Law Commons^™

Federal Prosecution Of Terrorism-Related Offenses: Conviction And Sentencing Data In Light Of The "Soft Sentence" And "Data Reliability" Critiques, Robert Chesney

Bobby Chesney

This symposium article examines two critiques associated with post-9/11 criminal prosecutions in terrorism-related cases. The data-reliability critique attacks the reliability of the statistics reported by the Justice Department in connection with such cases, while the soft-sentence critique suggests that claims of success in such cases might be overstated in light of the relatively short sentences they produce. I conclude that the data-reliability critique largely reflects disagreement regarding the types of cases that ought to be coded as terrorism-related. This dispute came to a head in the spring of 2007 in connection with a report issued by the Department’s Inspector General, …

Economic Emergency And The Rule Of Law, Bernadette Meyler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Academic work extolling the merits of the "rule of law" both domestically and internationally abounds today, yet the meanings of the phrase itself seem to proliferate. Two of the most prominent contexts in which rule of law rhetoric appears are those of economic development and states of emergency. In the area of private law, dissemination of the rule of law across the globe and, in particular, among emerging market countries is often deemed a prerequisite for enhancing economic development, partly because it ensures that foreign investments will not be summarily expropriated and that contractual rights will not be frustrated by …

Sending The Bureaucracy To War, Elena Baylis, David Zaring

Articles

Administrative law has been transformed after 9/11, much to its detriment. Since then, the government has mobilized almost every part of the civil bureaucracy to fight terrorism, including agencies that have no obvious expertise in that task. The vast majority of these bureaucratic initiatives suffer from predictable, persistent, and probably intractable problems - problems that contemporary legal scholars tend to ignore, even though they are central to the work of the writers who created and framed the discipline of administrative law.

We analyze these problems through a survey of four administrative initiatives that exemplify the project of sending bureaucrats to …