Law and Philosophy Commons^™

Religious Roots Of Corporate Organization, Amanda Porterfield

Seattle University Law Review

Religion and corporate organization have developed side-by-side in Western culture, from antiquity to the present day. This Essay begins with the realignment of religion and secularity in seventeenth-century America, then looks to the religious antecedents of corporate organization in ancient Rome and medieval Europe, and then looks forward to the modern history of corporate organization. This Essay describes the long history behind the entanglement of business and religion in the United States today. It also shows how an understanding of both religion and business can be expanded by looking at the economic aspects of religion and the religious aspects of …

Are We (Americans) All International Realists Now?, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

Is American international law distinctly legal realist? The claim is often made, but underexplored. What would it mean for American international law scholarship and practice to be legal realist in its orientation? Where would such an orientation come from, and what do those origin stories mean for current international law work? Are there common realist-inspired approaches within the varied schools of American international law scholarship? Does wielding those approaches produce distinctly American views on international law doctrine, its operation, or its function? And if American international law scholarship and practice is, in these ways, somewhat distinct, what does it mean …

Microwaving Dreams? Why There Is No Point In Reheating The Hart-Dworkin Debate For International Law, Jason A. Beckett

Faculty Book Chapters

A critique of attempts to transpose Hart and Dworkin's legal theories to international law. I demonstrate why neither approach can provide insights into international law. Hart and Dworkin are institutional theorists, their methodologies are anchored by the need to justify the exercise of socially centralised violence. International law lacks both institutions and centralised violence, and the stabilising force these bring; it is radically indeterminate. Attempts to suppress this indeterminacy have resulted in international lawyers fragmenting into communities of practice, united by their eschatological faith in the international community. I challenge this faith.

Harry Potter And The Gluttonous Machine, Jason A. Beckett

Faculty Journal Articles

In this paper, I outline the colonial structure of international law, and examine the short decline or suppression of its coloniality in the so-called ‘era of decolonisation’, then illustrate its resurgence in the modern neo-colonial order. PIL has split into two separate systems. One includes, and is justified by, the heroic tales of human rights and ‘Humanity’s Law’. The other is the actualised system of International Economic Law (IEL), an order driven by the need of the over-developed states to plunder the under-developed states’ resources and labour, to subsidise the luxury to which we have grown accustomed. One purports to …

Enough Is As Good As A Feast, Noah C. Chauvin

Seattle University Law Review

Ipse Dixit, the podcast on legal scholarship, provides a valuable service to the legal community and particularly to the legal academy. The podcast’s hosts skillfully interview guests about their legal and law-related scholarship, helping those guests communicate their ideas clearly and concisely. In this review essay, I argue that Ipse Dixit has made a major contribution to legal scholarship by demonstrating in its interview episodes that law review articles are neither the only nor the best way of communicating scholarly ideas. This contribution should be considered “scholarship,” because one of the primary goals of scholarship is to communicate new ideas.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Borrowing American Ideas To Improve Chinese Tort Law, Yongxia Wang

St. Mary's Law Journal

As China develops its modern jurisprudence it faces a choice between emulating the legal frameworks of civil law countries or common law countries. Thus far, the civil law path has allowed for a rapid expansion of Chinese tort law, but jurists have found difficulty in applying such generalized statutory schemes with the absence of supporting judicial interpretation. Cognizant of the differences between the public policy of common law countries and China, Vincent Johnson’s Mastering Torts (Měiguó Qīnquán Fǎ) provides this guidance through the lens of American tort law. The hornbook takes care to simplify the role of judicial …

In Memory Of Professor James E. Bond, Janet Ainsworth

Seattle University Law Review

Janet Ainsworth, Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law: In Memory of Professor James E. Bond.

The Modern Architecture Of Religious Freedom As A Fundamental Right, Peter G. Danchin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

International Law And Theories Of Global Justice, Steven Ratner, David Luban, Carmen Pavel, Jiewuh Song, James Stewart

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

International law informs, and is informed by, concerns for global justice. Yet the two fields that engage most with prescribing the normative structure of the world order – international law and the philosophy of global justice – have tended to work on parallel tracks. Many international lawyers, with their commitment to formal sources, regard considerations of substantive (and not merely procedural) justice as ultra vires for much of their work. Philosophers of global justice, in turn, tend to explore the moral commitments of international actors without grappling with the international legal doctrine or institutions. In recent years, however, both disciplines …

Book Review, Terje Einarsen & Joseph Rikhof, A Theory Of Punishable Participation In Universal Crimes (2018), Mark A. Drumbl, Lauren Hancock

Scholarly Articles

In A Theory of Punishable Participation in Universal Crimes, Terje Einarsen and Joseph Rikhof unpack concepts of liability for individual contributions to universal crimes. Universal crimes – namely genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and acts of aggression – tend to occur when a state or another powerful organization (a non-state actor, for example) collectivizes and channels the involvement of many people to commit the crime. The people who execute the acts are rarely ever the people who coordinate them. This disjuncture renders participation difficult to define and punish – individual acts may elide conventional legal intelligibility. Consequently, only …

Global Energy Poverty: The Relevance Of Faith And Reason, Lakshman Guruswamy

Publications

The challenge of energy poverty (EP) primarily confronts the least developed countries (LDCs) of the world, located in Africa and Asia, but is also prevalent within segments of more advanced developing countries in Asia. This article will first delineate the nature of global energy poverty that results in the premature deaths of millions of people and leads to pervasive sickness among many more millions. The article will next sketch the legal and political responses to this problem that have generally applied principles of sustainable development (SD) and the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of 2015 adopted by the General Assembly …

You That Build The Death Planes: Bob Dylan, War And International Affairs, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

Several years ago, I wrote that Bob Dylan was “a scholar with a well-developed jurisprudence on a range of topics including civil, criminal, public, and private law” (Perlin, 2011, p.1396). In that article, I discussed and analyzed Dylan songs that dealt with, variously, civil rights, inequality in the criminal and civil justice systems, institutions, governmental/judicial corruption, equality and emancipation, and the role of lawyers in the legal process. (Id.). But I noted that I was omitting – for space considerations – any discussion of Dylan songs dealing with war and international affairs (Id., p. 1398, n. 15).

In this paper, …

International Law And Theories Of Global Justice: Remarks, Steven R. Ratner, James Stewart, Jiewuh Song, Carmen Pavel

Articles

International law (IL) and political philosophy represent two rich disciplines for exploring issues of global justice. At their core, each seeks to build a better world based on some universally agreed norms, rules, and practices, backed by effective institutions. International lawyers, even the most positivist of them, have some underlying assumptions about a just world order that predisposes their interpretive methods; legal scholars have incorporated concepts of justice in their work even as their overall pragmatic orientation has limited the nature of their inquiries. Many philospophers, for their part, have engaged with IL to some extent—at a minimum recognizing that …

Can The International Criminal Court Succeed? An Analysis Of The Empirical Evidence Of Violence Prevention, Stuart Ford

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

Despite significant optimism about the future of the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) during its early years, recently there has been growing criticism of it by both scholars and governments. As a result, there appears to be more doubt about the ICC’s ability to succeed now than at any other point in its history. So, are the critics correct? Is the ICC failing? No. This Article argues that, not only can the ICC succeed, there is strong evidence that it is already succeeding. It analyzes several recent empirical articles that have convincingly demonstrated that the ICC prevents serious violations of international …

Experiments With Suppression: The Evolution Of Repressive Legality In Britain In The Revolutionary Period, Christopher M. Roberts

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

This article is concerned with the structure of repressive governance, and how it has evolved historically. It examines this theme through an exploration of the manner which repressive laws and institutions evolved in Britain over the course of the late eighteenth century. In particular, it reviews the various measures that British authorities utilized and relied upon in order to confront a growing wave of calls for social and political reforms. These included a policy of aggressive prosecutions of dissidents; the creation of new institutions such as the Home Office designed to enhance the powers of the central authorities; extralegal measures …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Decolonizing Human Rights: Sovereignty. Disruption. Tactics., A. Kayum Ahmed

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Despite its emancipatory potential, human rights remains locked in a form of epistemic coloniality that defers to Euro-American knowledge and reinforces anthropocentric exceptionalism. In order to employ human rights as a source of emancipation, human rights must itself be emancipated—it must be decolonized. Drawing on the notion of 'decoloniality' as a framework that advances radical possibilities by delinking from structural racism, patriarchy and class embedded in capitalism and Western modernity, a typology of human rights as sovereignty, disruption, and tactics is developed as a way of understanding human rights from the position of the colonized.

Flor Freire V. Ecuador, Raymond Chavez

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

This case is about the discharge from duty of a Second Lieutenant of the Ecuadorian army who had been accused of engaging in homosexual conduct. The Court found violation of several articles of the American Convention. The violation of the prohibition of discrimination is the most significant one.

Israeli Exception-Alism: The Nation-State Law And Its Place In The Israeli Geopolitical Zeitgeist, Daniel Bral

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

Israel is no stranger to the scorn of the international community. In many respects, Israel is held to a different standard than other nations. In July 2018, that hypothesis was tested when Israel’s Knesset passed The Basic Law: Israel – The Nation State of the Jewish People. Though largely symbolic, the Law declares, inter alia, “[t]he exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People.” Critics lambasted the clause for allegedly violating international law by rejecting non-Jews’ right to exercise self-determination in the State of Israel. This note argues that the …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The United Nations Compensation Commission: Mass Reparations Apotheosis, Gregory Townsend

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

No abstract provided.

Legal Education In The United States: Moving Toward More Practical Experience, Hon. Sandra R. Klein

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

No abstract provided.

International Law And Political Philosophy: Uncovering New Linkages, Steven R. Ratner

Articles

The legal regime regulating cross-border investment gives key rights to foreign investors and places significant duties on states hosting that investment. It also raises distinctive moral questions due to its potential to constrain a state’s ability to manage its economy and protect its people. Yet international investment law remains virtually untouched as a subject of philosophical inquiry. The questions of international political morality surrounding investment rules can be mapped through the lens of two critiques of the law – that it systemically takes advantage of the global South and that it constrains the policy choices of states hosting investment. Each …

Exoatmospheric Plowshares: Using A Nuclear Explosive Device For Planetary Defense Against An Incoming Asteroid, David A. Koplow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What should be done if we suddenly discover a large asteroid on a collision course with Earth? The consequences of an impact could be enormous—scientists believe that such a strike 60 million years ago led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, and something of similar magnitude could happen again. Although no such extraterrestrial threat now looms on the horizon, astronomers concede that they cannot detect all the potentially hazardous “near-Earth objects,” and even more striking, they acknowledge that if such a danger were discerned, there is currently no proven capability for diverting or destroying it.

One possible response to this …

The Roots And Fruits Of Good Faith In Domestic Court Practice, Thomas Neumann

Pace International Law Review

Good faith—most lawyers have an opinion on these two words. While the notion of good faith may play specific roles at domestic and regional levels, it remains an elusive siren at the international level. The concept was subject to controversy at the birth of the 1980 United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) and has been debated by scholars ever since. Considering that the Convention has now been in force for over thirty years, it is agreed that time is ripe for “a call to arms for further research into a uniform standard of good …

Responsibility In Building Rule Of Law: Kosovo Challenges, Avdullah Robaj, Sabiha Shala

International Journal on Responsibility

The principle of the rule of law is one of the most important and essential principles for any state and for democratic society. Its fullest realization in everyday life is the best guarantee for development of democracy and recognition and enforcement of citizens' fundamental rights and freedoms. To this end, the general principles of the rule of law today occupy a special place and are fixed explicitly in contemporary constitutions and democratic legislation. The well-known countries of Western democracies have long established a rich and valuable legacy in this regard. When exploring the contours and details about establishing the rule …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Private International Law As An Ethic Of Responsivity, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

The world is a mess. Populism, xenophobia, and islamophobia; misogyny and racism; the closing of borders against the neediest—the existential crisis of modernity calls for a firm response from ethics. Why, instead of engaging with these problems through traditional ethics, worry about private international law, that most technical of technical fields of law? My claim in this chapter: not despite, because of its technical character. Private international law provides such an ethic, an ethic of responsivity. It provides us with a technique of ethics, a technique that helps us conceptualise and address some of the most pressing issues of our …

Moving From Management To Termination: A Case Study Of Prolonged Occupation, David Hughes

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

In 2017, the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories reached a half-century in duration. This reignited a conversation amongst legal scholars. In articles and books, lawyers questioned the efficacy of occupation law. They asked whether it had become an anachronism. Across Israel and the Palestinian territories, those that directly invoke the law of occupation sought a more effective means of adapting the law to meet the exigencies of a fifty-year-old occupation. The accompanying debates recalled questions concerning the legal treatment of prolonged occupation. This article seeks to fundamentally alter the recurring discourse. Built around a detailed case study of Israel’s …