Law Commons^™

Maritime Delimitation In The Black Sea (Romania V. Ukraine), Coalter G. Lathrop

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Comparative Law As A Bridge Between The Nation-State And The Global Economy: An Essay For Herbert Bernstein, Richard M. Buxbaum

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Richard M. Buxbaum delivered the Fourth Annual Herbert L. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Comparative Law in 2005 and this article is based on his remarks. The article is included in the inaugural volume of CICLOPs that collects the first six Bernstein lectures. In this paper, Richard Buxbaum is primarily concerned with the potential of comparative law as a method to bridge the disparities between the laws of nation-states and the needs of the globalized economy. Buxbaum investigates three separate roles for comparative law in closing this gap: First, he discusses the potential uses of comparative law with regard to …

Foreword: The Bernstein Memorial Lecture, The First Six Years, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

In the spring of 2009, the Duke Law Center for International & Comparative Law launched an occasional paper series - CICLOPs. Prof. Michaels' foreword to the inaugural issue describes the project and the articles included in this issue that comprise the first six lectures in The Herbert L. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Comparative Law.

The Reichstag Fire Trial, 1933-2008 : The Production Of Law And History, Michael E. Tigar, John Mage

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

American Law And Transnational Corruption: Is There A Need For Lincoln’S Law Abroad?, Paul D. Carrington

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Original Sin And Judicial Independence: Providing Accountability For Justices, Paul D. Carrington, Roger C. Cramton

Faculty Scholarship

The independence of the judiciary is an enduring and defining objective of the legal profession. Law depends on judges to observe and enforce it. To secure such virtuous judges, they must be protected from retaliation by those who disapprove their decisions and prevented from receiving rewards from those who benefit by them. Those having the greatest stake in shielding judges from intimidation or reward are the profession that shares their dependence on public acceptance and respect. And that task of protecting judicial independence stands today at the very top of the agenda of the American legal profession.

After Guantanamo: War, Crime, And Detention, Madeline Morris, Frances A. Eberhard, Michael A. Watsula

Faculty Scholarship

Neither the law of war nor the criminal law, alone or in combination, provides an adequate legal structure for responding to the most serious threats posed by Al Qaeda and similar groups. After identifying the limits of the criminal law and the law of war for these purposes, this article outlines a comprehensive proposal for counterterrorism prosecution and detention policy. Appended to the article is the draft Counterterrorism Detention, Treatment and Release Act. The legislation proposed: 1) defines the category of persons to be subject to detention; 2) delineates procedures for identifying individuals falling within that category; 3) provides a …

Property And Speech In ‘Summum’, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Global Legal Pluralism, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

Some challenges of legal globalization closely resemble those formulated earlier for legal pluralism: the irreducible plurality of legal orders, the coexistence of domestic state law with other legal orders, the absence of a hierarchically superior position transcending the differences. This review discusses how legal pluralism engages with legal globalization and how legal globalization utilizes legal pluralism. It demonstrates how several international legal disciplines---comparative law, conflict of laws, public international law, and European Union law---have slowly begun to adopt some ideas of legal pluralism. It shows how traditional themes and questions of legal pluralism---the definition of law, the role of the …

Islands Of Effective International Adjudication: Constructing An Intellectual Property Rule Of Law In The Andean Community, Laurence R. Helfer, Karen J. Alter, M. Florencia Guerzovich

Faculty Scholarship

The Andean Community - a forty-year-old regional integration pact of small developing countries in South America - is widely viewed as a failure. In this Article, we show that the Andean Community has in fact achieved remarkable success within one part of its legal system. The Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ) is the world's third most active international court, with over 1400 rulings issued to date. Over 90% of those rulings concern intellectual property (IP). The ATJ has helped to establish IP as a rule of law island in the Andean Community where national judges, administrative officials, and private parties …

Knowing Law’S Limits: Comments On ‘Forgiveness: Integral To Close Relationships And Inimical To Justice?’, Kathryn Webb Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Who’S Number One? The Most Significant Cases In Environmental Law, James Salzman, J.B. Ruhl

Faculty Scholarship

What do environmental lawyers consider the most significant environmental cases? In 2001, Jim Salzman conducted a survey of the envlawprofs listserve for the "Most Excellent" environmental law cases in the field, tabulating the top cases for law profs and for practicing attorneys. Given the significant decisions over the eight years, we thought it would be useful to conduct the survey again, this time using a dedicated website and surveying both the envlawprofs listserve and members of the ABA's Section on Environment, Energy and Resources. We enjoyed a high level of participation, with over 440 responses from across the nation, from …

The Future Of Securitization, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

Securitization, a process in which firms can raise low-cost financing by efficiently allocating asset risks with investor appetite for risk, has been one of the most dominant and fastest-growing means of capital formation in the United States and the world. The subprime financial crisis, however, has revealed certain defects with how securitization is sometimes utilized. This article examines these defects and the extent they can, and should, be remedied going forward.

Keynote Address: Understanding The ‘Subprime’ Financial Crisis, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Prosecuting Alleged Terrorists By Military Commission: A Prudent Option, Scott L. Silliman

Faculty Scholarship

President Obama has announced that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay will be closed by January 22, 2010. He has also said that at least some of the detainees facing criminal prosecution will be tried in military commissions. The system of military commissions established by President Bush after the 9/11 attacks, as well as the one which Congress enacted in 2006 following the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision, were widely criticized as being unproductive and not meeting international legal standards. The Congress has, very recently, revised the rules and procedures for military commissions to make them fair, effective and much more …

Categoricalism And Balancing In First And Second Amendment Analysis, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

The least discussed element of District of Columbia v. Heller might ultimately be the most important: the battle between the majority and dissent over the use of categoricalism and balancing in the construction of constitutional doctrine. In Heller, Justice Scalia’s categoricalism essentially prevailed over Justice Breyer’s balancing approach. But as the opinion itself demonstrates, Second Amendment categoricalism raises extremely difficult and still-unanswered questions about how to draw and justify the lines between protected and unprotected “Arms,” people, and arms-bearing purposes. At least until balancing tests appear in Second Amendment doctrine—as they almost inevitably will—the future of the Amendment will depend …

A Response To The Critics Of Corporate Criminal Liability, Sara Sun Beale

Faculty Scholarship

This essay responds to critics of corporate liability and to the claim that elimination or limitation of such liability should be a priority for law reform. It discusses four points. First, imposing criminal liability on corporations makes sense, because corporations are not mere “fictional” entities. Rather, corporations are very real – and enormously powerful – actors whose conduct often causes very significant harms both to individuals and to society as a whole. Second, in evaluating the priorities for law reform it is critical to recognize that most of the problems with corporate liability are endemic to U.S. criminal law, rather …

Comparative Law By Numbers? Legal Origins Thesis, Doing Business Reports, And The Silence Of Traditional Comparative Law, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

The legal origins thesis -- the thesis that legal origin impacts economic growth and the common law is better for economic growth than the civil law -- has created hundreds of papers and citation numbers unheard of among comparative lawyers. The Doing Business reports -- cross-country comparisons including rankings on the attractiveness of different legal systems for doing business -- have the highest circulation numbers of all World Bank Publications; even critics admit that they have been successful at inciting legal reform in many countries in the world. Yet, traditional comparative lawyers have all but ignored these developments.

The first …

Mr. Presidential Candidate: Whom Would You Nominate?, Stuart M. Benjamin, Mitu Gulati

Faculty Scholarship

Presidential candidates compete on multiple fronts for votes. Who is more likeable? Who will negotiate more effectively with allies and adversaries? Who has the better vice-presidential running mate? Who will make better appointments to the Supreme Court and the cabinet? This last question is often discussed long before the inauguration, for the impact of a secretary of state or a Supreme Court justice can be tremendous. Despite the importance of such appointments, we do not expect candidates to compete on naming the better slates of nominees. For the candidates themselves, avoiding competition over nominees in the pre-election context has personal …

Rethinking The Role Of Clinical Trial Data In International Intellectual Property Law: The Case For A Public Goods Approach, Jerome H. Reichman

Faculty Scholarship

This article is a later version of the author's presentation at the Eleventh Annual Honorable Helen Wilson Nies Memorial Lecture March 26, 2008. Clinical trials are currently used to test drugs; however, the risk and cost of clinical trials are increasing so drastically that the clinical trials may become unsustainable. This article evaluates the legal and economic trends of intellectual property protection for pharmaceutical clinical trial data. The protection of clinical trials has become an alternative to patents as market exclusivity encourages the development and testing of unpatentable pharmaceuticals. This author argues that clinical trials should be treated as a …

After The Revolution – Decline And Return Of U.S. Conflicts Of Laws, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars in the US have become uninterested in conflict of laws, at least in the core issues that spurred the conflict of laws revolution, especially questions of method and areas of tort and contract law. Proposals for a new (third) Restatement have not yet led very far. By contrast, new interest comes from the fringes: special political questions and interdisciplinarity. As to the first, I use the example of same‑sex marriages to discuss the extent to which discussions about politics are inseparably linked with discussions over conflict of laws. Conflict of laws is here not a mere additional field in …

Tax Policy And Personal Identity Over Time, Lawrence A. Zelenak

Faculty Scholarship

Tax policy analysts often claim that tax distributional analysis should be based on a lifetime perspective, at least as a theoretical ideal. A prominent argument in favor of a consumption tax base over an income tax base appeals to this lifetime equity perspective, as does the argument for lifetime income averaging under an income tax with progressive marginal rates. These appeals to lifetime equity assume, in most cases without discussion, that personal identity over time is an unproblematic concept, so that the whole-life person is clearly the ideal unit for purposes of distributional analysis. However, the philosopher Derek Parfit claims …

Mechanism Choice, Jonathan B. Wiener, Barak D. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter reviews the literature on the selection of regulatory policy instruments, from both normative and positive perspectives. It first reviews the mechanism design literature to identify normative objectives in selecting among the menu or toolbox of policy instruments. The chapter then discusses the public choice and positive political theory literatures and the variety of models developed to attempt to predict the actual selection of alternative policy instruments. It begins with simpler early models focusing on interest group politics and proceeds to more complicated models that incorporate both supply and demand for policy, the role of policy entrepreneurs, behavioral and …

Umdenken Für Die Unidroit - Prinzipien: Vom Rechtswahlstatut Zum Allgemeinen Teil Des Transnationalen Vertragsrechts [Rethinking The Unidroit Principles: From A Law To Be Chosen By The Parties Towards A General Part Of Transnational Contract Law], Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

The most talked-about purpose of the UNIDROIT Principles of International and Commercial Contracts (PICC) is their applicability as the law chosen by the parties. However, focusing on this purpose in isolation is erroneous. The PICC are not a good candidate for a chosen law - they are conceived not as a result of the exercise of freedom of contract, but instead as a framework to enable such exercise. Their real potential is to serve as objective law - as the general part of transnational contract law.

This is obvious in practice. Actually, choice of the PICC is widely possible. National …

The Bernstein Memorial Lecture: The First Six Years, Ralf Michaels, Stephen Bornick, Jonathan Dalton White

Faculty Scholarship

CICLOPs, the Center for International & Comparative Law Occasional Papers, could not be launched with a better issue than one dedicated to Duke Law's named lecture series in the field, the Annual Herbert L. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Comparative Law. Herbert Bernstein was Duke's much-beloved professor of comparative law. The lecture series, established in Prof. Bernstein’s honor after his sudden death in 2001, has drawn leading scholars from all around the world to speak at Duke Law School on comparative law. This first issue of CICLOPs contains the text of the first six lectures, some of them previously published in …

Why We Should Ignore The “Octomom”, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Innovation After The Revolution: Foreign Sovereign Bond Contracts Since 2003, Mitu Gulati, Anna Gelpern

Faculty Scholarship

For over a decade, contracts literature has focused on standardization. Scholars asked how terms become standard, and why they change so rarely. This line of inquiry painted a world where a standard term persists until it is dislodged by another standard term, perhaps after a brief window of ferment before the second term takes hold. It also overshadowed the early insights of boilerplate theories, which described contracts as a mix of standard and customized terms, and asked why the mix might be suboptimal. This article brings the focus back to the mix. It examines the development of selected provisions in …

Soft Law As Delegation, Timothy Meyer

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines one of the most important trends in international legal governance since the end of the Second World War: the rise of "soft law," or legally non-binding instruments. Scholars studying the design of international agreements have long puzzled over why states use soft law. The decision to make an agreement or obligation legally binding is within the control of the states negotiating the content of the legal obligations. Basic contract theory predicts that parties to a contract would want their agreement to be as credible as possible, to ensure optimal incentives to perform. It is therefore odd that …

A Careful Examination Of The Live Nation-Ticketmaster Merger, Barak D. Richman, Alan J. Meese

Faculty Scholarship

As great admirers of The Boss and as fans of live entertainment, we share in the popular dismay over rising ticket prices for live performances. But we have been asked as antitrust scholars to examine the proposed merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, and we do so with the objectivity and honesty called for by The Boss’s quotes above. The proposed merger has been the target of aggressive attacks from several industry commentators and popular figures, but the legal and policy question is whether the transaction is at odds with the nation’s antitrust laws.

One primary source of concern to …

Historical Practice And The Contemporary Debate Over Customary International Law, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

Response to: Anthony J. Bellia, Jr. & Bradford R. Clark, The Federal Common Law of Nations, 109 Colum. L. Rev. 1 (2009).

A.J. Bellia and Brad Clark have performed a valuable service for other scholars interested in foreign relations law and federal jurisdiction by collecting and illuminating—with their usual care and insight—the historical practice of both English and early American courts with respect to the law of nations. Their recent Article, The Federal Common Law of Nations, demonstrates that, while American courts have not generally treated customary international law (CIL) as supreme federal law, they have applied such law where …