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.

La Proteccion De Los Inmigrantes Irregulares En Los Estados Unidos Y La Libertad De Circulacion En Una 'Union Americana', Kristina M. Campbell

Journal Articles

Este artículo es una continuación y ampliación de una propuesta que formulé en 2009, y se plantea si —y cómo— los Estados Unidos pueden apartarse de su actual sistema de regulación de la inmigración punitivo, cuasi-penal y de exigencia dura de su cumplimiento. ¿Es posible para los Estados Unidos y sus vecinos acercarse a un sistema de protección de los refugiados y otros migrantes irregulares del resto de las Américas, modelado sobre el concepto de «libertad de circulación» de la Unión Europea? Si es así, ¿a qué debería parecerse dicho sistema? Permitiendo a todos los ciudadanos de una «Unión Americana» …

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 …

Targeting The Targeted Killings Case - International Lawmaking In Domestic Contexts, Yahli Shereshevsky

Michigan Journal of International Law

The targeting of non-state armed groups members is perhaps the most debated legal issue in the law of contemporary armed conflicts between states and non-state actors. The 2006 Targeted Killings case of the Israeli Supreme Court (ISC) is a key reference point in this debate. Recently, without much scholarly or public attention, the government of Israel, in its report on the summer 2014 conflict in Gaza (the 2014 Gaza Conflict Report), dramatically diverged from the Targeted Killings case’s definition of legitimate targets in asymmetric conflicts. The Targeted Killings case held a conduct or functional membership-based approach to targeting. This approach …

¿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 …

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, …

Martin, Ghana, And Global Legal Studies, H. Timothy Lovelace Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

This brief essay uses global legal studies to reconsider Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s activism after Gayle v. Browder. During this undertheorized portion of King's career, the civil rights leader traveled the world and gained a greater appreciation for comparative legal and political analysis. This essay explores King's first trip abroad and demonstrates how King's close study of Kwame Nkrumah's approaches to law reform helped to lay the foundation for watershed moments in King's own life.

In To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr., renowned civil rights scholar and author, Adam …

Exclusionary Megacities, Wendell Pritchett, Shitong Qiao

Faculty Scholarship

Human beings should live in places where they are most productive, and megacities, where information, innovation, and opportunities congregate, would be the optimal choice. Yet megacities in both China and the United States are excluding people by limiting the housing supply. Why, despite their many differences, is the same type of exclusion happening in both Chinese and U.S. megacities? Urban law and policy scholars argue that Not-In-My-Back-Yard (“NIMBY”) homeowners are taking over megacities in the U.S. and hindering housing development. They pin their hopes on an efficient growth machine that makes sure “above all, nothing gets in the way of …

Rights-Weakening Federalism, Shitong Qiao

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines whether federalism protects land rights in China from two dimensions. I first compare national law with local institutions of eminent domain, revealing that local governments take much more land than the national government approves, frequently violating, tweaking, and challenging national law. I next examine the impact of interjurisdictional competition on the development of local land institutions, demonstrating that local governments are weakening individual land rights for the benefits of mobile capital. Overall, Chinese federalism weakens rather than strengthens individual land rights and should be called rights-weakening federalism.

This China case also has general theoretical implications. Leading property …

The Rise And Fall Of Fear Of Abuse In Consumer Bankruptcy: Most Recent Comparative Evidence From Europe And Beyond, 96 Tex. L. Rev. 1327 (2018), Jason Kilborn

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

Prepared for a symposium celebrating the groundbreaking career of Jay Westbrook, this Article examines recent evidence of fear of abuse of the benefits of consumer bankruptcy and the gradual abatement of that fear in modern consumer insolvency law reform. It marshals evidence of a recent and accelerating retreat in both the judicial discretion that Westbrook attributed to lawmakers' fear of abuse and other more direct techniques to avoid abusive recourse to consumer discharge. Fear of abuse appears to be diminishing with accumulated experience as indicated by recent liberalizing reforms in Denmark, Slovakia, Poland, Austria, Russia, and Romania. At the same …

Are Two Clauses Really Better Than One? Rethinking The Religion Clause(S), 80 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 1 (2018), Donald L. Beschle

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

The First Amendment begins with two references to the relationship between government and religion. The prohibition on establishment of religion and the guarantee of free exercise of religion, despite their obvious interaction, are generally regarded as separate clauses, and analyzed under tests developed under one or the other. The current state of Establishment Clause doctrine and Free Exercise doctrine is sharply contested and by no means clear. Supreme Court justices will usually classify a religious freedom case as either presenting non-establishment or free exercise issues. Having done so, they will apply the test framed for that clause. But does that …

Changing Governance Models By Applying Blockchain Computing, Steve Young

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

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 …

Trials By Peers: The Ebb And Flow Of The Criminal Jury In France And Belgium, Claire M. Germain

UF Law Faculty Publications

The participation of lay jurors in criminal courts has known much ebb and flow both in France and in Belgium. These two countries belong to the civil law tradition, where juries are the exception rather than the rule in criminal trials, and they only exist in criminal cases, not civil cases. In spite of some similarities, there are substantial differences between the two countries, and their systems will be examined in turn.

In France, the Cour d’assises itself was inherited from the French Revolution. Since a law of 1941, it is a mixed jury system, meaning that lay citizens sit …

A Comparative Study Of The Law Of Dismissal In The U.S. And China, Zhenxing Ke

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

The Labor Law in China, enacted in 1994, was the first statute in China to stipulate dismissal protections. The Employment Contract Law, a more recent law that went into effect in January 2008, strengthened Chinese dismissal protections. For example, in the summary termination about the misconduct, this law only allows six instances for termination, and if a misconduct committed by an employee is not covered in these six instances, it is hard for an employer to discharge this employee legally.

In contrast, America has a more flexible employment law. In America, the doctrine of dismissal is dominated by the …

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.