Law Commons^™

Judicial Review And United States Supreme Court Citations To Foreign And International Law, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

Recent decisions by the United States Supreme Court and extracurricular discussions between some of the Justices have fueled a debate regarding whether and when it is appropriate for the Court to make reference to foreign law in cases involving the interpretation and application of the United States Constitution. This debate has, to some extent, paralleled the argument over whether the Constitution is best interpreted by looking at the intent of the original drafters - an originalist approach - or by considering it to be a "living" document that must be interpreted to take account of contemporary realities. This article considers …

Sending The Bureaucracy To War, Elena Baylis, David Zaring

Articles

Administrative law has been transformed after 9/11, much to its detriment. Since then, the government has mobilized almost every part of the civil bureaucracy to fight terrorism, including agencies that have no obvious expertise in that task. The vast majority of these bureaucratic initiatives suffer from predictable, persistent, and probably intractable problems - problems that contemporary legal scholars tend to ignore, even though they are central to the work of the writers who created and framed the discipline of administrative law.

We analyze these problems through a survey of four administrative initiatives that exemplify the project of sending bureaucrats to …

Parallel Courts In Post-Conflict Kosovo, Elena Baylis

Articles

Even as American attention is focused on Iraq's struggle to rebuild its political and legal systems in the face of violent sectarian divisions, another fractured society - Kosovo - has begun negotiations to resolve the question of its political independence. Kosovo's efforts to establish multi-ethnic rule of law in the context of persistent ethnic divisions offer lessons in transitional justice and in managing legal pluralism for Iraq and other states.

In Kosovo today, two parallel judicial systems each claim sole jurisdiction over the province. One system was established by the United Nations administration in Kosovo, while the other system is …

Muhammad's Social Justice Or Muslim Cant?: Langdellianism And The Failures Of Islamic Finance, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

Though it is advertised and promoted as the bulwark of an alternative economic system based on populist Muslim notions of social justice and fairness, Islamic finance as a practice has failed to meet these objectives. The causes of that failure and the question of whether alternative approaches are possible are the subject of this Article.

The failure of Islamic finance to provide that which it promotes is the direct consequence of the application of an Islamic logic driven interpretive system through which rules are derived, which its adherents claim was formalized and systematized by the early jurist Muhammad Ibn Idris …

Zapata Retold: Attorneys' Fees Are (Still) Not Governed By The Cisg, Harry Flechtner, Joseph Lookofsky

Articles

In this work, the authors reiterate and expand on their conclusion that the question of reimbursement for attorney fees incurred in the course of litigating a claim under the United Nations Sales Convention (CISG) is beyond the scope of the CISG, and is governed by domestic law. As discussed in the paper, this conclusion is in line with a recent CISG Advisory Council Opinion (Advisory Council Opinion No. 6) dealing with the calculation of damages under Article 74 of the CISG. We argue that relegating to domestic law the question of recovering attorney fees incurred during litigation over a CISG …