Law Commons^™

The Sad Story Of The Northern Rocky Mountain Gray Wolf Reintroduction Program, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A reflection on the past, present and future of environmental law in this 20th Anniversary Edition offers an opportunity to revisit the Endangered Species Act, particularly the Northern Rocky Mountain States federal wolf reintroduction program. Environmental programs that depend on public support for their effectiveness are problematic when the government fails to understand and compensate for this fact. This essay explores the proposition that the federal government's failure to anticipate and respond to the negative reaction of people adversely affected by proposed solutions to environmental problems is contributing to a lack of progress despite great strides in our scientific understanding. …

Lies Without Liars? Janus Capital And Conservative Securities Jurisprudence, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court’s recent Janus Capital case offers a reading of the word “make” in Rule 10b-5 that speaks to ultimate legal authority over the communication in question. This creates the real possibility that we can have lies without liars, an entirely perplexing result in terms of any purposive meaning of the rule. In so holding, Justice Thomas joined a seemingly short list of judges who suggest that legal formalism is a particularly good weapon with which to fight securities fraud. This paper exploresJanus through the lens of conservative textualism, which takes us through a much longer intellectual history …

Communicative Content And Legal Content, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay investigates a familiar set of questions about the relationship between legal texts (e.g., constitutions, statutes, opinions, orders, and contracts) and the content of the law (e.g., norms, rules, standards, doctrines, and mandates). Is the original meaning of the constitutional text binding on the Supreme Court when it develops doctrines of constitutional law? Should statutes be given their plain meaning or should judges devise statutory constructions that depart from the text to serve a purpose? What role should default rules play in the interpretation and construction of contracts? This essay makes two moves that can help lawyers and legal …

The Wages Of Crying Judicial Restraint, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Five Justices voted to affirm the proposition that the Constitution creates a government of limited and enumerated powers and that the courts will enforce those limits. To understand why this victory was possible, it is important to understand that there are not just two versions of federalism, pre‐New Deal and post‐New Deal. There is also a third version. The failure to recognize the third version goes a long way to explain why most of my academic colleagues predicted that the right would have no chance to prevail in our constitutional challenge to the individual insurance mandate.

The first version of …

Liberal Responsibilities, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay is a review of When the State Speaks, What Should it Say?: How Democracies can Protect Expression and Promote Equality by Corey Brettschneider (2012) and Ordered Liberty: Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues by James E. Fleming & Linda C. McClain (2013).

In a parallel fashion, Fleming and McClain articulate and then defend a general conception of “constitutional liberalism” and its core individual rights against various critics, including communitarians such as Mary Ann Glendon and Michael Sandel, and “minimalists” such as Cass Sunstein and Jeremy Waldron, who argue that for various reasons those individual rights have undermined either civic society …

Bond V. United States: Can The President Increase Congress's Legislative Power By Entering Into A Treaty?, Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The proposition that treaties can increase the power of Congress is inconsistent with the text of the Treaty Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and the Tenth Amendment. It is inconsistent with the fundamental structural principle that "[t]he powers of the legislature are defined, and limited."S It implies, insidiously, that that the President and the Senate can increase their own power by treaty. And it implies, bizarrely, that the President alone--or a foreign government alone--can decrease Congress's power and render federal statutes unconstitutional. Finally, it creates a doubly perverse incentive: an incentive to enter into foreign entanglements simply to increase …

Gideon At Guantánamo, Neal K. Katyal

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The right to counsel maintains an uneasy relationship with the demands of trials for war crimes. Drawing on the author’s personal experiences from defending a Guantánamo detainee, the Author explains how Gideon set a baseline for the right to counsel at Guantánamo. Whether constitutionally required or not, Gideon ultimately framed the way defense lawyers represented their clients. Against the expectations of political and military leaders, both civilian and military lawyers vigorously challenged the legality of the military trial system. At the same time, tensions arose because lawyers devoted to a particular cause (such as attacking the Guantánamo trial system) were …

State Law, The Westfall Act, And The Nature Of The Bivens Question, Carlos Manuel Vázquez, Stephen I. Vladeck

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In a number of recent cases touching to varying degrees on national security, different courts of appeals have applied a strong presumption against recognition of a Bivens cause of action. In each of these cases, the courts’ approach was based on the belief that the creation of a cause of action is a legislative function and that the courts would be usurping Congress’s role if they recognized a Bivens action without legislative authorization. Thus, faced with a scenario where they believed that the remedial possibilities were either "Bivens or nothing," these courts of appeals chose nothing.

The concerns that …

From Antislavery Lawyer To Chief Justice: The Remarkable But Forgotten Career Of Salmon P. Chase, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The name Salmon P. Chase is barely known and his career is largely forgotten. In this paper, the author seeks to revive his memory by tracing the arc of his career from antislavery lawyer, to antislavery politician, to Chief Justice of the United States. In addition to explaining why this is a career worth both remembering and honoring, the author offers some possible reasons why his remarkable achievements have largely been forgotten.

Military Commissions And The Paradigm Of Prevention, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Why military commissions? Given the United States’s track record of success in trying terrorists in civilian criminal courts, and the availability of courts-martial to try war crimes, why has the United States government, under both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations alike, insisted on proceeding through untested military commissions instead? In May 2009, President Obama defended military commissions with the following claims:

Military commissions have a history in the United States dating back to George Washington and the Revolutionary War. They are an appropriate venue for trying detainees for violations of the laws of war. They allow for …

Welcome To The New Originalism: A Comment On Jack Balkin’S Living Originalism, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this short piece for a symposium on Jack Balkin's new book, Living Originalism, I welcome Jack Balkin into the originalist camp. I discuss how and why a nonoriginalist can become an originalist. By discussing how I eventually became an originalist at the end of the last century, I hope to shed some light on what exactly is so remarkable about Jack Balkin’s move. After discussing the appeal of the New Originalism that account for Balkin's originalist move, I conclude by offering a cautionary note about the use of "underlying principles in Balkin's "text and principle" approach, which in certain …

Egypt's New Constitution: The Islamist Difference, Lama Abu-Odeh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The paper discusses the distributional impact of the rules of the new Egyptian constitution (2012). It specifically addresses the way such rules, substantive and (potentially) procedural, can influence Egyptian law's identity and the underlying relations between the state and individuals and among individuals themselves that such identity implies.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Equal Protection Clause: 1970-80, Wendy Webster Williams

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg of Columbia Law School was the leading Supreme Court litigator for gender equality in the crucial decade, 1970-80. In addition to teaching her classes, producing academic articles, and co-authoring the first casebook on sex discrimination and the law, she worked on some sixty cases (depending on how one counts), including over two dozen cases in the Supreme Court. Rumor has it she did not sleep for ten years; her prodigious output gives the rumor some credence. Her impact on the law during that critical decade earned her the title "the Thurgood Marshall of the women's movement" …

Reassessing The Citizens Protection Act: A Good Thing It Passed, And A Good Thing It Failed, Rima Sirota

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Citizens Protection Act (CPA) of 1998 has always been a lightening rod for criticism, and it remains so today. This article reassesses the CPA’s perceived inadequacies in light of how it has actually affected (or, not affected) federal prosecutors’ involvement in criminal investigations. The article takes issue with the critics and demonstrates that the CPA succeeded where it should have, failed where it should have, and left us—however inadvertently—with a remarkably coherent and consistent approach to regulating federal prosecutors’ involvement in criminal investigations regardless of whether a suspect retains counsel early in the proceedings.

The CPA requires federal prosecutors …

“[This] I Know From My Grandfather”: The Battle For Admissibility Of Indigenous Oral History As Proof Of Tribal Land Claims, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A major obstacle indigenous land claimants must face is the application of federal evidentiary rules, like the hearsay doctrine, which block the use of oral history to establish legal claims. It is often oral history and stories that tribes rely upon as evidence to support their claims, reducing substantially the likelihood of a tribe prevailing. Indigenous oral history presents unique challenges to judges when faced with its admissibility. Canadian courts have largely overcome these challenges by interpreting evidentiary rules liberally, in favor of the aborigines. As such, Canadian aborigines have enjoyed greater land claim success than indigenous claimants in the …

Civil Rights For The Twenty-First Century: Lessons From Justice Thurgood Marshall's Race-Transcending Jurisprudence, Sheryll Cashin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Essay pays tribute to justice Thurgood Marshall's race-transcending vision of universal human dignity, and explores the importance of building cross-racial alliances to modern civil rights advocacy. justice Marshall's role as a "Race Man" is evident in much of his jurisprudence, where he fought for years to promote equal opportunity and equal justice. As an advocate for all marginalized people, justice Marshall viewed equal justice as transcending race, and this Essay suggests that the multi-racial coalition that supported President Obama aligns with Marshall's vision. The Essay evaluates the civil rights movement through the lens of Justice Marshall's equality analysis, and …

Social Enterprise: Who Needs It?, Brian Galle

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

State statutes authorizing firms to pursue mixtures of profitable and socially-beneficial goals have proliferated in the past five years. In this invited response essay, I argue that for one large class of charitable goals the so-called “social enterprise” firm is often privately wasteful. While the hybrid form is a bit more sensible for firms that combine profit with simple, easily monitored social benefits, existing laws fail to protect stakeholders against opportunistic conversion of the firm to pure profit-seeking. Given these failings, I suggest that social enterprise’s legislative popularity can best be traced to a race to the bottom among states …

Carrots, Sticks, And Salience, Brian Galle

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article considers the second-best design of Pigouvian taxes and subsidies in the presence of agents who are imperfectly aware of the instrument. Until very recently, the price instrument literature has assumed perfect rationality, and even the handful of prior attempts to account for “hidden” prices focus mainly on the income tax. I extend these efforts in several directions. First, I show that the best available instrument for correcting negative externalities is often one whose price is partially adjusted upwards -- or, in the case of subsidies, downwards -- to counter-act the neglect of irrational actors. In addition, I argue …

Charities In Politics: A Reappraisal, Brian Galle

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Federal law significantly limits the political activities of charities, but no one really knows why. In the wake of Citizens United, the absence of any strong normative grounding for the limits may leave the rules vulnerable to constitutional challenge. This Article steps into that breach, offering a set of policy reasons to separate politics from charity. I also sketch ways in which my more-precise exposition of the rationale for the limits helps guide interpretation of the complex legal rules implementing them.

Any defense of the political limits begins with significant challenges because of a long tradition of scholarly criticism of …

The Solicitor General And Confession Of Error, Neal K. Katyal

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Confessions of error have a long history. From the very beginning of the Solicitor General's position, we have had confessions of error.

All Solicitors General-it doesn't matter whether they are appointed by a Republican or a Democrat-have confessed error, roughly at the pace of two to three times per Supreme Court term.

The Incoherence Of Marital Benefits, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

En route to finding the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) an unconstitutional violation of the Fifth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Windsor v. United States gave short shrift to one of Congress's primary arguments in defense of the Act: that the federal government has a compelling interest in limiting federal marriage benefits to opposite-sex couples because traditional marriage has the laudable purpose-or function-of channeling the heterosexual sex that creates children into a way of life that provides the optimal environment for the rearing of those children. In other words, DOMA aims to minimize irresponsible …

Process Evaluation Of The Basic Training Program At A State Corrections Academy In The Southeast, Wendy Dawn Williams

Theses and Dissertations

This applied dissertation was designed to provide law enforcement and corrections administrators with current information about the components of basic training that can affect the retention of newly employed trainees during basic training. Attracting qualified applicants for law-enforcement jobs is a challenging task, and the preemployment screening and hiring processes are very expensive for agencies already plagued with reduced budgets. By the time a trainee actually makes it to basic training, a great deal of time and money has already been invested by the agency, and the trainee becomes an investment. When more than 20% of trainees exit a basic …

Improper Deportation Of Legal Permanent Residents: The U.S. Government’S Mischaracterization Of The Supreme Court’S Decision In Nijhawan V. Holder, Michael R. Devitt

San Diego International Law Journal

The purpose of this Article is to draw attention to the government’s misinterpretation of the central holding in Nijhawan v. Holder and how it has led to the improper dilution of evidentiary standards in removal proceedings when determining the $10,000 threshold loss requirement under section 101(a)(43)(M)(i) of the INA [hereinafter “M(i)”]. Section II of this article provides a brief doctrinal overview and summary of my proposed procedural methodology; sections III and IV provide essential background information regarding the Supreme Court’s important pre-Nijhawan opinions and the inconsistent methods circuit courts have applied when calculating the monetary threshold under the fraud or …

An Analysis Of The Legal Status Of Cia Officers Involved In Drone Strikes, Donna R. Cline

San Diego International Law Journal

This Article introduces international humanitarian law as the applicable legal standard, and develops the distinction between international and non-international armed conflict. Section II will define the key elements used to determine whether a situation of hostilities rises to the level of an armed conflict: the intensity of the conflict and the organization of the parties. Furthermore, this section will analyze the idea of internationalized armed conflict and examine the standard for determining when an attack by an armed group may be attributed to a State. Section III of this article describes the different categories of actors found in situations of …

A High Seas Requirement For Inciters And Intentional Facilitators Of Piracy Jure Gentium And Its (Lack Of) Implications For Impunity, Jonathan Bellish

San Diego International Law Journal

Around 2005, maritime piracy made a troubling resurgence three quarters of a century after a consensus had been reached that the age of piracy had permanently ended. Yet piracy returned in a slightly different form, with pirates relying more on land-based facilitators than their historical counterparts. Maritime piracy’s reappearance made ripe for consideration the question of whether a facilitator of maritime piracy must be physically present on the high seas while facilitating in order to be subject to universal jurisdiction. This Article undertakes an analysis of the text, statutory context, history, and policy impetus behind UNCLOS art. 101 as it …

Breaking Legal Ground: A Bivens Action For Noncitizens For Trans-Border Constitutional Torts Against Border Patrol Agents, Julie Hunter

San Diego International Law Journal

This Comment assesses whether noncitizens can sue in U.S. courts when they have sustained an injury outside of U.S. territory. This Comment assumes the underlying merits of the Hernandez’s claim that Agent Mesa used excessive force when shooting at Sergio. It will not address whether Agent Mesa acted in self-defense. Part II will discuss the context of the Hernandez litigation and its claims against the U.S. Government, its agencies, and employees for the use of excessive force against a noncitizen. It will also discuss the legal requirements for bringing an excessive force claim under Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents …

Naked Dishonesty: Misuse Of A Social Security Number For An Otherwise Legal Purpose May Not Be A Crime Involving Moral Turpitude After All, Nathanael C. Crowley

San Diego International Law Journal

This Comment questions whether the misuse of a Social Security number for an otherwise legal purpose is a crime involving moral turpitude. It begins with a history of moral turpitude and its initial connection to immigration law in the United States. Through a close analysis of misuse of a Social Security number for an otherwise legal purpose as a crime involving moral turpitude in modern cases, this Comment will examine the role of fraud and dishonesty in the question. The analysis reveals a critical distinction between crimes involving dishonesty and crimes involving fraud. This distinction shows that crimes involving naked …

South Africa's Electricity Crisis: The Need To Reconcile Environmental Policy Decisions With International Treaties, Brittany D. Botterill

San Diego Journal of Climate & Energy Law

This Comment examines whether South Africa’s treaty obligations conflict with the requirement of the country’s government to provide electricity to a burgeoning home-owning population. Section II introduces Eskom, South Africa’s largest utility company, which produces most of the electricity used in South Africa and surrounding countries. Section III discusses South Africa’s role in the Southern Africa Power Pool and the additional obligations this membership places on the country. Section IV then examines the controversial loan that South Africa received from the World Bank to assist in building the Medupi coal-fired power plant. Section V illustrates South Africa’s climate change obligations …

Nsa Surveillance Since 9/11 And The Human Right To Privacy, G. Alex Sinha

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Since shortly after 9/11, if not earlier, the National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting massive amounts of data about American citizens and permanent residents, ostensibly with the aim of preempting future terrorist attacks. While the NSA's program has invited substantial scholarly attention, specifically concerning its compliance with the United States Constitution and various domestic statutes, the academic debate about its merits entirely omits one crucial fact: the United States is also legally obliged to protect a human right to privacy, as codified in Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). This Article seeks to …

Crashing The Misdemeanor System, Jenny Roberts

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.