Comparative and Foreign Law Commons^™

Comparative Visions For U.S. Group-Based Asylum Proposal, Lauren N. Hughes

Scholarly Articles

Images of asylum seekers and migrants desperate to enter the United States at the southern border abound in U.S. media. Less familiar to the American public, but intertwined with the highly politicized modern migration crisis, is the ever-growing backlog of pending asylum applications before both the Asylum Office and Immigration Courts. This backlog has many causes, including underresourced agencies, a growing number of asylum applicants, the high evidentiary burden and complexities inherent to asylum law, and the lack of counsel for many asylum seekers. In response to this crippling backlog, some scholars propose the adoption of a “group-based” asylum mechanism. …

Book Review, Jens Meierhenrich, The Violence Of Law: The Formation And Deformation Of Gacaca Courts In Rwanda (2024)., Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

In The Violence of Law, Jens Meierhenrich—currently professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science—offers a detailed, erudite, and encyclopedic analysis of the gacaca system.

Refundable Tax Credit Design: Cohabitating Parents And Gender Presumptions, Michelle Lyon Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

This Essay is meant to encourage further thinking to improve upon design options for unmarried cohabitating parents. Are there better ways to recognize the needs of unmarried co-parents (whether living together or not) and to provide support for shared parenting? The policy considerations for providing support to unmarried cohabitating parents are different than those for supporting married couples, given that these individuals lack the financial protections of a formal partnership.

One solution is to have a default rule whereby the CTC is awarded to the primary caregiver. Canada’s gender presumption provides a degree of administrative simplicity, but the IRS could …

‘Resisting’ While Collaboratively Informing In Communist Czechoslovakia, Mark A. Drumbl, Barbora Holá

Scholarly Articles

Informers in the service of state secret police collaborate with authorities and thus contribute to the power of repressive regimes. Through a case-study of Communist Czechoslovakia (1945–1989)—and drawing from secret police archives– this article presents selected stories of informers who in one way or another also ‘resisted’ collaboration with the Czechoslovak State Security (StB). By doing so, we try to further complexify the notions of ’everyday resistance’, on the one hand, and ‘collaboration’ on the other. We demonstrate that resistant acts, similar to collaborative acts, can be apolitically devoid of ideology, highly idiosyncratic, and motivated by private drivers. Informing can …

La Cour! La Mer!, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

The presence of courts—la Cour, certainement, mais d’autres aussi—weaves and wends throughout The Last Colony. Fundamentally, this is a story of courts (tribunals, arbitrations, etc.) righting wrongs or, in the least, setting a tune for wrongrighting to which political institutions then can hum along. Philippe Sands evokes the solemnity of legalism with the ‘La Cour!’ greeting, which he plays and replays, and with which he begins his book. These are welcoming words, for Sands, and also welcoming words for law, insofar as they signal the opening of the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—La Cour!—for the …

Place-Based Versus Practice-Based Norms For American Lawyers: "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)", James E. Moliterno

Scholarly Articles

This Article acknowledges the growing trend toward practice-based lawyer norms, points out how it allows interaction between the existing place-based norms and the new practice-based norms, and compares this movement with the existing regulatory conditions outside the US. If there is movement from the world as we know it (place-based norms) to a world as it may come to be (practice-based norms), is the change tragic, inevitable, risky, in line with the rest of the global legal profession, or all of the above and more? Specifically, how would such an evolution affect the core duty of lawyer-client confidentiality?

Pandemic As Transboundary Harm: Lessons From The Trail Smelter Arbitration, Russell A. Miller

Scholarly Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused incalculable harm around the world. The fact that this immense harm can be traced back to a localized outbreak in or near Wuhan, China, raises questions about the responsibility China might bear for the pandemic under public international law. Famously applied in the seminal Trail Smelter Arbitration (1938/1941), the Transboundary Harm Principle provides that no state can use or allow the use of its territory in a manner that causes significant harm in the territory of other states. This article does not intend to tap into the unseemly, xenophobic spirit that animates much of the …

Introduction: Looking And Listening, Seeing And Hearing, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

This issue of the Temple Journal of International and Comparative Law hosts a symposium about Randle DeFalco's cutting-edge book, Invisible Atrocities: The Aesthetic Biases of International Criminal Justice. In it, DeFalco glances at glimpses of the metastasis of mass atrocity. He sees these metastatic processes-these movements-as simultaneously fast and slow. By fast, he refers to obvious and instantly horrific acts of physical violence. These are massacres, attacks, pogroms, and wanton destruction. But DeFalco also discerns that mass violence implicates slower movements and less directly causal harms: these are famine, starvation, corruption, impoverishment, mental anguish, and aid interference.' The movements …

Where's Rudy?, James E. Moliterno

Scholarly Articles

Choice of law in lawyer discipline matters, and the language among the popular choice of law rules in use matters. The core goals of choice of law principles should not limit the choices to the states in which a lawyer has a full, formal license. Doing so undermines the modern choice of law interests analysis by eliminating jurisdictions that may have the greatest interest in the conduct.

Lawyers cross borders physically and electronically on a daily basis. Accordingly, choice of law rules are critical, especially when a lawyer engages in missions that are targeted at particular jurisdictions, as Rudy Giuliani …

Recent Attacks On Judicial Independence: The Vulgar, The Systemic, And The Insidious, James E. Moliterno, Peter Čuroš

Scholarly Articles

This article offers an opening to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) situation and attacks against the judiciary in this region since 2010. The focus is not primarily on historical path dependence like the rest of this issue. Instead, the focus aims at the nature of attacks on the judiciary. Such attacks have appeared in CEE and the US in recent years. Its interest lies in explaining similar patterns visible in the judiciaries of CEE. Particularly, it looks at the current conditions in the Czech judiciary, political interventions in Poland since 2015 and in Hungary since 2010, and undermining of trust …

The U.S. Sentencing Commission’S Recidivism Studies: Myopic, Misleading, And Doubling Down On Imprisonment, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

Recidivism has now replaced rehabilitation as the guiding principle of punishment. It is increasingly used to steer criminal justice policy despite research limitations. It serves as a stand-in for public safety, even though lengthy incarceration may have criminogenic and other negative ramifications for family members and communities. Yet the U.S. Sentencing Commission emphasizes recidivism. It emphasizes what amounts to preemptive imprisonment for those with long criminal records to prevent future offending.

The Commission’s work should come with a warning label. First, its recidivism studies should not be consumed on their own. Instead they must be read in conjunction with U.S. …

The Many Harms Of Forced Marriage: Insights For Law From Ethnography In Northern Uganda, Myriam S. Denov, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

Harnessing an interdisciplinary framework that merges elements of law and social science, this article aims to recast the crime of forced marriage, and thereby enhance accountability, in light of knowledge acquired through ethnographic fieldwork in northern Uganda. More specifically, we draw upon the perspectives and experiences of 20 men who were "bush husbands" in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). These men were abducted by the LRA between the ages of 10 and 38 and spent between 6 and 24 years in captivity. During their time in the LRA, these men became ‘bush husbands’ with each man fathering between 1 and …

Making Open Access Viable Economically, Andrew Hyde, Russell A. Miller, Emanuel V. Towfigh

Scholarly Articles

The Editors-in-Chief have decided that we will provide our much-cherished readers with an editorial every so often as a way of sharing insights from the “machine room” where so much of the thinking and work is done to publish the German Law Journal. We want to let you in on the ideas that are on our minds, share with you our observations, and include you in the conversations we are having that might be of interest to you. We begin this tradition with this issue, Volume 21 – Number 6. Andrew Hyde, a member of the editorial team with which …

A Peruvian Tax Lawyer In A U.S. Corporate Tax Class: What Can Be Explained And What Cannot Be Explained, Fernando J. Loayza Jordán

Scholarly Articles

This paper is more of an ethnographic comparison, inspired by classroom experiences, between U.S. and Peruvian tax law education than what Garbarino calls “hard-nose comparative work” that requires an underlying theory and a clear methodology. It is also different from most comparative works because it is not actually about an area of law itself but about how it is taught and why, visiting some of the most critical variables in legal education. Nevertheless, I have tried to keep in mind the main critiques of comparative tax studies that could also become errors in the comparisons that I intend to draw.

Sustainable And Open Access To Valuable Legal Research Information: A New Framework, Alex Zhang, James Hart

Scholarly Articles

This article evaluates the current status of access to foreign and international legal research information, analyzes the challenges that information providers have experienced in providing valuable and sustainable access, and proposes a model that would help create and facilitate effective and sustainable access to valuable foreign, comparative, and international legal information.

The Right To Migrate: A Human Rights Response To Immigration Restrictionism In Argentina, David C. Baluarte

Scholarly Articles

Within days of President Donald Trump’s 2017 Executive Orders on border security and immigration enforcement, President Mauricio Macri of Argentina issued a Decree to address what he declared was an urgent problem of immigrant criminality. The timing of the two Presidents’ actions triggered concerns that U.S.-style restrictionist immigration regulation was spreading to South America, a continent that has taken progressive steps towards recognizing the human rights of migrants in recent years. Until Macri’s 2017 Decree, Argentina was considered a leader in this regard, with its 2004 immigration law that boldly codified a “right to migrate” and included robust substantive and …

Book Review, Marcos Zunino, Justice Framed: A Genealogy Of Transitional Justice (2019), Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

Transitional justice initiatives, broadly speaking, respond to systematic human rights abuses. These initiatives take multiple shapes and forms. This means that the actual practice of transitional justice is diverse and organic. Transitional justice discourse, however, is aspirational, normative and selective. It is less heterogeneous and far more directive. Marcos Zunino’s eye-opening book, Justice Framed, is about gaps between narrative discourse and tangible practice. It is about the effects of discourse on practice. More pointedly, Justice Framed is about how discourse ‘surfaces’ certain kinds of practices of the past while sidelining and ignoring others. Hence, to come full circle, this book …

The Role Of Women Entrepreneurs In Rebuilding A Nation: The Rwandan Model, Karen E. Woody

Scholarly Articles

This Article contributes to the literature by analyzing the normative shifts within the country's institutions, both pre- and post-genocide, and observes the role of women in restructuring the institutions as a major factor in the success that Rwanda enjoys today. By prioritizing gender equality in the recreation of its legal and economic structures, Rwanda is able to leverage the talents and capabilities of its entire population, and provides a model that can be applied to a number of other countries.

Part I details the historical underpinnings of the Rwandan genocide and humanitarian crisis. Part II addresses the efforts to establish …

What We Teach When We Teach German Constitutional Law: An Introduction To The Collection Memorializing Donald P. Kommers, Russell A. Miller

Scholarly Articles

The author posits that Americans’ interest in German constitutional law can be traced to a single source. Donald Kommers (1932-2018), the political scientist and legal scholar at Notre Dame, pioneered the field of comparative constitutional law and popularized German constitutional jurisprudence in the English speaking world with his groundbreaking study of the German Federal Constitutional Court, and his seminal, English-language treatise on German constitutional law that first published in 1989.

El Control De Convencionalidad En Sede Administrativa: Un Mecanismo Para La Defensa De Los Contribuyentes, Fernando Loayza Jordán, Julio César Casma Rocha

Scholarly Articles

A través de la sentencia recaída en el expediente 04293-2012-PA/TC, el Tribunal Constitucional dejó sin efecto el precedente vinculante que validaba la aplicación del control difuso en sede administrativa. Esto supuso para los contribuyentes una situación de indefensión frente a la potencial aplicación de normas tributarias inconstitucionales. Si bien existen vías alternativas para que estos puedan defenderse ante estas normas, estas no resultan igualmente idóneas para tutelar sus intereses y carecen de la rapidez que caracterizaba al control difuso en sede administrativa.

En este artículo, los autores proponen la aplicación del control de convencionalidad en sede administrativa como una solución …

The Legal Fate Of Internet Ad-Blocking, Russell A. Miller

Scholarly Articles

Ad-blocking services allow individual users to avoid the obtrusive advertising that both clutters and finances most Internet publishing. Ad-blocking's immense - and growing - popularity suggests the depth of Internet users' frustration with Internet advertising. But its potential to disrupt publishers' traditional Internet revenue model makes ad-blocking one of the most significant recent Internet phenomena. Unsurprisingly, publishers are not inclined to accept ad-blocking without a legal fight. While publishers are threatening suits in the United States, the issues presented by ad-blocking have been extensively litigated in German courts where ad-blocking consistently has triumphed over claims that it represents a form …

Structuring Relief For Sex Offenders From Registration And Notification Requirements: Learning From Foreign Jurisdictions And From The Model Penal Code: Sentencing, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

This paper first discusses the scope of sex offender registration and notification under federal and state laws, and contrasts U.S. laws with those in other countries. Part III turns to the prevailing rationales for these laws and tests their empirical validity. It highlights the negative effect of registries and notification on criminal investigations, and the cost they impose on public coffers, public safety, and those labeled sex offenders. Part IV discusses a set of proposals to turn registries, which may serve a limited legitimate function, into more effective law enforcement tools while restricting public notification. This section outlines ex ante …

¿Debemos Exigirle Seguridad Jurídica A Una Cláusula Antielusiva General? Reflexiones Sobre Las Líneas Discursivas Contrarias A La Cag, Fernando Loayza Jordán

Scholarly Articles

Las CAG generan tensiones entre la certidumbre que desean los contribuyentes y la flexibilidad que requiere su naturaleza. Esta tensión se refleja en las líneas discursivas críticas contra la Norma XVI. Hemos resumido estas en tres ideas fuerza: (i) “una CAG vulnera el principio de seguridad jurídica”, (ii) “una CAG solo podría ser aceptable si se enuncia con un lenguaje muy preciso y definido” y (iii) “una CAG interrumpiría la dinámica regular de los negocios y detendría la inversión”. A partir de la experiencia comparada y el análisis de la función de las CAG y la naturaleza del fenómeno de …

Germany's German Constitution, Russell A. Miller

Scholarly Articles

Comparative lawyers, working with blunt taxonomies such as “legal families,” have been satisfied with characterizing Germany as representative or a member of the “Germanic-Roman” law tradition. The life of the Federal Republic’s post-war legal culture, however, reveals a richly more complicated story. The civil law tradition, with its emphasis on abstract conceptualism and codification, remains dominant. But it has had to accommodate a new, vigorous constitutionalism that bears many of the traits of the common law tradition, including judicial supremacy and a form of case law. This is the encounter of discrete legal traditions within a particular legal system that …

On Hostility And Hospitality: Othering Pierre Legrand, Russell A. Miller

Scholarly Articles

Pierre Legrand's return to the pages of the American Journal of Comparative Law after nearly twenty years is cause for reflection on the reasons for this prolific comparatist's absence from one of the discipline's leading scholarly fora. One reason is the widespread disdain aimed at Legrand as a result of his persistent, sharply critical, and often pointedly personal crusade against the discipline's accepted approaches and their most prominent practitioners. This is partly the nature of the article he publishes in this collection, which features a no-holds-bared, uncomplimentary assessment of the work of James Gordley. In this Article I argue that …

Democracy Clauses In The Americas: The Challenge Of Venezuela’S Withdrawal From The Oas, Antonio F. Perez

Scholarly Articles

In light of Venezuela’s unprecedented notice of its intention to withdraw from the Organization of American States, this essay by a former member of the Juridical Committee of the OAS explores the range of discretion available to the OAS and its Member States in interpreting and applying the OAS’s unique provision for withdrawal. Presenting the first extensive analysis of this provision of the OAS Charter, the essay argues that the withdrawal clause can plausibly be interpreted to require Venezuela to fulfill all its obligations under the OAS Charter, including its obligations to respect democracy, before its unprecedented withdrawal can take …

La Aplicación De Otros Métodos De Valoración En El Régimen De Precios De Transferencia, Fernando Loayza Jordán, Martín La Rosa Almenara

Scholarly Articles

Previamente a la última reforma del régimen peruano de precios de transferencia, solo se permitía la aplicación de métodos específicos de valoración, lo que generó una serie de problemas de índole práctica y constitucional. Estos se resolvieron parcialmente con la reciente inclusión de una disposición que permite la aplicación de “otros métodos”. El presente trabajo analiza la problemática de la situación previa, así como las soluciones que presenta la reforma y sus límites. Por último, se propone una serie de precisiones que, a juicio de los autores, deberían incluirse en la reglamentación de los “otros métodos”.

Prior to the last …

Análisis Crítico Del Requisito Del Perjuicio Fiscal En El Régimen Peruano De Precios De Transferencia, Fernando Javier Loayza Jordán

Scholarly Articles

Tesis para optar el Título de Abogado, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú

El régimen peruano de precios de transferencia limita la aplicación de ajustes que afecten negativamente a la recaudación tributaria, de modo tal que solo se permiten ajustes cuando estos corrijan el perjuicio fiscal que se generaría por la aplicación del IR sobre un valor distinto al de mercado.

Por lo tanto, la importancia del perjuicio fiscal como requisito para realizar ajustes reside en constituirse como la condición que determinará si la asignación del valor de una transacción será (i) el valor de mercado según el ALP o (ii) …

To Compare Or Not To Compare? Reading Justice Breyer, Russell A. Miller

Scholarly Articles

Justice Breyer's new book The Court and the World presents a number of productive challenges. First, it provides an opportunity to reflect generally on extra-judicial scholarly activities. Second, it is a major and important - but also troubling - contribution to debates about comparative law broadly, and the opening of domestic constitutional regimes to external law and legal phenomena more specifically. I begin by suggesting a critique of the first of these points. These are merely some thoughts on the implications of extra-judicial scholarship. The greater portion of this essay, however, is devoted to a reading of Justice Breyer's book, …

The Regulation Of Commercial Profiling — A Comparative Analysis, Indra Spiecker, Olivia Tambou, Paul Bernal, Margaret Hu, Carlos Alberto Molinaro

Scholarly Articles

The authors, all data protection experts, discuss the status of the relevant data protection regulatory framework on profiling in the business sector in sev eral countries worldwide, from the constitutional level to some individual regulation including the general attitude towards the topic. The EU perspective is presented on the basis of the present directives as well as the General Data Protection Regulation. The United Kingdom, Germany and France, as three of the largest EU Member States with partly highly differing regulatory approaches represent Member State law. Australia, Brazil and the US regulation exemplify the different integration of data protection standards …