Source: https://lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/2009/10/index.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 07:36:11+00:00

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The international doctrine of human rights is one of the most ambitious parts of the settlement of World War II. Since then, the language of human rights has become the common language of social criticism in global political life. This book is a theoretical examination of the central idea of that language, the idea of a human right. In contrast to more conventional philosophical studies, the author takes a practical approach, looking at the history and political practice of human rights for guidance in understanding the central idea. The author presents a model of human rights as matters of international concern whose violation by governments can justify international protective and restorative action ranging from intervention to assistance. He proposes a schema for justifying human rights and applies it to several controversial cases--rights against poverty, rights to democracy, and the human rights of women. Throughout, the book attends to some main reasons why people are skeptical about human rights, including the fear that human rights will be used by strong powers to advance their national interests. The book concludes by observing that contemporary human rights practice is vulnerable to several pathologies and argues the need for international collaboration to avoid them.
Since Friedrich Hayek, debates about the proper relationship between the state and the market, and about the optimal design of regulatory institutions, often turn on assumptions about the workings of legal expertise — and in particular about the difference between public expertise (bureaucratic knowledge) and private expertise (private law). Hayek’s central argument, adopted uncritically by a wide array of policy-makers and academics across the political spectrum, is a temporal one: bureaucratic reasoning is inherently one step behind the market, and hence effective market planning is impossible. In contrast, Hayek argues, private ordering is superior because it is of the moment, happening in real time. My research suggests that Hayek’s description of the limitations of bureaucratic planning resonates with the sense of powerlessness and frustration experienced by many government officials themselves as they attempt to manage economic fluctuations. But Hayek’s rich (and even empathetic) account of the limits of well-meaning public legal expertise is far less complete when it comes to the strengths of private legal reasoning. Public reasoning has temporal weaknesses, so private reasoning must have equivalent temporal strengths, the argument goes. This chapter from a forthcoming book, Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets, takes on Hayekian arguments against government regulation through a detailed examination of real-world examples of how public and private legal technologies manage the temporal dimensions of risk in the over-the-counter derivatives markets. It draws upon over ten years of fieldwork conducted among regulators and market participants involved in the global derivatives markets in Japan. The specific examples are: the usage of collateral on the private law side, and the usage of “real time gross settlement” payment settlement systems on the public side. My research shows that while there is no reason to believe that either of these is actually more effective than the other as a stop-gap against future uncertainties in the market, there is nevertheless a kind of “Hayekian” perception, by market participants and government officials alike, that the private devices are more legitimate, and that the experts who deploy these are more knowledgeable, more expert. In order to understand the root of this legitimacy gap, the paper explores in detail how collateral, as a private legal technology, handles the temporal uncertainties surrounding market risk. At the heart of “collateral” is a deceptively mundane, but actually quite audacious legal trick called the legal fiction. In legal terms, a legal fiction is a statement that is consciously understood to be false, and hence is irrefutable. An example would be the statement that “a corporation is a person”. Collateral is actually just a set of legal fictions, layered one on top of another. I explain how these fictions — which are just as problematically related to market “realities” as government planning technologies — nevertheless come to be much more readily accepted predictors, and indeed creators of market realities. So does this mean that private regulation is inherently superior to public regulation? The fallacy of the Hayekian argument is the assumption that these “private” technologies can only be deployed by private actors. In fact, there is nothing inherently private or public about the legal fiction or other similar devices of private law. The paper demonstrates this by showing how financial regulators in Japan redeployed the trick of the legal fiction and hence regained legitimacy in their own eyes and in the eyes of market participants.
To answer methodological questions about whether legal theory can be descriptive, or whether instead it must instead always include moral elements, one must first confront more basic (and philosophically prior) questions regarding the subject and objective of legal theorizing. Finding a stable subject for a “theory of law” is not a simple matter. Significant progress has been made y positing “our concept of ‘law’” as the proper focus for legal theories. There is a second foundational question of jurisprudence: what grounds the truth or falsity of legal propositions. Here, the range of tenable answers varies from the purely empirical to the interpretive to the heavily morality-dependent. However, even if one’s ultimate answer is ultimately purely empirical, the argument that gets one there may itself need to be deeply evaluative.
The Supreme Court's decision in Ricci v. DeStefano (i.e., the New Haven firefighters case) foregrounded the question of whether Title VII's disparate impact standard conflicts with equal protection. This Article shows that there are three ways to read Ricci, one of which is likely fatal to disparate impact doctrine but the other two of which are not.
On June 26, 2008, the United States Supreme Court handed down its 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, striking a District of Columbia statute that prohibits the possession of useable handguns in the home on the ground that it violated the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Justice Scalia's majority opinion drew dissents from Justice Stevens and Justice Breyer. Collectively, the opinions in Heller represent the most important and extensive debate on the role of original meaning in constitutional interpretation among the members of the contemporary Supreme Court.
This Article investigates the relationship between originalist constitutional theory and judicial practice in the context of the United States Supreme Court's decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. Part I introduces Heller and the role of originalism in the opinions of the Justices. Part II contextualizes Heller by tracing the evolution of contemporary originalist theory. Part III examines the reasoning of the Heller majority and identifies the unarticulated assumptions that would be required to square the result in Heller with a fully articulated originalist theory of constitutional interpretation. Part IV examines the role of intentionalist and teleological reasoning in Justice Steven's dissenting opinion. Part V considers the implications of Heller's originalist theory for the question whether the Second Amendment will be applied to the states via the Due Process Clause or the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Part VI considers the relationship of the Heller to the distinction between constitutional interpretation and constitutional construction that has emerged from contemporary originalist theory. Finally Part VII draws conclusions about the implications of Heller for the relationship between originalist theory and originalist practice.
This is the final version of "District of Columbia v. Heller and Originalism" with pagination and citation information. The final draft version is available on SSRN as a working paper.
Judicial opinions map events into narrative. Errors in mapping are inevitable but are exacerbated when the adversary system breaks down. This paper explores these problems of narrative distortion through an analysis of corporate charitable giving cases: Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., A.P. Smith Co. v. Barlow, and Shlensky v. Wrigley. Each of these cases contains evidence of significant distortion in the mapping process. In Dodge, the distortion was due to the fact that neither party wanted to acknowledge what was really going on. In A.P. Smith, the evidence suggests that the litigation was collusive and that all parties, including the judge, were in on the scam. In Wrigley, the opinion may have had more to do with Chicago politics than with the accurate presentation of the facts. I conclude with tentative thoughts about the implications of narrative distortion in American law.
This article explores whether international investment agreements (IIAs) have the potential to impede democratic expression and, as a result, hinder sustainable development. The author first demonstrates that democracy plays an essential role in the promotion of sustainable development and provides a normative (rather than procedural) definition of democracy. The three ways in which IIAs can limit democracy are then addressed. First, they can limit the policy space of developing countries. This is demonstrated through an analysis of how types of provisions commonly found in IIAs can negatively affect policy flexibility. Second, democracy can be indirectly limited through the decisions of international investment tribunals, which give little deference to the decisions of domestic democratic forums. Third, democracy can be undermined if foreign investors are not accountable to any democratic government. In this regard, it is necessary for IIAs to impose obligations on home states and investors to ensure that investors behave in socially responsible ways. The article concludes with suggestions for ways in which developing coutnries can structure IIAs to support democracy rather than detract from it.
This paper proposes that Delaware could improve on existing, ineffective judicial mechanisms enforcing the duty of care by upgrading the ability of Delaware Chancery Court judges to comment on the quality of board decision processes. I suggest two possible reforms. First, Delaware Chancery Court judges could, in their discretion, award attorneys’ fees to unsuccessful plaintiffs in duty of care cases. Second, Delaware could authorize judicial inquiries into credible allegations of gross negligence in board decisions.
The national campaign against child abuse has changed the face of American evidence law during the past 30 years. The campaign has led to the relaxation of witness competency standards for alleged child victims, the recognition of new procedures for presenting child testimony such as the use of support persons, the creation of new hearsay exceptions, and the development of novel species of expert testimony. One of the most controversial new types of expert testimony is shaken baby syndrome. The proponents of the syndrome claim that the violent shaking of an infant by an adult can generate enough force to inflict fatal brain injuries on the infant even without impact. Many pediatricians and pathologists subscribe to this theory. However, many biolmechanical experts dispute the theory. To date, the vast majority of courts have admitted testimony based on the syndrome. The purpose of this article is to critically evaluate the available empirical data relevant to the question of the validity of the syndrome. The article concludes that this is one of the rare situations in which both sides' expert claims pass muster under Federal Rule of Evidence 702 and the Supreme Court's leading decisions, Daubert and Kumho. Once a decision-maker posits the validation standard enunciated in Daubert, it is possible to have genuine battles of the experts. In this case, the syndrome opponents can point to relatively well designed experiments finding that even violent shaking by an adult cannot generate enough force to cause fatal injuries to the infant brain. However, syndrome opponents note that in a large number of cases in which infants suffered such fatal brain injuries, the infant's custodian admitted shaking without impact. It may be tempting to conclude that classical experimentation should always trump more anecdotal expert reasoning. However, that conclusion is indefensible as a matter of both statutory construction and epistemology.

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