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Rebecca C. Morgan and Michael P. Allen, Introduction and Commentary: Reflections on and Implications of Schiavo, 35 Stetson L. Rev. 1 (2005)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Joseph F. Morrissey, Simplifying the Foreign Service Immunities Act: If a Sovereign Acts Like a Private Party, Treat it Like One, 5 University of Chi. J. Int'l L. 675 (2005)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This article focuses on the commercial activities exception of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). That exception is at the heart of the FSIA and basically states that if a foreign sovereign engages in private commercial activities like a private party then it should not be immune from suit in the United States. Unfortunately, the special guidelines set forth in the FSIA for applying the commercial activities exception to foreign sovereigns are confusing and have resulted in split opinions among the federal circuit courts.
My article argues that those guidelines should be thrown away. My proposal would first have courts assess whether foreign sovereigns are in fact engaging in private commercial activities. If the answer is yes, then the FSIA should direct courts to simply treat the foreign sovereign in the same way that it would treat a foreign private party for purposes of establishing jurisdiction. Namely, the courts should undertake the same minimum contacts due process analysis it has undertaken for decades with respect to foreign private parties. This solution avoids the complicated rubric established by the FSIA and accomplishing exactly what the FSIA had wanted to accomplish. It treats foreign sovereigns like private parties when and if they behave like them.
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Luz Estella Nagle, Global Terrorism in Our Own Backyard: Colombia’s Legal War against Illegal Armed Groups, 15 Transnational Law & Contemp. Probs. 2005 (2005)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
In the aftermath of 9-11, the United States embarked on an aggressive and costly war on terrorism in far flung regions of the world, mainly in the middle east and Afghanistan. However, the United States largely overlooked the terrorist threat to national security emanating much closer to home – in Colombia, where illegal armed groups have formed close connections to international terrorists organizations or have themselves transformed into international terrorists organizations intent on launching terrorist attacks within Colombia and throughout the Americas.
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Michael S. Finch, Law and the Problem of Pain, 74 U. Cin. L. Rev. 285 (2005)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This Article examines the problem of enigmatic chronic pain. The principal contention is that psychosomatic explanations of chronic pain are flawed, despite their inordinate popularity with social critics, expert witnesses, and a growing number of judges. There is little empirical evidence to support the view that chronic pain is principally a symptom of psychic conflict and distress, and much evidence to rebut it. Most compelling is the emerging biological evidence demonstrating that much chronic pain results from pathology in the central nervous system, rather than discrete injury or illness like that which produces acute pain.
The problem of chronic pain is examined by focusing on the most prevalent chronic pain syndrome found in litigation today, fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia is nothing less than the widespread pain of rheumatism that has distressed humanity throughout recorded history. This pain syndrome has been described as one of the "most controversial conditions in the history of medicine," and it is at the center of the debate about the nature of chronic pain. Part II begins by examining how chronic pain often straddles competing diagnoses in medicine and psychiatry, thus lending credibility to both organic and psychogenic concepts of pain. Part III then examines how the concept of psychosomatic pain or "somatization" has attained prominence in cultural history and critical medical literature. Although the concept of somatization does not intrinsically disparage chronic pain, it has acquired a distinct secondary meaning - that pain symptoms are exaggerated or feigned and, ultimately, within the control of the sufferer. Segments of the insurance and health care industries have now appropriated the theme of somatization to minimize the chronic pain experience and control health care costs.
Part IV next assesses empirical research concerning the role of psychological distress in the generation of chronic pain. As demonstrated, there is widespread acceptance that psychological factors play a role in the pain process. But research does not support the much broader claim that chronic pain syndromes are largely the consequence of psychological distress. The neo-Freudian concept of somatization has been greatly oversold and is driven more by theory than scientific evidence.
Finally, Part V examines the developing biological model of chronic pain. A compelling body of evidence now demonstrates that the acute-pain model still dominant in medical practice and the law is incomplete. There is growing recognition that the central nervous system is far more plastic than previously imagined. In an appreciable segment of the population the central mechanisms governing pain can be fundamentally altered, resulting in the persistent production of pain with no discernible relationship to bodily injury or illness. These central mechanisms, rather than mental disturbances, dispel the enigma of much chronic pain.
Part VI concludes that, somewhat remarkably, while a fundamental reassessment of chronic pain has occurred in the scientific literature, this reassessment has gone unnoticed in the law. Until courts rethink the prevailing model of pain and its mechanisms, chronic pain will remain a stubborn mystery, and its sufferers will remain under suspicion as latter-day hysterics and malingerers.
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Luz Estella Nagle, Demobilization of Paramilitary Combatants in Colombia, (unpublished) (2005)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Michèle Alexandre, David Gelfand: A Tribute, 37 Urb. Law. 641 (2005)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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James W. Fox, Doctrinal Myths and the Management of Cognitive Dissonance: Race, Law, and the Supreme Court’s Doctrinal Support of Jim Crow, 34 Stetson L. Rev. 293 (2005)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This article, published in 2005 as part of a symposium on Brown v. Board of Education, addresses the contradiction between long-professed and deeply-held equality and liberty principles and a devastating history of racism manifest itself in the Supreme Court’s doctrinal support for Jim Crow segregation. I argue that the Supreme Court managed this dissonance between the legal ideal of equality and the actual practice of racial subordination through the implementation of doctrinal myths, myths which enabled white legal actors and society to retain a formal belief in equality. Through the doctrinal myths of state action, federalism, separate-but-equal, and reasonable segregation, the Court was able to facilitate the white South’s re-establishment of legalized white supremacy, which contravened the basic principles of Reconstruction and the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution, and yet at the same time argue that it was all along implementing and preserving the equality ideals of those very Amendments. I also consider how, by studying this period of doctrinal myth-creation, we can perhaps more fully analyze current doctrines affecting racial and legal equality, and, in particular, how appeals to the doctrinal rhetoric of equal citizenship may or may not result in actual movement towards that principle even in the face of societal racial subordination.
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Ellen S. Podgor, Arthur Andersen, LLP and Martha Stewart: Should Materiality Be an Element of Obstruction of Justice?, 44 Washburn L.J. 583 (2005)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Obstruction of justice, with its many different statutes, is a crime that prosecutors can use with relative ease. It covers a wide breadth of activity and has few limitations. This paper examines the prosecutorial use of obstruction charges in the cases of Martha Stewart and Arthur Andersen, LLP. Although the statutes differed in these two prosecutions, with Arthur Andersen, LLP., prosecuted for the crime of obstruction of justice under 18 U.S.C. Section 1512, and Martha Stewart, prosecuted for several criminal charges including obstruction of justice under 18 U.S.C. Section 1505, both demonstrate how prosecutors can leave unfinished the original activity that was the subject of investigation to proceed with the easier obstruction charge.
This article provides a way to restrict prosecutors in their use of the crime of obstruction of justice when it is used solely for expediency purposes. In essence, it reads in an element of materiality as required for this crime in a manner similar to how the Supreme Court included materiality for fraud prosecutions. By adding an element of materiality as a requirement for an obstruction conviction, prosecutors are forced to complete investigations that can be completed on the substantive charges. In contrast, investigations that cannot continue because the obstructive conduct precludes continuation because of either destruction of evidence or intimidation of witnesses, still have available the ability to appropriately punish the activity via a charge of obstruction of justice.
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Susan D. Rozelle, Controlling Passion: Adultery and the Provocation Defense, 37 Rutgers Law Journal 197 (2005)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Adulterous wives, especially those caught in the act, are classically provoking. Conventional wisdom explains that the ordinary, reasonable, otherwise law-abiding person cannot be expected to control himself when faced with an actively faithless spouse - or at least, control becomes so hard to maintain that a defendant who kills under those circumstances may be partially excused. But the conventional wisdom is wrong: most people can control themselves under such circumstances. Instead, provocation is properly grounded in justification, and should be permitted only to those defendants who were legally entitled to use some amount of force when they killed.
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Ellen S. Podgor, Foreword, Overcriminalization: The Politics of Crime, 54 Am. U. L. Rev. 541 (2005)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.