Public Law and Legal Theory Commons^™

Frank Coffin And Enlightened Governance, Robert A. Katzmann

Maine Law Review

I have often thought that Judge Frank M. Coffin is one of a handful of statesmen of recent times I could easily imagine in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 (indeed, as a central figure in a David McCollough biography). If he had been, as competing factions struggled to find solutions to thorny issues, Madison’s Notes would inevitably and often have recorded: “With negotiations on the verge of collapse, all eyes turned to Frank Coffin, who found not only the key to compromise, but also the better way.”

The Legacy Of Judge Frank M. Coffin, Peter R. Pitegoff

Maine Law Review

Judge Coffin had adopted the University of Maine School of Law as if it were his own. He was a committed friend to the Law School and served on the advisory Board of Visitors for almost two decades. Like so many others, I felt his keen personal commitment as well, with his periodic calls and visits, his steady counsel and encouragement. Before arriving in Maine, I had known of Judge Coffin. Little did I anticipate that he would so enrich my experience as Dean at Maine Law. He remains a role model to so many of our graduates and leaves …

Textualism And The Problem Of Scrivener's Error, John David Ohlendorf

Maine Law Review

Scrivener’s errors make easy prey for the gentle comedy of the bench and bar, much in the way that typographical errors in billboards, newspaper headlines, and church bulletins form an endless source of humor for late night talk show hosts. But theorists of legal interpretation have long seen that scrivener’s errors pose a more serious problem. The doctrine surrounding scrivener’s error stands considered as something of a cousin to the absurdity doctrine, which has roots extending to the earliest days of the American Republic. More recently, the post-legal-process revival of formalist approaches to statutory interpretation on the bench, and their …

Rethinking Force Majeure In Public International Law, Myanna Dellinger

Pace Law Review

Climate change is one of today’s most significant and complex problems. The number and level of severity of extreme weather events is increasing rapidly around the world. One year after the next, we learn that heat records have been broken once again. Climate change has been traced to a wide range of severe problems around the world, ranging from the obvious damage caused by hurricanes, floods, extreme rainfall, prolonged droughts, wildfires and a host of other weather-related issues to the perhaps less obvious such as physical and mental illnesses, “civil unrest, riots, mass migrations and perhaps wars caused by water …

The Cost Of The Text, Richard A. Primus

Articles

Christopher Serkin and Nelson Tebbe's Is the Constitution Special?explores many facets of constitutional interpretation. I will focus here on their observation that constitutional interpretation is "less textual" than statutory interpretation. I place the expression "less textual" in quotation marks because "textual" could mean many things, such that it would often be problematic to characterize one interpretive exercise as more or less textual than another. In Serkin and Tebbe's view, as I understand it, mainstream constitutional interpretation is "less textual " than statutory decisionmaking in that it is less constrained by the words of particular enacted clauses. As a convenient …

Success, Merit, And Capital In America, Eli Wald

Marquette Law Review

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The Constitutional Constant, Richard A. Primus

Articles

According to a conventional view of the Constitution as a precommitment strategy, constitutional rules must remain fixed over time in order for the Constitution to do its work. In practice, however, constitutional rules regularly change over time, even without formal amendment. What is actually constant over time in the American constitutional system is not the content of constitutional law: it is the correspondence between the content of constitutional law and the American people’s (or at least the decision-making class’s) most powerful intuitions about issues of structure and ethos in American government. At any given time, constitutional law reflects those intuitions. …

The Aftermath Of Care V. Cow Palace And The Future Of Rcra In Cafo Cases, Lauren Tavar

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

Water, Water, Nowhere: Adapting Water Rights For A Changing Climate, Caleb Hall

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

Ridding Pes Systems Of The “Pay To Pollute” Principle: Pes Optimization Strategies, Kelly Carlson

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

Indoor Aquaponics In Abandoned Buildings: A Potential Solution To Food Deserts, Lisa Tomlinson

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

Investing In Resiliency: Prioritizing Water Systems And Investing In Green Infrastructure, Caitlin Cutchin

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

You Probably Shouldn’T Build There: Watershed-Based Land Use Strategies For Mitigating Global Climate Change In New Jersey’S Freshwater Systems, Matthew Knoblauch

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

About Sdlp

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

Constructing An International Community, Monica Hakimi

Articles

What unites states and other global actors around a shared governance project? How does the group—what I will call an “international community”—coalesce and stay engaged in the enterprise? A frequent assumption is that an international community is cemented by its members’ commonalities and depleted by their intractable disagreements. This article critiques that assumption and presents, as an alternative, a theory that accounts for the combined integration and discord that actually characterize most global governance associations. I argue that conflict, especially conflict that manifests in law, is not necessarily corrosive to an international community. To the contrary, it often is a …

The Rise Of The Executive And The Post-Political Drift Of European Public Law, Marco Dani

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Contemporary European public law is marked by the uneasy relationship between national constitutional democracies and the executive-based supranational governance of the European Union. Whereas constitutional democracy remains the dominant source of inspiration for European institutional imagination, the supranational executive has relentlessly expanded its scope and institutional culture to key policy fields at the core of national constitutional democracies. This article tracks the rise of the supranational executive by examining three relational paradigms developed between national constitutional democracies and the European Union in distinct phases of the European integration process (i.e., the complementarity paradigm in the foundational period; the competition paradigm …

A Cautionary Tale, David Schwendiman

Utah Law Review

It is imperative when talking about accountability and the enforcement of internationally recognized and accepted criminal norms governing conflict, when talking about investigating and prosecuting atrocity crime, not to raise expectations that have little or no chance of being met. Expanding the modes of liability to reach bystanders has the potential to raise such expectations, pushing the range of subjects that victims, survivors and others with an interest in the outcome of atrocity crime investigations and prosecutions expect will be prosecuted out beyond those as to whom there is likely to be political will to prosecute and certainly beyond the …

Improving Connectivity Between Asean's Legal Systems To Address Commercial Issues, Locknie Hsu, Pearlie M. C. Koh, Man Yip

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This interim report on legal barriers to doing business in ASEAN coincides with the 50th Anniversary of ASEAN’s founding and the first year of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). The team is privileged to be supported by, among others, the Canada-ASEAN Business Council (CABC), given that it is also the 40th anniversary of dialogue relations between Canada and ASEAN.

Despite occasional misgivings about the “ASEAN Way”, ASEAN economic integration has come a very long way. The number of member States has grown over the 50 years since ASEAN’s founding, and the joint efforts among these States driving economic growth and …

Masking Neo-Liberal Development: Polanyi, Rule Of Law And Dis-Embedding Dynamics, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Purpose: Polanyi in his analysis of market dis-embedding suggests a drift in economic relations from the social to the fictitious. The purpose of this paper is to add two crucial components to the dis-embedding dynamic: rule of law discourse as a market force away from the social, and through suspension of imagination and of disbelief, the incongruous compatibility of actual and fictional markets that further works against embedding.Design/methodology/approach: Theory building through the application and testing of the Polanyian market dis-embedding analysis is a central concern for the paper. Through the example of foreign direct investment (FDI) and the manner in …

Distinctive Factors Affecting The Legal Context Of End-Of-Life Medical Care For Older Persons, Marshall B. Kapp

Georgia State University Law Review

Current legal regulation of medical care for individuals approaching the end of life in the United States is predicated essentially on a factual model emanating from a series of high-profile judicial opinions concerning the rights of adults who become either permanently unconscious or are clearly going to die soon with or without aggressive attempts of curative therapy.

The need for a flexible, adaptable approach to medically treating people approaching the end of their lives, and a similar openness to possible modification of the legal framework within which treatment choices are made and implemented, are particularly important when older individuals are …

Smith V. Obama: A Neoclassical After Action Review, Sam Walenz

Florida State University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Possession, Child Pornography, And Proportionality: Criminal Liability For Aggregate Harm Offenses, Anthony M. Dillof

Florida State University Law Review

Federal prosecutions of individuals for possessing child pornography have risen steadily and dramatically over the last twenty years. As the number of prosecutions have increased, so have the penalties. Today a typical defendant charged with possessing child pornography can expect a seven-year prison sentence. This Article considers the question of whether such sentences are just, fair, and proportionate. To answer this question, this Article adopts a retributivist perspective on punishment. Retributivism, in turn, requires evaluating the wrongfulness of the conduct to be punished. This Article argues that while the possession of child pornography by a large group of persons in …

Contracting Out Of The Fiduciary Duty Of Loyalty: An Empirical Analysis Of Corporate Opportunity Waivers, Gabriel Rauterberg, Eric Talley

Articles

For centuries, the duty of loyalty has been the hallowed centerpiece of fiduciary obligation, widely considered one of the few “mandatory” rules of corporate law. That view, however, is no longer true. Beginning in 2000, Delaware dramatically departed from tradition by granting incorporated entities a statutory right to waive a crucial part of the duty of loyalty: the corporate opportunities doctrine. Other states have since followed Delaware’s lead, similarly permitting firms to execute “corporate opportunity waivers.” Surprisingly, more than fifteen years into this reform experiment, no study has attempted to either systematically measure the corporate response to these reforms or …

Wrongful Benefit & Arctic Drilling, Nicolas Cornell, Sarah E. Light

Articles

The law contains a diverse range of doctrines — “slayer rules” that prevent murderers from inheriting, restrictions on trade in “conflict diamonds,” the Fourth Amendment’s exclusion of evidence obtained through unconstitutional search, and many more — that seem to instantiate a general principle that it can be wrong to profit from past harms or misconduct. This Article explores the contours of this general normative principle, which we call the wrongful benefit principle. As we illustrate, the wrongful benefit principle places constraints both on whether anyone should be permitted to exploit ethically tainted goods, and who may be permitted to profit …

Revisiting Popular Action, Raúl Sánchez Gómez

DePaul Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Toiling In Trump's Vineyard Of Alternative Facts Lining Its Random Walk, David J. Cook

DePaul Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Erosion Of Civil Rights Remedies: How Ashcroft V. Al-Kidd Altered Qualified Immunity, Madeleine Sharp

DePaul Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Measuring “Progress” And “Regress” In Human Rights: Why We Need A Set Of Social Contract Measures To Replace Indices Of Violations And Slogans, David Lempert

DePaul Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Criminal Selectivity In The United States: A History Plagued By Class & Race Bias, Valeria Vegh Weis

DePaul Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Asian Americans And The Law: Sharing A Progressive Civil Rights Agenda During Uncertain Times, Harvey Gee

DePaul Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.