Law Commons^™

Why Didn't The Common Law Follow The Flag?, Christian Burset

Journal Articles

This Article considers a puzzle about how different kinds of law came to be distributed around the world. The legal systems of some European colonies largely reflected the laws of the colonizer. Other colonies exhibited a greater degree of legal pluralism, in which the state administered a mix of different legal systems. Conventional explanations for this variation look to the extent of European settlement: where colonizers settled in large numbers, they chose to bring their own laws; otherwise, they preferred to retain preexisting ones. This Article challenges that assumption by offering a new account of how and why the British …

White Paper: Options For A Treaty On Business And Human Rights, Douglass Cassel, Anita Ramasastry

Journal Articles

The United Nations Human Rights Council decided in June 2014 to establish an Intergovernmental Working Group to “elaborate an international legally binding instrument to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises.” The first meeting of the Working Group will take place in Geneva in July 2015.

The Council did not further specify what sort of instrument should be drafted. The Center for Human Rights of the American Bar Association and the Law Society of England and Wales have asked the present authors to prepare a “White Paper” on possible options for a …

In Search Of A Theory For Constitutional Comparativism, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

Constitutional comparativism - the notion that international and foreign material should be used to interpret the U.S. Constitution - is gaining currency. Yet proponents of this practice rarely offer a firm theoretical justification for the practice. This Article contends that constitutional comparativism should be examined from the perspective of constitutional theory. The use of comparative and international material must be deemed appropriate or inappropriate based on a particular judge's interpretive mode of constitutional analysis. The Article presents four classic constitutional theories - originalism, natural law, majoritarianism, and pragmatism - and addresses the propriety of constitutional comparativism under each theory. This …

Misusing International Sources To Interpret The Constituion, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

This article addresses the trend toward using international sources to interpret the Constitution. While recognizing that international sources may be appropriately used as persuasive authority in certain types of constitutional analysis, this article argues that such reliance is inappropriate if done improperly. There are four misuses of international sources that serve as the focus of the article.

The first misuse of international sources - particularly evident in death penalty litigation - occurs when the global opinions of humankind are ascribed constitutional value to thwart the domestic opinions of Americans. The article suggests that international norms cannot be internalized within our …

A Comparative Constitutional Law Canon, Donald P. Kommers, John E. Finn

Journal Articles

The article discusses what types of legal cases constitute a “canon” on American constitutional theory and comparative constitutional law, examples of case law that illustrate important developments in the two subjects. It describes the process taken by the article's authors to select a small sampling of 90 “canon” cases for their course book on American constitutional law, which is designed for the academic community and for undergraduate students enrolled in a traditional liberal arts curriculum.

Uses And Misuses Of Comparative Law In International Human Rights: Some Reflections On The Jurisprudence Of The European Court Of Human Rights, Paolo G. Carozza

Journal Articles

Virtually all of Mary Ann Glendon's work can be seen as part of a persistent effort to open some windows in the edifice of American law and allow cross-currents of foreign experience to blow fresh insight into the rooms of our republic. In her critique of contemporary strains of rights discourse in the United States, she makes the case against American insularity quite directly: "In closing our own eyes and ears to the development of rights ideas elsewhere, our most grievous loss is ... the kind of assistance ... that can be gained from observing the successes and failures of …

Continuity And Rupture In "New Approaches To Comparative Law", Paolo G. Carozza

Journal Articles

In the course of this conference on "new approaches to comparative law;" it has struck me as curious that so little has been said about the "old" approaches to comparative law. In such a self-conscious effort to distinguish ourselves from our predecessors, one would expect at least some articulation of distinctive criteria, if not a full-fledged manifesto of novelty. Giinter Frankenberg gave us three ideal-type identities of the comparative lawyer; David Kennedy boxed up the old approaches in his taxonomical chart. They and others have referred to the expansion of capitalist market economics and liberal democratic political structures as the …

Organic Goods: Legal Understandings Of Work, Parenthood, And Gender Equality In Comparative Perspective, Paolo G. Carozza

Journal Articles

The United States and Italy have taken quite different approaches toward providing legal protections for working parents. This Article uses a comparative perspective to highlight crucial aspects of the American legal and cultural attitudes towards parental leave. The author demonstrates how deeply rooted beliefs about equality, work, and family life have influenced the development of parental leave law. In particular, the Article describes how Italian law rests on notions of fundamental social equality, as well as on views concerning the importance of the interests of children and the family. As a result of this broad conception of the interests involved, …

The Value Of Comparative Constitutional Law, Donald P. Kommers

Journal Articles

The publication of an English translation of a notable decision by a major foreign tribunal' is a fitting occasion on which to discuss the value of comparative constitutional law as a subject of academic study and as a legal discipline of valid current applicability. When referring to comparative constitutional law, I am speaking mainly of case law and most particularly of judicial decisions handed down by national tribunals empowered to review the constitutionality of legislative and executive acts.