Law Commons^™

Civil Consequences Of Corruption In International Commercial Contracts, Padideh Ala'i

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The United States legal system seeks to prevent and prohibit bribery and corruption through a myriad of laws, regulations and policies. Anti-corruption jurisprudence is more developed in the context of public sector contracts where the United States criminalizes bribery of public officials through 18 U.S.C. §201 (Bribery of Public Officials and Witnesses). In addition, the United States was the first country to criminalize bribery of foreign government officials in 1977 with the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The FCPA has since been amended to comply with the adoption of the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign …

Human Rights Violations By Peacekeeping Forces In Somalia, Richard Wilson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Widespread sexual violence is occurring throughout South-Central Somalia, and the perpetrators of this violence are often alleged to be government security forces and military personnel from the African Union Mission for Somalia (AMISOM). Within Somalia, there is little recourse for victims of sexual violence, and human rights practitioners are looking to international options as alternative venues for seeking justice. This article uses the case of peacekeeping troops in Somalia perpetrating human rights violations to explore the liability of peacekeepers and their home states in these situations. It assumes, for purposes of analysis here, that due to their traditional immunities, the …

The Most Important Cases Of The Inter-American Commission On Human Rights, Richard Wilson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR), together with its companion body, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), are autonomous organs of the Organization of American States (OAS). The IACHR promotes and protects human rights in the Western Hemisphere. Created by the OAS in 1959, the Commission has its headquarters in Washington, D.C. Together with the Court, established in 1979 in San Jose, Costa Rica, the Commission has emerged as a model of international human rights and humanitarian law, as well as of individual rights.Since its inception, the Commission has made extraordinary progress. Through its 55-year history, it has …

Conceptions Of Agency In Social Movement Scholarship: Mack On African American Civil Rights Lawyers [Comments], Susan Carle

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This essay examines the theory of individual agency that propels the central thesis in Kenneth Mack's Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (2012)-namely, that an important yet understudied means by which African American civil rights lawyers changed conceptions of race through their work was through their very performance of the professional role of lawyer. Mack shows that this performance was inevitably fraught with tension and contradiction because African American lawyers were called upon to act both as exemplary representatives of their race and as performers of a professional role that traditionally had been reserved for whites …

What It Means To Be A Lawyer In These Uncertain Times: Some Thoughts On Ethical Participation In The Legal Education Industry, Susan Carle

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Discusses legal employment and salary and how legal education can address the current market.

Trial By Google: Judicial Notice In The Information Age, Andrew Ferguson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This Article presents a theory of judicial notice for the information age. It argues that the ease of accessing factual data on the Internet allows judges and litigants to expand the use of judicial notice in ways that raise significant concerns about admissibility, reliability, and fair process. State and federal courts are already applying the surprisingly pliant judicial notice rules to bring websites ranging from Google Maps to Wikipedia into the courtroom, and these decisions will only increase in frequency in coming years. This rapidly emerging judicial phenomenon is notable for its ad hoc and conclusory nature – attributes that …

Global Experimentalist Governance, Grainne De Burca, Robert O. Keohane, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

This article outlines the concept of Global Experimentalist Governance (GXG). GXG is an institutionalized transnational process of participatory and multilevel problem solving, in which particular problems, and the means of addressing them, are framed in an open-ended way, and subjected to periodic revision by various forms of peer review in light of locally generated knowledge. GXG differs from other forms of international organization and transnational governance, and is emerging in various issue areas. The Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances is used to illustrate how GXG functions. The conditions for the emergence of GXG are specified, as well as some of …

The Mirror Image Of Asylums And Prisons, Sacha Raoult, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

This article analyzes trends in prison rates and mental hospital rates in France since the earliest available statistics. It shows that, on almost two centuries of data and amidst an agitated political history, every asylum trend in France is "countered" by an inverse prison trend, and vice-versa. Both trends are like a mirror image of each other. We reflect on the possible explanations for this intriguing fact and show that the most obvious ones (a population transfer or a building transfer) are not able to account for most of the relationship. After these explanations have been dismissed, we are left …

We Need To Talk About Aereo: Copyright-Avoiding Business Models, Cloud Storage And A Principled Reading Of The "Transmit" Clause, Rebecca Giblin, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

Businesses are exploiting perceived gaps in the structure of copyright rights by ingeniously designing their technologies to fulfill demand for individual access through a structure of personalized copies and playback engineered in ways intended to implicate neither the public performance nor the reproduction rights. The archetypal example is Aereo Inc.’s system for providing online access to broadcast television. Aereo allows users to tune into individual antennae to stream TV to themselves, near-live, online. Aereo’s activities look a lot like the retransmission of broadcast signals, an activity which Congress has made very clear must result in remuneration for rightholders. However, Aereo’s …

An Introduction To The Law & Economics Of Information, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

This paper reviews the literature related to the properties of information and legal implications of same, making three observations:

First, scholars have extended a public good model of information to an ever-increasing number of fields where law and information intersect. An incomplete list includes intellectual property, securities regulation, contract theory, consumer protection, communications, and the study of free speech.

Second, scholars have sharply questioned whether, in practice, information actually has the characteristics of a public good. In particular, the claim that information is intrinsically impossible to exclude non-payers from has no clear basis, a fact that potentially undermines theoretical support …

How To Improve The Financial Architecture And Its Resilience, Dirk Helbing, Eve Mitleton-Kelly, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, Fabio Caccioli, J. Doyne Farmer, Steve Keen, Katharina Pistor, Dennis J. Snower, Olsen Richard, Angelo Ranaldo, Norbert Häring, Edward Fullbrook

Faculty Scholarship

This financial resilience survey was circulated on behalf of a working group of the Complexity Council of the World Economic Forum comprised of Prof. Eve Mitleton-Kelly of London School of Economics and Prof. Dirk Helbing at ETH Zurich's Risk Center. It was sent to a few dozens of financial experts with the aim to create an inventory of ideas of how the financial system might be improved and made more resilient. Unconventional ideas were also welcome.

Judicial Leadership In Family Court: A Cautionary Tale, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

For the past 35 years I have been practicing in, teaching, and writing about the Family Court. The problem-solving court movement in the last two decades – with its proliferation of drug courts, mental health courts, and veterans courts, to name a few – renewed my interest in the historical roots of the family court because of the parallels between the original juvenile court and the recent problem solving court movement. One of the key elements – perhaps the defining element – in both is the role of the judge as the leader of the court. That is what I …

A Reply To "Hollow Spaces", George A. Bermann, Jack J. Coe Jr., Christopher R. Drahozal, Catherine A. Rogers

Faculty Scholarship

This short essay responds to Chip Brower's thoughtful and meticulous critique of Tentative Draft No. 2 of the Restatement Third of the U.S. Law of International Commercial Arbitration. While we appreciate the concerns he raises, we disagree with the conclusions he draws both about the Restatement and the drafting process. We address here what we understand to be Professor Brower's major criticisms of the work.

Lgbti Migrants In Immigration Detention: A Global Perspective, Shana Tabak, Rachel Levitan

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Research Needs In The Colorado River Basin: A Summary Of Policy-Related Topics To Explore Further In Support Of Solution-Oriented Decision-Making, Colorado River Governance Initiative, University Of Colorado Boulder. Getches-Wilkinson Center For Natural Resources, Energy, And The Environment Western Water Policy Program

Books, Reports, and Studies

14 p. ; 28 cm

Restoring Sacred Waters: A Guide To Protecting Tribal Non-Consumptive Water Uses In The Colorado River Basin, Julie Nania, Julia Guarino, University Of Colorado Boulder. Getches-Wilkinson Center For Natural Resources, Energy, And The Environment

Books, Reports, and Studies

105 p. : color illustrations ; 28 cm

Introduction -- Gathering information and starting the process -- Indian federal reserved water rights -- Using Indian federal reserved water rights for instream flows -- Negotiating for non-consumptive uses in settlement agreements -- Protecting non-consumptive uses in tribal water codes -- Other legal tools -- Irrigating for instream flows and traditional plants -- Summary and key points

Building Blogs (And Law Firm Web Sites): Ethically, Effectively, Walter Effross

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Health Law As Social Justice, Lindsay Wiley

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Health law is in the midst of a dramatic transformation. From a relatively narrow discipline focused on regulating relationships among individual patients, health care providers, and third-party payers, it is expanding into a far broader field with a burgeoning commitment to access to health care and assurance of healthy living conditions as matters of social justice. Through a series of incremental reform efforts stretching back decades before the Affordable Care Act and encompassing public health law as well as the law of health care financing and delivery, reducing health disparities has become a central focus of American health law and …

The Ohio State University Dispute Resolution In Special Education Symposium Panel, Robert Dinerstein

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Exploitation Creep And The Unmaking Of Human Trafficking Law, Janie Chuang

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The U.S. government and influential NGOs have been promoting a greatly expanded legal and policy understanding of the problem of human trafficking, recasting forced labor as trafficking, and trafficking as "modern-day slavery." The aggregate effect is a doctrinally problematic "exploitation creep." For strong legal and policy reasons, anti-trafficking efforts should target struc- tural vulnerability to trafficking through strengthened labor frameworks. On the same grounds the article contests initiatives to conflate human trafficking with slavery and to address trafficking primarily under an ex post crime-control par- adigm focused on perpetrator accountability and victim protection.

Constitutional Culpability: Questioning The New Exclusionary Rules, Andrew Ferguson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This article addresses the questions left unanswered by the Supreme Court’s recent exclusionary rule cases. The Hudson-Herring-Davis trilogy presents a new and largely unexamined doctrinal landscape for Fourth Amendment suppression hearings. Courts, litigators, and scholars are only now assessing what has changed on the ground in trial practice.Once an automatic remedy for any constitutional violation, the exclusionary rule, now necessitates a separate and more searching analysis. Rights and remedies have been decoupled, such that a clear Fourth Amendment constitutional violation may not lead to the exclusion of evidence. Instead, it now leads to an examination of the conduct of the …

Will International Law Save Us From Climate Disasters?, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

I am going to address the role of international law in dealing with disasters that can be caused or worsened by climate change.

Problems Faced By Mexican Asylum Seekers In The United States, Anna Cabot

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Violence in Mexico rose sharply in response to President Felipe Calder6n's military campaign against drug cartels which began in late 2006. As a consequence, the number of Mexicans who have sought asylum in the United States has grown significantly. In 2013, Mexicans made up the second largest group of defensive asylum seekers (those in removal proceedings) in the United States, behind only China (EOIR 2014b). Yet between 2008 and 2013, the grant rate for Mexican asylum seekers in immigration court fell from 23 percent to nine percent (EOIR 2013, 2014b). This paper examines-from the perspective of an attorney who represented …

Comparative Urban Governance For Lawyers, Fernanda Nicola

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Democratic Capital: A Voting Rights Surge In Washington Could Strengthen The Constitution For Everyone, Jamin B. Raskin

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Congress As A Catalyst Of Patent Reform At The Federal Circuit, Jonas Anderson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is the dominant institution in patent law. The court’s control over patent law and policy has led to a host of academic proposals to shift power away from the court and towards other institutions, including the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and federal district courts. Surprisingly, however, academics have largely dismissed Congress as a potential institutional check on the Federal Circuit. Congress, it is felt, is too slow, too divided, and too beholden to special interests to effectively monitor changes in innovation and respond with appropriate reforms. …

The Rights Of Lesbian Gay Bisexual And Transgendered Peoples And International Human Rights Law, Claudia Martin, Diego Rodriguez-Pinzon

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Deluge Of New York City Laws Guards Against Flooding, Protects Environment, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The last year of Michael Bloomberg’s 12-year term as mayor of New York City saw a remarkable and little-noticed deluge of new environmental laws. The City Council passed and the mayor signed more than 50 envi­ronmental bills. Over half of these laws were passed in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy and focused on making infrastructure more resilient, improving emergency preparedness and response, and easing recovery for homeowners and businesses. In addi­tion, laws were enacted concerning clean energy, improving energy and fuel efficiency, reducing emissions from vehicles, and strengthening the city’s recycling laws.

Survey Of 2013 Cases Under State Quality Review Act, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The courts issued 38 decisions in 2013 under the State Envi­ronmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA). This represented the third-lowest number of deci­sions since this annual survey began in 1990; lower numbers were found only in 2011 (35) and 2010 (37).

Introduction: Law And Neoliberalism, David Singh Grewal, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

“Neoliberalism” refers to the revival of the doctrines of classical economic liberalism, also called laissez-faire, in politics, ideas, and law. These revived doctrines have taken new form in new settings: the “neo-” means not just that they are back, but that they are also different, a new generation of arguments. What unites the two periods of economic liberalism is their political effect: the assertion and defense of particular market imperatives and unequal economic power against political intervention. Neoliberalism’s advance over the past few decades has reshaped most important domains of public and private life, and the law has been no …