Rule of Law Commons^™

Some Realism About Legal Certainty In The Globalization Of The Rule Of Law, James Maxeiner

All Faculty Scholarship

The rule of law is at the heart of globalization. It promises both international and domestic routes to peace, security, democracy, human rights and sustainable development worldwide. A central tenet of the rule of law is legal certainty. For most modern jurists, it is a matter of course that legal certainty is a systemic goal, even if that goal is not always fully realized. But for American jurists who count themselves legal realists, legal certainty is not even a flawed goal; it is a childish myth. This address seeks to raise awareness of this fundamental difference and to show its …

Book Review Of The Nine: Inside The Secret World Of The Supreme Court, Eric J. Segall

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Migrant Children, Compulsory Education And The Rule Of Law In China, Brian Holland

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Rule Of Law And The Politics Of Fear: Human Rights In The Twenty-First Century, Irene Zubaida Khan

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sanctioning The Ambulance Chaser, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Force Of Law: The Role Of Coercion In Legal Norms, Ekow N. Yankah

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Let My People Go: Human Capital Investment And Community Capacity Building Via Meta/Regulation In A Deliberative Democracy-A Modest Contribution For Criminal Law And Restorative Justice, Bruce P. Archibald

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The article explores the integration of restorative justice within Canada's criminal justice system, emphasizing its potential to enhance human capital development and community capacity through deliberative democratic processes. It argues that restorative justice offers a more effective and responsive approach compared to traditional punitive measures, which often fail to address the root causes of crime and may even exacerbate recidivism. By examining the Nova Scotia Restorative Justice Program as a model, the analysis highlights the benefits of combining restorative practices with formal criminal justice systems, advocating for a shift towards more inclusive and rehabilitative approaches to crime.

The Solitude Of Latin America: The Struggle For Rights South Of The Border, Ángel Oquendo

Faculty Articles and Papers

The article focuses, comparatively, on remarkable recent developments in Latin America regarding the programmatic adjudication, procedural enforcement, and internationalization of fundamental entitlements. It applauds, first, the manner in which many Latin American courts have uncompromisingly enforced positive guaranties in the last decade or so. Secondly, it analyzes various widely available procedures for the vindication of rights, including the writ of protection or security, unconstitutionality actions, and collective suits. Thirdly, it studies the manner in which the interaction between domestic and transnational rights has become extremely intense in the region. Finally, it notes the tension between the realization of the juridical …

Faith In The Rule Of Law, Marc O. Degirolami

Scholarly Articles

For all but the most unflinching consequentialist, "instrumentalism" tends to draw mixed reviews. So it does from Brian Tamanaha. His book, Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law, documents with measured diffidence the ascendancy and current reign of "legal instrumentalism," so entrenched an understanding of law that it is "taken for granted in the United States, almost a part of the air we breathe." Professor Tamanaha shows that in our legal theorizing, our approaches to legal education, our understanding of legal practice, and our perception of judges, legislators, and legal administrators, law is widely …

Competing Legal Cultures And Legal Reform: The Battle Of Chile, James M. Cooper

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Article explores the competition that exists between U.S. and German legal cultures and examines Chilean legal reform efforts since the late 1990s as a case study of this competition. A country's legal culture is comprised of the self-governing rules and operations of national and regional bar associations, the format of legal education, the structure of the legal and judicial profession, the role of the judiciary, jurisprudential style, and the reputation of the legal sector according to the general public. The influence of predominant legal cultures on developing nations has been explored in a number of contexts, while the importance …

Respect And Resistance In Punishment Theory, Alice Ristroph

Studio for Law and Culture

Is it coherent to speak of a right to resist justified punishment? Thomas Hobbes thought so. This essay seeks first to (re)introduce Hobbes as a punishment theorist, and second to use Hobbes to examine what it means to respect the criminal even as we punish him. Hobbes is almost entirely neglected by scholars of criminal law, whose theoretical inquiries focus on liberal, rights-based accounts of retribution (often exemplified by Immanuel Kant) and claims of deterrence or other consequentialist benefits (elucidated, for example, by Jeremy Bentham). Writing before Kant or Bentham, Hobbes offered a fascinating account of punishment that will strike …

Less Safe, Less Free: A Progress Report On The War On Terror: Address To The Terrorism & Justice Conference At The University Of Central Missouri, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Bush Administration since 9-11 has adopted a strategy, which in some sense depends upon the ability to predict with incredible accuracy at what will happen in the future. It was given its name by the U.S. Attorney General during the first Bush Administration, Missouri’s John Ashcroft, who argued that what we need in the wake of 9-11 is a “preventive paradigm.” The argument is understandable: when facing foes who are willing to commit suicide in order to inflict mass casualties on innocent civilians, it is not enough to bring them to justice after the fact. The perpetrators are dead--and …

True Believers At Law: National Security Agendas, The Regulation Of Lawyers, And The Separation Of Powers, Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

Ideological agendas distort the deliberation required for sound legal advice about national security. Elite government lawyers after September 11 advanced a theory at the expense of context, labeling legal constraints as "lawfare" against American interests. The lawfare critics failed to recognize that legal constraints can empower decision makers by reinforcing reputational and other long-term values. They also failed their history test, ignoring the lessons of presidents from Jefferson to Kennedy who rejected a rigid adherence to ideology in the national security realm. By discounting context, the construction of the lawfare paradigm produced dire results, including the torture memos drafted by …

Incorporation And Originalist Theory, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Does the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution incorporate the Bill of Rights contained in the first eight amendments? And how should an originalist answer that question? This paper focuses on the latter question--the issues of originalist theory that are raised by judicial and scholarly debates over what is called "incorporation."

The inquiry proceeds in six parts. Part I answers the questions: "What is incorporation?" and "What is originalism?" Part II examines the theoretical framework for an investigation of incorporation that operates within the narrow confines of interpretation of the linguistic meaning text based on the assumption that the …

Securing The Rule Of Law Through Interpretive Pluralism: An Argument From Comparative Law, Richard Stith

Law Faculty Publications

Can law rule? For law to rule, it must be enforced. But when law is enforced, not it but its enforcers may rule. To bind those enforcers firmly to the law, they, too, would have to be subjected not only to law but also to a still stronger force—which itself may then be lawless. The very effort to secure the rule of law appears to lead instead to ever more powerful human rulers.

Put another way: If we abolish the police and the courts, in order to leave people truly “not under man but under God and the law,”1 we …

Legal Accountability In The Service-Based Welfare State: Lessons From Child Welfare Reform, Kathleen G. Noonan, Charles F. Sabel, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Current trends intensify the longstanding problem of how the rule-of-law should be institutionalized in the welfare state. Welfare programs are being re-designed to increase their capacities to adapt to rapidly changing conditions and to tailor their responses to diverse clienteles. These developments challenge the understanding of legal accountability developed in the Warren Court era. This Article reports on an emerging model of accountable administration that strives to reconcile programmatic flexibility with rule-of-law values. The model has been developed in the reform of state child protective services systems, but it has potentially broad application to public law. It also has novel …

Overcoming Lochner In The Twenty-First Century: Taking Both Rights And Popular Sovereignty Seriously As We Seek To Secure Equal Citizenship And Promote The Public Good, Thomas B. Mcaffee

University of Richmond Law Review

Professor McAffee reviews substantive due process as the textual basis for modern fundamental rights constitutional decision-making. He contends that we should avoid both the undue literalism that rejects the idea of implied rights, as well as the attempt to substitute someone's preferred moral vision for the limits, and compromises, that are implicit in and intended by the Constitution's text. He argues, moreover, that we can largely harmonizethe variousgoals of our constitutionalsystem by taking rights se- riously and by understanding that securing rights does not ex-haustthe Constitution'spurposes.

Understanding Indigenous Dispute Resolution Processes And Western Alternative Dispute Resolution: Cultivating Culturally Appropriate Methods In Lieu Of Litigation, Carlo Osi

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

This article specifically focuses on Indigenous Dispute Resolution, Western-inspired ADR mechanisms, and Indigenized Western ADR as culturally appropriate methods to resolve disputes in lieu of litigation. This article will also focus on how these processes are able to help solve intellectual property rights disputes involving Indigenous communities. Generally, this article will describe how successful all three modes of dispute resolution have been in Indigenous conflict resolution, in the quest for benefit-sharing agreements, and the potential for their use in other controversies. This article proposes the adoption of an Indigenized Western ADR approach on issues surrounding intellectual property rights regimes.

Structure And Integrity, Susan Carle

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

In this Review Essay of David Luban's Legal Ethics and Human Dignity, I argue that although Professor Luban has not had much to say until now about "structural" concerns - namely, how lawyers' locations within institutions that organize access to power shape or should shape those lawyers' conduct - in his most recent work, another approach slips in as a supplement to his individualist framework. In this emerging supplement, structural concerns become increasingly important. Although individual integrity continues to matter most in Professor Luban's world view, it increasingly matters in the context of structural relations in which lawyers' ethical duties …

Proyecto Acceso: The Use Of Popular Culture To Build The Rule Of Law In Latin America, James Cooper

Faculty Scholarship

This article is about developing the rule of law in Latin America using popular popular culture and modeling the United States' experience.

Beyond Discretion: Prosecution, The Logic Of Sovereignty, And The Limits Of Law, Conor Clarke, Austin Sarat

Scholarship@WashULaw

Today it is widely recognized in both academic literature and the main-stream media that prosecutors have substantial discretion. Yet prosecutorial decisions involve, in our view, something more than a straightforward exercise of discretion. In this article we move from the language of discretion to that of sovereignty to describe prosecutorial power. In so doing we want to move from the language of administration to the language of power. Focusing on the decision not to prosecute, we argue that prosecutorial decisions participate in, and exemplify, the logic of sovereignty and its complex relationship to legality. By drawing on Carl Schmitt and …

Policy And Methods: Choices For Legislatures, James Maxeiner

All Faculty Scholarship

The legal methods through which one adopts and implements policy decisions profoundly affect the compatibility of policy implementation with democratic legitimacy and legal certainty of the rule of law. Indeed, the choice of legal methods can be as important as the formulation of the policy itself. While a good choice of methods will not heal a bad policy, it can help assure that a less-than-perfect choice of policy can be more forcefully realized than otherwise, it can also help improve the policy choices made and help protect democratic legitimacy and the rule of law. While deficiencies in legislation or in …

Congressional Oversight Of National Security Activities: Improving Information Funnels, Heidi Kitrosser

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Craft And Power, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

Oliver Wendell Holmes-a great judge-said that "the command of the public force is intrusted to the judges in certain cases, and the whole power of the state will be put forth, if necessary, to carry out their judgments and decrees." Appellate courts command that force in ways that principle and practicalities leave little fettered. Judges must fetter themselves, not least by honoring the judicial duty of craftsmanship. That duty obliges courts to respect procedural rules, for they keep courts within their bounds and promote fair and sound decisions. That duty obliges courts to analyze legal authority scrupulously, since judicial legitimacy …

When Should Original Meanings Matter?, Richard A. Primus

Articles

Constitutional theory lacks an account of when each of the familiar sources of authority-text, original meaning, precedent, and so on-should be given weight. The dominant tendency is to regard all sources as potentially applicable in every case. In contrast, this Article proposes that each source of authority is pertinent in some categories of cases but not in others, much as a physical tool is appropriate for some but not all kinds of household tasks. The Article then applies this approach to identify the categories of cases in which original meaning is, or is not, a valid factor in constitutional decisionmaking.

The Politics Of The Rule Of Law, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

This article is about the political significance and the moral justification of the rule of law in one country, i.e., Britain. Its conclusions apply to other countries in proportion to the degree to which their political culture is similar to the British one.

Emergency Federalism: Calling On The States In Perilous Times, Adam M. Giuliano

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The attacks of September 11 prompted a historic debate concerning terrorism and domestic emergency response. This ongoing dialogue has driven policy decisions touching upon both liberty and security concerns. Yet despite the enormous effort that has gone into the national response, the role of the sovereign states, and with it federalism, has received comparatively little attention. This Article explores the relevance of federalism within the context of the "War on Terror" and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Acknowledging that theories of federalism developed elsewhere are insufficient, he outlines a doctrine of 'emergency federalism.' The author argues that the Framers …

The Next Generation Of Legal Citations: A Survey Of Internet Citations In The Opinions Of The Washington Supreme Court And Washington Appellate Courts, 1999-2005, Tina S. Ching

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

Ruling Out The Rule Of Law, Kim Forde-Mazrui

Vanderbilt Law Review

Although criminal justice scholars continue to debate the overall value of the void-for-vagueness doctrine, broad consensus prevails that requiring crimes to be defined in specific terms reduces law enforcement discretion. A few scholars have questioned this assumption, but the conventional view remains dominant. This Article intends to resolve the question whether the void-for-vagueness doctrine really reduces police discretion. It focuses on traffic enforcement, a context in which laws are both specific and subject to discretionary enforcement. The Article concludes that specific rules do not constrain discretion unless judicial limits are placed either on the scope of activities that may be …

The Bridge At Jamestown: The Virginia Charter Of 1606 And Constitutionalism In The Modern World, A.E. Dick Howard

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.