Rule of Law Commons^™

Introduction: Judges As Diplomats In Advancing The Rule Of Law: A Conversation With President Koen Lenaerts And Justice Stephen Breyer, Fernanda Nicola

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Introduction. On both sides of the Atlantic, Western countries have taken a well publicized and perhaps poorly understood turn toward leaders espousing extremist, xenophobic, and introspective politics that threaten the core tenets of liberal democracy. Electorates appear divided and confused as political leadership in Europe and the U.S. take measures that undermine the basic principles of the rule of law and human rights. Above all else, the designated defenders of the constitutional order, the supreme courts, have come under direct political attack in countries such as Hungary and Poland. Even in traditional bastions of Western democracy, like the United States …

Sovereign Display And Fiscal Techniques, Magnus Hornqvist

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Over recent decades, the state has come to increasingly rearticulate sovereignty at the very center of society. To support the thesis of a migration of sovereignty from the periphery to the center, from the punishment of marginalized groups to the regulation of economic transactions, this Article sketches the development of rules, monitoring, and sanctions--the three phases of regulation in the strict sense--with respect to first tax evasion and undeclared work and then organized crime, money laundering, and terrorist financing. Unbounded reasons of state, symbolic authority, and conflicts with formidable foes are found to be expressed in the economic sphere, which …

Crafting Precedent, Richard C. Chen

Faculty Publications

(with the Hon. Paul J. Watford & Marco Basile)

How does the law of judicial precedent work in practice? That is the question at the heart of The Law of Judicial Precedent, a recent treatise by Bryan Garner and twelve distinguished appellate judges. The treatise sets aside more theoretical and familiar questions about whether and why earlier decisions (especially wrong ones) should bind courts in new cases. Instead, it offers an exhaustive how-to guide for practicing lawyers and judges: how to identify relevant precedents, how to weigh them, and how to interpret them. This Review takes up the treatise on …

The Law Of Interpretation, William Baude, Stephen E. Sachs

Faculty Scholarship

How should we interpret legal instruments? How do we identify the law they create? Current approaches largely fall into two broad camps. The standard picture of interpretation is focused on language, using various linguistic conventions to discover a document's meaning or a drafter's intent. Those who see language as less determinate take a more skeptical view, urging judges to make interpretive choices on policy grounds. Yet both approaches neglect the most important resource available: the already applicable rules of law.

Legal interpretation is neither a subfield of linguistics nor an exercise in policymaking. Rather, it is deeply shaped by preexisting …

Social Justice And Silicon Valley: A Perspective On The Apple-Fbi Case And The “Going Dark” Debate, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Regulatory Theory Of Legal Claims, Maria J. Glover

Vanderbilt Law Review

Procedural law in the United States seeks to achieve three interrelated goals in our system of litigation: efficient processes that achieve "substantive justice" and deter wrongdoing, accurate outcomes, and meaningful access to the courts. For years, however, procedural debate, particularly in the context of due process rights in class actions, has been redirected toward more conceptual questions about the nature of legal claims-are they more appropriately conceptualized as individual property or as collective goods? At stake is the extent to which relevant procedures will protect the right of individual claimants to exercise control over their claims. Those with individualistic conceptions …

From Territorial To Monetary Sovereignty, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

State sovereignty is closely intertwined with, but not limited to, control over territory and people. It has long been recognized that control over monetary affairs is a critical part of genuine sovereignty. In this Article, I go a step further and argue that the relevance and importance of territorial versus monetary sovereignty has shifted in favor of the latter. This shift goes hand in hand with the rise of credit-based financial systems. Such systems depend, in the last instance, on backstopping by an entity with control over its own money supply and no binding survival constraints. Only states with monetary …

Contemporary Soviet Criminal Law: An Analysis Of The General Principles And Major Institutions Of Post-1958 Soviet Criminal Law, Chris Osakwe

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Some Remarks On Self-Defense And Intervention: A Reaction To Reading Law And Civil War In The Modern World, Josef Rohlik

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Evaluating Legislative Justice Sector Reforms: Creating An Environment For Survival, Lauren A. Shumate

Journal of Legislation

No abstract provided.

On The Place Of Judge-Made Law In A Government Of Laws, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

This essay explores a constitutional account of the elevation of the judiciary in American states following the Revolution. The core of the account is a connection between two fundamental concepts in Anglo-American constitutional thinking, discretion and a government of laws. In the periods examined here, arbitrary discretion tended to be associated with alien power and heteronomy, while bounded discretion was associated with self-rule. The formal, solemn, forensic, and public character of proceedings in courts of law suggested to some that judge-made law (a product of judicial discretion under these proceedings) did not express simply the will of the judge or …

Jus Cogens In International Law, With A Projected List, Marjorie M. Whiteman

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Law And Modernization In China: The Juridical Behavior Of The Chinese Communists, Daniel J. Hoffheimer

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

South Africans Learn That The Law Can Be A Double-Edged Sword, Penelope Andrews

Other Publications

South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority charged the country’s finance minister Pravin Gordhan and two of his former colleagues at the tax authority, Ivan Pillay and Oupa Magashule, with fraud last month. The charge was widely criticised as baseless and politically motivated, amid allegations of state capture. It sent the currency into a nosedive and wiped billions off the stock market. This week, the NPA withdrew the charges on the eve of the trio’s court appearance. Politics and society editor, Thabo Leshilo, asked law professor Penelope Andrews for her view.

Is The Supreme Court Disabling The Enabling Act, Or Is Shady Grove Just Another Bad Opera?, Robert J. Condlin

Faculty Scholarship

After seventy years of trying, the Supreme Court has yet to agree on whether the Rules Enabling Act articulates a one or two part standard for determining the validity of a Federal Rule. Is it enough that a Federal Rule regulates “practice and procedure,” or must it also not “abridge substantive rights”? The Enabling Act seems to require both, but the Court is not so sure, and the costs of its uncertainty are real. Among other things, litigants must guess whether the decision to apply a Federal Rule in a given case will depend upon predictable ritual, judicial power grab, …

Plea Bargaining And Prosecutorial Motives, Charlie Gerstein

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

This Article argues that the structure of the plea-bargaining system—which the Supreme Court recently recognized “is the criminal justice system”—hinges on something previously unappreciated by scholars and unaddressed in criminal procedure doctrine: prosecutors’ motives. This Article addresses that problem by studying the prosecutor’s disclosure obligations when defendants plead guilty. Courts and commentators have been divided for years over whether Brady v. Maryland applies when defendants plead guilty. But the current split blinds us to more important, and more vexing, aspects of the problem. The fact is, there already is a disclosure obligation, albeit a hidden one. Armed with an …

The Results Of Deliberation, Maggie Wittlin

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

When evaluating whether to sue, prosecute, settle, or plead, trial lawyers must predict the future—they need to estimate how likely they are to win a given case in a given jurisdiction. Social scientists have used mock juror studies to produce a vast body of literature showing how different variables influence juror decision making. But few of these studies account for jury deliberation, so they present an impoverished picture of how these effects play out in trials and are of limited usefulness.

This Article helps lawyers better predict the future by presenting a novel computer model that extrapolates findings about jurors …

Book Review Of The Quiet Power Of Indicators: Measuring Governance, Corruption, And The Rule Of Law, Sital Kalantry

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

No abstract provided.

From Environmental Rights To Environmental Rule Of Law: A Proposal For Better Environmental Outcomes, Jessica Scott

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

With the recent lead contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan, the unfavorable United States country report of the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation seems prescient. The Special Rapporteur’s report highlighted the problem of drinking water contaminated from lead pipes and the disproportionate burdens Black Americans face in accessing safe drinking water. The report argues that the U.S. should address these issues by explicitly recognizing a human right to safe drinking water and sanitation under U.S. law.

Like the Special Rapporteur, much of the literature and some environmental advocates call for environmental …

The Modern Treaty-Executing Power: Constitutional Complexities In Contemporary Global Governance, Carlo Felizardo

Northwestern University Law Review

Treaties have evolved significantly since the ratification of the United States Constitution, leading to uncertainty as to the constitutional limits on their domestic execution. This Note adapts existing constitutional doctrine on treaty execution to two distinct complications arising in the contemporary treaty regime. First, voluntary treaties imposing aspirational obligations on signatories raise the issue of the extent of obligations that Congress may domestically enforce by federal statute. Second, originating treaties which create international organizations and authorize them to adopt rule- and adjudication-type post-treaty pronouncements bring up a question of when, if ever, to incorporate those pronouncements into U.S. law, and …