Law Commons^™

Under Fire: The New Consensus On The Second Amendment, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Until the early 1980s the Second Amendment had received little attention or interest from legal scholars. In 1981 Northwestern University law professor Daniel D. Polsby ridiculed the individual rights view of the Amendment as "a lot of horsedung."

Research conducted through the 1980s has led legal scholars and historians to conclude, sometimes reluctantly, but with virtual unanimity, that there is no tenable textual or historical argument against a broad individual right view of the Second Amendment.

According to the broad individual right view, the right of the people to keep and bear arms is to be treated the same as …

Toward A "Due Foundation" For The Separation Of Powers: The Federalist Papers As Political Narrative, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

During the past quarter century, lawyers have become strangely comfortable with descriptions of our government's structure that would, to an untutored ear, speak contradiction. We are quite satisfied to say that governmental powers are separate and shared, departments distinct and overlapping, functions autonomous and interdependent. We have settled into these contradictions as we would a roomy chair: talking this way is no longer controversial but taken for granted, uttered with a knowing wink, perceived as the starting point of sophisticated analysis. A not "entirely separate," but "entirely free," set of departments is the only way we can think about the …

Getting Even: Restitution, Preventive Detention, And The Tort/Crime Distinction, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Preventive detention is in conflict with the standard account because it appears to justify the imprisonment of persons who have committed no crime, and who are therefore blameless, on the strength of a prediction that they will commit a crime in the future, thus undermining the legitimating conditions of the criminal law. The same objection can be made against imprisoning an offender longer than he "deserves" to be imprisoned on the basis of his "culpability" for the offense, solely on the ground that he may commit another offense in the future.

Understanding Constitutional War Powers Today: Why Methodology Matters, Jane E. Stromseth

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

With the Cold War over, Americans have grown more introspective about the role of the United States in global affairs. It could hardly be otherwise. America's rise to military preeminence, its overseas commitments and priorities, and its basic sense of international purpose all were forged by circumstances of the past fifty years that have changed dramatically. The Soviet threat is gone; once shaky allies in Europe and Asia are now comparatively stable and prosperous; the specter of cataclysmic nuclear war has receded while regional conflicts, ethnic strife, and humanitarian emergencies have moved to center stage. Although the world is no …

Can A 'Dumb Ass Woman' Achieve Equality In The Workplace? Running The Gauntlet Of Hostile Environment Harassing Speech, Deborah Epstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Sandra Bundy may have guessed that her new job with the District of Columbia Department of Corrections would be a challenge. What she may not have expected was that she would have to meet the challenge under very different conditions than those faced by her male coworkers. Ms. Bundy's work was continually interrupted by one of her supervisors, who kept calling her into his office and forcing her to listen to his theories about how women ride horses to obtain sexual gratification. He repeatedly asked Ms. Bundy to come home with him in order to view his collection of pictures …

Libertarianism With A Twist, Heidi Li Feldman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Review of SIMPLE RULES FOR A COMPLEX WORLD. By Richard A. Epstein. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1995. Pp. xiv, 361.

Codes And Virtues: Can Good Lawyers Be Good Ethical Deliberators?, Heidi Li Feldman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Regardless of its specific contents, any black letter statutory codification regulating lawyers' conduct will be flawed as an instrument of ethics for lawyers. This is the central thesis of this Article. It is motivated by the idea that typical statutory prohibitions and permissions are likely to stunt sentimental responsiveness, a key feature of good ethical deliberation. Additionally, a certain technocratic mode of legal analysis heightens this tendency. Although other styles of lawyering might better engender sentimental responsiveness, statutory codes of lawyers' ethics do not invite this style as readily as a welldeveloped common law of lawyers' ethics would.

The Trouble With The Adversary System In A Postmodern, Multicultural World, Carrie Menkel-Meadow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this Essay I suggest the heretical notion that the adversary system may no longer be the best method for our legal system to deal with all of the matters that come within its purview. If latetwentieth century learning has taught us anything, it is that truth is illusive, partial, interpretable, dependent on the characteristics of the knowers as well as the known, and, most importantly, complex. In short, there may be more than just two sides to every story. The binary nature of the adversary system and its particular methods and tactics often may thwart some of the essential …

Constitutional Fictions And Meritocratic Success Stories, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

L.H. LaRue demonstrates in his book, Constitutional Law as Fiction, that, at least in the realm of constitutional law, there is no simple correspondence between fiction and falsehood, or fact and truth. Partial or fictive accounts of our constitutional history, even when they are riddled with inaccuracies, may state deep truths about our world, and accurate recitations of historical events may be either intentionally or unintentionally misleading in the extreme. According to LaRue, the Supreme Court engages in a form of storytelling or myth-making that goes beyond the inevitably partial narratives of fact and precedent. The Supreme Court also tells …

Liability For Unreasonably And Unavoidably Unsafe Products: Does Negligence Doctrine Have A Role To Play, Joseph A. Page

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

To what extent, if any, should courts hold defendants liable for harm caused by hazards associated with the unduly and unavoidably dangerous aspects of goods they produce and market?

Where manufacturers might have eliminated unreasonable risks arising from the manufacture or design of a product, or from the information (or lack thereof) conveyed by a product's labeling, the tort system traditionally has provided injured victims with an opportunity to obtain compensation for injuries attributable to these risks. Moreover, even where risks from manufacturing or construction defects could not have been eliminated with the exercise of reasonable care, the courts have …

Don’T Gut Political Asylum, Philip G. Schrag

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For many years, the United States has granted political asylum to victims of persecution who come to our country and seek our protection. Now, however, Congress is on the verge of abolishing the right of political asylum.

Congress is not proposing to repeal the asylum provisions of the Refugee Act of 1980. An outright repeal would probably never pass, because many in Congress, recalling America's sorry treatment of refugees during the Holocaust, accept the humanitarian premises underlying asylum. Rather, the abolition is in the form of a new, apparently innocuous "procedural" requirement. The House Judiciary Committee recently adopted, as an …

Dual Regulation, Collaborative Management Or Layered Federalism: Can Cooperative Federalism Models From Other Laws Save Our Public Lands?, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Few would assert that the current governance model for managing the nation's public lands, which grants exclusive authority to the federal government, has protected the natural resource values of those lands or provided a framework for the harmonious resolution of conflicts over their use. Dissatisfaction is apparent from recurrent proposals to privatize public lands or to devolve their ownership to the states. The emergence of the "wise use" and "county supremacy" movements directly challenges the authority of the federal government to manage its land. While this new state and local assertiveness is not without historical basis nor completely without merit, …

The Death Of Reliance, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the mid-1970s, it was an article offaith that contract was not properly conceived as a means by which persons could, by their own choice, make law for themselves to govern their relations. Instead, contract was thought best conceived as the rectification of injuries persons may have caused by their verbal conduct in much the same way that persons have a duty to rectify the injuries caused by their physical acts. With contracts, these injuries consisted of detrimental reliance on the words of another. So conceived, both contract and tort duties are imposed by law, and do not arise from …

The Relevance Of The Framers’ Intent, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Ever since the revival of interest in originalism that occurred in the 1980s, critics have 'charged that for a variety of reasons it is impractical, if not impossible, to determine the Framers' intentions. In addition, they argue that we today should not be bound by the intentions of a few men who lived and died over two-hundred years ago. In sum, adherence to original intent is rejected as being impractical, unjust, or both.

In this article, the author argues that we cannot assess either the practicality or the justice of discerning original intent without first asking why it is we …

A Right To Read Anonymously: A Closer Look At "Copyright Management" In Cyberspace, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It has become commonplace to say that we have entered the age of information. The words conjure up images of a reader’s paradise—an era of limitless access to information resources and unlimited interpersonal communication. In truth, however, the new information age is turning out to be as much an age of information about readers as an age of information for readers. The same technologies that have made vast amounts of information accessible in digital form are enabling information providers to amass an unprecedented wealth of data about who their customers are and what they like to read. In the new …

The Independent Counsel Statute: Bad Law, Bad Policy, Julie R. O'Sullivan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Watergate scandal-and the crisis in public confidence in government it spawned-left us many legacies, one of which is the Independent Counsel ("IC") statute. Over twenty years after the fact, the "lessons" of the scandal itself continue to be the dominant reference. It is time to evaluate the "lessons" of Watergate's legacies and, in particular, the IC mechanism.

Beyond Autonomy: Coercion And Morality In Clinical Relationships, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article considers the problem of line-drawing between autonomy-preserving and autonomy-negating influence in clinical relationships. The author’s purpose is not to propose particular boundaries, either with respect to reproductive decisions by HIV-infected women or for other clinical choices. Rather, he attempts to shed some light on what drives our disputes about whether one or another influence method is compatible with autonomous choice.

The author argues that such disagreements reflect underlying conflicts between normative commitments, and that resolving these conflicts is essential to settling controversies over whether particular influences unduly interfere with autonomous choice. Alternative understandings of the prerequisites for autonomous …

Constructing A Clinic, Philip G. Schrag

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author addresses some basic structural questions that the clinic's supervisor or supervisors might think about when beginning to design or renovate a program. These include the goals of the proposed clinic; the number and qualifications of its teaching and support staff; the desired relationships among staff members; the subject matter of the clinic's cases; the duration of the clinic, the amount of course credit that students should receive for taking it, and the caseload per student; the grading system; the relationships between the students and the tribunals or other fora in which they will be practicing; how the clinic …

Foreword: Federalism And Anti-Federalism As Civil Rights Tools, Charles F. Abernathy

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The focus on Civil Rights and the Supreme Court 1994 Term in this issue of the Howard Law Journal has one relatively consistent underlying theme-the role of federalist and anti-federalist arguments in the formulation of civil rights policy. As you might expect, there is not much dispute among the authors about the proper goals of civil rights law, for virtually every author in this issue is in one sense or another a traditionalist on policy... What separates the authors is their instrumentalist arguments; that is, how they would accomplish their goals...Some are traditional federalists, supporting the federal role for civil …

Getting Normative: The Role Of Natural Rights In Constitutional Adjudication, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Property Rights - A Response To Carol M. Rose’S ‘Property As The Keystone Right?’, J. Peter Byrne

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Property as the Keystone Right?, Professor Carol Rose examines the claim that the protection of property is an important-indeed, the most important-right conferred by our constitutional order. Although the equality of property rights with other constitutionally protected rights occasionally has been questioned, such instances are far outweighed by instances of rhetorical insistence upon the bedrock nature of individual property rights for our constitutional and democratic order. With the recent collapse of statist economies in other parts of the world, and the attempted transformation of those economies into market-driven, capitalist systems, the American idea of constitutional protection of individual property …

Representing The Unrepresented In Class Action Settlements, Brian Wolfman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Class actions are important and useful both to deter wrongful conduct and to provide compensation for injured plaintiffs. In complex cases, however, the existing class action structure falters. In this article, Messrs. Wolfman and Morrison argue that in "settlement class actions" the current class action rules do not adequately protect class members whose interests do not coincide with those of the class representatives and the class attorneys. Through a survey of recent, prominent settlement class actions, the authors show that the current system does not fairly treat subgroups in a class with respect to matters as diverse as future injury, …