Law Commons^™

On Becoming ‘Professor’: A Semi-Serious Look In The Mirror, Ezra Rosser

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The author offers a brief parody article about law reviews, socio-economic class, cheese, and the legal professoriate.

History And Action: The Inter-American Human Rights System And The Role Of The Inter-American Commission On Human Rights, Robert K. Goldman

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article examines the historical origins of the Inter-American human rights system and key achievements of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights over the past fifty years. The article also focuses on various notable activities and achievements of the Commission during three discreet periods between 1960 and 2004. It explores the Commission’s use of on-site visits and country reports to expose human rights violations of military governments during the 1970s and its increased use of the case system since the restoration of democratic rule in the 1990s. The article notes how key themes and shifts in US foreign policy, from …

The Limits Of Advocacy, Amanda Frost

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Party control over case presentation is regularly cited as a defining characteristic of the American adversarial system. Accordingly, American judges are strongly discouraged from engaging in so-called “issue creation”—that is, raising legal claims and arguments that the parties have overlooked or ignored—on the ground that doing so is antithetical to an adversarial legal culture that values litigant autonomy and prohibits agenda setting by judges. And yet, despite the rhetoric, federal judges regularly inject new legal issues into ongoing cases. Landmark Supreme Court decisions such as Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938), and Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. …

Experiential Education And The Rule Of Law: Teaching Values Through Clinical Education In China, Elliott Milstein

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The author summarizes his discussions with Chinese law professors regarding the issues that separate American from Chinese attitudes in creating clinical legal education. The author observes that the baseline orientation of American lawyers to turn to the courts for redress is usually not the same for the Chinese, where bribery of judges is accepted. He also notes that in addition to teaching practical skills such as client interviewing and persuasive advocacy, American clinicians devote attention to value questions, such as client-centeredness, the demands and limits of zealous advocacy, and the commitment to bring about social justice. The inclusion of these …

Constitutional Borrowing, Robert L. Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Borrowing from one domain to promote ideas in another domain is a staple of constitutional decisionmaking. Precedents, arguments, concepts, tropes, and heuristics all can be carried across doctrinal boundaries for purposes of persuasion. Yet the practice itself remains underanalyzed. This Article seeks to bring greater theoretical attention to the matter. It defines what constitutional borrowing is and what it is not, presents a typology that describes its common forms, undertakes a principled defense of borrowing, and identifies some of the risks involved. The authors' examples draw particular attention to places where legal mechanisms and ideas migrate between fields of law …

Panel 1: Are Adequate Legal Frameworks In Place At The Domestic Level?: Domestic Incorporation Of Obligations Under The Convention Against Torture, Claudio Grossman

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Debunking The Myth Of Civil Rights Liberalism: Visions Of Racial Justice In The Thought Of T. Thomas Fortune, 1880-1890, Susan D. Carle

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

n recent years, the supposed achievements of the American civil rights movement have come under attack as part of a critique of the ideology of legal liberalism. That critique argues that civil rights lawyers and other activists too greatly emphasized court-focused strategies aimed at achieving what would turn out to be pyrrhic "civil" rights victories - i.e., gains solely in "formal" equality in requirements enshrined in law as to how the state should treat its citizens. This critique of legal liberalism is well deserved insofar as it is aimed at a tendency within legal academia to extol the virtues of …

Multiple Families, Multiple Goals, Multiple Failures: The Need For “Limited Equalization” As A Theory Of Child Support, Adrienne Jennings Lockie

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Current child support laws are based on flawed assumptions about families that fail to reflect family complexity and the realities of parenting. Further, there has been little reevaluation of the stated goals of child support law since they were first implemented thirty years ago. The stated goals — fiscal savings, children’s economic well-being, and parental involvement — have not been achieved and are increasingly unlikely to be achieved because they ignore the way that children in multiple families — families in which at least one parent has had another child with a different partner —compete for the limited resources of …

Climate Change, Corporate Strategy, And Corporate Law Duties, Perry E. Wallace

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Although greenhouse-gas management now ranks among the world’s great challenges, this status did not obtain instantly—or easily. Today, however, reservations about the validity of global warming as a major threat are fading. They are fading, appropriately, as rapidly as some ice sheets and glaciers are melting. Indeed, the steady flow of new, compelling evidence joins an already considerable base of scientific, economic, and other certainties about the subject.

The result of this evolution in climate-change certainty has been major change of global dimensions. In notable ways, the structures and the functions of governmental, economic, and social institutions around the world …

Turkey: At The Crossroads Of Secular West And Traditional East, Padideh Ala'i

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

On January 9, 2008 Washington College of Law at American University sponsored a conference entitled: Turkey: At the Crossroads of Secular West and Traditional East. This conference was percipitated by the recent election of the AKP party in Turkey and my trip to Turkey in summer 2007. In this short introduction to the American University International law Review symposium issue, I summarize the major issues raised in that one day conference specifically by Dean Haluk Kabaalioglu of Yeditepe University Facutly of Law, expert on EU law and Turkish-EU relations,and Professor Feroz Ahmad, the learned historian of modern Turkey. The aim …