Law Commons^™

A Global Convention On Choice Of Court Agreements, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

This article reviews the work of the Special Commission of the Hague Conference on Private International Law, which meet during the first nine days of December 2003 to consider a Draft Text on Choice of Court Agreements. Negotiations originally sought a rather comprehensive convention on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments, with a preliminary draft convention being prepared in October 1999, and further revised at the first part of a Diplomatic Conference in June 2001. When it became clear that some countries, particularly the United States, could not agree to the convention being considered, negotiations were redirected at …

Courts As Forums For Protest, Jules Lobel

Articles

For almost half a century, scholars, judges and politicians have debated two competing models of the judiciary's role in a democratic society. The mainstream model views courts as arbiters of disputes between private individuals asserting particular rights. The reform upsurge of the 1960s and 1970s led many to argue that courts are not merely forums to settle private disputes, but can also be used as instruments of societal change. Academics termed the emerging model the hein"public law" or "institutional reform" model.

The ongoing debate between these two views of the judicial role has obscured a third model of the role …

A Thirteenth Amendment Framework For Combating Racial Profiling, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

Law enforcement officers’ use of race to single persons out for criminal suspicion (“racial profiling”) is the subject of much scrutiny and debate. This Article provides a new understanding of racial profiling. While scholars have correctly concluded that racial profiling should be considered a violation of the Fourth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, and existing federal statutes, this Article contends that the use of race as a proxy for criminality is also a badge and incident of slavery in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Racial profiling is not only a denial of the right to equal treatment, but …

Trust Me, I’M A Judge: Why Binding Judicial Notice Of Jurisdictional Facts Violates The Right To Jury Trial, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

The conventional model of criminal trials holds that the prosecution is required to prove every element of the offense beyond the jury's reasonable doubt. The American criminal justice system is premised on the right of the accused to have all facts relevant to his guilt or innocence decided by a jury of his peers. The role of the judge is seen as limited to deciding issues of law and facilitating the jury's fact-finding. Despite these principles,judges are reluctant to submit to the jury elements of the offense that the judge perceives to be . routine, uncontroversial or uncontested.

One such …

Politicizing The Crime Against Humanity: The French Example, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

The advantages of world adherence to universally acceptable standards of law and fundamental rights seemed apparent after the Second World War, as they had after the First. Their appeal seems ever greater and their advocates ever more persuasive today. The history of law provides evidence that caution may be in order, however, and that the human propensity to ignore what transpires under the surface of law threatens to dull and silence the ongoing self-examination and self-criticism required in perpetuity by the law if it is to be correlated with justice.

This Essay presents one side, the dark side, of the …

Preventive Detention: Prisoners, Suspected Terrorists And Permanent Emergency, Jules Lobel

Articles

Central to the United States government’s strategy after the September 11th attacks has been a shift from punishing unlawful conduct to pre-empting possible or potential dangers. This strategy threatens to undermine fundamental principles of both constitutional law and international law which prohibit certain government action based on mere suspicion or perceived threat. The law normally requires that the government wait until a person or nation has committed or is attempting to commit a criminal act before it may employ force in response. The dangers of a policy of preventive detention have been analyzed from a number of perspectives. Historians have …

The Mote In Thy Brother’S Eye: A Review Of Human Rights As Politics And Idolatry, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

Michael Ignatieffs provocatively titled collection of essays, Human Rights As Politics and Idolatry [hereinafter Human Rights], is a careful examination of the theoretical underpinnings and contradictions in the area of human rights. At bottom, both of his primary essays, Human Rights As Politics and Human Rights As Idolatry, make a claim that is perhaps contrary to the instincts of human rights thinkers and activists: namely, that international human rights can best be philosophically justified and effectively applied to the extent that they strive for minimal ism. Human rights activists generally argue for the opposite conclusion: that international human rights be …

The War On Terrorism And Civil Liberties, Jules Lobel

Articles

Throughout American history, we have grappled with the problem of balancing liberty versus security in times of war or national emergency. Our history is littered with sordid examples of the Constitution's silence during war or perceived national emergency. The Bush Administration’s War on Terror has once again forced a reckoning requiring Americans to balance liberty and national security in wartime. President Bush has stated, "[w]e believe in democracy and rule of law and the Constitution. But we're under attack.” President Bush, Attorney General Ashcroft and other governmental leaders have argued that in war, "the Constitution does not give foreign enemies …

Sovereignty: The State, The Individual, And The International Legal System In The Twenty First Century, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

This essay proposes that an understanding of original concepts of sovereignty both helps explain twentieth century developments in international law and provides a proper context for coming changes in the ways in which persons relate to states, states relate to states within the international legal system, and ultimately and most importantly-the way international law affects and applies to persons. The most important developments in international law in the new century are likely not to be in state-state relationships but rather in the status and rights of the person in international law. The twentieth century process of globalization brought us back …

Judicial Activism: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Arthur D. Hellman

Articles

No matter how judges are selected, sooner or later some unfortunate candidate will be labeled a "judicial activist." One has to wonder: Does the term have any identifiable core meaning? Or is it just an all-purpose term of opprobrium, reflecting whatever brand of judicial behavior the speaker regards as particularly pernicious? Implicit in this question are several important issues about the role of courts in our democratic society.

I take my definition from Judge Richard Posner, who describes activist decisions as those that expand judicial power over other branches of the national government or over state governments. Unlike other uses …

Competing Frameworks For Assessing Contemporary Holocaust-Era Claims, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

There are many angles from which to perceive the contemporary holocaust-era claims. In 1997, Time magazine quoted Elie Wiesel as saying that, [i]f all the money in all the Swiss banks were turned over, it would not bring back the life of one Jewish child. But the money is a symbol. It is part of the story. If you suppress any part of the story, it comes back later, with force and violence.

Wiesel touches on two perspectives: first, what has been described as litigating the holocaust, with all that that implies about the law's questionable capacity to adjudicate issues …

Corporate Governance Reform And The 'New' Corporate Social Responsibility, Douglas M. Branson

Articles

The history of corporate governance "reform" begins with Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means's "The Modern Corporation and Private Property," first published in 1932. That book posited the "separation of ownership from control," discussed in the first section of this essay.

The subsequent history of corporate governance reform has been the postulation, by academics and others, of solutions to problems posed by the separation of ownership from control.

One subset of proposed reforms, those of the 1970s, formed the "corporate social responsibility movement." During that era, reformers urged governmental intervention which, as a matter of general corporate law, would expand corporate …

Benign Hegemony? Kosovo And Article 2(4) Of The U.N. Charter, Jules Lobel

Articles

The 1999 U.S.-led, NATO-assisted air strike against Yugoslavia has been extolled by some as leading to the creation of a new rule of international law permitting nations to undertake forceful humanitarian intervention where the Security Council cannot act. This view posits the United States as a benevolent hegemon militarily intervening in certain circumstances in defense of such universal values as the protection of human rights. This article challenges that view. NATO's Kosovo intervention does not represent a benign hegemony introducing a new rule of international law. Rather, the United States, freed from Cold War competition with a rival superpower, is …

Recognizing Opportunistic Bias Crimes, Lu-In Wang

Articles

The federal approach to punishing bias-motivated crimes is more limited than the state approach. Though the federal and state methods overlap in some respects, two features of the federal approach restrict its range of application. First, federal law prohibits a narrower range of conduct than do most state bias crimes laws. In order to be punishable under federal law, bias-motivated conduct must either constitute a federal crime or interfere with a federally protected right or activity-requirements that exclude racially motivated assault, property damage and many other common violent or destructive bias offenses. In most states, however, hate crimes encompass a …

Getting It Right: Panel Error And The En Banc Process In The Ninth Circuit Court Of Appeals, Arthur D. Hellman

Articles

"Why are judges [who are] so good making so many errors?"

That question, posed at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 1999, nicely captures one of the principal arguments made in the Final Report of the Commission on Structural Alternatives for the Federal Courts of Appeals. The Commission, chaired by retired Supreme Court Justice Byron White, recommended that Congress divide the existing Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals into three "adjudicative divisions," each of which would operate almost as an independent appellate court. Restructuring is necessary, the Commission said, because "the law-declaring function of appellate courts requires groups …

Pharmacists, Physician-Assisted Suicide, And Pain Control, Alan Meisel

Articles

One of the unintended consequences of the decade-old public debate about the legalization of physician-assisted suicide is an increased interest in pain control for terminally ill patients. Pain control and other aspects of palliative care are seen not only as medically desirable but as necessary to assure so as to minimize the pressure to legalize physician-assisted suicide or utilize physician-assisted suicide even if not legal. Most of the public debate has centered on the role of physicians in assisted suicide.

However, there has been very little discussion about the role that health care professionals - - other than physicians -- …

Managed Care, Autonomy, And Decision-Making At The End-Of-Life, Alan Meisel

Articles

Some argue that legalizing physician-assisted suicide poses intolerable risks, especially as we move from a system of fee-for-service health care to managed care. Although we need to be concerned about physician-assisted suicide in the context of managed care, physician-assisted suicide poses risks in a fee-for-service system too. In addition, we need to be concerned about the risks posed not only by physician-assisted suicide but also by the well-accepted practice of forgoing life-sustaining treatment. Instead of focusing on the manner of hastening death or the type of health care system, we need to show more concern for protections to assure that …

Car Wars: The Fourth Amendment's Death On The Highway, David A. Harris

Articles

In just the past few terms, the Supreme Court has issued several decisions that have increased police discretion to stop and question drivers and passengers and search both these persons and their vehicles. These cases are only the latest in a line that has slowly but surely made it ever easier for police to do these things without being concerned with procedural or constitutional obstacles.

This article traces the history of those cases, and argues that, however much protection the Fourth Amendment might accord to an ordinary citizen in his or her home or even walking down the street, it …

Error Correction, Lawmaking, And The Supreme Court’S Exercise Of Discretionary Review, Arthur D. Hellman

Articles

Controversies involving the United States Supreme Court generally center on the content of Court’s decisions, but in recent years, much attention has focused on the Court’s processes – in particular, two very different aspects of the Court’s modes of doing business. At one end of the spectrum, the number of cases receiving plenary consideration – full briefing, oral argument, and (almost invariably) a signed opinion – has shrunk to levels lower than any since the Civil War. At the other end, the Court has effectively resolved many high-profile disputes through unexplained orders granting or denying emergency relief in cases in …

The Business Of The Supreme Court Under The Judiciary Act Of 1925: The Plenary Docket In The 1970'S, Arthur D. Hellman

Articles

During the last decade, the Supreme Court has been deciding 65 to 70 cases a Term after oral argument. That represents a sharp decline from the 1970s and 1980s, the era of the Burger Court, when the Court was deciding about 150 cases a Term. The Burger Court’s docket, in turn, reflected a shift from the 1960s, when the docket was smaller. In short, what is “normal” for the plenary docket varies from one era to another. The period of the Burger Court retains a special interest in that regard because that was the only period after World War II …

Political Surveillance And The Fourth Amendment, Alan Meisel

Articles

The United States District Court case has left the scope of the warrant protection of the fourth amendment considerably clearer and broader. The door left ajar in Katz has been firmly fastened shut by the Court leaving only the traditional exceptions to the warrant requirement, which are based upon practical necessity, and the still unconfronted question of the power of the executive to conduct warrantless surveillances of foreign agents in national security cases." It is also clear that courts are no less competent to evaluate the appropriateness of a search and seizure in an internal security case than in a …