Rule of Law Commons^™

The Democracy Principle In State Constitutions, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Miriam Seifter

Michigan Law Review

In recent years, antidemocratic behavior has rippled across the nation. Lame-duck state legislatures have stripped popularly elected governors of their powers; extreme partisan gerrymanders have warped representative institutions; state officials have nullified popularly adopted initiatives. The federal Constitution offers few resources to address these problems, and ballot-box solutions cannot work when antidemocratic actions undermine elections themselves. Commentators increasingly decry the rule of the many by the few.

This Article argues that a vital response has been neglected. State constitutions embody a deep commitment to democracy. Unlike the federal Constitution, they were drafted—and have been repeatedly rewritten and amended— to ...

A Bibliometric Analysis Of Human Trafficking In The Wake Of Natural Disasters, Shashikala Gurpur Dr, Manika Kamthan Dr, Vartika Tiwari Ms.

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study is based on the bibliometric analysis of research publications that focus on highlighting the interlinkages between natural disasters and human trafficking as its aftermath. The main objectives of the study are to determine the frequency of such publications and also to establish that the problem of trafficking as a result of natural disasters has not received enough attention from the researchers. The data was collected from the Scopus database using VOSviewer software. Literature written from 2000 to October 2020 were perused. The study consisted of a total of 66 documents which are classified into articles, letters, editorials conference ...

Can The Liberal Order Be Sustained? Nations, Network Effects, And The Erosion Of Global Institutions, Bryan H. Druzin

Michigan Journal of International Law

A growing retreat from multilateralism is threatening to upend the institutions that underpin the liberal international order. This article applies network theory to this crisis in global governance, arguing that policymakers can strengthen these institutions by leveraging network effect pressures. Network effects arise when networks of actors—say language speakers or users of a social media platform—interact and the value one user derives from the network increases as other users join the network (e.g., the more people who speak your language, the more useful it is because there are more people with whom you can communicate). Crucially, network ...

Ending Corporate Anonymity: Beneficial Ownership, Sanctions Evasion, And What The United Nations Should Do About It, Vineet Chandra

Michigan Journal of International Law

In the vast majority of jurisdictions around the world, there is a generous array of corporate forms available to persons and companies looking to do business. These entities come with varying degrees of regulation regarding how much information about the businesses’ principal owners must be disclosed at the time of registration and how much of that information is subsequently available to the public. There is little policy harmonization around the world on this matter. Dictators and despots have long taken advantage of this unintended identity shield to evade sanctions which target them; in July of 2019, the Center for Advanced ...

Egyptian Public Law Judge: Reviewing Public Economic Policies From Nationalization To Privatization, Omar El Menshawy

Theses and Dissertations

Do public law judges play a role in public economic policies in Egypt? Egypt has witnessed rough changes, leading to the adoption of different public economic policies. Public law judges have played a key role in these economic shifts. However, the efficacy of this role is pending on the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the government with the courts and the judicial decisions. This paper argues that the government posses the upper hand in dealing with the judicial influence in economic issues in Egypt. The paper scrutinizes the transformation in the judicial attitude towards government economic policies. Specifically, the paper demarcates ...

Will The "Legal Singularity" Hollow Out Law's Normative Core?, Robert F. Weber

Michigan Technology Law Review

This Article undertakes a critical examination of the unintended consequences for the legal system if we arrive at the futurist dream of a legal singularity—the moment when predictive, mass-data technologies evolve to create a perfectly predictable, algorithmically-expressed legal system bereft of all legal uncertainty. It argues that although the singularity would surely enhance the efficiency of the legal system in a narrow sense, it would also undermine the rule of law, a bedrock institution of any liberal legal order and a key source of the legal system’s legitimacy. It would do so by dissolving the normative content of ...

Accountability For Employers Or Independence For Contractors? Accomplishing Ab5’S Labor Classification Goals In The Gig Economy, Chelsea Rauch

Seattle University Law Review

U.S. employment law traditionally classifies workers as either employees or independent contractors; each worker under this traditional legal rubric can only be classified as one or the other—there can be no ambiguity or overlap. An employee is generally defined as “a person hired for a regular, continuous period to perform work for an employer who maintains control over both the service details and the final product.” In contrast, an independent contractor is generally defined as “a worker who performs services for others, usually under contract, while at the same time retaining economic independence and complete control over both ...

The Small-Er Screen: Youtube Vlogging And The Unequipped Child Entertainment Labor Laws, Amanda G. Riggio

Seattle University Law Review

Family vloggers are among the millions of content creators on YouTube. In general, vloggers frequently upload recorded videos of their daily lives. Family vloggers are unique because they focus their content around their familial relationships and the lives of their children. One set of family vloggers, the Ace Family, has recorded their children’s lives from the day they were born and continue to upload videos of each milestone, including “Elle Cries on Her First Rollercoaster Ride” and “Elle and Alaïa Get Caught Doing What!! **Hidden Camera**.” Another vlogging couple, Cole and Savannah LaBrant, post similar content, including videos titled ...

School “Safety” Measures Jump Constitutional Guardrails, Maryam Ahranjani

Seattle University Law Review

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and efforts to achieve racial justice through systemic reform, this Article argues that widespread “security” measures in public schools, including embedded law enforcement officers, jump constitutional guardrails. These measures must be rethought in light of their negative impact on all children and in favor of more effective—and constitutionally compliant—alternatives to promote school safety. The Black Lives Matter, #DefundthePolice, #abolishthepolice, and #DefundSchoolPolice movements shine a timely and bright spotlight on how the prisonization of public schools leads to the mistreatment of children, particularly children with disabilities, boys, Black and brown children ...

Duress In Immigration Law, Elizabeth A. Keyes

Seattle University Law Review

The doctrine of duress is common to other bodies of law, but the application of the duress doctrine is both unclear and highly unstable in immigration law. Outside of immigration law, a person who commits a criminal act out of well-placed fear of terrible consequences is different than a person who willingly commits a crime, but American immigration law does not recognize this difference. The lack of clarity leads to certain absurd results and demands reimagining, redefinition, and an unequivocal statement of the significance of duress in ascertaining culpability. While there are inevitably some difficult lines to be drawn in ...

No, The Firing Squad Is Not Better Than Lethal Injection: A Response To Stephanie Moran’S A Modest Proposal, Michael Conklin

Seattle University Law Review

In the article A Modest Proposal: The Federal Government Should Use Firing Squads to Execute Federal Death Row Inmates, Stephanie Moran argues that the firing squad is the only execution method that meets the requirements of the Eighth Amendment. In order to make her case, Moran unjustifiably overstates the negative aspects of lethal injection while understating the negative aspects of firing squads. The entire piece is predicated upon assumptions that are not only unsupported by the evidence but often directly refuted by the evidence. This Essay critically analyzes Moran’s claims regarding the alleged advantages of the firing squad over ...

Choice Of Law And The Preponderantly Multistate Rule: The Example Of Successor Corporation Products Liability, Diana Sclar

Dickinson Law Review

Most state rules of substantive law, whether legislative or judicial, ordinarily adjust rights and obligations among local parties with respect to local events. Conventional choice of law methodologies for adjudicating disputes with multistate connections all start from an explicit or implicit assumption of a choice between such locally oriented substantive rules. This article reveals, for the first time, that some state rules of substantive law ordinarily adjust rights and obligations with respect to parties and events connected to more than one state and only occasionally apply to wholly local matters. For these rules I use the term “nominally domestic rules ...

The People's Court: On The Intellectual Origins Of American Judicial Power, Ian C. Bartrum

Dickinson Law Review

This article enters into the modern debate between “consti- tutional departmentalists”—who contend that the executive and legislative branches share constitutional interpretive authority with the courts—and what are sometimes called “judicial supremacists.” After exploring the relevant history of political ideas, I join the modern minority of voices in the latter camp.

This is an intellectual history of two evolving political ideas—popular sovereignty and the separation of powers—which merged in the making of American judicial power, and I argue we can only understand the structural function of judicial review by bringing these ideas together into an integrated whole ...

Don't Change The Subject: How State Election Laws Can Nullify Ballot Questions, Cole Gordner

Dickinson Law Review

Procedural election laws regulate the conduct of state elections and provide for greater transparency and fairness in statewide ballots. These laws ensure that the public votes separately on incongruous bills and protects the electorate from uncertainties contained in omnibus packages. As demonstrated by a slew of recent court cases, however, interest groups that are opposed to the objective of a ballot question are utilizing these election laws with greater frequency either to prevent a state electorate from voting on an initiative or to overturn a ballot question that was already decided in the initiative’s favor. This practice is subverting ...

Fair Play: Notes On The Algorithmic Soccer Referee, Michael J. Madison

Articles

The soccer referee stands in for a judge. Soccer’s Video Assistant Referee (“VAR”) system stands in for algorithms that augment human deciders. Fair play stands in for justice. They are combined and set in a polycentric system of governance, with implications for designing, administering, and assessing human-machine combinations.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

The Republic Of Letters And The Origins Of Scientific Knowledge Commons, Michael J. Madison

Book Chapters

The knowledge commons framework, deployed here in a review of the early network of scientific communication known as the Republic of Letters, combines a historical sensibility regarding the character of scientific research and communications with a modern approach to analyzing institutions for knowledge governance. Distinctions and intersections between public purposes and privacy interests are highlighted. Lessons from revisiting the Republic of Letters as knowledge commons may be useful in advancing contemporary discussions of Open Science.

School "Safety" Measures Jump Constitutional Guardrails, Maryam Ahranjani

Faculty Scholarship

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and efforts to achieve racial justice through systemic reform, this Article argues that widespread “security” measures in public schools, including embedded law enforcement officers, jump constitutional guardrails. These measures must be rethought in light of their negative impact on all children and in favor of more effective—and constitutionally compliant—alternatives to promote school safety. The Black Lives Matter, #DefundthePolice, #abolishthepolice, and #DefundSchoolPolice movements shine a timely and bright spotlight on how the prisonization of public schools leads to the mistreatment of children, particularly children with disabilities, boys, Black and brown children ...

Sovereign Immunity And Interstate Government Tort, Louise Weinberg

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This paper argues that the Supreme Court made a serious mistake last term, when, in a case of interstate government tort, it tore up useful options that should be available to each state for the rare cases in which they would be of service. In seeking to insulate a state from liability when its employee intrudes on a sister state’s territory and causes injury there, the Court stripped every state of power, in cases of interstate government tort, to try injuries occurring on its own territory to its own residents—an unprecedented disregard of a state’s acknowledged traditional ...

Government Ethics In The Age Of Trump, Adam Raviv

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Americans’ trust in government officials has never been lower. Despite the intense public focus on ethics in government in recent years, legal scholarship on the subject has been sparse. This Article fills the gap by examining the ethics regime of the federal executive branch in depth, with a discussion of both the applicable ethics standards and the agencies and offices that are charged with ensuring that government officials comply with those standards. The Article describes how the current system heavily emphasizes prevention, education, and highly detailed disclosures while it rarely enforces the law against wrongdoers. A federal official in the ...