Comparative and Foreign Law Commons^™

Space Law And Gnss—A Look At The Legal Frameworks For “Outer Space”, Frans G. Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), obviously, make crucial use of satellites operating in an area commonly known as “outer space,” raising issues regarding which specific body of law might rule the operations of such satellite systems. Though the “horizontal” boundary between outer space and the underlying area of airspaces has never been authoritatively defined, it has generally been agreed that those two areas differ fundamentally as to the legal regimes ruling them, giving rise indeed to a specific body of “space law.”

Trabalho Escravo: L'Esclavage Contemporain Au Brésil, Rebecca J. Scott, Jean Hebrard

Articles

"Le gouvernement brésilien a engagé, il y a quelques années, une ambitieuse campagne de lutte contre l’exploitation de travailleurs dans une condition « analogue » à celle d’esclave. Cette politique répondait à des campagnes de protestation réitérées et à des pressions internationales, mais elle se formula en référence à une histoire nationale dont l’esclavage était inséparable. Les révélations de la Commission pastorale de la terre, les plaintes déposées auprès de la Cour interaméricaine des droits de l’homme, les actions de nombreux organismes gouvernementaux ou non-gouvernementaux ont certainement été déterminantes dans les choix qui ont alors été faits. Toutefois, tout au …

The Brazilian Appellate Procedure Through Common Law Lenses: How American Standards Of Review May Help Improve Brazilian Civil Procedure, Cesar Zucatti Pritsch

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

In this article, I discuss a flaw in Brazilian civil procedure observed in my practice as a Federal Labor Judge in Brazil, an issue that may be addressed by limiting appellate review in a similar fashion as the American courts do, using standards of appellate review. In Brazil, appellate courts tend to ignore the lower court’s decisions, replacing them for the ruling they would have made had they been the original decision makers. A simple disagreement with the lower court’s findings of fact or discretionary rulings, no matter how reasonable, is sufficient grounds for reversal. The lack of standards of …

Labor Violations In Mexico: Can New Trade Agreements Effectuate Change?, Nicole Downey Moss

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

Child labor and forced labor remain pervasive problems on Mexican farms. Millions of workers on these farms are forced to work and live in inhumane conditions, only to leave the season’s harvest just as poor as they were before. To date, human rights and labor treaties and agreements that Mexico is party to have failed to protect workers. In early 2016, however, negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (“TPP”) concluded and, if ratified, the party-countries claim that the TPP will hold Mexico to higher standards than previously faced because the TPP will link labor rights with trade law. However, this was …

“So Come Put On De Handcuff Dem”; Jamaica’S Dancehall Superstar’S Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Of Life In Prison, Amanda Preston

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

In the United States, it was O.J. Simpson. In South Africa, it was Oscar Pistorius. But in Jamaica, it was Adidjah Palmer. Labeled by many as the trial of the century, the case against Palmer—a dancehall superstar better known as Vybz Kartel—saw controversial rulings, immense media scrutiny, and an unprecedented level of public discourse. When the 39-year-old music artiste was sentenced to life in prison, the island’s 2.7 million population was divided among those who applauded with approval and those who wept and cried foul. The latter category claimed that it was not Palmer who was prosecuted, but rather his …

Investment Treaty Arbitration In Cuba, Rafael Cox Alomar

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

Not since the fateful days of the 1962 Missile Crisis, has Cuba commanded as much global attention as it does today. The 2014 diplomatic rapprochement between the United States and Cuba, not only did away with the last vestiges of the Cold War in Caribbean waters, but more importantly has coincided with a period of acute ideological effervescence in Havana. Even in the face of President Raúl Castro’s resolute commitment to the principles of the 1959 Revolution, it is more than evident that Cuba is in the midst of a transformational moment. And perhaps in no other area of the …

Achieving Justice Through Adr: An Analysis Of The Korean Mediation System, Yonghwan Choung

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to reconsider Korean judicial mediation as a part of alternative dispute resolution (“ADR”) and to discuss the possible legal transition of Korean judicial mediation into private sector mediation.

Similar to other states’ judicial problems, Korea has also faced overloaded case dockets, congestion of the civil process, an expensive legal process, and emotional stress on parties during the procedures. The Korean judicial authority continuously developed the Korean mediation programs, which can be categorized as court-related mediation, including court-annexed and court-connected mediations. Based on enactment of the Judicial Conciliation of Civil Disputes Act of 1990 (“JCCDA”) …

Toward The Search For The Proper Liability Rule For Harms Resulting From Sources Of Risk: A Different Approach To The Choice Between Strict Liability And Fault-Based Regime, Wen-Hsuan Yang

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

An important issue in Taiwan today concerns the rising tension between strict liability and negligence. Article 191-3 of the Civil Code of Taiwan imposes a fault-based standard of liability on persons conducting dangerous activities. On the other hand, the majority of scholars believe that to afford greater protection, this rule should be changed into a strict liability rule.

Traditionally, three arguments make it preferable to impose strict liability under certain circumstances. First, strict liability induces more safety incentives on the part of the defendant. Second, fairness requires that one who benefits from conducting dangerous activities should bear the risk of …

Potential Regulatory Systems For Carbon Capture And Sequestration (Ccs): Legal Analysis Of The Current And Future Regulatory Systems And Recommendations For Acceptance In South Korea, Moonsook Park

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to create legal and regulatory systems for Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS), based on demonstrating rationales of this technology. This dissertation analyzes whether or not existing international and domestic (including the United States, Australia, China, and South Korea) laws could cover potential legal issues. After exploring desirable directions for addressing key legal issues regarding CCS, this dissertation ultimately aims to set up a legal and regulatory framework for CCS in South Korea.

Specifically, permits, environmental impact assessments, liability, and property rights issues are of common importance, which are priority areas to establish well. In …

Marriage Equality And Family Diversity: Comparative Perspectives From The United States And South Africa, Holning Lau

Fordham Law Review

This Article proceeds in two parts. Part I examines the United States’s and South Africa’s competing approaches to same-sex marriage. Both countries’ highest courts ruled that excluding same-sex couples from marriage is unconstitutional, but they took divergent paths to reach that conclusion. This Article contends that the Constitutional Court of South Africa paved a better road for other countries to follow because it developed a superior conceptualization of the right to marry. Part II looks beyond same-sex marriage to explore new frontiers for reforming laws to address family diversity both in the United States and in South Africa. Specifically, Part …

Ties Of Separation: Analogy And Generational Segregation In North America, Australia, And Israel/Palestine, Hedi Viterbo

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

This article takes analogy as both its mode and object of inquiry, to canvas the relationship between historical-geographical analogies and generational segregation (the large-scale separation of children and adults) from three complementary perspectives. First, due to restrictions recently introduced by the Israeli authorities, Palestinian prisoners have been prevented from reading popular study materials dealing with both Indigenous child removal and analogies concerning settler-indigenous relations in North America and Australia. This article revives the critical potential of this encounter with analogies and accounts by asserting an analogy between the removal of indigenous children to boarding schools in the United States and …

When Does Cultural Satire Cross The Line In The Global Human Rights Regime?: The Charlie Hebdo Controversy And Its Implication For Creating A New Paradigm To Assess The Bounds Of Freedom Of Expression, Kwanghyuk Yoo

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Social justice does not exist in a vacuum. Social justice deters human rights policies from crossing the line. Thus, the principle of justice counterbalances the evils of the laissez-faire human rights philosophy when society lacks an appropriate form of legal or regulatory framework for legitimate restraints on human rights. Moreover, well-ordered just society does not allow human rights to be abused or curtailed beyond the level necessary to safeguard superior social norms or national interests. As such, human rights are subject to relative protection while they receive universal respect across the world. From a semantic standpoint, two ambivalent natures of …

Have Prenup, Will Travel: Why England’S Law On Marital Agreements Has Attracted Forum Shoppers And How The Courts Can Fight Back, Karina Vanhouten

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

This Note examines the English judiciary’s reluctance to fully accept marital agreements, and the disruptive effect this has in the global legal arena. In our increasingly international world, the fundamental events of family life—marriage, divorce, and death—often no longer occur in the same jurisdiction. In recent years, prospective divorcées from around the globe have flocked to England to take advantage of the country’s matrimonial law, which generally favors the party seeking to invalidate or minimize a marital agreement. This forum-shopping phenomenon is problematic because English courts regularly disregard foreign marital agreements that would be valid and binding in other jurisdictions, …

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: A Need For China To Further Amend Its 2013 Trademark Law In Order To Prevent Trademark Squatting, Jessica Martin

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

This Note examines the effect that China’s 2013 Trademark Law amendments have had on curtailing the trademark squatting problem that plagues foreign corporations and individuals attempting to register a trademark in China. Trademarks play a crucial role in establishing brand recognition in an individual or a company’s product. Given China’s large and growing population of potential consumers, obtaining a Chinese trademark is especially valuable. Chinese trademark squatters, however, make this difficult for foreign corporations and individuals by filing for registration in China once the mark gains popularity, not intending to use the trademark in commerce, but to hold it as …

The Evolution Of Pattern Of Criminalizing The Unknown Crime Of Rape In Global Scale, Sahar Jalili

SJD Dissertations

Rape is a crime globally condemned, yet it's one of the most controversial crimes at the time. What this research did was to gather the information of countries' rape laws in their penal codes from all over the world and create a pattern of how countries on a global scale criminalize rape and how far they have changed in the past century. The goal was to produce a rape criminalization map of the world to show which elements are playing the main factors and which factors are missing, how close countries define rape and how different their reactions are.

The …

Should Foreign Pension Funds With U.S. Investments Pay U.S. Tax?, Cynthia Blum

William & Mary Business Law Review

U.S. and foreign pension funds are investing heavily outside of their home countries. With the aging of the world’s population, this trend will likely intensify. Most countries, including the U.S., accord a tax exemption to certain qualified pension funds organized within their own country; however, when a foreign pension fund invests in the U.S., the U.S. tax code does not recognize its tax exemption. Responding to the need to attract greater investment in U.S. infrastructure, Congress in 2015 enacted a new provision ameliorating the tax treatment of foreign pension plans investing in U.S. real estate. This Article examines whether the …

Transitional Justice, The Role Of The Judiciary And Rupture Of Democracy In Brazil In 2016, Jose Carlos Moreira Da Silva Filho

Distinguished Speaker Series

In comparison to the other countries in Latin America that suffered under civilian-military national security dictatorships in the second half of the 20th century, Brazil presented two peculiarities that had an enormous influence on the characteristics of the democratic regime that began in 1988: its amnesty law was enacted while the authoritarian regime was still in power, and throughout the period of the dictatorship, it promoted a broad and intensive process of judicialization of the political repression. I believe these aspects will influence and interact in a notable way with the new coup d’état process that began in Brazil in …

Redefining Corporate Purpose: An International Perspective, Afra Afsharipour

Seattle University Law Review

This comparative analysis of India’s move toward redefining corporate purpose proceeds as follow. Part I presents an overview of global debates over corporate purpose, drawing principally from the move toward the ESV model in the U.K. and benefit corporations in the U.S. This section briefly recounts the debates in both jurisdictions about whether the changes they have experienced will engender more socially responsible corporations. Part II then provides a condensed history of corporate law reforms in India and an overview of the legislative changes undertaken in the past decade. In Part II, this Article takes a broad approach toward analyzing …

The Rights And Wrongs Of Shareholder Rights, Will Hutton, Colin Mayer, Philippe Schneider

Seattle University Law Review

The company is a legal structure designed to bring together the different parties of a firm—its employees, investors, customers, and suppliers—in the delivery of its corporate purpose. Corporations were established as institutions with autonomous lives—self-standing, legal entities independent of those who worked, financed, and managed them. They were devices to ensure long-term commitment to shared goals and risks, with reciprocal obligations on those engaged in them. A company had to declare its purpose before earning a licence to trade. For example, the East India Company, England’s earliest public company, to issue shares to the public as permanent capital, was given …

A Critical Canadian Perspective On The Benefit Corporation, Carol Liao

Seattle University Law Review

Part I of this Article provides a brief background and description of the American benefit corporation. Part II then delineates the Canadian model of corporate law and governance as it currently stands in the statutes, common law, and in practice. Part III applies the information gathered from the previous two sections to explain why the legal features in the American benefit corporation model are largely redundant to existing Canadian corporate laws. It also addresses how the implementation of the benefit corporation in Canada would conflate incorrect assumptions on Canada’s model of governance and potentially impede the progressive development of Canada’s …

Can The Japanese Supreme Court Overcome The Political Question Hurdle?, Po Liang Chen, Jordan T. Wada

Washington International Law Journal

In 1947, a new Japanese Constitution (“Kenpō”) was born and its pacifist ideal was embodied in Article 9. Meanwhile, judicial review was transplanted, mainly from the United States (“U.S.”), into Japan. While the U.S. Supreme Court has narrowed its political question doctrine since Baker v. Carr in 1962, Japan developed its constitutional avoidance and political question doctrine in part to avoid deciding the merits of Article 9 disputes, including the legitimacy of Japan’s Self-Defense Force, the Security Treaty between the US and Japan, and the stationing of U.S. Forces in Japan. The Japanese Supreme Court (“SCJ”) adopted a deferential …

No Port, No Passport: Why Submerged States Can Have No Nationals, Heather Alexander, Jonathan Simon

Washington International Law Journal

Territorial loss owing to sea level rise presents novel challenges to the international legal order. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of small island states like the Maldives, Tuvalu and Kiribati, whose very existence is in jeopardy. In our recent article, Sinking Into Statelessness, we argue that the principle of presumption of continuity of state existence does not ensure that sinking states shall, or may, retain their legal statehood, because that principle cannot overrule the fact that territoriality is a constitutive feature of legal statehood. Here, we argue that even if, contra our previous conclusion, submerged states retain …

A Quest To Increase Women In Corporate Board Leadership: Comparing The Law In Norway And The U.S., Angela R. Foster

Washington International Law Journal

Gender imbalance is a persistent problem on corporate boards the world over. Women are severely underrepresented in these important leadership positions within public companies. Norway took a big swing at inequality in 2003 by enacting a quota law requiring at least 40% representation of each gender on boards of directors of public companies. Norway now has the highest percentage of women serving on corporate boards. Through Securities and Exchange Commission regulations, the United States enacted a diversity disclosure rule that requires public companies to divulge their policy regarding gender in board hiring. The disclosure rule has proven ineffectual, and at …

Pushing The Envelope: Application Of Guiding Cases In Chinese Courts And Development Of Case Law In China, Mo Zhang

Washington International Law Journal

The modern Chinese legal system has at least two notable features. First, bearing the civil law tradition, Chinese courts do not follow precedent. Second, under the people’s congress system, the Chinese judiciary has no power to make law. In recent years, however, the Supreme People’s Court of China began building a guiding case system in the Chinese judiciary. The application of guiding cases implicates (a) an expansion of the power of the Chinese judiciary into the field of law-making; and (b) development of case law in China. Chinese guiding cases differ from the common law cases in many aspects, and …

Chinese Patent Law's Statutory Damages Provision: The One Size That Fits None, Xiaowu Li, Don Wang

Washington International Law Journal

The concept of statutory damages was first introduced into the Chinese patent regime in 2001 as a “last-resort” approach for damages calculation in infringement cases. Curiously, in the following 15 years, this last-resort approach became so popular among the courts that it is essentially the exclusive approach today. This Article examines the legal and policy implications of the current statutory damages scheme, and concludes that the existence of statutory damages is fundamentally detrimental to the validity of the Chinese patent system. Therefore, we argue that the statutory damages provision in Article 65 of the Patent Law of China should be …

Linnaean Taxonomy And Globalized Law, Ronald J. Krotoszynski Jr.

Michigan Law Review

Review of The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities by Stephen Breyer.

One Person, One Vote: Gerrymandering And The Independent Commission, A Global Perspective, James Ruley

Indiana Law Journal

In 1863, on the hallowed fields at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln encapsulated a core principle of democracy by describing our system as a “government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people.” This definition accurately depicts the ideal of democracy—that supreme power is vested in the citizenry, not in the government itself. Since the American model is based on representative democracy instead of direct democracy, extreme scrutiny must be placed upon the system of choosing representatives if government is to accurately represent the will of the people.

One of the greatest abuses of a citizen’s voting rights is gerrymandering. …

Children Crossing Borders: Internationalizing The Restatement Of The Conflict Of Laws, Louise Ellen Teitz

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Entrenching The Minority: The Constitutional Court In Thailand's Political Conflict, Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang

Washington International Law Journal

Since 2006, Thailand has witnessed an unprecedented surge of judicial activism from the Constitutional Court to scrutinize elected politicians in the name of the rule of law. Democracy, argued Constitutional Court judges, could only be consolidated if the rule of law was maintained. But examination of several high-profile constitutional cases suggested that the Constitutional Court was actually working on behalf of the powerful elite minority to obstruct the democratic process under the pretext of protecting the rule of law. This antagonistic position brewed resentment and violence which jeopardized the Constitutional Court’s legitimacy as a neutral political arbiter. The 2014 coup …

Virtual Whats?: Defining Virtual Currencies In The Face Of Conflicting Regulatory Guidances, Stephanie A. Lemchuk

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

The note argues that Bitcoin and other virtual currencies, while promising, require clear regulatory frameworks to achieve long-term success. It emphasizes the need for uniform classification and regulation, proposing that treating virtual currencies as commodities under existing commodity laws offers a viable solution. The analysis highlights the dual nature of virtual currencies as both innovative financial tools and vehicles for illicit activities, stressing the importance of collaboration among regulatory agencies to balance innovation with consumer protection.