Law Commons^™

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 …

The Limits Of Moral Intuitions For Human Rights Advocacy, Andrew K. Woods

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The central ambition of human rights advocacy is to get people to care, who might otherwise not, about the suffering of others. To accomplish this, human rights advocates often appeal to moral intuitions by telling stories that evoke moral outrage, indignation, or guilt. Are these sorts of appeals a good way to promote human rights? The conventional wisdom suggests that they are. But perhaps the conventional wisdom is incomplete—perhaps human rights advocates should treat moral intuitions with skepticism rather than uncritical embrace. In this brief essay, I argue that appeals to moral intuitions are problematic because moral intuitions can lead …

Toward A Situational Model For Regulating International Crimes, Andrew K. Woods

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The international criminal regime, as currently conceived, relies almost exclusively on the power of backward-looking criminal sanctions to deter future international crimes. This model reflects the dominant mid-century approach to crime control, which was essentially reactive. Since then, domestic criminal scholars and practitioners have developed and implemented new theories of crime control—theories notable for their promise of crime prevention through ex ante attention to community and environmental factors. Community policing crime prevention through environmental design, and related "situational" approaches to crime control have had a significant impact on the administration of domestic criminal law.

This Article evaluates the implications of …

Moral Judgments & International Crimes: The Disutility Of Desert, Andrew K. Woods

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The international criminal regime exhibits many retributive features, but scholars and practitioners rarely defend the regime in purely retributive terms—that is, by reference to the inherent value of punishing the guilty. Instead, they defend it on the consequentialist grounds that it produces the best policy outcomes, such as deterrence, conflict resolution, and reconciliation. These scholars and practitioners implicitly adopt a behavioral theory known as the "utility of desert," a theory about the usefulness of appealing to people's retributive intuitions. That theory has been critically examined in domestic criminal scholarship but practically ignored in international criminal law.

This Article fills this …

Balancing Lives: Individual Accountability And The Death Penalty As Punishment For Genocide (Lessons From Rwanda), Melynda J. Price

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The purpose of this Article is not to answer the question of whether the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for genocide. One could safely argue that there is an emerging norm in international law against the death penalty, but individual countries have maintained their right to use the death penalty and continue to do so in code and in practice. This Article, using Rwanda as a case study, evaluates the real outcomes of such discrepancies in punishment at the domestic and international level, and the ability of both approaches to bring justice to the victims of genocide. Both domestic …

South Korea's National Security Law: A Tool Of Oppression In An Insecure World, Diane B. Kraft

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In September 2004, the ruling party in South Korea, along with two opposition parties, called for the abolishment of the 1948 anti-communist National Security Law. The following month, Amnesty International, a long-time critic of the law, officially called for the law's repeal. The law had been enacted in 1948 in response to threats from communist North Korea, but has long been used by the government to silence legitimate opposition in South Korea. This Comment will examine South Korea's National Security Law as viewed by its domestic supporters and critics, as well as by the international community. Part I will consider …

A Solution To The Yahoo! Problem? The Ec E-Commerce Directive As A Model For International Cooperation On Internet Choice Of Law, Mark F. Kightlinger

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In May 2000, a French court decided that a French law banning the display of Nazi materials for sale applies to an auction website hosted by the California-based company Yahoo! Inc. The following year, at the request of Yahoo! Inc., a U.S. District Court declared that the French judgment was unenforceable in the United States because enforcing it would violate an important public policy-the First Amendment. These two cases have attracted considerable attention because they crystallize a difficult problem. The Internet is global. Every website potentially reaches every home on the planet. Thus, website content or activity that may be …

The Internet And Public International Law, John M. Rogers

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

It is perhaps commonplace to observe that recent developments in information technology are revolutionizing most aspects of our lives. Anything that affects our lives so profoundly will, of necessity, have a significant effect on the law. We can expect that the information revolution will have a comparably significant impact on the international system of binding obligations often called public international law. Just what that will be is of course extremely difficult to predict. Compounding that difficulty is the lack of consensus on just what actually amounts to the public international legal system. Scholars and lawyers still debate fundamental questions regarding …

"Intensional Contexts" And The Rule That Statutes Should Be Interpreted As Consistent With International Law, John M. Rogers

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Striving for consistency—for consistency, that is, properly understood—must characterize legal reasoning in order for the reasoning to deserve to be called "legal." It may conceivably be "good" or "moral" for identically situated persons to be treated differently by institutions with power, but doing so can hardly be called "legal." Very careful attention must be given, of course, to what is meant by "identically situated," as no two different persons can be 100% identically situated. Their names, for instance, are different. By identical, we must mean no relevant distinction, or no distinction that serves a purpose that we can articulate and …

On The Exclusivity Of The Hague Evidence Convention, John M. Rogers

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

As the world grows smaller and nations become more interdependent, the likelihood that litigation will involve foreign property, parties, or activities increases tremendously. To prepare and conduct such litigation, the lawyer may need to obtain information "located" in a foreign jurisdiction: a person located abroad may know the information; documents located abroad may contain the information; or the information may describe conditions or property located abroad. The question of when relatively burdensome, internationally-approved methods of obtaining such information must be used thus becomes more and more important.

Consider a product liability suit for damages in the United States arising from …

Applying The International Law Of Sovereign Immunity To The States Of The Union, John M. Rogers

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A state of the Union may preserve its immunity from suit in its own courts, and the Constitution restricts its amenability to suit in the federal courts. Yet in Nevada v. Hall the Supreme Court held that in a motor-vehicle accident case a state cannot claim a constitutional immunity from suit in the courts of a sister state. The Court indicated, however, that if a suit involved a defendant state's “capacity to fulfill its own sovereign responsibilities,” different constitutional considerations might control. In vigorous dissents Justices Blackmun and Rehnquist argued that the reasoning of the majority precluded even this possibility. …