Comparative and Foreign Law Commons^™

Cisg Translation Issues: Reducing Legal Babelism, Claire M. Germain

UF Law Faculty Publications

The CISG (Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods) has remarkably facilitated commercial transactions across boundaries and different legal systems. This article, to be published as a Book Chapter, discusses some possible difficulties caused by using different languages, or words which might be interpreted differently, and some solutions and ways to deal with these difficulties. Three kinds of issues have appeared: the first has to do with drafting issues, and the peculiar problem of the six official languages of the Convention. The second set of issues deals with the interpretation of the Convention and the so-called homeward trend. …

Constitutional Heterarchy: The Centrality Of Conflict In The European Union And The United States, Daniel Halberstam

Book Chapters

In the debates about whether to take constitutionalism beyond the state, the European Union invariably looms large. One element, in particular, that invites scholars to grapple with the analogy between the European Union and global governance is the idea of legal pluralism. Just as the European legal order is based on competing claims of ultimate legal authority among the European Union and its member states, so, too, the global legal order, to the extent that we can speak of one, lacks a singular, uncontested hierarchy among its various parts. To be sure, some have argued that the UN Charter provides …

What The United States Taught The Commonwealth About Pure Economic Loss: Time To Repay The Favor, Bruce Feldthusen

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Searching For United States Tort Law In The Antipodes, Peter Cane

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Word Commons And Foreign Laws, Thomas O. Main

Scholarly Works

Dual trends are colliding in U.S. courts. The first trend is a tidal wave of cases requiring courts to engage the domestic laws of foreign legal systems; globalization is the principal driver of this escalation. The second trend is a profound and ever-increasing skepticism of our ability to understand foreign law; the literature of pluralism and postmodernism has illuminated the uniquely local, language-dependent, and culturally embedded nature of law. Courts cope with this dissonance by finding some way to avoid the application of foreign law. But these outcomes are problematic because parties are denied access to court or have their …

North American Border Wars: The Role Of Canadian And American Scholarship In U.S. Labor Law Reform Debates, Michael J. Zimmer, Susan Bisom-Rapp

Faculty Scholarship

The economies of Canada and the United States and the organization of their societies are deeply interrelated but significant differences exist. This article briefly traces the interaction between the two countries in the development of labor relations laws with a particular emphasis on the impact of scholarly work on U.S. labor law reform debates in the last two decades. Instructive for that purpose is the work of Professor Paul Weiler, a prominent figure in labor law policy discussions in both countries. A significant architect of labor law in Canada, Professor Weiler came to Harvard Law School in 1978 and brought …

Criminal Justice Models: Canadian Experience In European And Islamic Comparative Perspective, Bruce P. Archibald

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This paper examines Canadian models of criminal justice in a European and Islamic comparative perspective. The traditional model of Canadian criminal justice is a state centred adversarial one intended to punish, deter and/or rehabilitate offenders who are accorded formal due process protections embedded in a liberal constitutional and procedural rights. This model has been transformed recently into an ambiguously tripartite adversarial model through an overlay of victims’ rights at all stages. However, Canadian law also recognizes alternative processes through various forms of problem solving courts and sometimes comprehensive restorative justice approaches, the latter rooted in relational notions of rights. Meanwhile, …

Our Exceptional Constitution, Timothy Zick

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Uprooted Justice: Transformations Of Law And Everyday Life In Northern Thailand, David M. Engel

Journal Articles

Studies of law in everyday life tend to view law either as instrumental in shaping specific decisions and practices or as constitutive of the cultural categories through which humans apprehend their world and perceive law as relevant to a greater or lesser extent. This article, however, suggests that circumstances may arise in which law’s role in relation to everyday life is neither instrumental nor constitutive but instead becomes one of radical dissociation. Based on an analysis of injuries in northern Thailand, it examines two transformational episodes in Thai legal and political history. The first occurred at the turn of the …

Method, Community And Comparative Law: An Encounter With Complexity Science, David J. Gerber

All Faculty Scholarship

Assume that you are attending a symposium on comparative law being held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Society for Comparative Law. Comparative law scholars from many universities are present, and a few legal practitioners are attending as well. One speaker begins as follows: “This talk will be about complex adaptive systems—the emerging science of complexity.” Based on experience in similar contexts, I would anticipate several common reactions among members of the audience. The most common might be “he’s in the wrong room.” Another set of reactions is likely to be “What? What’s that? Never heard of …

The Case Of Colonel Abel, Jeffrey D. Kahn

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In June 2010, journalists for the Associated Press reported the arrest of ten Russian spies, all suspected of being “deep-cover” illegal agents in the United States. Seeking to convey the magnitude of this event, the journalists wrote in the first paragraphs of their article that this “blockbuster series of arrests” might even be as significant as the FBI’s “famous capture of Soviet Col. Rudolf Abel in 1957 in New York.” Colonel Abel’s story of American justice at a time of acute anxiety about the nation’s security is one that continues to resonate today. The honor, and error, that is contained …

Judicial Retirement And Return To Practice, Mary Clark

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This Article engages recent scholarly debates about U.S. Supreme Court tenure and retirement practices, specifically those concerning the merits of adopting eighteen-year term limits or mandatory retirement for Supreme Court Justices. It broadens the discussion by including all Article III judges and by addressing former Article III judges’ return to practice following resignation or retirement, which has been largely ignored in the literature to date despite what I have found to be the return-to-practice rate of over forty percent in the last two decades.

This Article advocates retaining life tenure because it promotes institutional and individual judicial independence better than …

Advice And Consent Vs. Silence And Dissent? The Contrasting Roles Of The Legislature In U.S. And U.K. Judicial Appointments, Mary Clark

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The Senate‘s role in judicial appointments has come under increasingly withering criticism for its uninformative and spectacle-like nature. At the same time, Britain has established two new judicial appointment processes - to accompany its new Supreme Court and existing lower courts - in which Parliament plays no role. This Article seeks to understand the reasons for the inclusion and exclusion of the legislature in the U.S. and U.K. judicial appointment processes adopted at the creation of their respective Supreme Courts.

The Article proceeds by highlighting the ideas and concerns motivating inclusion of the legislature in judicial appointments in the early …

Vicki C. Jackson, Constitutional Engagement In A Transnational Era, Melissa A. Waters

Scholarship@WashULaw

This essay reviews and critiques Vicki C. Jackson's book on constitutional engagement and comparative constitutional law.

Over the past decade, the debate over the use of foreign authority in interpreting the U.S. Constitution has fallen prey to an unfortunate “Crossfire” phenomenon, reminiscent of the old (and much maligned) CNN news commentary program. Serious discourse on this important issue has been obscured by an increasingly rancorous public debate in the news media, the blogosphere, and even before Congress. In this Crossfire debate, it seems, everyone must “choose up sides.” So-called “nationalists” deplore even most modest citations to foreign authority in constitutional …

Two Paths To Judicial Power: The Basic Structure Doctrine And Public Interest Litigation In Comparative Perspective, Manoj Mate

San Diego International Law Journal

This Article analyzes two key critical moments in the empowerment of the Supreme Court of India--the assertion of the basic structure doctrine, in which the Court asserted that constitutional amendments may be held unconstitutional on substantive grounds, and the development of the Public Interest Litigation (PIL) regime, through which the Court sought to protect and promote the rule of law and assume an expanded role in governance. I argue, in this article, that these two moments are exemplars of two types of moments that capture distinct aspects of the role of courts in different polities--"constitutional entrenchment" and "judicialization of governance" …

Pleading And Access To Civil Procedure: Historical And Comparative Reflections On Iqbal, A Day In Court And A Decision According To Law, James Maxeiner

All Faculty Scholarship

The Iqbal decision confirms the breakdown of contemporary American civil procedure. We know what civil procedure should do, and we know that our civil procedure is not doing it. Civil procedure should facilitate determining rights according to law. It should help courts and parties apply law to facts accurately, fairly, expeditiously and efficiently. This article reflects on three historic American system failures and reports a foreign success story.

Pleadings can help courts do what we know courts should do: decide case on the merits, accurately, fairly, expeditiously and efficiently. Pleadings facilitate a day in court when focused on deciding according …

Plural Vision: International Law Seen Through The Varied Lenses Of Domestic Implementation, D. A. Jeremy Telman

Law Faculty Publications

This Essay introduces a collection of essays that have evolved from papers presented at a conference on “International Law in the Domestic Context.” The conference was a response to the questions raised by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Medellín v. Texas and also a product of our collective curiosity about how other states address tensions between international obligations and overlapping regimes of national law.

Our constitutional tradition speaks with many voices on the subject of the relationship between domestic and international law. In order to gain a broader perspective on that relationship, we invited experts on foreign law to …

Property Rights & The Demands Of Transformation, Bernadette Atuahene

All Faculty Scholarship

The conception of property that a transitional state adopts is critically important because it affects the state’s ability to transform society. The classical conception of real property gives property rights a certain sanctity that allows owners to have near absolute control of their property. But, the sanctity given to property rights has made land reform difficult and thus can serve as a sanctuary for enduring inequality. This is particularly true in countries like South Africa and Namibia where—due to pervasive past property theft— land reform is essential because there are competing legitimate claims to land. Oddly, the classical conception is …

Pluralism In Marbury And Van Gend, Daniel Halberstam

Book Chapters

‘Great cases, like hard cases, make bad law’, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, famously remarked in his first Supreme Court dissent. For Holmes, ‘great cases are called great, not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment’. On this account neither Marbury v Madison70 nor Van Gend en Loos would qualify. Van Gend was a case of great principle without greatly interesting facts. And Marbury was a great political battle that nevertheless produced a case of great principle.

Comparative Law: Problems And Prospects, Elisabeth Zoller, George A. Bermann, Patrick Glenn, Kim Lane Scheppele, Amr Shalakany, David V, Snyder

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This is an edited transcript of the closing plenary session of the XVIIIth International Congress of Comparative Law. The session took place on Saturday, July 31, 2010, in Washington, D.C., at the conclusion of the week-long congress, which is held quadrennially by the International Academy of Comparative Law (Acadimie Internationale de Droit Compare). The remarks were given in a mix of French and English, but for ease of reading the transcript is almost entirely in English.

Civil Procedure Reform In Switzerland And The Role Of Legal Transplants, Samuel P. Baumgartner

Akron Law Faculty Publications

On January 1, 2011, Swiss courts will begin operating under a unified federal code of civil procedure for the first time in the country’s history. This code has been exceedingly long in the making. In this chapter, I use the new code and its history to engage the editors’ claim that the old categories of common law and civil law procedure are crumbling, thus making differences among countries within the common law or civil law world more important than differences across the divide.

First, the new Swiss code of civil procedure includes a number of features that may look like …

Significance Of The Fujimori Trial, Juan E. Mendez

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Teaching International Law: Lessons From Clinical Education: Introductory Remarks, Richard J. Wilson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

The Merits Of ‘Merits’ Review: A Comparative Look At The Australian Administrative Appeals Tribunal, Jeffrey Lubbers, Michael Asimow

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This article compares several systems of administrative adjudication. In the U.S., adjudication is typically performed by the same agency that makes and enforces the rules. However, in Australia, almost all administrative adjudication is performed by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), a non-specialized adjudicating agency, and several other specialized tribunals that are independent of the enforcing agency. These tribunals (which evolved out of concerns about separation of powers) have achieved great legitimacy. In the U.K., recent legislation (the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act) merged numerous specialized tribunals into a single first-tier tribunal with much stronger guarantees of independence than previously existed. …

Things Fall Apart: The Illegitimacy Of Property Rights In The Context Of Past Theft, Bernadette Atuahene

All Faculty Scholarship

In many states, past property theft is a volatile political issue that threatens to destabilize nascent democracies. How does a state avoid instability when past property theft causes a significant number of people to believe that the property distribution is illegitimate? To explore this question, I first define legitimacy relying on an empirical understanding of the concept. Second, I establish the relationship between inequality, illegitimate property distribution, and instability. Third, I describe the three ways a state can achieve stability when faced with an illegitimate property distribution: by using its coercive powers, by attempting to change people’s beliefs about the …

Human Rights And Military Decisions: Counterinsurgency And Trends In The Law Of, Dan E. Stigall, Christopher L. Blakesley, Chris Jenks

Scholarly Works

The past several decades have seen a Copernican shift in the paradigm of armed conflict, which the traditional Law of International Armed Conflict (LOIAC) canon has not fully matched. Standing out in stark relief against the backdrop of relative inactivity in LOIAC, is the surfeit of activity in the field of international human rights law, which has become a dramatic new force in the ancient realm of international law. Human rights law, heretofore not formally part of the traditional juridico-military calculus, has gained ever increasing salience in that calculus. Indeed, human rights law has ramified in such a manner that …

Measuring State Compliance With The Right To Education Using Indicators: A Case Study Of Colombia’S Obligations Under The Icescr, Sital Kalantry, Jocelyn Getgen, Steven A. Koh

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

The right to education is often referred to as a “multiplier right” because its enjoyment enhances other human rights. It is enumerated in several international instruments, but it is codified in greatest detail in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Despite its importance, the right to education has received limited attention from scholars, practitioners, and international and regional human rights bodies as compared to other economic, social and cultural rights (ECSRs). In this Article, we propose a methodology that utilizes indicators to measure treaty compliance with the right to education. Indicators are essential to measuring compliance …

Turkey: At The Crossroads Of Secular West And Traditional East, Padideh Ala'i

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

On January 9, 2008 Washington College of Law at American University sponsored a conference entitled: Turkey: At the Crossroads of Secular West and Traditional East. This conference was percipitated by the recent election of the AKP party in Turkey and my trip to Turkey in summer 2007. In this short introduction to the American University International law Review symposium issue, I summarize the major issues raised in that one day conference specifically by Dean Haluk Kabaalioglu of Yeditepe University Facutly of Law, expert on EU law and Turkish-EU relations,and Professor Feroz Ahmad, the learned historian of modern Turkey. The aim …

Changing The Paradigm Of Stock Ownership From Concentrated Towards Dispersed Ownership? Evidence From Brazil And Consequences For Emerging Countries, Erica Gorga

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

This paper analyzes micro-level dynamics of changes in ownership structures. It investigates a unique event: changes in ownership patterns currently taking place in Brazil. It builds upon empirical evidence to advance theoretical understanding of how and why concentrated ownership structures can change towards dispersed ownership.

Commentators argue that the Brazilian capital markets are finally taking off. The number of listed companies and IPOs in the Sao Paulo Stock Exchange (Bovespa) has greatly increased. Firms are migrating to Bovespa’s special listing segments, which require higher standards of corporate governance. Companies have sold control in the market, and the stock market has …

From The Editors, Mark Tushnet, Carrie Menkel Meadow

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.