Law Commons^™

A History Lesson: Reparations For What?, Emma Coleman Jordan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A major difficulty facing the reparations-for-slavery movement is that to date the movement has focused its litigation strategies and its rhetorical effort upon the institution of slavery. While slavery is the root of modern racism, it suffers many defects as the centerpiece of a reparations litigation strategy. The most important difficulty is temporal. Formal slavery ended in 1865. Thus, the time line of potentially reparable injury extends to well before the period of any person now living. The temporal difficulty arises from the conventional expectations of civil litigation, which require a harmony of identity between the defendants and the plaintiffs. …

Human Capabilities And Human Authorities: A Comment On Martha Nussbaum’S Women And Human Development, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What does it mean to be truly human? And, relatedly, what does it mean to be treated as truly human, and with dignity, by the state, or community, of which one is a part? To be fully human, Martha Nussbaum has argued for the better part of two decades, and argues in greater detail in “Women and Human Development”, is not only to be rational, and not only to be happy, but also to be capable - capable, for example, of loving others, of thinking rationally about one's own life, of engaging in dignified labor, of interacting with the natural …

Leveling The Playing Field: Federal Rules Of Evidence 412 & 415: Evidence Class As A Platform For Larger (More Important) Lessons, Jane H. Aiken

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Teachers often approach Federal Rules of Evidence 412 and 415 with trepidation. After all, it means that a law teacher will have to talk about sex, with a group (often a large group) of law students - many of whom are in their early twenties and have never had a non-peer conversation about sex. It looks like a recipe for disaster. Let me suggest just the opposite - it offers the law teacher an opportunity to address perhaps one of the most important lessons of law school: the law only works if there is a level playing field.

Erasure And Recognition: The Census, Race And The National Imagination, Naomi Mezey

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article is concerned with the constitutive power of the census with respect to race. It is an examination of the U.S. Census as an aspect of what Angela Harris calls race law, "law pertaining to the formation, recognition, and maintenance of racial groups, as well as the law regulating the relationships among these groups." While others have noted and explored the epistemological and constitutive functions of the census race categories, my aim is to unpack this insight in the context of two specific examples of categorical change and contest: the addition of a Chinese racial category in 1870 and …

“Head Start Works Because We Do”: Head Start Programs, Community Action Agencies, And The Struggle Over Unionization, Eloise Pasachoff

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the summer of 2002, the city of Boston watched a fierce battle unfold between low-wage workers who provide child care and the social service agencies that employ them. Boston requires its city contractors to pay more than twice the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour to their employees, according to the terms of the city's "living wage" ordinance. The social service agencies, which receive government subsidies to run their child care programs, claimed that they could not afford to pay this rate. These agencies mounted an intense legal and political campaign, arguing that they would be forced to …

Constitutional Legitimacy, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The problem of constitutional legitimacy is to establish why anyone should obey the command of a constitutionally-valid law. A lawmaking system is legitimate if there is a prima facie duty to obey the laws it makes. Neither "consent of the governed" nor "benefits received" justifies obedience. Rather, a prima facie duty of obedience exists either (a) if there is actual unanimous consent to the jurisdiction of the lawmaker or, in the absence of consent, (b) f laws are made by procedures which assure that they are not unjust. In the absence of unanimous consent, a written constitution should be assessed …

Re-Imagining Justice, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What do we mean by legal justice, as opposed to distributive, or social, or political justice; what is the justice, that is, we hope law promotes? What is the justice that lawyers and judges, peculiarly, are professionally committed to pursue? What is the virtue around which, arguably, this profession, and the individuals within it, have defined their public lives?

Justice -- and more particularly legal justice -- is a badly under-theorized topic in jurisprudence; perhaps surprisingly, there is little written on it. The paucity of writing of course has a history. It can be traced to the turn of the …