Law Commons^™

Law School News: Supporting Rhode Island's Aquaculture 9-23-2024, Andrew Clark, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

State Consent And The Legitimacy Of International Law, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Like all law, international law is a practice of reason-giving, one in which agents invoke legal norms to justify their conduct. Practitioners of inter- national law generally proceed on the assumption that those norms do, in fact, justify the conduct they sanction. Theorists, in contrast, tend to take a more critical stance towards the practice of international law, including the assumption that the law succeeds in providing a justification for its subjects’ conduct. Why treat the claim that international law prohibits Φ-ing as in itself a reason not to Φ? Or using the terminology I will employ in this chapter, …

Persuasion Through Citation: Four Ways To Enhance Your Legal Arguments With Proper Legal Citation, Melissa N. Henke

Law Faculty Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Problems With Authority, Amy J. Griffin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Judicial decisionmaking rests on a foundation of unwritten rules—those that govern the weight of authority. Such rules, including the cornerstone principle of stare decisis, are created informally through the internal social practices of the judiciary. Despite the central role of such rules in judicial decisionmaking, we lack a good account of how they are created, revised, and enforced. There is something paradoxical and troubling about the notion that the rules of the game are determined by the players as they play the game according to those rules. Because weight-of-authority rules are largely informal and almost entirely unwritten, we don’t even …

Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers And Protect Abusers: A Book Talk With Author Deborah Tuerkheimer, Deborah Tuerkheimer, Emily Sack

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Law Library Blog (April 2022): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Revisiting The Precedential Status Of Crown Court Decisions, Kwan Ho Lau

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The binding authority of substantive decisions made by the Crown Court in the exercise of its criminal jurisdiction is often assumed to be negligible. In 2013, the Court of Appeal appeared to confirm the correctness of that assumption. Yet there was little in the way of explanation or case law that was cited in support by the court. This article suggests that a re-evaluation of the place and treatment of such decisions within the doctrine of precedent is overdue, and considers that they should be recognised to have some binding effect if there is able to be established a reasonably …

22nd Annual Open Government Summit: Office Of The Attorney General: Access To Public Records Act & Open Meetings Act, Attorney General State Of Rhode Island

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

May The State Punish What It May Not Prevent?, Gabriel S. Mendlow

Articles

In Why Is It Wrong To Punish Thought? I defended an overlooked principle of criminalization that I called the Enforceability Constraint. The Enforceability Constraint holds that the state may punish transgressions of a given type only if the state in principle may forcibly disrupt such transgressions on the ground that they are criminal wrongs. As I argued in the essay, the reason why the state is forbidden from punishing thought is that the state is forbidden from forcibly disrupting a person’s mental states on the ground that they are criminally wrongful (as opposed to, say, on the ground that they …

Importing Prescription Drugs From Canada — Legal And Practical Problems With The Trump Administration's Proposal, Rachel E. Sachs, Nicholas Bagley

Articles

As Americans report ever-growing difficulty affording their prescription drugs, President Donald Trump has come under increasing pressure to act. To date, the Trump administration has attempted to advance a number of policy initiatives by means of executive action, but it has not yet adopted a program that would meaningfully assist patients. Most recently, the administration proposed a rule that, if finalized, would allow states to develop programs to import lower-priced prescription drugs from Canada, with the intent of reducing spending on drugs by U.S. patients and states and increasing access for patients.

Law Library Blog (May 2020): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Women In Law Leadership: Inaugural Lecture: A "Fireside Chat" With Gillian Lester 2-18-2020, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Michael M. Bowden, Andrea Hansen

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Who's Laughing Now, June Forte

Mighty Pen Project Anthology & Archive

Using the chain of command as an appeal process, a woman soldier in the '70s reports her company commander and first sergeant to the brigade commander when her immediate superiors refuse to listen to her grievance.

Articles, stories, and other compositions in this archive were written by participants in the Mighty Pen Project. The program, developed by author David L. Robbins, and in partnership with Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia War Memorial in Richmond, Virginia, offers veterans and their family members a customized twelve-week writing class, free of charge. The program encourages, supports, and assists participants in sharing their …

The Restatements And The Rule Of Law, Kristina Daugirdas

Book Chapters

This chapter explores the promotion of the rule of law. In drafting and publishing Restatements of Foreign Relations Law, both the American Law Institute and the reporters have understood the projects as contributing to the rule of law at the international level, at the domestic level, or both. There are at least three distinct ways that these Restatements might promote the rule of law. First, they might do so by clarifying the content of the law. Second, the Restatements might contribute to the development of new legal rules, specifically to the evolution and consolidation of customary international law. Finally, the …

Article Ii Vests Executive Power, Not The Royal Prerogative, Julian Davis Mortenson

Articles

Article II of the United States Constitution vests “the executive power” in the President. For more than two hundred years, advocates of presidential power have claimed that this phrase was originally understood to include a bundle of national security and foreign affairs authorities. Their efforts have been highly successful. Among constitutional originalists, this so-called “Vesting Clause Thesis” is now conventional wisdom. But it is also demonstrably wrong. Based on an exhaustive review of the eighteenth-century bookshelf, this Article shows that the ordinary meaning of “executive power” referred unambiguously to a single, discrete, and potent authority: the power to execute law. …

Crisis-Driven Tax Law: The Case Of Section 382, Albert H. Choi, Quinn Curtis, Andrew T. Hayashi

Articles

At the peak of the 2008 financial crisis, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issued Notice 2008–83 (the Notice), administrative guidance that limited Internal Revenue Code (the Code) section 382, an important tax rule designed to discourage tax-motivated acquisitions. Although styled as a mere interpretation of existing law, the Notice has been widely viewed as an improper exercise of the IRS’s authority that undermined its legitimacy. But did the Notice work? There were many extraordinary interventions during the financial crisis that raised questions about eroding the rule of law and the long-term destabilizing effects of bail­outs. In a financial crisis, regulators …

Why Is It Wrong To Punish Thought?, Gabriel S. Mendlow

Articles

It’s a venerable maxim of criminal jurisprudence that the state must never punish people for their mere thoughts—for their beliefs, desires, fantasies, and unexecuted intentions. This maxim is all but unquestioned, yet its true justification is something of a mystery. In this Essay, I argue that each of the prevailing justifications is deficient, and I conclude by proposing a novel one. The proposed justification captures the widely shared intuition that punishing a person for her mere thoughts isn’t simply disfavored by the balance of reasons but is morally wrongful in itself, an intrinsic (i.e., consequence-independent) injustice to the person punished. …

Reform At Risk — Mandating Participation In Alternative Payment Plans, Scott Levy, Nicholas Bagley, Rahul Rajkumar

Articles

In an ambitious effort to slow the growth of health care costs, the Affordable Care Act created the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) and armed it with broad authority to test new approaches to reimbursement for health care (payment models) and delivery-system reforms. CMMI was meant to be the government’s innovation laboratory for health care: an entity with the independence to break with past practices and the power to experiment with bold new approaches. Over the past year, however, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has quietly hobbled CMMI, imperiling its ability to generate meaningful data …

Dethroning The Hierarchy Of Authority, Amy J. Griffin

Publications

The use of authority in legal argument is constantly evolving—both the types of information deemed authoritative and their degree of authoritativeness—and that evolution has accelerated in recent years with dramatic changes in access to legal information. In contrast, the uncontroversial and ubiquitous “hierarchy of authority” used as the cornerstone for all legal analysis has remained entirely fixed. This article argues that the use of the traditional hierarchy as the dominant model for legal authority is deeply flawed, impeding a deeper understanding of the use of authority in legal argument. Lawyers, judges, and academics all know this, and yet no scholarly …

Debating The Past's Authority In Alabama, Sara Mayeux

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

With some exceptions, the major project of civil rights litigators today is not forward movement but the work of preserving as much as possible the gains of the 1960s against legal and political battering.29 Meanwhile, and ironically, the rise of conservative progress metanarratives reflects the achievement of both liberal and radical scholars of forcing into mainstream discourse greater recognition of the evils of slavery and Jim Crow. Respectable conservatives now join in denouncing the most flagrant forms of racial terror running through the American past (pace certain allies of the Trump Administration). But doing so places them in a bind, …

The Pro Bono Collaborative Project Spotlight 09-06-2017, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Pro Bono Collaborative Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Criminal Contempt, John A.E. Pottow, Jason S. Levin

Articles

It is of course too early to tell whether we are in a new era of bankruptcy judge (dis)respectability. Only time will tell. But this Article performs a specific case study, on one discrete area of bankruptcy court authority, based upon a particular assumption in that regard. The assumption is this: certain high-salience judicial events-here, the recent Supreme Court bankruptcy judge decisions, coupled with earlier constitutional precedents involving the limits of Article III-can trigger overreaction and hysteria. Lower courts may read these Supreme Court decisions as calling into question the permissibility of certain bankruptcy court practices under the Constitution, and …

Trending @ Rwu Law: Louise Ellen Teitz's Post: The Supreme Court And Cross-Border Litigation 04-04-2017, Louise Ellen Teitz

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

The Gibbons Fallacy, Richard A. Primus

Articles

In Gibbons v. Ogden, Chief Justice John Marshall famously wrote that "the enumeration presupposes something not enumerated." Modern courts use that phrase to mean that the Constitutions enumeration of congressional powers indicates that those powers are, as a whole, less than a grant of general legislative authority. But Marshall wasn't saying that. He wasn't talking about the Constitution's overall enumeration of congressional powers at all. He was writing about a different enumeration - the enumeration of three classes of commerce within the Commerce Clause. And Marshall's analysis of the Commerce Clause in Gibbons does not imply that the enumerated …

Democracy, Law, Compliance, Don Herzog

Articles

Professors Schauer and McAdams both seek a more or less sweepingly general theory of why we obey the law. But we should split, not lump. There are different reasons different actors in different social settings obey different laws–not only, but not least, out of regard for democratic decision making.

The Sec's Shift To Administrative Proceedings: An Empirical Assessment, Stephen J. Choi, Adam C. Prichard

Articles

Congress has repeatedly expanded the authority of the SEC to pursue violations of securities laws in proceedings adjudicated by the SEC's own administrative law judges, most recently through the Dodd-Frank Act. We report the results from an empirical study of SEC enforcement actions against non-financial public companies to assess the impact of the Dodd-Frank Act on the balance between civil court and administrative enforcement actions. We show a general decline in the number of court actions and an increase in the number of administrative proceedings post-Dodd-Frank. At the same time, we show an increase in average civil penalties post-Dodd-Frank for …

Slides: The Columbia River Basin, Barbara Cosens

Coping with Water Scarcity in River Basins Worldwide: Lessons Learned from Shared Experiences (Martz Summer Conference, June 9-10)

Presenter: Barbara Cosens, Professor and Associate Dean of Faculty, University of Idaho College of Law, Waters of the West Interdisciplinary Program

16 slides

Against Data Exceptionalism, Andrew Keane Woods

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

One of the great regulatory challenges of the Internet era—indeed, one of today's most pressing privacy questions—is how to define the limits of government access to personal data stored in the cloud. This is particularly true today because the cloud has gone global, raising a number of questions about the proper reach of one state's authority over cloud-based data. The prevailing response to these questions by scholars, practitioners, and major Internet companies like Google and Facebook has been to argue that data is different. Data is “unterritorial,” they argue, and therefore incompatible with existing territorial notions of jurisdiction. This Article …

Islamic Law And Constitution-Making: The Authoritarian Temptation And The Arab Spring, Mohammad Fadel

Osgoode Legal Studies Research Paper Series

The political dynamics that have characterized post-Mubarak Egypt have often been understood to be a battle between "religious" forces, represented by the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters, and "secularist" forces, represented by a diverse group of civil society actors. Opposition of this latter group to the "religious" politics of the Muslim Brotherhood is therefore understood to be the primary cause of the events that led to the July 3, 2013 military coup that overthrew Egypt's only freely elected President, Mohammed Morsi. Without denying the salience of a religious-secularist divide in Egypt, this narrative of post-Mubarak politics fails to appreciate the …

The Variation In The Use Of Sub-Regional Integration Courts Between Business And Human Rights Actors: The Case Of The East African Court Of Justice, James T. Gathii

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.