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Articles 1 - 30 of 86
Full-Text Articles in Law
International Trade And Developing Countries (Introduction), Steve Charnovitz
International Trade And Developing Countries (Introduction), Steve Charnovitz
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This article is an introduction to the Fordham International Law Journal, Volume 29, Number 2. The journal issue addresses the challenge of trade and developing countries. The most powerful countries have sound financial, political, environmental, and social reasons to promote sustainable economic growth throughout the world. Nevertheless, the policies used to do so have failed or have, in some instances, been designed in such a hypocritical way that they could not possibly succeed in their ostensible purposes. The issue offers a useful contribution to the debate about what works and does not work in promoting development.
Foster Children Awaiting Adoption Under The Adoption And Safe Families Act Of 1997, Catherine J. Ross
Foster Children Awaiting Adoption Under The Adoption And Safe Families Act Of 1997, Catherine J. Ross
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This article discusses the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 and how it relates to the rules created by constitutional law and federal legislation about shifting children between foster care and adoption. The article focuses on the 15/22 months rule, which provides that a state should pursue adoption for a child who has remained in foster care for fifteen of the preceding 22 months and encourages states to take action to implement the 15/22 months rule to comply with the Constitution and federal law, noting that many children in foster care will need pre-adoptive and adoptive homes.
Poor Children: Child Witches And Child Soldiers In Sub-Saharan Africa, Naomi R. Cahn
Poor Children: Child Witches And Child Soldiers In Sub-Saharan Africa, Naomi R. Cahn
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This paper, written for a symposium on The Mind of a Child, examines two different aspects of the accountability of children: those children who are thrown away by their families because they are sorcerers, and those children who become soldiers and, through their involvement in armed conflict, inflict violence and death on others, including children. Like all other children, both sets of children are especially vulnerable because of their developmental (im)maturity. Indeed, as policy-makers struggle to develop strategies for responding to the needs of these children, the new neuroscientific literature provides yet another basis for arguing that children must be …
Predictive Decisionmaking, Michael B. Abramowicz
Predictive Decisionmaking, Michael B. Abramowicz
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
In this Article, Professor Abramowicz identifies a regulatory strategy that he calls "predictive decisionmaking" and provides a framework for assessing it. In a predictive decisionmaking regime, public or private decisionmakers make predictions, often of future legal decisions, rather than engage in normative analysis. Several scholars, particularly in recent years, have offered proposals that fit within the predictive decisionmaking paradigm, but have not noted the connection among these proposals. The Article highlights five different mechanisms on which predictive decisionmaking regimes may rely, including predictive standards, enterprise liability, accuracy incentives, partial insurance requirements, and information markets. After identifying several advantages that predictive …
Vicious Dog Laws Unconstitutional In Ohio, Joan Schaffner, Barbara J. Gislason
Vicious Dog Laws Unconstitutional In Ohio, Joan Schaffner, Barbara J. Gislason
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
On March 3, 2006, an Ohio appeals court issued a landmark decision in City of Toledo v. Tellings, 2006 WL 513946 (Ohio App. 6 Dist), which may affect pit bulls and pit bull "look-a-likes" and their owners nationwide. Tellings was the owner of three pit bulls. The warden killed one of his pit bulls and criminally charged Tellings with two violations of the local Toledo ordinance limiting ownership to one vicious dog per household and two violations of the state statute requiring liability insurance with ownership of a vicious dog. The vicious dog laws on Ohio include pit bulls in …
Restoring (And Risking) Interest In International Law, Edward T. Swaine
Restoring (And Risking) Interest In International Law, Edward T. Swaine
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago Law School articulate a comprehensive and engaging theory of state behaviors in their new book, “The Limits of International Law,” but with several internal flaws. Their book uses rational choice theory to explain how states act rationally to maximize their interests, and how, in doing so, states align themselves (sometimes) with international law. This book review argues that while Limits is a skilled and pioneering work that deserves to be taken seriously, it also suffers from tensions and over-generalizations that undermine its claims. As a result, …
Coordination, Property & Intellectual Property: An Unconventional Approach To Anticompetitive Effects & Downstream Access, F. Scott Kieff
Coordination, Property & Intellectual Property: An Unconventional Approach To Anticompetitive Effects & Downstream Access, F. Scott Kieff
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Countless high profile cases like the recent patent litigation threatening to shut down the BlackBerry® service have long drawn sharp criticism; and in response, most of the intellectual property (IP) literature argues for the use of weaker, or liability rule, enforcement as a tool for solving the problems of anticompetitive effects and downstream access while still providing sufficient rewards to IP creators. This paper takes an unconventional approach under which rewards don't matter much, but coordination does matter a great deal. The paper shows how stronger, or property rule, enforcement facilitates the good type of coordination that increases competition and …
The Multistate Bar Exam As A Theory Of Law, Daniel J. Solove
The Multistate Bar Exam As A Theory Of Law, Daniel J. Solove
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
What if the Bar Exam were read as a work of jurisprudence? What is its theory of law? How does the Bar Exam compare to works of jurisprudence by H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, Karl Llewellyn, and others? This short tongue-in-cheek book review of the Bar Exam seeks to answer these questions. Each year, thousands of lawyers-to-be ponder over it, learning its profound teachings on the meaning of the law. They study it for months, devoting more time to it than practically any other jurisprudential text. It therefore comes as a great surprise that such a widely read and studied work …
Predictive Decisionmaking, Michael B. Abramowicz
Predictive Decisionmaking, Michael B. Abramowicz
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
In this Article, Professor Abramowicz identifies a regulatory strategy that he calls "predictive decisionmaking" and provides a framework for assessing it. In a predictive decisionmaking regime, public or private decisionmakers make predictions, often of future legal decisions, rather than engage in normative analysis. Several scholars, particularly in recent years, have offered proposals that fit within the predictive decisionmaking paradigm, but have not noted the connection among these proposals. The Article highlights five different mechanisms on which predictive decisionmaking regimes may rely, including predictive standards, enterprise liability, accuracy incentives, partial insurance requirements, and information markets. After identifying several advantages that predictive …
Rethinking Interest Representation In The European Union. Review Of Law, Legitimacy And European Governance: Functional Participation In Social Regulation, By Stijn Smismans, Francesca Bignami
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This article reviews the book, Law, Legitimacy, and European Governance: Functional Participation in Social Regulation, by Stijn Smismans. Law, Legitimacy, and European Governance is part of a movement to reinvent the Economic and Social Committee and the form of interest group politics that originated there—what Smismans calls “functional participation.” Smismans argues that functional participation can contribute to the legitimacy of the Economic and Social Committee and that the constitutional debates concerning the construction of a supranational European polity have largely neglected this European project. The book assesses the full range of European bodies that were originally created to represent economic …
Fear Of Democracy: A Cultural Evaluation Of Sunstein On Risk, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, Paul Slovic, John Gastil
Fear Of Democracy: A Cultural Evaluation Of Sunstein On Risk, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, Paul Slovic, John Gastil
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
What dynamics shape public risk perceptions? What significance should such perceptions have in the formation of risk regulation? In Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (2005), Cass Sunstein catalogs a variety of cognitive and social mechanisms that he argues inflate public estimations of various societal risks. To counter the impact of irrational public fears, he advocates delegation of authority to politically insulated experts using economic cost-benefit analysis. Missing from Sunstein's impressive account, however, is any attention to the impact of cultural cognition, the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that reflect and reinforce their cultural worldviews. Relying on …
Cultural Cognition And Public Policy, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan
Cultural Cognition And Public Policy, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
People disagree about the empirical dimensions of various public policy issues. It's not surprising that people have different beliefs about the deterrent effect of the death penalty, the impact of handgun ownership on crime, the significance of global warming, the public health consequences of promiscuous sex, etc. The mystery concerns the origins of such disagreement. Were either the indeterminacy of scientific evidence or the uneven dissemination of convincing data responsible, we would expect divergent beliefs on such issues to be distributed almost randomly across the population, and beliefs about seemingly unrelated questions (whether, say, the death penalty deters and whether …
Reserving, Edward T. Swaine
Reserving, Edward T. Swaine
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
The law of treaty reservations - which enables states to ask that their multilateral obligations be tailored to their individual preferences - has been controversial for over fifty years, and is at present subject to pitched battles within (and between) the International Law Commission and numerous other international institutions. There is broad agreement that existing scheme under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties involves a sharp tradeoff between honoring the unalloyed consent of non-reserving states (that is, those agreeing to the treaty as originally negotiated, which may object to proposed reservations) and respecting the conditioned consent of reserving …
Hail, No: Changing The Chief Justice, Edward T. Swaine
Hail, No: Changing The Chief Justice, Edward T. Swaine
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
How do we get a new chief justice? Traditionally, the President decides between nominating a newcomer and promoting a sitting associate justice, and places either nominee before the Senate for its advice and consent. But this is not constitutionally required, or at least not evidently so, and there is no better time to confront this fact. This short essay explains that Congress could develop a different mechanism for promoting justices without subjecting them to a second appointment - providing, for example, that the position would rotate among sitting justices based on seniority, or that the justices would elect a chief …
The Case Against Income Averaging, Neil H. Buchanan
The Case Against Income Averaging, Neil H. Buchanan
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Should tax liability be based on annual income or on the average of a taxpayer's income earned over the space of several years (or even a lifetime)? This article assesses proposals to replace the current method of computing taxes with a system that would allow taxpayers to smooth out their income tax liabilities by offsetting high-income years with low-income years. While the usual discussion of this issue revolves around supposed horizontal inequities, I show that it is not clear that the current system generates horizontal inequities at all; and even if it does, I suggest as a normative issue that …
Nongovernmental Organizations And International Law, Steve Charnovitz
Nongovernmental Organizations And International Law, Steve Charnovitz
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This article examines NGOs and their advocacy activities aimed at influencing international relations. The article addresses longstanding issues such as the legal status of NGOs, as well as new problems such as whether NGO lobbying in intergovernmental forums is democratically legitimate. In doing so, the article draws upon past scholarship to shed light on the guiding ideas in the contemporary debate regarding NGOs. Part I examines issues regarding the identity of NGOs and then catalogs the ways that state practice incorporates NGOs into authoritative decision making. Part II looks at the legal status of NGOs in international law. Part III …
The Corporate Lawyer And 'The Perjury Trilemma', Thomas D. Morgan
The Corporate Lawyer And 'The Perjury Trilemma', Thomas D. Morgan
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This paper extends Monroe Freedman's idea of the criminal lawyer's "perjury trilemma" to current issues faced by corporate lawyers dealing with perceived pressures on the attorney-client privilege. The duties of criminal defense and corporate lawyers are more similar than they often seem. Corporate lawyers' duties of honesty in dealing with third parties are closely analogous to criminal lawyers' duties of honesty in dealing with a court. Both sets of lawyers also have an important interest in fostering open communications with their clients. Where their situations differ is not with respect to lawyer obligations but with respect to their clients' rights. …
Linking Domestic Violence, Child Abuse, And Animal Cruelty, Joan Schaffner
Linking Domestic Violence, Child Abuse, And Animal Cruelty, Joan Schaffner
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
For years social science has demonstrated a link between animal abuse and human violence but the legal system has been slow to recognize this link. This article discusses the link among domestic violence, child abuse and animal abuse in the home and how one jurisdiction, the District of Columbia, is addressing this complex and integrated cycle of abuse as family abuse. The legal proposals include mandatory cross-reporting of abuse between child services and animal protection services, recognizing pet abuse with the intent of injuring a human family member as grounds for an intra-family abuse protective order, providing companion animal protection …
The Originalist's Dilemma, Peter J. Smith
The Originalist's Dilemma, Peter J. Smith
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
In response to Anti-Federalist complaints that the Constitution was dangerous because it was ambiguous, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton argued that judges would construe the Constitution in the same manner that they construed statutes, and in the process would fix the meaning of ambiguous constitutional provisions. In other words, the original understanding was that constitutional ambiguities would be resolved, among other means, through adjudication. During his lengthy tenure, Chief Justice John Marshall had ample occasion to fix constitutional meaning, and he presided over a Court that resolved many constitutional ambiguities according to a nationalistic view of the relationship between the …
The Common Law As An Iterative Process: A Preliminary Inquiry, Lawrence A. Cunningham
The Common Law As An Iterative Process: A Preliminary Inquiry, Lawrence A. Cunningham
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
The common law often is casually referred to as an iterative process without much attention given to the detailed attributes such processes exhibit. This Article explores this characterization, uncovering how common law as an iterative process is one of endless repetition that is simultaneously stable and dynamic, self-similar but evolving, complex yet simple. These attributes constrain the systemic significance of judicial discretion and also confirm the wisdom of traditional approaches to studying and learning law. As an iterative system, common law exhibits what physicists call sensitive dependence on initial conditions. This generates a path dependency from which it may be …
Public Law Values In A Privatized World, Laura T. Dickinson
Public Law Values In A Privatized World, Laura T. Dickinson
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Although domestic administrative law scholars have long debated privatization within the US, this debate has not confronted the growing phenomenon of privatization in the international realm or its impact on the values embodied in public international law. Yet, with both nation-states and international organizations increasingly privatizing foreign affairs functions, privatization is now as significant a phenomenon internationally as it is domestically. For example, states are turning to private actors to perform core military, foreign aid, and diplomatic functions. Military privatization entered the popular consciousness in 2004, when private contractors working for the US government abused detainees at Abu Ghraib prison …
Constructing A Bid Protest Process: Choices Every Procurement Challenge System Must Make, Daniel I. Gordon
Constructing A Bid Protest Process: Choices Every Procurement Challenge System Must Make, Daniel I. Gordon
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Many public procurement systems, within the United States and abroad, have established systems for allowing vendors to challenge the conduct of procurement processes. Providing an effective domestic review mechanism for vendors who believe that government procurement officials have not conducted an acquisition lawfully brings an important measure of transparency and accountability to public procurement systems. This brief article discusses the goals of these bid protest systems, and then presents key choices that must be made in crafting such a system. For example: Where in the government is the protest forum located? How broad is the forum's jurisdiction? Who has standing …
A Place At The Table: Creating Presence And Voice For Teenagers In Dependency Proceedings, Catherine J. Ross
A Place At The Table: Creating Presence And Voice For Teenagers In Dependency Proceedings, Catherine J. Ross
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This comment argues that lawyers for youth in foster care too often fail to include their clients in judicial hearings and that foster youth are entitled to appear at hearings where critical decisions affecting their lives will be made. The article reviews studies showing that foster children complain that they have little or no opportunity to be heard, and discusses the interplay between foster care and problems at school.
A Brief History Of Information Privacy Law, Daniel J. Solove
A Brief History Of Information Privacy Law, Daniel J. Solove
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This book chapter provides a brief history of information privacy law in the United States from colonial times to the present. It discusses the development of the common law torts, Fourth Amendment law, the constitutional right to information privacy, numerous federal statutes pertaining to privacy, electronic surveillance laws, and more. It explores how the law has emerged and changed in response to new technologies that have increased the collection, dissemination, and use of personal information.
Federalism And Faith, Ira C. Lupu, Robert W. Tuttle
Federalism And Faith, Ira C. Lupu, Robert W. Tuttle
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Should the U.S. constitution afford greater discretion to states than to the federal government in matters affecting religion? In recent years, a number of commentators have been asserting that the Establishment Clause should not apply to the states. Justice Thomas has embraced this view, while offering his own refinements to it. Moreover, the Supreme Court's decision in Locke v. Davey (2004) ruled that a state did not run afoul of the Free Exercise Clause when it refused to subsidize religious studies, in a context in which the Establishment Clause would have permitted the subsidy.
This paper offers a focused (re)consideration …
Filartiga’S Legacy In An Era Of Military Privatization, Laura T. Dickinson
Filartiga’S Legacy In An Era Of Military Privatization, Laura T. Dickinson
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Filartiga v. Pena-Irala established the idea that domestic tort suits might be brought under the Alien Tort Claims Act ("ATCA") against those accused of violating human rights norms. But what is the legacy of this case in an era of military privatization? Are there available legal responses to what we might call the privatization of torture? In the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where detainees were tortured and abused, the individuals involved in the torture included not only members of the military, but contractors hired from the private sector. Because U.S. constitutional scrutiny traditionally applies only to state actors, privatization …
The Rehnquist Court's Noninterference With The Guardians Of National Security, Gregory E. Maggs
The Rehnquist Court's Noninterference With The Guardians Of National Security, Gregory E. Maggs
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Based on an examination of the Rehnquist Court's national security cases decided between 1986 and 2005, this essay makes three claims. The first claim is that the Rehnquist Court generally did not interfere with the governmental units that serve as the guardians of national security. The Rehnquist Court almost always rejected challenges to governmental actions when the official responsible justified the actions based on the need to protect the United States from external threats. The second claim is that the Rehnquist Court's hands-off approach generally had favorable consequences. It promoted national security by leaving the subject to the governmental units …
Private Monitoring Of Gatekeepers: The Case Of Immigration Enforcement, Jeffrey Manns
Private Monitoring Of Gatekeepers: The Case Of Immigration Enforcement, Jeffrey Manns
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This article shows how the enlistment of private monitors can overcome the limits of public enforcers in overseeing gatekeeper compliance with liability-induced duties. Gatekeepers are private actors who possess skills or advantages that allow them to detect and prevent wrongdoing in a more cost-effective way than the state. The problem enforcers face is that the same skills or advantages that equip gatekeepers with the ability to identify wrongdoing often provide them with the means and incentives to subvert their duties and to evade public oversight. Policymakers have largely attempted to remedy this challenge by increasing sanctions against gatekeepers and have …
Voter Identification, Spencer A. Overton
Voter Identification, Spencer A. Overton
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
In the wake of closely contested elections, calls for laws that require voters to present photo identification as a condition to cast a ballot have become pervasive. Advocates tend to rely on two rhetorical devices: (1) anecdotes about a couple of elections tainted by voter fraud; and (2) common sense arguments that voters should produce photo identification because the cards are required to board airplanes, buy alcohol, and engage in other activities. This Article explains the analytical shortcomings of anecdote, analogy, and intuition, and applies a cost-benefit approach generally overlooked in election law scholarship. Rather than rushing to impose a …
Is It Sometimes Good To Run Budget Deficits? If So, Should We Admit It (Out Loud)?, Neil H. Buchanan
Is It Sometimes Good To Run Budget Deficits? If So, Should We Admit It (Out Loud)?, Neil H. Buchanan
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
There are bad deficits and there are good deficits. What makes a fiscal deficit good or bad depends on both the context in which the deficit is run and the reason that the deficit is rising. The belief that it is unquestionably foolish to adopt policies that directly or indirectly increase the government's annual borrowing on the financial markets - which is what it means to run a budget deficit - is not the universal truth that the current conventional wisdom might imply. Budget deficits are potentially dangerous and must be monitored carefully, but they are not always, inevitably, completely, …