Comparative and Foreign Law Commons^™

The Inconsequential Choice-Of-Law Question Posed By Jesner V. Arab Bank, Beth Van Schaack

ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law

In Jesner v. Arab Bank, the United States (U.S.) Supreme Court has taken up the question of whether victims of human rights abuses can sue corporations and other legal entities for violations of the law of nations under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS).

Incitement And Defamation In Saudi Arabia: The Case Of Human Rights Lawyer Waleed Abu Al-Khair, Javier El-Hage, Celine Assaf Boustani

ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law

Saudi human rights lawyer and pro-democracy activist Waleed Abu Al-Khair was convicted for “inciting public opinion” and “harming the reputation of the King.” As a result, he is currently serving a fifteen-year prison sentence in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This Article analyzes Abu Al-Khair’s criminal conviction under international law, with a focus on the universal standard for the protection of freedom of expression. Specifically, this article explores international law rules that call for narrow constructions of the offenses of “incitement” and “defamation” under domestic law when dealing with public figures and public affairs. Portions of this paper have been …

Non-State Actors As Respondents Before International Judicial Bodies, Peter Tzeng

ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law

For centuries, non-state actors have acted as claimants before international judicial bodies. Only recently, however, have they begun acting as respondents.

The Complexities Of Human Rights And Constitutional Reform In The United Kingdom; Brexit And A Delayed Bill Of Rights: Informing (On) The Process, Katie Boyle, Leanne Cochrane

Northwestern Journal of Human Rights

The United Kingdom’s politicised and contested human rights framework has come under increasing pressure during recent periods of constitutional and political instability. The UK 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union, the delayed repeal of the Human Rights Act 1998 and the proposals to enact a British Bill of Rights have all shaped the discourse at the national level around decisions to retain rights (or not) rather than progressively improve the human rights structure. The European Union and Council of Europe human rights frameworks act as important pillars of human rights and democracy under the UK constitution and each …

Comparative Law In A Time Of Nativism, Margaret Woo

UC Law SF International Law Review

Pressures of globalization have strained population movements, restructured markets have led to widening economic divides, and terrorism has redefined national borders and identity. What we have seen in response is a rise in nationalism, nativism and in the extreme cases, isolationism. This inward turn seems to be true at least in the U.S. and in China. This turning inward presents a challenge to those of us who work in and champion the cause of comparative law, since comparative studies by its nature urges us to turn our gaze outward. This article examines what the turn to nativism means for the …

Looking Beyond The Positive-Negative Rights Distinction: Analyzing Constitutional Rights According To Their Nature, Effect, And Reach, Jorge M. Farinacci-Fernós

UC Law SF International Law Review

The relatively short catalogue of rights recognized by the Constitution of the United States, coupled with their near exclusive articulation as political and civil rights of a negative character opposable only to state action, has substantially narrowed the scope of analysis as to the different features and manifestations of constitutional rights in general. This has led the debate amongst U.S. scholars to focus their attention to rights as a sometimes simplistic dichotomy between negative political rights on the one hand, and positive socioeconomic rights on the other, which are more typically found in modern, teleological constitutions. In this brief Article, …

Globalization Of Japanese Lawyers: Achievements,Challenges, And Expectations Of American Law Schools, Akira Kawamura

UC Law SF International Law Review

Globalization of the legal profession is ever relevant, as the ideology of globalism is challenged in many places around the world today. The most controversial backlash against globalization was the U.S. presidential election, held only a few weeks before the UC Hastings College of the Law symposium on the globalization of the legal profession. In the last twenty years, the legal service industry has transformed dramatically and has grown exponentially as part of the global economy, especially with the growth of global financial industries. Should globalization be criticized, the global legal profession may undergo criticism as well. As Dr. Stiglitz …

Role Of Bar Associations In The Globalization Of Japaneselawyers, Tatsu Katayama

UC Law SF International Law Review

Japanese lawyers have faced the globalization of legal markets for decades. The first wave of globalization was characterized by inbound work. It came in 1987, when Japan opened its legal markets to foreign lawyers. Since then, foreign law firms have established offices in Japan and practiced together with Japanese lawyers on international legal matters. The second wave of globalization was characterized by outbound work. Japanese lawyers practicing outside of Japan have increased significantly in the past several years. My presentation briefly describes activities of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations (“JFBA”) in the context of the globalization of Japanese lawyers.

Public Interest Lawyering In Japan Under Globalization, Shinichi Sugiyama

UC Law SF International Law Review

Globalization came to the Japanese legal community as a form of legal reform early in the millennium. The reform has impacted not only business lawyering, but also public interest lawyering, which aims at access to justice (see Parts I and II). The growing national budget has improved legal services for the underrepresented (see Part III). The increasing number of Japanese lawyers has brought improvement in access to justice to thinly populated areas. More attorneys seek careers as in-house lawyers in business or public interest organizations such as the United Nations (see Parts IV, V). The negative effects of public interest …

Fifty Years Of Space Law: Basic Decisions And Future Challenges, Marcus Schladebach

UC Law SF International Law Review

Space Law is often described as a collection of more or less amusing and unrealistic rules. For society, outer space is more of an imaginary sphere than a concrete space of Public International Law. That is why it is an ambitious project to explain that the international community of States has created a legal order for exploring and using outer space by concluding a binding international treaty. With a duration of 50 years, the Outer Space Treaty is in an advanced age. This special anniversary represents good reason to evaluate basic decisions and to predict future challenges of this modern …

The Origin And Role Of The Penitentiary In Brazil, Scandanavia, And The United States, Nitin Sapra

UC Law SF International Law Review

Modern penitentiaries offer valuable insight on the core of society’s sensibilities, perceptions, and values. They shed light on the relation between the State and the citizenry, particularly the lower classes. Beyond its explicit reformative goals to the criminal justice system, the penitentiary functions to affect social policy through norms of decency and respect for human rights. From the unique architectural choices to the minute logistical details, a government makes choices that intimately speak on how it views its most vulnerable groups of individuals. The origins of the penitentiary offer insight into the circumstances that interweave to organize the social fabric …

Three Arguments Of The “Right To Secession” In The Civil War: International Perspectives, Han Liu

UC Law SF International Law Review

Secession becomes a source of controversies again both within and outside the United States. In both political discourse and public imagination, the image of secession of the South in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as the Civil War it triggered, occupies an important position. Conducted in blood, the end of the Civil War is usually thought to establish a constitutional rule that no state shall secede from the Union. Challenging the conventional understanding, recent legal scholarship has shown that the legality/constitutionality of secession did not receive a definitive, legal answer at Appomattox. But the question remains: Why so? Explaining the …

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1540: An Exemplary Model For A Framework To Safeguard Dangerous Dams Against Sabotage By Nonstate Actors, Ian Andrew Barber

UC Law SF International Law Review

The purpose of this research is to explore how an international framework could be developed in order to safeguard large dams against sabotage by nonstate actors, such as terrorist organizations or hostile civilians. The necessity of an international security agreement to manage dams as a global security threat will be clearly substantiated via an analysis of three determinants: the possible magnitude of dam failure, the inadequacies of international law to regulate asymmetric warfare, and the evolving threat of dam sabotage in the developing world. Subsequently, various legal components and regulatory mechanisms from an existing international agreement will be considered with …

Globalization Of Japanese Lawyers: Achievements,Challenges, And Expectations Of American Law Schools, Setsuo Miyazawa

UC Law SF International Law Review

The topic of the 2016 symposium was “Globalization of Japanese Lawyers: Achievements, Challenges, and Expectations of American Law Schools.” The symposium was held on November 18, 2016. This symposium commemorated the signing of the cooperation and the exchange agreement between UC Hastings and Niben. The 2016 symposium was organized to explore the following inquiries: how Japanese lawyers have been coping with a globalizing legal market; how much and in what way have Japanese lawyers become globalized; achievements of Japanese lawyers; challenges of Japanese lawyers; and finally what they expect from American law schools in their effort of globalization. We were …

Treaty Exit And Intra-Branch Conflict At The Interface Of International And Domestic Law, Laurence R.. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter, forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Foreign Relations Law, considers two important and unresolved issues raised by unilateral withdrawal from or denunciation of treaties. The first issue concerns whether treaty obligations end in both international and domestic law after a state leaves a treaty. Exit often produces the same effects in both legal systems, but some withdrawals bifurcate a treaty’s status, ending its obligations in domestic law but continuing to bind the state internationally, or vice versa. The second issue concerns denunciations initiated by different branches of government. The decision to withdraw from a treaty is usually …

How Asian Should Asian Law Be? – An Outsider’S View, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

Is there an Asian identity of Asian law, comparable to European identity and therefore similarly useful as a justification for unification projects? If so, what does it look like? And if so, does this make Asia more like Europe, or less so? Or is this question itself already a mere European projection?

This chapter tries to address such questions. In particular, I look at a concrete project of Asian law unification—the Principles of Asian Comparative Law—and connect discussions about its Asian identity with four concepts of Asia. The first such concept is a European idea of Asia and Asian law, …

Setbacks In Regulatory Data Protection Confront Innovative Drug Developers In The Russian Federation, Bruce Mcdonald, Vladislav Ugryumov, Denis Kolesnikov

The International Lawyer

No abstract provided.

Talking Foreign Policy: Jesner V. Arab Bank, Milena Sterio, Thomas Buergenthal, Carsten Stahn, Avidan Cover, Timothy Webster, Michael P. Scharf

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Talking Foreign Policy is a one-hour radio program, hosted by Case Western Reserve University School of Law Co-Dean Michael Scharf, in which experts discuss the salient foreign policy issues of the day. Dean Scharf created Talking Foreign Policy to break down complex foreign policy topics that are prominent in the day-to-day news cycles yet difficult to understand.

This broadcast featured:

• Judge Thomas Buergenthal, the youngest survivor of the Auschwitz death camp, who went on to become the Dean of American University Law School, to serve for twelve years as a judge on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and then …

Local Human Rights Lawyering, Lauren Bartlett

All Faculty Scholarship

International human rights offer a powerful set of norms that have helped domestic advocates to successfully secure additional civil, political, economic and social rights for those living in poverty in the U.S. Legal aid attorneys, public defenders, and other public interest advocates have recognized human rights as an additional advocacy tool and are increasingly using human rights arguments in U.S. courts. This article examines three cases in which legal aid attorneys and public defenders successfully used human rights arguments in U.S. courts, and discusses emerging best practices for using human rights in litigation in the U.S.

Mr. Trump's Contribution To Women's Human Rights, Barbara Stark

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Trump’s presidency is for those who support women’s human rights what Roe v. Wade was for abortion opponents, a “target,” as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg characterized Roe, an event that has focused and united people who did not realize how much they had in common. Just as Roe did for the radical right, this presidency has not only unified those concerned with women’s human rights, but galvanized them.

This Article focuses on three major areas of women’s human rights: civil and political rights; the right to be free from sexual harassment; and the right to health. The range of these …

International Comity And The Non-State Actor, Microsoft: Why Law Enforcement Access To Data Stored Abroad Act (Leads Act) Promotes International Comity, Sabah Siddiqui

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Currently large email service providers, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are refusing to comply with warrants issued under the Secured Communications Act (“SCA”) because in many instances, the requested information may be stored in servers located abroad. In the dismissed Supreme Court case, In re Warrant to Search a Certain E-Mail Account Controlled & Maintained by Microsoft Corporation, the Supreme Court should have addressed whether an internet service provider must comply with a warrant issued under the SCA when the requested information is stored in a foreign country and whether enforcement of these warrants would be an impermissible …

Chasing Shadows: The Economic And Noneconomic Thrust Of Bds, Harry G. Hutchison

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

Proponents of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, in combination with left-wing activists and progressive theorists, sustain themselves through perceived adversity with the mantra that the universe evolves toward justice, which, in turn, allows for a focused indignation on Israel for alleged abuses of the Palestinian people. In this account, Israel's conduct thwarts desirable human progress and deserves reproof Alternatively, ire erupts because Israeli Jews are being, well, Jews. Despite persuasive evidence showing the contention that the Arabs of Palestine and the Land of Israel possess the same legal rights as the Jewish people contradicts principles of international law, …

Faith-Based Mediation In The Pakistan-India Conflict, Sarah Khan

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

Section II of this Note explores the background history of Muslims and Hindus in India, the partition, and some of the most prominent issues that stand in the way of resolution. Section III discusses how religious mediation methods have been, and continue to be, used successfully in the contexts of other countries and conflicts. Section IV proposes that these methods be applied in the Pakistan-India situation to target specific issues facing the two countries, while incorporating the already proposed solutions that are on the table by politicians today.

Mediation Capacity Building With Liberian Diaspora Communities: Some Observations, Maria R. Volpe, Bradley L. Roth

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

The focus of this article will be on elucidating an initiative that has involved multiple partnerships, sensitivity to cultural differences, local-global interactions, work with diaspora communities, adaptation of mediation training programs, dedicated volunteerism, and concerns about sustainability. Central to all of the activities is an explicit resolve by the mediators involved to understand and appropriately respond to the parties' contexts when providing mediation expertise. John Paul Lederach has referred to this method as a mix of prescriptive and elicitive approaches. In sum, the trainers used their expertise as both mediators and trainers to be conscious of and sensitive to the …

Inaccessible Apexes: Comparing Access To Regional Human Rights Courts And Commissions In Europe, The Americas, And Africa Symposium: Comparing Regional Human Rights Regimes, Claudia Martin, Francoise Hampson, Frans Vilijoen

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The three well-established regional human rights systems (in Europe, the Americas, and Africa) aim to provide access to individuals to a decision and remedy based on the violation of human rights in the founding treaties. In this article, the notion of the "dispute pyramid," developed in sociolegal studies, generally, is adjusted to describe and help us better understand regional access. Access differs considerably across the three systems, and its major stumbling blocks present themselves at different stages. In the European system, most cases are dismissed at the admissibility phase. In the Inter-American system, most cases are weeded out at the …

Table Of Contents, Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review, Vol. 1, Iss. 2

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

No abstract provided.

Biased Damages Awards: Gender And Race Discrimination In Tort Trials, Goran Dominioni

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

Current U.S. tort law incentivizes potential tortfeasors to target members of underprivileged social groups by using gender and race-based statistical tables life expectancy; work-life expectancy and average wage) to award damages. Legal scholars have long criticized this practice from the point of view of distributive justice but supported it on welfarist grounds. Recent research in law and economics has however cast doubts on the efficiency of this practice. On this basis, some propose abandoning it in favor of gender and race neutral tables. In this article, I contribute to this debate by analyzing from a behavioral law and economics perspective …

Asteroid Mining: International And National Legal Aspects, Frans G. Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

1. Introduction; Asteroid Mining and the Law … 2. The International Legal Context for Asteroid Mining—The Outer Space Treaty … 3. The International Legal Context for Asteroid Mining—The Moon Agreement … 4. Back to the Outer Space Treaty: Interpreting the Nonappropriation Prohibition … 5. Unilateral Action: Title IV, U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act … 6. Concluding Remarks

Asteroid mining is one of the hot topics today not only within the space arena at large but also in the more specific domain of space law, comprising “every legal or regulatory regime having a significant impact, even if implicitly or indirectly, …

Some Remarks Further To "Outer Space And International Geography: Article Ii And The Shape Of Global Order" By P. J. Blount, Frans Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

Introduction ... The Key Role of Article II of the Outer Space Treaty ... Article II of the Outer Space Treaty and the Commercialization of Outer Space ... Space Mining: The Need for an Update of the Legal Framework ... Updating the Existing Legal Framework: Some Further Thoughts ... Concluding Remarks

The European Union And Space—Space For Competition?, Frans G. Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

From the inception of European integration, a regime trying to regulate and arrange competition as much as considered necessary for the benefit of society at large has been one of the core elements of the European Union’s legal order. While the European Union has over the past few decades become more and more involved in the European space effort, this has so far hardly given rise to fundamental application of this competition regime to space activities, even if space also in Europe increasingly has become commercialized and privatized. The current paper investigates the reasons and rationale for this special situation, …