Law and Politics Commons^™

Could Government Speech Endorsing A Higher Law Resolve The Establishment Clause Crisis?, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

Terrorism, Containment And International Law, Ian Shapiro

Other Lectures and Presentations

Prof. Ian Shapiro in a noontime lecture discusses recent developments in dealing with terrorism.

The Rule Of Law Is Dead! Long Live The Rule Of Law!, Keith J. Bybee

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

Polls show that a significant proportion of the public considers judges to be political. This result holds whether Americans are asked about Supreme Court justices, federal judges, state judges, or judges in general. At the same time, a large majority of the public also believes that judges are fair and impartial arbiters, and this belief also applies across the board. In this paper, I consider what this half-law-half-politics understanding of the courts means for judicial legitimacy and the public confidence on which that legitimacy rests. Drawing on the Legal Realists, and particularly on the work of Thurman Arnold, I argue …

The European Court’S Political Power Across Time And Space, Karen Alter

Faculty Working Papers

This article extracts from Alter's larger body of work insights on how the political and social context shapes the ECJ's political power and influence. Part I considers how the political context facilitated the constitutionalization of the European legal system. Part II considers how the political context helps determine where and when the current ECJ influences European politics. Part III draws lessons from the ECJ's experience, speculating on how the European context in specific allowed the ECJ to become such an exceptional international court. Part IV lays out a research agenda to investigate the larger question of how social support shapes …

When God Hates: How Liberal Guilt Lets The New Right Get Away With Murder, Jose M. Gabilondo

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Institutional Pluralism From The Standpoint Of Its Victims: Calling The Question On Indiscriminate (In)Tolerance, Jose M. Gabilondo

Faculty Publications

Borrowing from postmodernity, new Right intellectuals have become adept at plucking core terms from the liberal register, stripping away their history and social context, and making them do the conceptual work of backlash. A recent example is the theme of the 2009 annual meeting of the AALS: institutional pluralism. The phrase has a surface resemblance to traditional liberal values but, in truth, acts as a Trojan horse for discrimination projects that many may find troubling. By putting the phrase in its social context, this essay reveals the ideological interests at work in the idea.

The Constitution And The American Federal System, Robert A. Sedler

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Building The Bottom Up From The Top Down, A. Michael Froomkin

Articles

"Bottom up" governance. "Self-organization." These are among the most talismanic virtue-words of modern political discourse. Yet the reality is that in politics, "self-organization" is rare, being hard to initiate and even harder to sustain. As Oscar Wilde once complained about socialism, it "requires too many evenings." Governance as we tend to know it depends primarily on hierarchical institutions, or on close coordination within small groups. True partnerships, conversations among engaged equals, do not seem to scale. Indeed, whether one believes the fundamental problem to be something about the economics of group formation, the iron law of oligarchy, or something in …

"Separated Unto The Gospel Of God": Political Theology In Badiou And Agamben, Charles Barbour

Seattle University Law Review

This paper begins with a comparison of two texts: Alain Badiou's Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism and Giorgio Agamben's The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. In Parts III and IV, I will summarize in very broad terms the details of Badiou's and Agamben's respective appropriations of Paul. Within each of these Parts, I will speak a little bit about the implications of these various claims for contemporary legal theory-- at least as I understand it, and I am no expert. Finally, in Part V, I will discuss briefly an alternative reading of Paul, …

A Pragmatic Approach To Law And Organizing: A Comment On "The Story Of South Ardmore", 42 J. Marshall L. Rev. 631 (2009), Scott L. Cummings

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Social Movements, Social Process: A Response To Gerald Rosenberg, 42 J. Marshall L. Rev. 671 (2009), Laura Beth Nielsen

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Lawyers And The Power Of Community: The Story Of South Ardmore, 42 J. Marshall L. Rev. 595 (2009), Corey S. Shdaimah

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Organizing In The Obama Era: A Progressive Moment Or A New Progressive Era?, 42 J. Marshall L. Rev. 685 (2009), Peter Dreier

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Unaccountability Of The Accounting Regulators: Analyzing The Constitutionality Of The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, 42 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1019 (2009), Whitney Innes

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Commentary: International Prosecution Of Heads Of State For Genocide, War Crimes, And Crimes Against Humanity, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. Xxv (2009), Hans Corell

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Observations On Leadership: Moral And Otherwise, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 159 (2009), William Arthur Wines

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

When Is Lying Illegal? When Should It Be? A Critical Analysis Of The Federal False Statements Act, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 111 (2009), Steven R. Morrison

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Voting And Registration Technology Issues: Lessons From 2008, S. Candice Hoke, David Jefferson

Law Faculty Contributions to Books

This chapter reviews the 2008 field performance and the scientific assessments of both voting systems and the statewide voter-registration databases. The federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) mandated each of these technologies. Despite definitive scientific studies that documented grave security deficiencies that can cause voting systems to produce inaccurate vote tallies and “winners” who actually had fewer votes, these systems continue to be deployed. The Chapter traces the regrettable decisions on election technologies to a poorly designed regulatory structure and staffing, which continue to underweight and misunderstand security issues in election technologies.

Extraterritorial Electioneering And The Globalization Of American Elections, Zephyr Teachout

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay explores a fascinating new truth: because of the Internet, governments, corporations, and citizens of other countries can now meaningfully participate in United States elections. They can phone bank, editorialize, and organize in ways that impact a candidate's image, the narrative structure of a campaign, and the mobilization of base support. Foreign governments can bankroll newspapers that will be read by millions of voters. Foreign companies can enlist employees in massive cross-continental email campaigns. Foreign activists can set up offline meetings and organize door-to-door campaigns in central Ohio. They can, in short, influence who wins and who loses. Depending …

Regulating Robocalls: Are Automated Calls The Sound Of, Or A Threat To, Democracy, Jason C. Miller

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

African-American voters receive a phone message implying that they are not registered to vote. Others hear "an almost threatening male voice," a "fake New York accent," factual distortions about legislation, false endorsements from controversial groups, calls promoting one candidate claiming to be from his opponent, and a constant barrage of annoying phone calls designed to make voters think a different candidate was sponsoring them. These messages were delivered through automated political telephone calls, also known as robocalls. Robocalls are cheap and efficient--one can deliver a pre-recorded message through 100,000 automated phone calls in one hour for only $2000. Consequently, robocalls …

Ubi Jus, Ibi Remedium, Steven M. Schneebaum

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Justice Across Borders: The Struggle for Human Rights in U.S. Courts. By Jeffrey Davis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 320 pp.

Law, Economics, And Torture, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

This paper addresses three sets of questions, among which it wishes to draw connections: (1) Why has there been so little resistance to the recent massive transfer of national wealth to the rich and super-rich? It is the majority who are injured, and they presumably hold the power in a democracy: why have they not exercised it? (2) Why are law schools so dominated by questions of policy, with rather little interest in the intellectual and linguistic activities of the practicing lawyer and judge? Why indeed do judicial opinions themselves seem so often to be written in a dead and …

Political Control Of Federal Prosecutions: Looking Back And Looking Forward, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay explores the mechanisms of control over federal criminal enforcement that the administration and Congress used or failed to use during George W. Bush's presidency. It gives particular attention to Congress, not because legislators played a dominant role, but because they generally chose to play such a subordinate role. My fear is that the media focus on management inadequacies or abuses within the Justice Department during the Bush administration might lead policymakers and observers to overlook the hard questions that remain about how the federal criminal bureaucracy should be structured and guided during a period of rapidly shifting priorities …

Rules, Rights And Religion: The Abyssinian Baptist Church And The Quest For Community, 1808-1810, Quinton H. Dixie

Seattle University Law Review

Religion, as with law, is partially about bringing together opposing narrative interpretations in order to better understand what believers feel is real. This morning I will show how narratives and their various interpretations display how communities bound by laws and morality express their understanding of who they are called to be.

Legislating Clear-Statement Regimes In National-Security Law, Jonathan F. Mitchell

Georgia Law Review

Congress's national-security legislation will often require clear and specific congressional authorization before the executive can undertake certain actions. The War Powers Resolution,for example, prohibits any law from authorizing military hostilities unless it "specifically authorizes"them. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 required its own amendment or repeal of its "exclusive means"provision before authorizing warrantless electronic surveillance. But efforts to legislate clear-statement regimes in national-security law have failed to induce compliance. The Clinton Administration inferred congressional "authorization" for the 1999 Kosovo War from an appropriations statute that failed to specifically authorize the conflict. And the Bush Administration inferred congressional "authorization"for …

Portraits Of The Undocumented Immigrant: A Dialogue, Stephen H. Legomsky

Georgia Law Review

Few subjects can match the pure polarizing power of illegal immigration. Yet the scholarly literature has made surprisingly little effort even to identify, much less evaluate, the critical philosophical and empirical assumptions that have driven either the perceptions or the policy prescriptions of the opposing camps. This Article seeks to fill that gap. Through a spirited dialogue between two fictional professors with sharply differing views, it paints contrasting portraits of undocumented immigrants. Two patterns emerge. First, the more restrictive positions invariably reflect what this Article calls "aggregation"-a tendency to visualize undocumented immigrants en masse and to emphasize their collective impact …

Racial Exhaustion, Darren Lenard Hutchinson

UF Law Faculty Publications

Contemporary political and legal discourse on questions of race unveils a tremendous perceptual gap among persons of color and whites. Opinion polls consistently demonstrate that persons of color commonly view race and racial discrimination as important factors shaping their opportunities for economic and social advancement. Whites, on the other hand, often discount race as a pertinent factor in contemporary United States society. Consequently, polling data show that whites typically reject racial explanations for acute disparities in important socio-economic indicators, such as education, criminal justice, employment, wealth, and health care. Echoing this public sentiment, social movement actors, politicians, and the Supreme …

Emerging Global Environmental Governance, N. Brian Winchester

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Environmental thinking and activism are steadily gaining widespread, even global acceptance, but are often in conflict with economic interests and international politics. Environmental priorities are further challenged by scientific uncertainty involving effects that in some cases will only become manifest far into the future. Nonetheless, accompanying this global environmental awakening has been an extraordinary number of international agreements on a wide range of critical environmental issues. While many of these environmental regimes lack adequate financial support and sanctions for non-compliance, they involve a variety of non-state actors, suggesting meaningful movement towards an evolving, complex form of global environmental governance. Indeed, …

Deliberative Democracy In Severely Fractured Societies, Adeno Addis

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The world is full of boundaries. Whatever their nature, boundaries provide the conditions for communal or individual identity and agency, and they make collective action possible. That very capacity to define and contain, however, allows boundaries to "close off possibilities of being that might otherwise flourish." Paradoxically, boundaries "both foster and inhibit freedom." This article explores how one particular boundary-ethnicity- has served both as an important source of identity and a cause of deep fracture in societies that this article calls "severely fractured." The purpose of the article is to explore what institutional structures and processes might be appropriate to …

Introduction: Operationalizing Global Governance, Hannah Buxbaum

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Operationalizing Global Governance, Symposium. Indiana University Maurer School of Law-Bloomington, Indiana, March 19-21, 2008