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Full-Text Articles in Legal Theory

Unanswered Questions Of A Minority People In International Law: A Comparative Study Between Southern Cameroons & South Sudan, Bernard Sama Mr Oct 2011

Unanswered Questions Of A Minority People In International Law: A Comparative Study Between Southern Cameroons & South Sudan, Bernard Sama Mr

Bernard Sama

The month July of 2011 marked the birth of another nation in the World. The distressful journey of a minority people under the watchful eyes of the international community finally paid off with a new nation called the South Sudan . As I watched the South Sudanese celebrate independence on 9 July 2011, I was filled with joy as though they have finally landed. On a promising note, I read the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon saying “[t]ogether, we welcome the Republic of South Sudan to the community of nations. Together, we affirm our commitment to helping it meet its …


Legal Mechanization Of Corporate Social Responsibility Through Alien Tort Statute Litigation: A Response To Professor Branson With Some Supplemental Thoughts, Donald J. Kochan Jul 2011

Legal Mechanization Of Corporate Social Responsibility Through Alien Tort Statute Litigation: A Response To Professor Branson With Some Supplemental Thoughts, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

This Response argues that as ATS jurisprudence “matures” or becomes more sophisticated, the legitimate limits of the law regress. The further expansion within the corporate defendant pool – attempting to pin liability on parent, great grandparent corporations and up to the top – raises the stakes and complexity of ATS litigation. The corporate social responsibility discussion raises three principal issues about how a moral corporation lives its life: how a corporation chooses its self-interest versus the interests of others, when and how it should help others if control decisions may harm the shareholder owners, and how far the corporation must …


Collective Choice, Justin Schwartz Jan 2011

Collective Choice, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

This short nontechnical article reviews the Arrow Impossibility Theorem and its implications for rational democratic decisionmaking. In the 1950s, economist Kenneth J. Arrow proved that no method for producing a unique social choice involving at least three choices and three actors could satisfy four seemingly obvious constraints that are practically constitutive of democratic decisionmaking. Any such method must violate such a constraint and risks leading to disturbingly irrational results such and Condorcet cycling. I explain the theorem in plain, nonmathematical language, and discuss the history, range, and prospects of avoiding what seems like a fundamental theoretical challenge to the possibility …


Innovation Cooperation: Energy Biosciences And Law, Prof. Elizabeth Burleson Jan 2011

Innovation Cooperation: Energy Biosciences And Law, Prof. Elizabeth Burleson

Prof. Elizabeth Burleson

This Article analyzes the development and dissemination of environmentally sound technologies that can address climate change. Climate change poses catastrophic health and security risks on a global scale. Universities, individual innovators, private firms, civil society, governments, and the United Nations can unite in the common goal to address climate change. This Article recommends means by which legal, scientific, engineering, and a host of other public and private actors can bring environmentally sound innovation into widespread use to achieve sustainable development. In particular, universities can facilitate this collaboration by fostering global innovation and diffusion networks.


Cancun Climate Negotiations, Prof. Elizabeth Burleson Jan 2011

Cancun Climate Negotiations, Prof. Elizabeth Burleson

Prof. Elizabeth Burleson

The United Nations Climate Change Conference, held from November 29 to December 11, 2010, in Cancún, Mexico, relaunched the United Nation's multilateral facilitation role.


On Equality: The Anti-Interference Principle, Donald J. Kochan Dec 2010

On Equality: The Anti-Interference Principle, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

This Essay introduces the “Anti-Interference Principle” – a new term on the meaning of equality, or at least one not yet so-named in the equality lexicon – as a necessary foundation for achieving the goal of true equality. Equality has a long-standing place in the discussion of politics and jurisprudence and remains a struggle of definition today. Rather than rehash the mass of scholarship, this Essay seeks to summarize the general equality concept, and propose that the legal discourse on equality center on a requirement that governmental power must protect and respect equal treatment and opportunity, unconstrained, not equal outcomes. …