Law Commons^™

Codifying Shari'a: International Norms, Legality & The Freedom To Invent New Forms, Paul H. Robinson, Adnan Zulfiqar, Margaret Kammerud, Michael Orchowski, Elizabeth A. Gerlach, Adam L. Pollock, Thomas M. O'Brien, John C. Lin, Tom Stenson, Negar Katirai, J. John Lee, Marc Aaron Melzer

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The United Nations Development Program and the Republic of the Maldives, a small Muslim country with a constitutional democracy, commissioned this project to craft the country's first system of codified penal law and sentencing guidelines. This Article describes the special challenges and opportunities encountered while drafting a penal code based on Shari'a (Islamic law). On the one hand, such comprehensive codification is more important and more likely to bring dramatic improvements in the quality of justice than in many other societies, due in large part to the problems of assuring fair notice and fair adjudication in the uncodified Shari'a-based system …

A Contractarian Argument Against The Death Penalty, Claire Oakes Finkelstein

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Opponents of the death penalty typically base their opposition on contingent features of its administration, arguing that the death penalty is applied discriminatory, that the innocent are sometimes executed, or that there is insufficient evidence of the death penalty’s deterrent efficacy. Implicit in these arguments is the suggestion that if these contingencies did not obtain, serious moral objections to the death penalty would be misplaced. In this Article, Professor Finkelstein argues that there are grounds for opposing the death penalty even in the absence of such contingent factors. She proceeds by arguing that neither of the two prevailing theories of …

Christianity And The (Modest) Rule Of Law, David A. Skeel Jr., William J. Stuntz

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Conservative Christians are often accused, justifiably, of trying to impose their moral views on the rest of the population: of trying to equate God's law with man's law. In this essay, we try to answer the question whether that equation is consistent with Christianity. It isn't. Christian doctrines of creation and the fall imply the basic protections associated with the rule of law. But the moral law as defined in the Sermon on the Mount is flatly inconsistent with those protections. The most plausible inference to draw from those two conclusions is that the moral law - God's law - …

The Next "New Wave": Law Genre Documentaries, Lawyering In Support Of The Creative Process, And Visual Legal Advocacy, Regina Austin

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Unlike law-related feature films, law-related documentary or nonfiction films have rarely been the subject of legal scholarship, nor have they been extensively used as teaching tools throughout the law school curriculum. The lack of interest in such films is explained by a number of popular misconceptions about documentaries, such as their “genre-lessness” or the lack of common threads running through the films that facilitate critical reception; the elusive nature of documentary truth; the films’ fixation on victimization and by necessity the exploitation of the films’ subjects; and the lack of practical payoff for law students and lawyers from critically studying …

The Future Of International Law Is Domestic (Or, The European Way Of Law), William W. Burke-White, Anne-Marie Slaughter

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No abstract provided.

The Consciousness Of Religion And The Consciousness Of Law, With Some Implications For Dialogue, Howard Lesnick

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No abstract provided.

Interview With Howard Gittis, Sahar Dar, Howard Gittis, Legal Oral History Project, University Of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Legal Oral History Project

For transcript, click the Download button above. For video index, click the link below.

Howard Gittis (L '58) was a partner at Wolff Block Solis Cohen and later vice chairman and a close adviser to Ronald Perelman at MacAndrews & Forbes. He served on the Temple University Board of Trustees for 27 years, including six years as chair. He died in 2007.

Choice, Consent, And Cycling: The Hidden Limitations Of Consent, Leo Katz

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Most legal scholars assume that if V consents to allow D to do something to him, such consent makes D's actions legally and morally acceptable. To be sure, they are willing to make an exception when consent is given under a specified list of conditions: Force, fraud, incompetence, third-party effects, unequal bargaining power, commodification, paternalism - all of these may be grounds for rejecting the validity of V's consent. We might call scholars who take this view of consent quasi-libertarians. In this Article, I argue against the quasi-libertarian view of consent. My central claim is that the validity of consent …

Hobbes And The Internal Point Of View, Claire Oakes Finkelstein

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No abstract provided.

Final Report Of The Maldivian Penal Law & Sentencing Codification Project: Text Of Draft Code (Volume 1) And Official Commentary (Volume 2), Paul H. Robinson, Criminal Law Research Group -- University Of Pennsylvania

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The United Nations Development Programme and the Government of the Maldives commissioned the drafting of a penal code based upon existing Maldivian law, which meant primarily a codification of Shari'a. This is the Final Report of that codification project. A description of the process that produced this Report and the drafting principles behind it, as well as a discussion of the special challenges of codifying Islamic criminal law, are contained in an article at http://ssrn.com/abstract=941443.

Introduction, Anita L. Allen

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No abstract provided.

The "Bad Man" Goes To Washington: The Effect Of Political Influence On Corporate Duty, Jill E. Fisch

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No abstract provided.

Hart On Social Rules And The Foundations Of Law: Liberating The Internal Point Of View, Stephen R. Perry

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No abstract provided.

Responsibilities Of Judges And Advocates In Civil And Common Law: Some Lingering Misconceptions Concerning Civil Lawsuits, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr., Angelo Dondi

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No abstract provided.

Preemption In The Rehnquist Court: A Preliminary Empirical Assessment, Michael S. Greve, Jonathan Klick

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The federal preemption of state law has emerged as a prominent field of study for legal scholars and political scientists. This rise to prominence of a technical and often dull field of jurisprudence is due to a number of developments-increasingly frequent federal statutory preemptions; the states' unprecedented aggressiveness in regulating business transactions, the expansion of corporate liability under state common law and the increased resort of corporate defendants to federal preemption defenses; and, not least, the Rehnquist Court's discovery of federalism and states' rights.

Unfortunately, the preemption debate has been marred by misperceptions and a lack of reliable data. Extravagant …

Rhetoric Of Disputes In The Courts, The Media, And The Legislature, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

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No abstract provided.

Government Regulation Of Irrationality: Moral And Cognitive Hazards, Jonathan Klick, Gregory Mitchell

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Behavioral law and economics scholars who advance paternalistic policy proposals typically employ static models of decision-making behavior, despite the dynamic effects of paternalistic policies. This Article considers how paternalistic policies fare under a dynamic account of decision making that incorporates learning and motivation effects. This approach brings out two important limitations on the efficiency effects of paternalistic regulations. First, if preferences and biases are endogenous to institutional forces, paternalistic government regulations may perpetuate and even magnify a given bias and cause other adverse psychological effects. Second, for some biases, it will be more efficient to invest resources in debiasing than …

Moralizing In Public, Anita L. Allen

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No abstract provided.

Restorative Processes & Doing Justice, Paul H. Robinson

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This essay argues that, while many restorative processes are quite valuable, there is the potential for their use to produce results that conflict with the community's shared intuitions of justice and to thereby undermine the criminal law's moral credibility. Because such moral credibility can have practical crime-control value, it ought not be undermined unless the crime-control benefits of doing so clearly outweigh the costs. In practice, it is entirely possible to rely upon restorative processes in ways that avoid injustice and that assure justice is done.

Alternative Career Resolution Ii: Changing The Tenure Of Supreme Court Justices, Stephen B. Burbank

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No abstract provided.

The Strange Career Of Jane Crow: Sex Segregation And The Transformation Of Anti-Discrimination Discourse, Serena Mayeri

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This article examines the causes and consequences of a transformation in anti-discrimination discourse between 1970 and 1977 that shapes our constitutional landscape to this day. Fears of cross-racial intimacy leading to interracial marriage galvanized many white Southerners to oppose school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, some commentators, politicians, and ordinary citizens proposed a solution: segregate the newly integrated schools by sex. When court-ordered desegregation became a reality in the late 1960s, a smattering of southern school districts implemented sex separation plans. As late as 1969, no one saw sex-segregated schools …

Mandatory Waiting Periods For Abortions And Female Mental Health, Jonathan Klick

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Proponents of laws requiring a waiting period before a woman can receive an abortion argue that these cooling off periods protect against rash decisions on the part of women in the event of unplanned pregnancies. Opponents claim, at best, waiting periods have no effect on decision-making and, at worst, they subject women to additional mental anguish and stress. In this article, I examine these competing claims using adult female suicide rates at the state level as a proxy for mental health. Panel data analyses suggest that the adoption of mandatory waiting periods reduce suicide rates by about 10 percent, and …

Aspirational Rights And The Two-Output Thesis, Mitchell N. Berman

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No abstract provided.

Addiction, Genetics, And Criminal Responsibility, Stephen J. Morse

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No abstract provided.