Law Commons^™

Planned Obsolescence: The Supreme Court And Partisan Redistricting, Ethan Schafer

Honors Projects

Partisan redistricting, more commonly known as gerrymandering, is the act of a political party in power using its majority to draw district maps in such a way that it stays in power or increases its power. The United States Census takes place every ten years as mandated by Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, when the maps for state and national Congress are redrawn to better allocate representation among the people. Examples of this include the two cases that are discussed in Rucho v Common Cause, the redistricting case from 2019. In this case, both the Democrat-controlled government …

Geopolitics And The Digital Domain: How Cyberspace Is Impacting International Security, Georgia Wood

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The digital domain is the emerging environment for which the internet and data connectivity exists. This new domain is challenging the traditional place for geopolitics to exist, and creating new challenges to international relations. The use of cyberweapons through direct cyberattacks, such as the possibility of an attack on the U.S. power grid, or misinformation campaigns, such as the one launched by Russia against the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, can expand the international threat landscape. While these new threats increase, states are widely not prepared to address the new challenges in the digital domain. This paper will use three primary …

North Korean Refugees Along The Route To Freedom: Challenges Of Geopolitics, Deborah Da Sol Jeong

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This Independent Study Project conducts an analysis of the North Korean Refugee Crisis by following the refugees along their escape route from the North Korean regime. By following a common escape route that includes China, Laos, Thailand, and finally, South Korea, this study unpacks the geopolitical factors and diplomatic relations that hinder and improve the progress of these refugees. Afterward, this study analyzes the resettlement process that North Korean refugees undergo in South Korea and the challenges that remain even after gaining South Korean citizenship. Finally, this project concludes by suggesting that the international community actively endeavor to establish a …

Morocco’S Leadership: Assessing The Relationship Between The State And Non-Governmental Organizations Working On Migration Affairs, Adriana Nadyieli González Ortiz

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The history of Moroccan Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) is almost as long as the country’s history with migration. After Morocco's record as a sending country, its unique location attracted an increasing flow of migrants from the rest of Africa to transit the territory in hopes of crossing over to Europe. More recently, tighter border securitization has resulted in notable numbers of migrants permanently settling in Morocco. Significant changes in migration policy have both prompted and resulted from this progression. And simultaneously, national NGOs have strengthened their role as protagonist advocates for migrants’ rights as well as foremost providers of target-diverse support …

The Political Development Of Capital Punishment In The Modern Moroccan State, Mia Barr

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The modern Moroccan state seen today is very young. Having only been independent from France since 1956, the country has spent the last sixty-four years crafting its post-colonial statehood. What has emerged is a hybrid political system with powers split, however unequally, between the King and his inner circle, known as the makhzen, and the Parliament. Not only is the monarchy constitutional—meaning that its legitimacy is literally written into the primary governing document of Morocco, which had its last referendum in 2011—but it is also self-sustaining and self-legitimizing, for the monarchy uses its constitutional powers to grant itself further powers …

Reentry Court Judges: The Key To The Court, Christopher Salvatore, Venezia Michalsen, Caitlin Taylor

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Over the last few decades, treatment-oriented court judges have moved away from being neutral arbitrators in an adversarial court process to treatment facilitators. In the problem-solving court model, judges are part of a more therapeutic treatment process with program participants and a courtroom workgroup. The shift from the use of the traditional criminal justice process toward the use of more treatment-oriented models for some populations highlights the need to systematically document key elements of treatment court models. In particular, it is important to clearly document the role of Reentry Court Judges because they are a key component of the Reentry …

George W. Bush, Policy Selling And Agenda-Setting After 9/11, Gabriel Rubin

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

George W. Bush successfully set the agenda for an expansive, global war against terrorists after the 9/11 attacks. This agenda was not inevitable, it arose from an interpretation of events and of America’s adversaries that leaned on global conflict, cultural differences, and the presumption of evil intent. Bush’s speech-making successfully led to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, civil liberty-reducing legislation, and a large institutional edifice dedicated to counterterrorism. The themes Bush’s speeches evoked and the agendas and policies that these speeches set are covered in this chapter.

How Can Presidents Properly Calibrate The Terror Threat?, Gabriel Rubin

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Presidential rhetoric has minimally changed from the narrative set by George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks. Bush’s policies and agenda have also largely remained. This chapter provides proposals for change given the empirical and theoretical findings made in the book. The counterterrorist policy agenda needs to be narrowed and made more precise. The public needs to educate itself about the terror threat to understand that it is not a significant risk when weighed against others. Presidents need to be more careful with what words they use when describing America’s terrorist adversaries and with who they call terrorists. Recalibrating the …

Barack Obama: From An End To Terror To Drone Wars And Isis, Gabriel Rubin

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Barack Obama attempted to recalibrate presidential rhetoric on the terror threat. He made far fewer speeches about terrorism than George W. Bush did. Yet, despite some efforts to the contrary, he continued many of Bush’s policies—and in the case of targeted assassinations using drones (unmanned aerial vehicles), went further than Bush. The analysis of Obama’s rhetoric on terrorism shows a president who both wants to distance himself from his predecessor and one who wants to be seen as tough on terrorism. In the final analysis, Obama’s rhetoric and policies hewed rather closely to George W. Bush’s. This chapter raises questions …

Crimmigrant Nations: Resurgent Nationalism And The Closing Of Borders [Table Of Contents], Robert Koulish, Martje Van Der Woude

Law

As the distinction between domestic and international is increasingly blurred along with the line between internal and external borders, migrants—particularly people of color—have become emblematic of the hybrid threat both to national security and sovereignty and to safety and order inside the state. From building walls and fences, overcrowding detention facilities, and beefing up border policing and border controls, a new narrative has arrived that has migrants assume the risk for government sponsored degradation, misery, and death. Crimmigrant Nationsexamines the parallel rise of anti-immigrant sentiment and right-wing populism in both the United States and Europe to offer an unprecedented …

Law Library Blog (March 2020): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Testing For Negative Spillovers: Is Promoting Human Rights Really Part Of The “Problem”?, Anton Strezhnev, Judith G. Kelley, Beth A. Simmons

All Faculty Scholarship

The international community often seeks to promote political reforms in recalcitrant states. Recently, some scholars have argued that, rather than helping, international law and advocacy create new problems because they have negative spillovers that increase rights violations. We review three mechanisms for such spillovers: backlash, trade-offs, and counteraction and concentrate on the last of these. Some researchers assert that governments sometimes “counteract” international human rights pressures by strategically substituting violations in adjacent areas that are either not targeted or are harder to monitor. However, most such research shows only that both outcomes correlate with an intervention—the targeted positively and the …

Do We Intend To Keep Our Republic?, John M. Greabe

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] Commentators recently have reminded us of a famous statement Benjamin Franklin allegedly made upon exiting Independence Hall on the final day of the 1787 Constitutional Convention. When asked whether the proposed Constitution would establish a monarchy or a republic, Franklin supposedly answered: "A republic, if you can keep it."

The anecdote, which both inspired the title of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch's recent book and was recounted by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi when she announced the impeachment inquiry into the conduct of the president, reminds us that our republican form of government is not to be taken …

The Proof Is In The Process: Self-Reporting Under International Human Rights Treaties, Cosette D. Creamer, Beth A. Simmons

All Faculty Scholarship

Recent research has shown that state reporting to human rights monitoring bodies is associated with improvements in rights practices, calling into question earlier claims that self-reporting is inconsequential. Yet little work has been done to explore the theoretical mechanisms that plausibly account for this association. This Article systematically documents—across treaties, countries, and years—four mechanisms through which reporting can contribute to human rights improvements: elite socialization, learning and capacity building, domestic mobilization, and law development. These mechanisms have implications for the future of human rights treaty monitoring.

Amid The Covid-19 Outbreak, What Can Singapore Expect In Budget 2020, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The Covid-19 outbreak has placed significant and urgent demands on Budget 2020 that will be unveiled on Tuesday (Feb 18). The Government has given a strong affirmation that the Budget will be equal to the task and that it will reinforce the “never fear” spirit that Singapore and Singaporeans will need to adopt to come out stronger of this challenging period.

The Congressional Review Act (Cra): Frequently Asked Questions, United States Congressional Research Service

U.S. House of Representatives Documents

Summary

The Congressional Review Act (CRA) is an oversight tool that Congress may use to overturn rules issued by federal agencies. The CRA was included as part of the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA), which was signed into law on March 29, 1996. The CRA requires agencies to report on their rulemaking activities to Congress and provides Congress with a special set of procedures under which to consider legislation to overturn those rules.

Under the CRA, before a rule can take effect, an agency must submit a report to each house of Congress and the comptroller general containing …

Congressional Committee Resources On Space Policy During The 115th Congress (2017-2018): Providing Context And Insight Into U.S. Government Space Policy, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Article 1 of the US Constitution assigns the US Congress numerous responsibilities. These include creating new laws, revising existing laws, funding government programs, and conducting oversight of these programs' performance. Oversight of US Government agency space policy programs is executed by various congressional space policy committees, including the House and Senate Science Committees, Armed Services, and Appropriations Committees. These committees conduct many public hearings on space policy which invite witnesses to testify on US space policy programs and feature debate on the strengths and weaknesses of these programs. Documentation produced by these committees is widely available to the public, except …

Recognition And Positive Freedom, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

A number of well-known Hegel-inspired theorists have recently defended a distinctive type of social freedom that, while bearing some resemblance to Isaiah Berlin’s famous description of positive freedom, takes its bearings from a theory of social recognition rather than a theory of moral self-determination. Berlin himself argued that recognition-based theories of freedom are really not about freedom at all (negatively or positively construed) but about solidarity, More strongly, he argued that recognition-based theories of freedom, like most accounts of solidarity, oppose what Kant originally understood to be the essence of positive freedom, namely the setting of volitional ends in accordance …

Development On A Cracked Foundation: How The Incomplete Nature Of New Deal Labor Reform Presaged Its Ultimate Decline, Leo E. Strine Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Margaret Levi, and Barry R. Weingast’s excellent essay, Twentieth Century America as a Developing Country, Conflict, Institutional Change and the Evolution of Public Law, celebrates the period during which the National Labor Relations Act facilitated the peaceful resolution of labor disputes and improved the working conditions of American workers. These distinguished authors make a strong case for the essentiality of law in regulating labor relations and the importance of national culture in providing a solid context for the emergence of legal regimes facilitating economic growth and equality. This reply to their essay explores how the New Deal’s failure …

Partisan Voting On The California Supreme Court, Mark P. Gergen, David A. Carrillo, Benjamin M. Chen, Kevin M. Quinn

Faculty Articles

When did ideology become the major fault line of the California Supreme Court? To answer this question, we use a two-parameter item response theory (IRT) model to identify voting patterns in non-unanimous decisions by California Supreme Court justices from 1910 to 2011. The model shows that voting on the court became polarized on recognizably partisan lines beginning in the mid-1900s. Justices usually did not vote in a pattern that matched their political reputations and party affiliation during the first half of the century. This began to change in the 1950s. After 1959 the dominant voting pattern is partisan and closely …

Modern Peace Keeping In Africa: Lessons From Nigeria, Solomon Hailu

College of Arts and Cultural Studies Faculty Research and Scholarship

Solomon Hailu, "Modern Peace Keeping in Africa: Lessons from Nigeria," The Journal of African Policy Studies, Volume 26 No. I, 2020, pp. 69-86

Different approaches to conflict resolution and peacekeeping in African failed states have taken the centre stage of this analysis. These approaches are based not merely on theory or doctrine but on the self-perceived interests of the stakeholders in peacekeeping inside Africa. The Western powers have repeatedly expressed the view that they will not commit their armed forces to resolve African conflicts. The West's desire to place responsibility on African states, rather than sharing it, will not bring …

Keeping Faith With Nomos, Steven L. Winter

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Reflections On The Effects Of Federalism On Opioid Policy, Matthew B. Lawrence

Faculty Articles

One thing we have seen today that we talk about in health law all the time is how the policy, the laws and institutions up at the 10,000 foot level, can so dramatically influence the personal, people’s lived experiences. Our speakers today have done a really great job of drawing out abstract institutional questions and also showing us how those questions have influenced the lives of real people in often tragic ways. Another thing we have seen that we talk about in administrative law all the time is the importance of expertise, especially given how hard it is to trace …

From The Legal Literature: Criminalizing Propaganda: J. Remy Green’S Argument To Digitize Brandenburg, Francesca Laguardia

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

From The Legal Literature: Automating Police, Francesca Laguardia

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

For-Profit Managers As Public Fiduciaries: A Neo-Classical Republican Perspective, Rob Atkinson

Scholarly Publications

This Article examines the fiduciary duties of for-profit managers in modern liberal society. To arrive at the right "mix" of these duties, it compares the fiduciary duties implied by a standard descriptive model of our society with two competing normative models: Lockean libertarianism on the "right" and neo-classical republicanism on the "left." This comparison shows that all three versions of liberalism, even the one with a Lockean nightwatchman state, require far more extensive duties than we now expect, including a professionalization of management itself. And it shows that the version of liberalism with the most expansive state, neo-classical republicanism, requires …

Conclusion: Law As Scapegoat, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Populist nationalist movements have been on the rise around the world in recent years. These movements have tapped into, and fueled, a deep anger among many members of the public. Especially in the face of stagnant or declining economic prospects—as well as expanding inequality—much anger has been directed at minorities and migrants. Politicians with authoritarian tendencies have sought to leverage such public anger by reinforcing tendencies to scapegoat others for their society’s problems. In this paper, I show that laws and regulations—like migrants—can be framed as “the other” too and made into scapegoats. With reference to developments in Brazil, the …

Rejoining Treaties, Jean Galbraith

All Faculty Scholarship

Historical practice supports the conclusion that the President can unilaterally withdraw the United States from treaties which an earlier President joined with the advice and consent of two-thirds of the Senate, at least as long as this withdrawal is consistent with international law. This Article considers a further question that to date is deeply underexplored. This is: does the original Senate resolution of advice and consent to a treaty remain effective even after a President has withdrawn the United States from a treaty? I argue that the answer to this question is yes, except in certain limited circumstances. This answer …

Divided By The Sermon On The Mount, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

This Essay, written for a festschrift for Bob Cochran, argues that the much-discussed friction between evangelical supporters of President Trump and evangelical critics is a symptom of a much deeper theological divide over the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus told his disciples to turn the other cheek when struck, love their neighbor as themselves, and pray that their debts will be forgiven as they forgive their debtors. Divergent interpretations of these teachings have given rise to competing evangelical visions of justice. One side of today’s divide—the religious right—can be traced directly back to the fundamentalist critics of the early …

Politics, Identity, And Class Certification On The U.S. Courts Of Appeals, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article draws on novel data and presents the results of the first empirical analysis of how potentially salient characteristics of Court of Appeals judges influence class certification under Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. We find that the ideological composition of the panel (measured by the party of the appointing president) has a very strong association with certification outcomes, with all-Democratic panels having dramatically higher rates of procertification outcomes than all-Republican panels—nearly triple in about the past twenty years. We also find that the presence of one African American on a panel, and the presence of …