Law Commons^™

When Do Chinese National Ministries Make Law?, Wei Cui

All Faculty Publications

This paper documents some basic empirical facts about the issuance of formal regulations (FRs) and informal policy directives (IPDs) by China’s national ministries and agencies from 2000 to 2014. Prior scholarship (e.g. Cui 2011, Howson 2012) depicts specific instances of Chinese national agencies announcing substantive new policies (many ultra vires by statutory standards) through IPDs. I use FR and IPD quantities as measures of the agencies’ propensity to resort to legal as opposed to non-legal, merely bureaucratic mechanisms for announcing policy. I find significant variations across agencies in the quantities of FRs issued, both in absolute terms and relative to …

The Devil In The Detail: Mitigating The Constitutional & Rule Of Law Risks Associated With The Use Of Artificial Intelligence In The Legal Domain, Catrina Denvir, Tristan Fletcher, Jonathan Hay, Pascoe Pleasence

Florida State University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Justice Jackson's 1946 Nuremberg Reflections At Buffalo: An Introduction, Alfred S. Konefsky, Tara J. Melish

Tara Melish

This Essay introduces the 2011 James McCormick Mitchell Lecture, “From Nuremberg to Buffalo: Justice Jackson’s Enduring Lessons of Morality and Law in a World at War,” a commemoration of Jackson’s 1946 centennial convocation speech at the University of Buffalo. It discusses Jackson’s speech, breaks down its thematic components, and situates the distinguished Mitchell Lecturers’ responses to it in context. Unlike Justice Jackson’s commanding and historic opening and closing statements as U.S. chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Jackson’s 1946 speech, delivered just days after his return from Germany where he heard the Nuremberg Tribunal deliver its final judgment and verdicts, has largely …

Due Process Court Of Appeals

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Just Listening: The Equal Hearing Principle And The Moral Life Of Judges, Barry Sullivan

Barry Sullivan

No abstract provided.

Dear I.R.S., It Is Time To Enforce The Campaigning Prohibition. Even Against Churches, Samuel Brunson

Samuel D. Brunson

In 1954, Congress prohibited tax-exempt public charities, including churches, from endorsing or opposing candidates for office. To the extent a tax-exempt public charity violated this prohibition, it would no longer qualify as tax-exempt, and the IRS was to revoke its exemption.

While simple in theory, in practice, the IRS rarely penalizes churches that violate the campaigning prohibition and virtually never revokes a church's tax exemption. And, because no taxpayer has standing to challenge the IRS's inaction, the IRS has no external imperative to revoke the exemptions of churches that do campaign on behalf of or against candidates for office.

This …

The Cognitive Dissonance Between The Rule Of Law And Rural Realities: Reading Gillian Hadfield’S Rules For A Flat World In The Context Of Rural Identity And Politics, Danielle M. Conway

Faculty Scholarly Works

Rural communities – as well as other marginalized communities – see their access to legal infrastructure declining, so much so that they feel disconnected from the rule of law. Current complex law and legal infrastructure focus on big “I” innovation, which is hyper-transactional and benefits the few. Rural communities, and others, would find law and legal infrastructure more relevant if they focused more on small “i” innovation, which centers on negotiating real, societal relationships.

Fostering Adaptive Marine Aquaculture Through Procedural Innovation In Marine Spatial Planning, Robin Kundis Craig

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Worldwide, as wild-caught commercial fisheries plateau and human demands for protein increase, marine aquaculture is expanding. Much marine aquaculture is inherently adaptable to changing climatic and chemical conditions. Nevertheless, siting of marine aquaculture operations is subject to competing environmental, economic, and social demands upon and priorities for ocean space, while some forms of marine aquaculture can impose other externalities on marine systems, such as pollution from wastes (nutrients) and antibiotics, consumption of wild fish as food, and introduction of non-native or genetically modified species. As a result, governmental policy decisions to promote both marine aquaculture that can adapt to a …

Alternatives To Investor-State Dispute Settlement, Lise Johnson, Jesse Coleman, Brooke Güven, Lisa E. Sachs

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Proponents often explain support for international investment agreements (IIAs) for their ability to: (1) promote investment flows; (2) depoliticize disputes between investors and states; (3) promote the rule of law; and (4) provide compensation for certain harms to investors – objectives of varying degrees of importance to multinational enterprises, home states, host states, and other stakeholders.

While each of these objectives may seem desirable, it is important to consider what exactly they mean and whether IIAs are optimally tailored to achieve them.

This two-part series aims to consider just that. In the first blog installment, we asked of investor-state dispute …

Prosecuting The Executive, Tiffany R. Murphy

San Diego Law Review

A special counsel is appointed to investigate and potentially prosecute any criminal activity involving those in the Executive Branch. When an attorney general makes such a decision, the individual should consider not only the scope of the appointment but whether the special counsel will protect the fundamental rules of law upon which the Constitution rests; no one person is above the law. Recent history illustrates the abuses of the special prosecutor’s role where it was used as a political weapon or for low level officials. Instead, a special counsel should be used only when the crisis is severe enough that …

Defending Against Notions Of Terra Nullius With The Re.Past.Malaga Performance, Danielle M. Conway

Faculty Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Reconsidering Judicial Independence: Forty-Five Years In The Trenches And In The Tower, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

Trusting in the integrity of our institutions when they are not under stress, we focus attention on them both when they are under stress or when we need them to protect us against other institutions. In the case of the federal judiciary, the two conditions often coincide. In this essay, I use personal experience to provide practical context for some of the important lessons about judicial independence to be learned from the periods of stress for the federal judiciary I have observed as a lawyer and concerned citizen, and to provide theoretical context for lessons I have deemed significant as …

Manufactured Emergencies, Robert Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Emergencies are presumed to be unusual affairs, but the United States has been in one state of emergency or another for the last forty years. That is a problem. The erosion of democratic norms has led to not simply the collapse of the traditional conceptual boundary between ordinary rule and emergency governance, but also the emergence of an even graver problem: the manufactured crisis. In an age characterized by extreme partisanship, institutional gridlock, and technological manipulation of information, it has become exceedingly easy and far more tempting for a President to invoke extraordinary power by ginning up exigencies. To reduce …

The Rule Of Law, Arbitrariness And Institutional Virtue, Anthony Keith Thompson

Law Papers and Journal Articles

This article summarises Professor Martin Krygier's work on the rule of law and his view that arbitrariness is its core and is under-theorised. From ancient philosophy, the author suggests that our rule of law settlement feels tentative because arbitrariness is a human characteristic that cannot be completely fixed with institutional checks and balances. The author observes that a variety of rule of law virtues are already expected of judicial decision-makers and suggests that these institutional virtues should be transferred into the administrative, executive and corporate decision-making space to advance the rule of law project.

Decentralizing Legislation In China’S Law On Legislation Amendment, Wei Cui, Jiang Wan

All Faculty Publications

We present a novel account of China’s recent move to decentralize legislation through amending the Law on Legislation (LL). Conventional wisdom pervading both Chinese political discourse and social scientific scholarship on China portrays law as incompatible with experimentation and as only suitable for codifying policies adopted after experimentation. Moreover, the value of legislatures is viewed as lying in their independence from the executive branch. We highlight rationales offered by the Chinese Communist Party for the LL amendment that repudiate these assumptions: the Party proclaimed the intention to promote lawmaking as a central instrument of policy experimentation; moreover, the Party’s intervention …

Law As Strategy: Thinking Below The State In Afghanistan, Charles H. Norchi

Faculty Publications

U.S.engagement in Afghanistan is inevitable, but there will be choices about strategy. In 1952, the U.S.Naval War College convened a lecture series devoted to strategy. On March 20, the lecturer was Harold D.Lasswell, an architect of the New Haven School of Jurisprudence. Lasswell observed, “The aim of strategy is to maximize the realization of the goal values of the body politic.” This article proposes that law is among the available strategic instruments to advance goal values common to the United States, Afghanistan,and the world community.

Jurisdiction Stripping Circa 2020: What The Dialogue (Still) Has To Teach Us, Henry P. Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Since its publication in 1953, Henry Hart’s famous article, The Power of Congress to Limit the Jurisdiction of Federal Courts: An Exercise in Dialectic, subsequently referred to as simply “The Dialogue,” has served as the leading scholarly treatment of congressional control over the federal courts. Now in its seventh decade, much has changed since Hart first wrote. This Article examines what lessons The Dialogue still holds for its readers circa 2020.

Democratic Policing Before The Due Process Revolution, Sarah Seo

Faculty Scholarship

According to prevailing interpretations of the Warren Court’s Due Process Revolution, the Supreme Court constitutionalized criminal procedure to constrain the discretion of individual officers. These narratives, however, fail to account for the Court’s decisions during that revolutionary period that enabled discretionary policing. Instead of beginning with the Warren Court, this Essay looks to the legal culture before the Due Process Revolution to provide a more coherent synthesis of the Court’s criminal procedure decisions. It reconstructs that culture by analyzing the prominent criminal law scholar Jerome Hall’s public lectures, Police and Law in a Democratic Society, which he delivered in 1952 …

One Rule Of Law Project In Post-Soviet Russia, Albert E. Scherr

Law Faculty Scholarship

"One Rule of Law Project in Post-Soviet Russia" is published as Chapter 9 of the book At Home Abroad: Friendship First - A Look at Rule of Law Projects and Other International Insights, (ed. Joseph Nadeau, New York: Austin Macauley Publishers LLC, 2019). This book provides personal insights into an international cooperative effort to promote the rule of law in emerging democracies around the world. Professor Scherr's chapter examines the cultural context within a study of the rule-of-law project that was conducted between 1999 and 2004 in Vologda, Russia.

The Cognitive Dissonance Between The Rule Of Law And Rural Realities: Reading Gillian Hadfield’S Rules For A Flat World In The Context Of Rural Identity And Politics, Danielle M. Conway

Faculty Publications

Rural communities – as well as other marginalized communities – see their access to legal infrastructure declining, so much so that they feel disconnected from the rule of law. Current complex law and legal infrastructure focus on big “I” innovation, which is hyper-transactional and benefits the few. Rural communities, and others, would find law and legal infrastructure more relevant if they focused more on small “i” innovation, which centers on negotiating real, societal relationships.

Manufactured Emergencies, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

Emergencies are presumed to be unusual affairs, but the United States has been in one state of emergency or another for the last forty years. That is a problem. The erosion of democratic norms has led to not simply the collapse of the traditional conceptual boundary between ordinary rule and emergency governance, but also the emergence of an even graver problem: the manufactured crisis. In an age characterized by extreme partisanship, institutional gridlock, and technological manipulation of information, it has become exceedingly easy and far more tempting for a President to invoke extraordinary power by ginning up exigencies. To reduce …

Political Trust In Kosovo: Exploring Cultural And Institutional Dynamics, Ermira Babamusta

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

In this dissertation I examine political trust perceptions across different political-legal institutions and actors in Kosovo. I evaluate the levels of political trust using cultural and institutional performance explanations to investigate the key factors that have an impact on political trust. The study explores national political trust and international political trust, considering many domains of political trust: government, political leaders, political parties, Kosovo Courts, Kosovo Police, NATO, United Nations, European Union, and the Kosovo Specialist Court. There is growing concern about lower levels of political trust across Europe, especially in post-communist countries. In this study, I make the case that …

The Most Fundamental Right, Nicholas A. Robinson

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The Magna Carta and successors recognize a right to the environment as central to human existence. Along with associated rule of law and due process, 193 national charters recognize such a right — but not the U.S. Constitution. This right does lie latent in America’s state constitutions, however, and can also be read into the federal document as well. Meanwhile, recognition of environmental rights is expanding globally.