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 & Global health. The organization has 585 authors who have published 2488 publications receiving 36650 citations. The organization is also known as: Georgetown Law & GULC.

The People or the State?: Chisholm V. Georgia and Popular Sovereignty

Abstract: Chisholm v. Georgia was the first great constitutional case decided by the Supreme Court. In Chisholm, the Court addressed the fundamental question: Who is Sovereign? The People or the State? It adopted an individual concept of popular sovereignty rather than the modern view that limits popular sovereignty to collective or democratic self-government. It denied that the State of Georgia was a sovereign entitled, like the King of England, to assert immunity from a lawsuit brought by a private citizen. Despite all this, Chisholm is not among the canon of cases that all law students are taught. Why not? In this essay, I offer several reasons: Constitutional law is taught by doctrine rather than chronologically; law professors have reason to privilege the Marshall Court; and the Court's individualist view of popular sovereignty is thought to have been repudiated by the adoption of the Eleventh Amendment. I explain why the Eleventh Amendment did not repudiate the view of sovereignty expressed in Chisholm by comparing the wording of the Eleventh with that of the Ninth Amendment, and conclude by suggesting another reason why Chisholm is not in the canon: Law professors follow the lead of the Supreme Court and, like the Ninth Amendment, the Supreme Court has deemed its first great decision too radical in its implications.

Dr. Generative Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the iPhone

Abstract: In The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain argues that the Internet has succeeded because it is uniquely "generative": individuals can use it in ways its creators never imagined. This Book Review uses the Apple II and the iPhone - the hero and the villain of the story as Zittrain tells it - to show both the strengths and the weaknesses of his argument. Descriptively and normatively, Zittrain has nailed it. Generativity elegantly combines prior theories into a succinct explanation of the technical characteristics that make the Internet what it is, and the book offers a strong argument that preserving generativity is vital for the sake of future innovation and creativity. Unfortunately, while Zittrain calls for compromises to preserve generativity, he doesn't provide a roadmap for distinguishing good compromises from bad. These tradeoffs, however, are essental. Restricting generativity in one place (for example, by building computers with fixed circuit boards rather than a tangle of reconfigurable wires) can massively enhance generativity overall (by making computers cheap and usable enough that everyone can tinker with their software). We use this obervation to offer a series of corollaries to aid policymakers and system designers in optimizing generativity in the real world: Generativity is only one value among many, generativity is never absolute, and generativity is a systemic property, not a local one.

Income-Driven Repayment and the Public Financing of Higher Education

Abstract: This article provides the first comprehensive analysis in the legal literature of the federal government’s new income-driven student loan repayment programs, known as Income-Based Repayment and Pay As You Earn. In a set of gradual and little-noticed statutory and regulatory moves, the federal government, through these programs, has dramatically reshaped higher education finance in ways that schools, students, and even the government itself are only beginning to understand.Under IBR and PAYE, a student borrower pays no more than 10% of her discretionary income in loan service payments, and after a maximum of 20 years, the remaining debt is forgiven — for any borrower, regardless of degree, career, or debt load. This article argues that such an income-driven system is analogous to the federal government paying the up-front costs of higher education, but raising that money from a 10% “surtax” in the incomes of graduates. This is a huge change from the current mixture of debt-financed tuition, need-based grants, and moderate state subsidies.This framing raises important questions. Is this income-driven repayment structure appropriate? How tax-like and progressive are IBR and PAYE in fact, and can they be made more (or less) so? What are the risks and downsides of such a structure? This article claims that using a tax-like instrument such as income-driven repayment is well suited for higher education, given its economics, financial characteristics, and social benefits. In particular, the key difference between income-driven repayment and up-front need-based grants, such as Pell Grants, is that income-driven repayment makes a judgment of need based on ex post graduate income, rather than ex ante parental income. Based on this analysis, this article concludes with some novel suggestions for reform to PAYE.

Getting the Haves to Come Out Behind: Fixing the Distributive Injustices of American Health Care

Abstract: This article responds to a provocative article on American health policy by Professors Clark Havighurst and Barak Richman. Havighurst & Richman argue from a market-oriented perspective that the health care system is "rigged against the true interests of the political majority," and this "systematic exploitation of the majority by affluent minorities" is both a "breathtaking injustice" and a "extortion-like protection scheme." Unfortunately, Havighurst & Richman don't say much of anything about concrete reforms they want enacted. Worse still, Havighurst & Richman don't say anything at all about how to get there from here. Both are important failings. Havighurst & Richman have plenty of company in ignoring the ways and means of policy, but their indictment isn't going to have the intended effects (or, dare one say it, any effect whatsoever) without a concrete plan for implementation. Accordingly, my response offers a short "how to" guide for those interested in moving from diagnosis to treatment. It provides six rules of "hacking" derived from my time in Washington, and years spent watching hacks and wonks at play in the fields of health policy. Those who object to these rules, or to the tone with which they are described are, by definition, wonks.

Alternative and Appropriate Dispute Resolution in Context Formal, Informal, and Semiformal Legal Processes

Abstract: This chapter of the Handbook of Conflict Resolution reviews the development of dispute resolution programs in courts, as theories of conflict resolution from the 19th and 20th century were operationalized in formal legal institutions. The chapter reviews the theories behind, the design of, the implementation of and empirical evaluations (where they exist) of court programs in the United States at both federal and state levels. Various court programs, from mandatory to voluntary, including mediation, arbitration, early or later case evaluation, pre-trial settlement conferences and hybrids of these are described and reviewed. Analytically the chapter characterizes these programs as blurring the forms of formal and informal justice to lead to a sometimes problematic notion of "semi-formal" justice in which there is neither adjudication, review and monitoring of processes, nor the creativity and tailoring of solutions that is one of the mainstays of theoretical reasons for the use of party-structured and controlled processes. Whether "alternative" dispute resolution, as practiced in formal courts, is really "appropriate" dispute resolution is explored and interrogated. This chapter is a revised version of an earlier work on international and comparative approaches to "appropriate" dispute resolution and semi-formal justice prepared for the International Procedural Law conference in Moscow.