Georgetown University Law Center

About: Georgetown University Law Center is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Supreme court & Public health. The organization has 585 authors who have published 2488 publications receiving 36650 citations. The organization is also known as: Georgetown Law & GULC.

The Art of Legislative Lawyering and the Six Circles Theory of Advocacy

Abstract: A "legislative lawyer" is a person who exists in Washington, D.C., and in almost every city and state in this country where legislation and administrative regulations are developed. But most people do not know who that person is or what that person does. In fact, most advocacy organizations that should be hiring legislative lawyers have no idea who a legislative lawyer is. The author coined the term "legislative lawyer" when she created a Federal Legislation Clinic at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. over a decade ago. The author needed to explain to her faculty colleagues what type of law she intended to teach her students in the Clinic and why such learning deserved six (now ten) law school credits.The author explained at the time, "legislative lawyers" are individuals who practice law in a political, advocacy context. Good legislative lawyers are: (1) good at comprehending, analyzing, and manipulating legal text and, at the same time, good at understanding the political dynamics of legislative and administrative systems; (2) able to gain the trust and respect of both legal players and political players in an advocacy effort because of their joint competency in law and politics; and (3) able, because of such trust and respect, to be effective and creative translators and negotiators between the often disparate worlds of law, policy, and politics.The author’s primary goal in this article is to describe the skills and talents of a good legislative lawyer. The legislative lawyer is a key component of the author’s Six Circles Theory of Effective Advocacy. She developed this theory mostly (although not exclusively) out of her experience working on the Americans with Disabilities Act from 1988 to 1990. An additional goal of this article, therefore, is to set forth the Six Circles Theory of Effective Advocacy and to highlight its potential contribution towards structuring an effective legislative or regulatory effort.The author’s final goal of this article is to provide an overview of how she teaches "legislative lawyering" in a law school clinical setting. The author hopes this section of the article, together with its appendices, will be useful to anyone who wishes to establish a similar clinic focusing on legislation and administrative regulations.

Empirical Studies of ADR: The Baseline Problem of What ADR is and What it is Compared to

Abstract: This chapter in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Empirical Legal Studies reviews key issues in the empirical study of "alternative" dispute resolution processes, including both descriptive and comparative empirical studies and evaluations of negotiation, mediation, arbitration, consensus building, facilitative and other hybridized processes, such as regulatory negotiation and rule-making, and some instances of deliberative democracy. Problems of definition, dynamism of the processes studied, shifting boundaries of public and private processes, and the inability to compare "like" cases in different processes are explored. Because some processes are conducted in private it is difficult to rigorously study them, either descriptively or comparatively. The issue of what a "baseline" measure is for evaluating comparative processes is explored and problematized. As both civil and criminal justice systems explore a variety of reforms and the pressure to empirically evaluate different processes becomes important for scholars, practitioners and policy makers, it remains difficult to have confidence in studies which lack boundary clarity. There are advantages and disadvantages in both aggregate data studies and more in-depth limited case studies of different processes. In an era of increased "process pluralism" in both domestic and international law, the problem of measurement and evaluation of different processes remains important, if difficult, to master.

Denial of the child's right to counsel, voice, and participation in juvenile delinquency proceedings

Abstract: Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child clearly recognizes the importance of the child's voice in judicial proceedings that affect him or her. Nowhere is the child's voice more important than in delinquency proceedings where decisions will be made about the child's liberty, rehabilitative prospects, and other important constitutional rights. This article examines the role of the child's voice in improving fairness and accuracy in adjudicatory and dispositional decisions and enhancing therapeutic outcomes for youth in juvenile court.

The Law of Deception: A Research Agenda

Abstract: The law of deception is the body of laws that address acts and omissions that wrongfully cause others to hold false beliefs. So, defined, the law of deception cuts across traditional doctrinal boundaries. It encompasses the torts of deceit and defamation, false advertising laws, labeling requirements, securities fraud and disclosure regulations, criminal fraud, perjury statutes, and a host of other generic and more targeted laws. This essay suggests that the law of deception constitutes a coherent body of law, and identifies four salient questions about it. The questions are these: First, within the law of deception one finds several different approaches to interpreting potentially deceptive communications. These include highly contextualist approaches (e.g., the tort of deceit), more restrictive literal-meaning rules (federal perjury law), and occasionally default legal meanings (the FTC’s reasonable basis rule). One set of questions concerns when and why which interpretive approach is appropriate. A second set of questions concerns legally salient harms. Laws of deception can be designed to protect those who might be deceived (e.g., negligent misrepresentation), those about whom a lie is told (defamation), honest competitors (false advertising laws), and credible communication more generally (as the Stolen Valor Act attempted). A theory of the law of deception should disaggregate these distinct purposes and evaluate the justifications for and design implications of each. A third set of questions concerns the relationship between deception and consent. Although deception sometimes vitiates consent (in the torts of battery and trespass, in contract law, in fourth amendment searches, and in rape law), it does not always do so. And the line between vitiating and non-vitiating deception shifts across different laws. This too demands explanation. Finally, sometimes the law permits parties to contract out of liability for deception (e.g., “big boy” letters), effectively consenting to what would otherwise be deceptive behavior. A theory of the law of deception should also provide an account when, why and how parties are able to contract out of laws of deception. These are not the only interesting questions one might ask about the law of deception. Nor does this essay attempt to answer them. The goal is to make the case for thinking about the law of deception as a whole, and to suggest some directions for further research.

A conditional intent to perform

Abstract: The doctrine of promissory fraud holds that a contractual promise implicitly represents an intent to perform. A promisor's conditional intent to perform poses a problem for that doctrine. It is clear that some undisclosed conditions on the promisor's intent should result in liability for promissory fraud. Yet no promisor intends to perform come what may, so there is a sense in which all promisors conditionally intend to perform.Building on Michael Bratman's planning theory of intentions, this article provides a theoretical account of the distinction between “foreground” and “background” conditions on intentions in general and then explains why foreground conditions on a promisor's intent to perform are likely to result in material promissory misrepresentation, while background conditions are not. The difference between foreground and background conditions lies in whether the agent accepts the satisfaction of the condition for the purposes of her practical reasoning. A promisor's nonacceptance of a condition on her intent to perform is material because it is likely to affect her preperformance deliberations and investment in the transaction, as well as her willingness to seek agreement with the promisee on how to fill contractual gaps.