Law Commons^™

Natural Law As Professional Ethics: A Reading Of Fuller, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Plato's Laws, the Athenian Stranger claims that the gods will smile only on a city where the law "is despot over the rulers and the rulers are slaves of the law." This passage is the origin of the slogan "the rule of law not of men," an abbreviation of which forms our phrase "the rule of law." From Plato and Aristotle, through John Adams and John Marshall, down to us, no idea has proven more central to Western political and legal culture. Yet the slogan turns on a very dubious metaphor. Laws do not rule, and the "rule of …

Report On The Workshop On Refugee And Asylum Policy In Practice In Europe And North America, Randall Hansen, Susan Martin, Andrew I. Schoenholtz, Patrick Weil

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Western nations have struggled to accomplish the dual goals of refugee and asylum policies: (1) identifying and protecting Convention refugees as well as those fleeing civil conflict; and (2) controlling for abuse. The Workshop on Refugee and Asylum Policy in Practice in Europe and North America was organized to facilitate a transatlantic dialogue to explore just how well these asylum systems are balancing the dual goals. The workshop exa!llined key elements of the U.S. and European asylum systems: decision making on claims, deterrence of abuse, independent review, return of rejected asylum seekers, scope of the refugee concept, social rights and …

Asylum In Practice: Successes, Failures, And The Challenges Ahead, Susan Martin, Andrew I. Schoenholtz

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Workshop on Refugee and Asylum Policy in Practice in Europe and North America was organized to facilitate a transatlantic dialogue aimed at understanding just how well these asylum systems are balancing the dual goals. The Workshop was convened by the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) of Georgetown University and the Center for the Study of Immigration, Integration and Citizenship Policies (CEPIC) of the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique, with the support of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. It was held on July 1-3, 1999, at Oxford University.

The workshop examined key issues …

Crossing The River Of Blood Between Us: Lynching, Violence, Beauty, And The Paradox Of Feminist History, Emma Coleman Jordan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Understandably, early feminist legal theory and history focused almost exclusively on establishing white women's autonomy against white male dominance. The vehicles of nineteenth century women's liberation included elements of public equality such as ownership of property, the right to vote, access to male dominated occupations, equal education and employment opportunity. Twentieth century feminists extended the equality project by penetrating the "private" sphere and attacking the very notion of a separate zone of family relations which was immune from government intervention to protect women from male abuse. Cultural feminists like Carol Gilligan took another approach, arguing that women's experiences as sexual …

Imagining Justice, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As we approach the new century and the new millennium, those of us who are legal professionals in liberal capitalist democracies need to drastically improve our practices of law if we are to bring those practices in line with our professed ideals. The commodification and marketing of legal services, for example, combined with a nearly blind commitment to overly combative advocacy, puts legal assistance beyond the means of large segments of the public, severely undercutting our commitment to equality before the law. A different and perhaps harder question, however, is whether the ideals against which we judge our practices are …

Deconstructing Section 11: Public Offering Liability In A Continuous Disclosure Environment, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article is an effort to rethink civil liability in capital-raising transactions by large capitalization issuers. After a brief digression about who should set liability standards, the article then addresses two related questions. The first deals with a natural question: Should not the primary regulatory effort for large issuers be to assure continuous disclosure in the secondary marketplace, given the far larger volume of such trading in that market compared to that in primary transactions? Second, if we have developed a satisfactory regime of disclosure responsibilities for this setting, what more, if anything, in terms of liability protection, is needed …

Taking Stock: New Views Of American Labor Law Between The World Wars, Daniel R. Ernst

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This symposium originated in a session at the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History held in Seattle in October 1998. Entitled "Labor, Law, and the State in the Interwar Period," the panel provided four different views of a decisive period in the development of labor law in the United States. In the 1980s the panel's chair, Katherine Van Wezel Stone, and commentator, Christopher L. Tomlins, published works that helped spark a modern revival in the historical study of U.S. labor law. The authors of the four papers presented at the session were more recent entrants into the …

Second Amendment Symposium: Commentary, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Commentary on the Second Amendment given as part of the “Symposium on the Second Amendment.”

Preemption & Human Rights: Local Options After Crosby V. Nftc, Robert Stumberg

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In June 2000, the Supreme Court held in Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) that federal sanctions against Burma preempted the Massachusetts Burma law. With its "Burma Law," Massachusetts sought to replicate the anti-Apartheid boycott, one of the most successful human rights campaigns in history. Massachusetts' Burma law authorized state agencies to exercise a strong purchasing preference in favor of companies that do not conduct business in Burma unless the preference would impair essential purchases or result in inadequate competition.

In Crosby, the Court held that Congress preempted the Massachusetts Burma law when it adopted federal sanctions on …

Book Review: New Chemical Weapons Convention: Implementation And Prospects, David A. Koplow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Review of The New Chemical Weapons Convention: Implementation and Prospects by Michael Bothe, Natalino Ronzitti, and Allan Rosas (1998).

This book, a fine-grained, expert-level analysis of several of the most intricate legal and policy issues arising in connection with the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), also serves as a vivid symbol of the "coming of age" of arms control. For all their strategic significance and political innovation, earlier generations of arms control treaties--bilateral or multilateral, concerning nuclear, chemical, biological, or other weapons--could not plausibly have spawned this type of 600-page exegesis or inspired the painstaking, inch-by-inch explorations presented in its …

Beyond The Supreme Court: A Modest Plea To Improve Our Asylum System, Andrew I. Schoenholtz

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Moderating a session at the Workshop on the Supreme Court and Immigration and Refugee Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, Peter Spiro asked just how important the Supreme Court really is to refugee and immigration law. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has actively interpreted the Refugee Convention and Protocol, and its decisions have had an adverse affect on important protection issues. James Hathaway knows this well. Yet his article focuses on the two Supreme Court decisions that most practitioners and scholars agree have not translated into serious protection problems in the United States or abroad.

The Perils Of Globalization And The World Trading System, John H. Jackson

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The post-World War II world trading system is now more than fifty years old, and not surprisingly, it has evolved through a number of different stages of development and survived a series of perils. Recently, however, the perils seem even greater than before. The failure of the Seattle Ministerial Meeting of November-December 1999 focused the attention of the international community, almost like a prospective execution focusing the attention of the targeted person. A number of different factors have contributed to this perilous situation, and in this brief Essay, I want to look particularly at some of the institutional characteristics of …

Eleventh Amendment Schizophrenia, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article argues that conflicting analytical strains run through the Supreme Court's recent majority opinions in the area of state sovereign immunity. The "supremacy" strain stresses that, despite the Eleventh Amendment, the states remain obligated to comply with federal law, and that the Constitution envisions the "necessary judicial means" to enforce these obligations against the state. These means include suits by the federal government, private suits for injunctive relief, and suits seeking damages from state officials in their individual capacities. Thus, according to the supremacy strain, state sovereign immunity is unimportant because it merely bars unnecessary means of enforcing the …

Economic Incentives In Representing Publicly-Funded Criminal Defendants In England's Crown Court, Peter W. Tague

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The flux now engulfing the way in which the defenders of indigent criminal defendants are compensated in England's Crown Court provides a sober lesson for U.S. lawyers. Once, U.S. lawyers, who themselves are appointed to represent indigent defendants, could have cited English practice to support a hefty increase in the meager compensation they receive in many jurisdictions. For in balancing the tension between encouraging effective representation, but at bearable social cost, U.S. jurisdictions stress the latter, all but ignoring the former. The English approach, by contrast, has paid generously, at least in serious cases, thereby implicitly recognizing that defenders could …

The Difference In Women’S Hedonic Lives: A Phenomenological Critique Of Feminist Legal Theory, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Part One of this article provides a phenomenological and hedonic critique of the conception of the human - and thus the female - that underlies liberal legal feminism. Part Two presents a phenomenological critique of the conception of the human - and thus the female - which underlies radical feminist legal criticism. Again, I will argue that in both cases the theory does not pay enough attention to feminism: liberal feminist legal theory owes more to liberalism than to feminism and radical feminist legal theory owes more to radicalism than it does to feminism. Both models accept a depiction of …

Examined Lives: Informational Privacy And The Subject As Object, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the United States, proposals for informational privacy have proved enormously controversial. On a political level, such proposals threaten powerful data processing interests. On a theoretical level, data processors and other data privacy opponents argue that imposing restrictions on the collection, use, and exchange of personal data would ignore established understandings of property, limit individual freedom of choice, violate principles of rational information use, and infringe data processors' freedom of speech. In this article, Professor Julie Cohen explores these theoretical challenges to informational privacy protection. She concludes that categorical arguments from property, choice, truth, and speech lack weight, and mask …

A Report Card On The Impeachment: Judging The Institutions That Judged President Clinton, Susan Low Bloch

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Now that we have lived through one of the most unusual events in American history-the impeachment and trial of the President of the United States-it is appropriate, indeed essential, that we assess how the process worked and learn what we can from it. Specifically, I want to address two questions: First, how well did the impeachment process work? In good academic fashion, I will grade each of the governmental institutions involved – giving them, if you will, a report card. Second, what did we learn from the experience to guide us if, in the future, we face the impeachment of …

Copyright And The Perfect Curve, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay argues that the assumption that “progress” is qualitatively independent of the underlying entitlement structure is wrong. In particular, I shall argue that a shift to a copyright rule structure based on highly granular, contractually enforced “price discrimination” would work a fundamental shift, as well, in the nature of the progress produced. The critique of the contractual price discrimination model, moreover, exposes deep defects in the use of neoclassical “law and economics” methodology to solve problems relating to the incentive structure of copyright law. What is needed, instead, is an economic model of copyright that acknowledges the central role …

Dc Consortium Of Legal Service Providers: Legal Services 2000 Symposium, Peter B. Edelman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

My main point is to urge you to the see what is possible in the way of what I might call a public health approach to lawyering for the poor. In a public health approach you find something that has polluted the river and you clean it up at its source instead of just treating its victims one by one. In legal and societal terms, when we are discussing why so many children are growing up poor and dying a slow death of disappointment, the challenge is to think about it in a public health way. Of course we cannot …

Globalization And Federalism In A Post-Printz World, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article uses the recent Supreme Court decision in Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council as the vehicle for examining the way in which the U.S. constitutional law of federalism might be responding to globalization. Part II develops the argument that globalization as such has no strong implications for domestic constitutional law. The remainder of the Article examines the U.S. constitutional response to the aspect of globalization revealed in Crosby, and argues that the Court's decision in Crosby is in tension with its other federalism decisions. But, the Article argues, that tension arises not from the fact that Crosby arises …

Twins At Birth: Civil Rights And The Role Of The Solicitor General, Seth P. Waxman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is painful even today to contemplate the awful devastation wreaked upon this nation by the War Between the States. But like most cataclysms, the Civil War also gave birth to some important positive developments. I would like to talk with you today about two such offspring of that war, and the extent to which, like many sibling pairs, they have influenced each other's development. The first child - the most well-known progeny of the Civil War - was this country's commitment to civil rights. The war, of course, ended slavery. But it did not - and could not - …

Evidence Issues In Domestic Violence Civil Cases, Jane H. Aiken, Jane C. Murphy

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article is intended to assist practitioners in anticipating and responding to some of the evidentiary challenges in civil cases in which relief is sought for the victims of domestic violence. First, expert testimony is often necessary to dispel common myths about battered women and to educate judges and juries about the dynamics of domestic violence. Recent case law, however, has limited the admissibility of "non-scientific" expert testimony and may make it difficult for practitioners to use experts in their cases. In addition, particular evidentiary issues arise when victims are pursuing both criminal and civil remedies against the batterer. This …

On Causation, Mari J. Matsuda

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this Essay, Professor Matsuda argues that the narrow dyadic focus of tort law perpetuates very real, and remediable, social harms. Using tort causation doctrine as her starting point, Professor Matsuda demonstrates how the tort system sacrifices human bodies to maintain the smooth flow of the economic system. Time after time, tragedies occur: school systems fail, first graders shoot each other, women live in constant fear of rape. Yet each tragedy is met with the same systematic response: those without resources, those least able to correct the harm, are considered the legal cause of the harm. The economic and corporate …

Mothers And Fathers Of Invention: The Intellectual Founders Of Adr, Carrie Menkel-Meadow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

When we think of the "founding" of the ADR movement (particularly, but not exclusively, in law), from when do we date it? Whom do we think of as our leaders? Many of us think of Frank Sander and the "multi-door courthouse" suggested by his famous paper, delivered at the Pound Conference on the Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice in 1976. For others, the publication of Roger Fisher and William Ury's "Getting to Yes," signaled an interest in a changed paradigm for engaging in legal negotiations. Some may associate ADR's nascency with early practical efforts to institutionalize …

Remarks, John H. Jackson

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The limits of international trade must be understood within the context of the institutional framework of the WTO, in particular, the decision-making and dispute settlement processes. The WTO dispute settlement rules are contained in the Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU), which is Annex 2 to the WTO agreement. The DSU includes some comments on the philosophy, the direction and the purposes of the dispute settlement procedures. Article 3.2 of the DSU has some very interesting phrases. One of those phrases (roughly paraphrased) says, ''None of the reports of the dispute settlement procedure should result in a change, addition, or subtraction from …

Willard Hurst And The Administrative State: From Williams To Wisconsin, Daniel R. Ernst

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article follows Willard Hurst from his undergraduate days at Williams College through the start of his teaching career at Wisconsin in the fall of 1937. During these years Hurst acquired an abiding interest in the rise of the administrative state as well as some of the insights he would use to account for it in his mature work. For the most part, the article proceeds chronologically through four episodes in Hurst's training: (1) his year-long study of Charles and Mary Beard's "Rise of American Civilization" undertaken as an undergraduate at Williams College; (2) his three years as a student …

Ensuring Able Representation For Publicly-Funded Criminal Defendants: Lessons From England, Peter W. Tague

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

While there are skilled private defense lawyers who enthusiastically represent indigent criminal defendants, too often defense lawyers whose income depends upon appointments provide deplorable representation. The problem is well known and pervasive. In addition to the blizzard of claims on appeal of ineffective representation, defenders' efforts have been savaged by judges and by fellow lawyers. These nagging problems persist: to induce private lawyers to represent their clients effectively by eliciting the defendant's story and managing their relationship in a way that at least does not displease the defendant; investigating his and the prosecution's positions; pressing the prosecution for discovery, for …

The "Normal" Successes And Failures Of Feminism And The Criminal Law, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

To write of feminist reform in the criminal law is to write of simultaneous success and failure. We have seen marked changes in the doctrines and the practice of rape law, domestic violence law, and the law of self-defense. There is not a criminal law casebook in America today, nor a state statute book, that does not tell this story. Yet for all of this success, we also live in a world in which reform seems to suffer routine failures. Many believe, for example, that feminist reforms have rid rape law of the resistance requirement; however, recent scholarship makes it …

The Value Of Dissent, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay reviews Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America by Steven H. Shiffrin (1999).

Theorizing about the freedom of speech has been a central enterprise of contemporary legal scholarship. The important contributions to the debate are simply far too numerous to categorize. One ambition of this theorizing is the production of a comprehensive theory of the freedom of expression, a set of consistent normative principles that would explain and justify First Amendment doctrine. Despite an outpouring of scholarly effort, the consensus is that free speech theory has failed to realize this imperial ambition. Rather than searching for the global …

Damage Control? A Comment On Professor Neuman’S Reading Of Reno V. Aadc, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This comment responds to an article by Professor Gerald Neuman on the Supreme Court's recent decision in Reno v. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (AADC). The Court in AADC rejected a selective prosecution claim by immigrants targeted for deportation based on First Amendment-protected activities, finding that Congress had stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction over such claims, and that in any event the Constitution does not recognize a selective prosecution objection to a deportation proceeding. Professor Neuman argues that the decision should not be read as implying that aliens have less First Amendment protection than citizens, and that the decision can …