating a dramatic discursive moment: it both decriminalized consensual homosexual relations between adults, and, simultaneously, authorized a new regime of heightened regulation of homosexuality. How that happened and what we can expect next are the subjects of this essay.

Deliberate Extinction: Whether To Destroy The Last Smallpox Virus, David A. Koplow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The target problem to be examined is smallpox. Specifically, what should we (the United States and the entire world) now do with the last known residual samples of the virus that causes this uniquely horrific disease? The illness itself has virtually disappeared from the catalogue of human afflictions: due to a stunningly imaginative, concerted, and resolute campaign of the World Health Organization (WHO) through the 1970s, no one has contracted this deadly impairment for twenty-five years. Yet the causative element, an insidious scourge known as the variola virus, still remains, housed for now in high-security freezers at the U.S. Centers …

War Everywhere: Rights, National Security Law, And The Law Of Armed Conflict In The Age Of Terror, Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Both international and domestic law take as a basic premise the notion that it is possible, important, and usually fairly straightforward to distinguish between war and peace, emergencies and normality, the foreign and the domestic, the external and the internal. From an international law perspective, the law of armed conflict is triggered only when a armed conflict actually exists; the rest of the time, other bodies of law are applicable. Domestically, U.S. courts have developed a constitutional and statutory jurisprudence that distinguishes between national security issues and domestic questions, with the courts subjecting government actions to far less scrutiny when …

The Aretaic Turn In Constitutional Theory, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author argues that the aretaic turn in constitutional theory is an institutional approach to theories of constitutional interpretation ought to be supplemented by explicit focus on the virtues and vices of constitutional adjudicators. Part I, The Most Dysfunctional Branch, advances the speculative hypothesis that politicization of the judiciary has led the political branches to exclude consideration of virtue from the nomination and confirmation of Supreme Court Justices and to select Justices on the basis of the strength of their commitment to particular positions on particular issues and the fervor of their ideological passions.

Part II, Institutionalism and Constitutional …

The Moral Foundations Of Modern Libertarianism, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Libertarians no longer argue, as they once did in the 1970s, about whether libertarianism must be grounded on moral rights or on consequences; they no longer act as though they must choose between these two moral views. In this paper, the author contends that libertarians need not choose between moral rights and consequences because theirs is a political, not a moral, philosophy, one that can be shown to be compatible with various moral theories, which is one source of its appeal.

Moral theories based on either moral rights or on consequentialism purport to be comprehensive, insofar as they apply to …

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 …

The Threat To Constitutional Academic Freedom, J. Peter Byrne

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Since the late 1980s, the academic authority of colleges and universities has been subjected to continuing blasts of criticism. Culture warriors portray decayed institutions where sixties radicals have seized control and terrorize students and the few remaining honest faculty with demands for political conformity or bewilder them with incomprehensible theorizing. Some valid criticisms by these writers can be gleaned among their towering hyperbole and tendentious accusations. But the overall effect has been to paint for the broader public an alarming, misleading picture of intolerance and cant. The prevalence of this picture, however false it may be, imperils the constitutional autonomy …

Health Of The People: The Highest Law?, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Law and ethics in population health are undergoing a renaissance. Once fashionable during the Industrial and Progressive eras, the ideals of population health began to wither with the rise of liberalism in the late twentieth century. In their place came a sharpened focus on personal and economic freedom. Political attention shifted from population health to individual health and from public health to private medicine.

The field of public health law and ethics needs a theory and definition (what is public health law and ethics and what are its doctrinal boundaries?); a well-articulated vision (why should health be a salient public …

Pandemic Influenza: Public Health Preparedness For The Next Global Health Emergency, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) garnered a great deal of public attention because it was novel and its potential for spread was unknown. However, the SARS corona virus is significantly less virulent than pandemic influenza viral infections. The annual number of deaths for seasonal influenza is 36,000 people in the United States and 250,000- 500,000 worldwide. However, highly pathogenic influenza pandemics have occurred roughly 2-3 times per century, causing untold morbidity and mortality. The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 was believed to have caused over 20 million deaths in a world less than one-third the size of the current global …