Law Commons^™

Philosophy V. Rhetoric In Legal Education: Understanding The Schism Between Doctrinal And Legal Writing Faculty, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author argues that although legal writing faculty know that what they teach is absolutely essential to their students' success, yet it continues to be grossly, even embarrassingly, undervalued in legal education. Doctrinal legal faculty perpetuate the view that legal education is a philosophical endeavor that focuses on the truth about the nature of law and, in the twenty-first century, on the law's ability to serve justice in a multicultural America. Because of their political power, however, doctrinal faculty are able to preserve the task of truth finding for themselves. Since the nature of truth is independent of its practical …

Who's Afraid Of Unenumerated Rights?, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Unenumerated rights are expressly protected against federal infringement by the original meaning of the Ninth Amendment and against state infringement by the original meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Despite this textual recognition, unenumerated rights have received inconsistent and hesitant protection ever since these provisions were enacted, and what protection they do receive is subject to intense criticism. In this essay, the author examines why some are afraid to enforce unenumerated rights. While this reluctance seems most obviously to stem from the uncertainty of ascertaining the content of unenumerated rights, he contends that underlying this …

Block Grants, Early Childhood Education, And The Reauthorization Of Head Start: From Positional Conflict To Interest-Based Agreement, Eloise Pasachoff

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In early 2003, the Bush administration proposed and Congress considered two types of highly controversial structural reform to Head Start, the federal program that since 1965 has provided early education and comprehensive health and social services to low-income preschoolers and their families. First, the proposal would begin funding Head Start through federal block grants to the states rather than through direct federal grants to local agencies. Second, the proposal would shift oversight of Head Start at the federal level from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to the Department of Education (ED). Variations on these two proposals have …

Democracy, Race, And Multiculturalism In The Twenty-First Century: Will The Voting Rights Act Ever Be Obsolete?, Sheryll Cashin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Part I of this essay begins one hundred years before the passage of the Act, with Reconstruction. I briefly canvas the interracial alliances of the Reconstruction and Redemption periods, underscoring that American democracy has been most responsive to the masses, including working class whites, when interracial alliances between whites and blacks commanded majority power. I then recount how a politics of white supremacy animated and perpetuated racial schisms between blacks and whites for a century in the South. Part II describes how the Act came to be passed, emphasizing the role of protest and coalition politics in its enactment, and …

"Just Like A Tree Planted By The Waters, I Shall Not Be Moved": Charles Ogletree, Jr., And The Plain Virtues Of Lawyering For Racial Equality, Emma Coleman Jordan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It was a moment of unbelievable risk, a precipice of career suicide, a decision that would challenge the careful planning of more timid lawyers. His wife urged caution; a Harvard colleague explored back channels with the Senate Judiciary Committee to telegraph warning to him of unseen torpedoes that might lie in his path. Even he hesitated in the face of the immediate demands of the substantial scholarly writing required to earn tenure at Harvard. Yet, at the end of the day of October 10, 1991, Charles Ogletree, Jr., known as "Tree" to his friends, chose to step into a role …

Constitutions As "Living Trees"? Comparative Constitutional Law And Interpretive Metaphors, Vicki C. Jackson

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Part I below explores the interpretive approaches of three other high national courts that have engaged in constitutional review over a long period of time, identifying two respects in which they may bear on this debate. First, their jurisprudence relies on interpretive approaches that depend on multiple sources and forms of argument-what some call an "eclectic" method, and others might call common law constitutionalism. Second, the jurisprudence of other significant national courts acknowledges the possibility that interpretive understandings will change. Indeed, in those countries with continuity of rights-protecting constitutional regimes and with high courts vested with the power of judicial …

Justice Blackmun, Abortion, And The Myth Of Medical Independence, Nan D. Hunter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this article I test this conventional wisdom by explicitly placing medicine at the center of the analysis of Justice Blackmun's opinions on abortion, and then interrogating the connection between law and medicine. Using the Blackmun papers opened to the public in 2004 and augmented by other documents and sources, I examine four critical periods in Blackmun's life: his years at Mayo; his participation in a series of medicine-related cases prior to Roe; the period of intra-Court dynamics in Roe; and the post-Roe period in which a split developed between Blackmun and Roe's critics over the use of medical rhetoric. …

New Paradigms For The Jus Ad Bellum?, Jane E. Stromseth

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I am delighted to be here today to honor Ed Cummings, a wonderful colleague and a source of great wisdom for so many of us. I first worked with Ed in the Legal Adviser's Office in the late 1980s. More than fifteen years later, Ed is still the person I turn to for insight on the most difficult issues in the law of armed conflict. Most memorably of all, while serving at the National Security Council in 1999, I worked closely with Ed in achieving an important treaty milestone: the Procotol restricting the use of child soldiers in armed conflict …

Twenty-First Century Equal Protection: Making Law In An Interregnum, Nan D. Hunter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

During her remarkable career on the Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor articulated principles, in both concurrence and dissent, which moved to the doctrinal core of multiple areas of jurisprudence. Perhaps, just perhaps, Justice O'Connor has done it again. In Lawrence v. Texas, although the Court's majority decided the case on substantive due process grounds, O'Connor concurred relying solely on the Equal Protection Clause. Because future litigation on sexuality and gender issues is more likely to turn on issues of equality (or expression) than on issues of privacy, her concurrence may ultimately achieve the influence of many of her past …

New Rules For Promissory Fraud, Gregory Klass, Ian Ayres

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article summarizes the authors’ recommended reforms to the law of promissory fraud. These recommendations are presented as a Draft Prestatement of the Law of Insincere Promising. The basic propositions of the Prestatement are taken, with some modification, from the authors’ book, Insincere Promises: The Law of Misrepresented Intent (2005). This article adds extensive comments, in the style of the Restatements, and a prose introduction identifying three reforms we deem most important. First, courts should drop their insistence that every promise represents an intent to perform, and treat that representation instead as a default. Second, courts faced with claims of …

Reflections On Scienter (And The Securities Fraud Case Against Martha Stewart That Never Happened), Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper considers what research in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics has to say about one of the basic "state of mind" constructs in the law of fraud: scienter. It takes a clinical approach, examining the securities fraud case that never happened against Martha Stewart. In granting a judgment of acquittal in Stewart's favor on the securities fraud charge, the court seemingly misunderstood the law of scienter, which turns on awareness rather than purpose. But that simply provides an opportunity to think about what awareness means in the context of financial transactions. From publicly available sources, interesting inferences can be …

Internal Controls After Sarbanes-Oxley: Revisiting Corporate Law's "Duty Of Care As Responsibility For Systems", Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Revisiting section 3.4.2 of Clark's Corporate Law ('Duty of Care as Responsibility for Systems") reminds us, however, that the internal controls story actually goes back many decades, and that many of the strategic issues that are at the heart of section 404 have long been contentious. My Article will briefly update Clark's account through the late 1980s and 1990s before returning to Sarbanes-Oxley and rulemaking thereunder by the SEC and the newly created Public Company Accounting Oversight Board ("PCAOB"). My main point builds on one of Clark's but digs deeper. Internal controls requirements, whether federal or state, are incoherent unless …

The Measure Of A Justice: Justice Scalia And The Faltering Of The Property Rights Movement Within The U.S. Supreme Court, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The purpose of this Article is to take the measure of Justice Scalia's ability to produce significant opinions for the Court, rather than just for himself, by focusing on the Court's property rights cases during the past several decades. Much of the analysis will rely on the Blackmun Papers, because they provide a virtual treasure trove of information revealing the Court's deliberative process while Blackmun was on the Court from 1971 to 1994. Almost all of this information, including Justice Blackmun's handwritten notes on what each Justice said at the Court's private deliberations and initial voting on the cases at …

Unitariness And Myopia: The Executive Branch, Legal Process And Torture, Cornelia T. Pillard

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What promotes legality on the part of government under strain? This Article looks to the role of intra-executive processes in facilitating well-reasoned, legitimate conclusions on questions like the one addressed in this symposium: What are the legal authorities and limits governing coercive interrogation tactics? Admittedly, even the best legal processes are no guarantee of good substantive outcomes. Many critics would disagree with the substance of the executive's August 1, 2002, legal position on coercive interrogation no matter how it was derived. And even were all the best processes faithfully adhered to in developing the government's legal position on torture, it …

The Story Of Upjohn Co. V. United States: One Man's Journey To Extend Lawyer-Client Confidentiality, And The Social Forces That Affected It, Paul F. Rothstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The attorney-client privilege protects information a client provides an attorney in confidence for the purpose of securing legal advice. But suppose the client is not a person but a corporation and can only speak through its agents and employees. What then are the contours of the privilege? If the corporation's attorney asks an employee for information relating to pending litigation or other legal matters, is the conversation privileged? Some courts said that no communications to a corporate attorney were privileged unless they came from members of the corporate control group, loosely those people who had authority to direct the attorney's …

Exclusionary Conduct, Effect On Consumers, And The Flawed Profit-Sacrifice Standard, Steven C. Salop

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The central thesis of this article is that the use of the profit-sacrifice test as the sole liability standard for exclusionary conduct, or as a required prong of a multi-pronged liability standard is fundamentally flawed. The profit-sacrifice test may be useful, for example, as one type of evidence of anticompetitive purpose. In unilateral refusal to deal cases, it can be useful in determining the non-exclusionary benchmark. However, the test is not generally a reliable indicator of the impact of allegedly exclusionary conduct on consumer welfare - the primary focus of the antitrust laws. The profit-sacrifice test also is prone to …

Defending And Despairing: The Agony Of Juvenile Defense, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I believe there is no more important work than defending kids, especially those accused of serious crimes. The consequences of juvenile crime are increasingly severe, whether kids remain in the juvenile system or are prosecuted as adults. We lock up too many people in this country, many of whom are children. Surely, at the start of the twenty-first century - given our knowledge about the causes of juvenile delinquency and crime - we can do more than put troubled kids in cages. So, why not work with young offenders who are on their way to becoming adult clients, to try …

Crystals And Mud In Nature, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Professor James Salzman has written a wonderful article, which promises an equally wonderful book. His article intelligently and thoughtfully examines the forces that compete, conflict, and combine in the creation of laws relating to drinking water. These include, of course, the physical characteristics of the resource itself and how the resource relates to essential biological needs of humankind. But as Professor Salzman demonstrates, the biological role is only one of several perspectives on drinking water relevant to the kind of legal rules that apply to it. The article describes drinking water as a cultural resource, a social resource, and an …

The Liberal Legacy Of Bush V. Gore, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article examines the last ten years of the Rehnquist Court, which was divided evenly by the Court's highly controversial intervention in the 2000 presidential election, Bush v. Gore. I compare the Court's record before and after that decision both qualitatively and quantitatively, and argue that the Court shifted noticeably to the left, particularly in high-profile cases, after Bush v. Gore, as conservative Justices showed a greater willingness to side with their liberal colleagues to reach liberal results. I hypothesize that this may have reflected an effort, conscious or subconscious, to restore the Court's legitimacy by counteracting images of a …

Critical Constitutionalism Now, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The starting point for this essay is the claim that if the texts that critical scholars studied are unstable over time, then this must also be true of the studies themselves. There is no reason to suppose that the critical perspective, uniquely among all possible perspectives, reflects timeless and contextless truth. The question I want to ask, then, is what meaning the critical perspective has for us now in our new and dramatically transformed environment. I proceed in four parts. First, I address the meaning that critical scholars attributed to constitutional law in the late twentieth century. Second, I describe …

Anglo-American Privacy And Surveillance, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The United States’ Terrorism Surveillance Program represents just one of many expansions in surveillance since 9/11, as legal controls previously introduced to protect citizens’ privacy and to prevent the misuse of surveillance powers have been relaxed. What makes the situation qualitatively different now is not just the lowering of the bar: digitization and the rapid advancement of technology mean that the type and volume of information currently available eclipse that of previous generations. The issue is not confined to the United States. Despite the incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights into British law, the United Kingdom also appears …

Clauses Not Cases, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Clauses Not Cases is a Response to Robert Post and Reva Siegel, Questioning Justice: Law and Politics in Judicial Confirmation Hearings, Yale L.J. (The Pocket Part), Jan. 2006.

In Questioning Justice, Robert Post and Reva Siegel make three claims. First, that the Constitution authorizes the Senate to rest its judgement, in part, on the constitutional philosophy of nominees to the Supreme Court; second, that this practice is justified on grounds of democratic legitimacy; and third, that it is best implemented by asking nominees “to explain the grounds on which they would have voted in past decisions of the …

The World Bank's Uses Of The "Rule Of Law" Promise In Economic Development, Alvaro Santos

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this chapter, the author seeks to disaggregate the World Bank and provide insight on the impact that particular groups have in dominant development strategies. By analyzing the internal dynamics among groups at the Bank, his aim is to illuminate the rise and fall of ideas about development and their resistance to both empirical evidence and academic critique. These internal dynamics include institutional inertia and constraints, groups’ struggle and competition over resources and prestige, and the relationship between groups at the Bank and the governments of borrowing countries.

The argument presented is that the conceptions of the rule of law …

Race, Money And Medicines, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Taking notice of race is both risky and inevitable, in medicine no less than in other endeavors. The literature on race as a classifying tool in clinical research poses this core dilemma: On the one hand, race can be a useful stand-in for unstudied genetic and environmental factors that yield differences in disease expression and therapeutic response. On the other hand, racial distinctions have social mean­ ings that are often pejorative or worse, especially when these distinctions are cast as culturally or biologically fixed. Our country's troubled past in this regard and the persistence of race-related disadvantage should keep us …