Courts Commons^™

International Law And National Courts: Between Mutual Empowerment And Mutual Weakening, Osnat Grady Schwartz

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

Over the past two decades, national courts have increasingly engaged with international law in fields and cases they used to avoid before. This Article argues that national courts' voluntary/discretionary application of international law and their greater openness to it are incentivized by the power offered to courts by international law. It empowers them directly - through making them direct subjects of it, advancing the rule of law, and offering institutional backup in the form of international courts and tribunals - and indirectly - by offering them a normative tool kit to be used in their decisions and amplify their legitimacy. …

Complex Experimental Federalism, Doni Gewirtzman

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Law And Politics Of The Charles Taylor Case, Charles Chernor Jalloh

Articles

This article discusses a rare successful prosecution of a head of state by a modern international criminal court. The case involved former Liberian president Charles Taylor. Taylor, who was charged and tried by the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone ("SCSL'), was convicted in April 2013 for planning and aiding and abetting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other serious international humanitarian law violations. He was sentenced to 50 years imprisonment. The SCSL Appeals Chamber upheld the historic conviction and sentence in September 2013. Taylor is currently serving his sentence in Great Britain.

This article, from an insider who …

A Prosecutor's Guide To Character Evidence: When Is Uncharged Possession Evidence Probative Of A Defendant's Intent To Distribute?, James Decleene

Marquette Law Review

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An Analysis Of The Legal And Practical Implications Of The Potential Increased Participation In Jury Service By Racial Minorities In The U.S. Criminal Justice System, Brian Keith Leonard

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Judge Posner's Simple Law, Mitchell N. Berman

Michigan Law Review

The world is complex, Richard Posner observes in his most recent book, Reflections on Judging. It follows that, for judges to achieve “sensible” resolutions of real-world disputes—by which Judge Posner means “in a way that can be explained in ordinary language and justified as consistent with the expectations of normal people” (p. 354)—they must be able to navigate the world’s complexity successfully. To apply legal rules correctly and (where judicial lawmaking is called for) to formulate legal rules prudently, judges must understand the causal mechanisms and processes that undergird complex systems, and they must be able to draw sound factual …

Paths Of Resistance To Our Imperial First Amendment, Bertrall L. Ross Ii

Michigan Law Review

In the campaign finance realm, we are in the age of the imperial First Amendment. Over the past nine years, litigants bringing First Amendment claims against campaign finance regulations have prevailed in every case in the Supreme Court. A conservative core of five justices has developed virtually categorical protections for campaign speech and has continued to expand those protections into domains that states once had the authority to regulate. As the First Amendment’s empire expands, other values give way. Four key cases from this era illustrate the reach of this imperial First Amendment. In Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc. v. …

Griggs At Midlife, Deborah A. Widiss

Michigan Law Review

Not all Supreme Court cases have a midlife crisis. But it is fair to say that Griggs v. Duke Power Co., which recently turned forty, has some serious symptoms. Griggs established a foundational proposition of employment discrimination law known as disparate impact liability: policies that significantly disadvantage racial minority or female employees can violate federal employment discrimination law, even if there is no evidence that the employer “intended” to discriminate. Griggs is frequently described as one of the most important decisions of the civil rights era, compared to Brown v. Board of Education for its “momentous social consequences.” In 1989, …

Prosecuting Generals For War Crimes: The Shifting Sands Of Accomplice Liability In International Criminal Law, Mark A. Summers

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The article examines the evolving concept of "specific direction" in accomplice liability for war crimes under international law, highlighting the conflicting approaches of the ICTY and ICC. It advocates for the ICC to adopt a clear, intent-based standard to ensure accountability and consistency, avoiding the ambiguities of "specific direction."

Lessons Unlearned: The Effects Of Statutory Ambiguity And The Interpretative Uncertainty It Injects In The Courts, Carolyn Singh

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

For centuries, courts have dealt with the challenge of imposing penalties for crimes when governing law changes. Applying the new provisions can be a straightforward exercise for courts, but when legislatures are ambiguous with regard to which law applies-forexample, to pending cases-the courts are forced to interpret what legislatures intended. For some judges, the answer is easily found in the plain meaning of the text. For others, legislative intent can become the deciding factor. Throughout United States history, this has been a manageable yet controversial task, but aside from interpretive differences among judges, creating laws with uncertainty is a dangerous …

Internet Payment Blockades: Sopa And Pipa In Disguise? Or Worse?, Stacey Dogan

Shorter Faculty Works

The law of intermediary liability in intellectual property reflects a constant struggle for balance. On the one hand, rights owners frustrated by the game of whack-a-mole have good reason to look for more efficient ways to stanch the flow of infringement. While this concern is not a new one, the global reach and decentralization of the Internet have exacerbated it. On the flipside, consumers, technology developers, and others fret about the impact of broad liability: it can impede speech, limit competition, and impose a drag on economic sectors with only a peripheral relationship to infringement. As the Supreme Court put …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Law Professors In Support Of Defendant-Appellee National Football League, Rebecca Tushnet, Mark Mckenna

Court Briefs

No. 14-3428
John Frederick Dryer v. National Football League

On Appeal from the United States Distric Court for the District of Minnesota, Civ. No. 09-02182 (PAM/FLN), Hon. Paul A. Magnuson

From the Summary of Argument

Based on the undisputed facts, the NFL’s films in this case are noncommercial speech; their profit-seeking and brand-building nature are standard features of noncommercial speech. Truthful, nondefamatory noncommercial speech deserves full First Amendment protection, and there is no justification for allowing Appellants to control speech about them in this case.

Separately, Appellants’ right of publicity claims are preempted by the Copyright Act, which allows owners …

International Law - Employment Discrimination. Japanese Corporation Formed Under United States Law Must Comply With Terms Of Title Vii Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964. Avagliano V. Sumitumo Shoji America, Inc., - U.S. -, 102 S. Ct. 2374 (1982)., Henry Cyrus

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

From The Shoals Of Ras Kaboudia To The Shores Of Tripoli: The Tunisia/Libya Continental Shelf Boundary Delimitation, Donna R. Christie

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Jurisdiction - The Supreme Court Upholds The Constitutionality Of The Jurisdictional Grant Of The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act Over A Suit Between An Alien And A Foreign Sovereign In United States District Court, Stephen E. Farish

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Product Liability Law In Japan: An Introduction To A Developing Area Of Law, Younghee Jin Ottley, Bruce L. Ottley

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Violence-Related Police Crime Arrests In The United States, 2005-2011, Philip M. Stinson, Steven L. Brewer Jr, Joelle K. Bridges

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

This study is a quantitative content analysis of news reports and court records on 3,328 violence-related arrest cases of 2,586 individual sworn law enforcement officers during the years 2005-2011. The arrested officers were employed by 1,445 nonfederal state, local, special, constable, tribal, and regional law enforcement agencies located in 805 counties and independent cities in 49 states and the District of Columbia. Binary logistic regression and classification and regression tree (CART) analyses were conducted to predict criminal conviction in violence-related police crime arrest cases. Finding indicate that conviction of police officers on one or more offenses charged are driven by …

Cases, Controversies, And Diversity, F. Andrew Hessick

Northwestern University Law Review

Article III’s diversity jurisdiction provisions extend the federal judicial power to state law controversies between different states or nations and their respective citizens. When exercising diversity jurisdiction, the federal judiciary does not function in its usual role of protecting federal interests or ensuring the uniformity of federal law. Instead, federal courts operate as alternative state courts for resolving disputes between diverse parties. But federal courts often cannot act as alternative state courts because of Article III justiciability doctrines such as standing, ripeness, and mootness. These doctrines define when a federal court may act. But they do not apply to state …

Contents

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Longstanding Agency Interpretations, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Fordham Law Review

    How much deference—or what kind—should courts give to longstanding agency interpretations of statutes? Surprisingly, courts and scholars lack a coherent answer to this question. Legal scholars long have assumed that longstanding agency statutory interpretations are treated with heightened deference on judicial review, and federal courts sometimes have made statements suggesting that this is the case. But in practice, federal court review of longstanding agency interpretations—at both the U.S. Supreme Court and courts of appeals—turns out to be surprisingly erratic. Reviewing courts sometimes note the longevity of an agency’s statutory interpretation as a plus factor in their deference analysis but at …

"Friending" Students On Social Media, Charles J. Russo

Educational Leadership Faculty Publications

The use of social media, particularly services such as Facebook and Twitter, has grown exponentially in recent years. Yet to date, relatively little litigation has arisen around the issue of teachers and other educators engaging in questionable or inappropriate use of social media when communicating with students. Even so, parental complaints do arise when teachers share inappropriate communications with students through social media. Consequently, as social networking continues to increase, school business officials and other education leaders should devise policies to help deal with this growing trend.

Given the widespread use of social media, this column examines emerging legal questions …

Plaintiphobia In State Courts Redux? An Empirical Study Of State Court Trials On Appeal, Theodore Eisenberg, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Prior federal and state civil appeals studies show that appeals courts overturn jury verdicts more than bench decisions and that defendants fare better than plaintiffs on appeal. Attitudinal and selection effect hypotheses may help explain an appellate court tilt that favors defendants. This study builds on and extends our prior work on state civil appeals and examines a comprehensive state court civil appeals data set to test leading theories on appellate outcomes as well as to explore the relation between plaintiff success at trial and on appeal. Using data from 40 different states and 141 counties on 8,872 completed civil …

Sovereign Defaults Before International Courts And Tribunals, John A. E. Pottow, Emily Himes Iversen

Law & Economics Working Papers

This book review probes Michael Waibel’s new book, Sovereign Defaults Before International Courts and Tribunals. Waibel's project is ambitious, exploring international attempts to address sovereign defaults over the past century and a half. Through painstaking and comprehensive historical analysis, Waibel shows how we've been here before -- a sober reminder for those thinking Argentina is simply part of a new fad in financial default. With the UN now turning its attention to sovereign debt issues, this study is especially timely. Although somewhat disappointing in the lightness of its normative content, the book should nevertheless prove helpful to those considering the …

Issue 3: Table Of Contents

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

At The Fontier Of The Younger Doctrine: Reflections On Google V. Hood, Gil Seinfeld

Articles

On December 19, 2014, long-simmering tensions between Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood and the search engine giant Google boiled over into federal court when Google filed suit against the Attorney General to enjoin him from bringing civil or criminal charges against it for alleged violations of the Mississippi Consumer Protection Act. Hood had been investigating and threatening legal action against Google for over a year for its alleged failure to do enough to prevent its search engine, advertisements, and YouTube website from facilitating public access to illegal, dangerous, or copyright protected goods. The case has garnered a great deal of …

Federalism, Marriage, And Heather Gerken's Mad Genius, Kristin Collins

Faculty Scholarship

In her characteristically astute and engaging essay, Professor Heather Gerken offers a sensitive and sympathetic reading of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in United States v. Windsor.¹ Her core claim is that Windsor—and the transformation of political and legal support for same-sex marriage in the United States—demonstrate how “federalism and rights work together to promote change” and, in particular, how federalism furthers the equality and liberty values of the Fourteenth Amendment.² This is a natural line of argument for Gerken to develop with respect to Windsor, as she has produced an incredible body of scholarship dedicated to what …

The Philip D. Reed Lecture Series: Judicial Records Forum, Panel Discussion

Fordham Law Review

    This Panel Discussion of the Judicial Records Forum was held on June 4, 2014, at Fordham University School of Law. The Judicial Records Forum focuses on issues involving the creation and management of judicial records and access to judicial records in the digital age.
    The transcript of the Panel Discussion has been lightly edited and represents the panelists’ individual views only, and in no way reflects those of their affiliated firms, organizations, law schools, or the judiciary.

A Friendly Amendment, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

Heather Gerken comes to praise Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the Supreme Court in United States v. Windsor. 1 I come to praise Gerken’s valiant effort to recast the Windsor opinion along more convincing lines.2 Gerken does not propose a wholesale substitute for Justice Kennedy’s analysis. She suggests a shift in emphasis that lends Kennedy’s explanation for condemning DOMA a surprising jurisprudential significance. Where some us have seen yet another lamentable paean to the sovereignty of the states, Gerken detects the faint hint of the “nationalist” school of federalism that she and others have nurtured in recent years.3 Gerken does not …

Taking Stock Of The Change Of Position Defence, Hang Wu Tang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The change of position defence is a developing doctrine and debate continues as to its true rationale and various facets of the defence remain unclear. Many issues surrounding the following two fundamental questions await clarifications from the courts: (a) What constitutes change of position? (b) What kind of conduct disqualifies a person from relying on the change of position defence? This article attempts to map out the contours of the debate which would hopefully be useful in framing the debate when this matter next comes before the courts.

Standing In For The State: Defending Ballot Initiatives In Federal Court Challenges, Joshua J. Bishop

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.