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Full-Text Articles in Law

Harry Potter And The Half-Crazed Bureaucracy, Benjamin H. Barton May 2006

Harry Potter And The Half-Crazed Bureaucracy, Benjamin H. Barton

Michigan Law Review

What would you think of a government that engaged in this list of tyrannical activities: tortured children for lying; designed its prison specifically to suck all life and hope out of the inmates; placed citizens in that prison without a hearing; ordered the death penalty without a trial; allowed the powerful, rich, or famous to control policy; selectively prosecuted crimes (the powerful. go unpunished and the unpopular face trumped-up charges); conducted criminal trials without defense counsel; used truth serum to force confessions; maintained constant surveillance over all citizens; offered no elections and no democratic lawmaking process; and controlled the press? …


Should Coercive Interrogation Be Legal?, Eric A. Posner, Adrian Vermeule Feb 2006

Should Coercive Interrogation Be Legal?, Eric A. Posner, Adrian Vermeule

Michigan Law Review

Most academics who have written on coercive interrogation believe that its use is justified in extreme or catastrophic scenarios but that nonetheless it should be illegal. They argue that formal illegality will not prevent justified use of coercive interrogation because government agents will be willing to risk criminal liability and are likely to be pardoned, acquitted, or otherwise forgiven if their behavior is morally justified. This outlaw and forgive approach to coercive interrogation is supposed to prevent coercive interrogation from being applied in inappropriate settings, to be symbolically important, and nonetheless to permit justified coercive interrogation. We argue that the …


Judicial Power And Mobilizable History, Richard A. Primus Jan 2006

Judicial Power And Mobilizable History, Richard A. Primus

Articles

One contribution that law professors can make to constitutional discourse, I suggest, is the nurturing of new mobilizable histories. A "mobilizable history," as I will use the term, is a narrative, image, or other historical source that is sufficiently well-known to the community of constitutional decisionmakers so as to be able to support a credible argument in the discourse of constitutional law. It draws upon materials that are within the collective memory of constitutional interpreters; indeed, a necessary step in nurturing a new mobilizable history is to introduce new information into that collective memory or to raise the prominence of …


Two Paradigms Of Jurisdiction, Ralf Michaels Jan 2006

Two Paradigms Of Jurisdiction, Ralf Michaels

Michigan Journal of International Law

Globalization causes convergence of legal orders. Or so it is argued. Law and economics scholars predict that legal orders will move towards the same efficient end state. They argue that the requirements of globalization will pressure legal orders to converge on the level of economic efficiency, because regulatory competition between legal orders makes it impossible for individual legal systems to maintain suboptimal solutions. Many comparative lawyers predict a similar convergence. In particular traditional functionalist comparatists have long held that unification of law was both desirable and unavoidable. Their basic argument is based on functional equivalence and can be summarized as …