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.

Property Law as Labor Control in the Postbellum South

Abstract: After the Civil War, state legislatures criminalized trespass, restricted hunting and fishing, and closed the range. Earlier studies cannot agree whether these changes in property law were motivated by racism or inevitably resulted from economic progress. This Article presents a more complete picture of the South and reports evidence that legal change was motivated by labor control. Like other legal change in the postbellum South, planters sought new laws to coerce blacks into working for low wages and under poor conditions.

Women in Dispute Resolution: Parties, Lawyers and Dispute Resolvers: What Difference Does ‘Gender Difference’ Make?

Abstract: For a symposium on Women In ADR, this article reviews the existing and controversial literature on whether gender difference makes a difference in dispute resolution. In addition to focusing on the more conventional literature on whether women negotiate differently from men, this article reviews the complexity of women in additional roles in dispute resolution, including as parties, lawyers, third party neutrals (including as judges, mediators and arbitrators), witnesses, clients and experts. Not surprisingly, the role of gender salience and performance in modern dispute resolution is ever more complex as context and role matter and most dispute resolution “events” now involve many participants in many different roles, providing greater complexity for both academic analysis and practice. The author, one of the earliest commentators on the role of gender in dispute resolution, reviews the early theoretical claims, including her own, and deepens our understanding of when and how gender might be salient in dispute resolution and when it may be only one of many factors affecting how disputes are resolved and what people expect of dispute resolution processes. Ultimately, role, context and complexity of matter may structure how salient gender is in dispute resolution.

Invisible Borders: Mapping Out Virtual Law?

Abstract: International law on boundary delimitation and demarcation is out-dated and problematic. The technology of border drawing has advanced significantly through the use of GPS technology while the legal guidelines have not followed. The legal norms for demarcation remain the same as those that were used at the time of the Roman Empire. Each state uses its own method of calculating boundaries – whether through physically placed monuments or latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates calculated with reference to a particular datum, or reference point. This Article draws attention to this discrepancy between science and the law on international boundaries and proposes an institutional mechanism that would harness the potential of the recent advances in border technology and assist in ameliorating ongoing boundary-related controversies. Only by using a uniform system for all borders and cataloguing them with the same tools will we reach a normatively coherent techno-legal regime in this field.

Promissory Fraud Without Breach

Abstract: It is of course true that proving breach of contract is not sufficient to establish promissory fraud liability. But in this paper we argue that breach of contract should not even be a necessary element for proving promissory fraud. There are a variety of contexts without legally enforceable contracts where insincere promising should still be deemed tortuous because of the willful harm that it causes. Promisors who are free from contractual liability nonetheless are sometimes potentially liable for this promissory tort.

Mapping a Cultural Studies of Law

Abstract: In this chapter I briefly map the terrain of a set of scholarly approaches that could be called a cultural analysis of law. A cultural analysis or a cultural studies of law generally starts with the dual premise that law is a set of meaning-making practices that exists within and is the product of a particular culture and that the culture is a set of meaning-making practices that exists within and is the product of a particular set of laws.In this chapter I unpack and elaborate this foundational idea by exploring three routes along which a cultural analysis of law has been productively pursued: (1) narration, (2) identity, and (3) visuality. Narration is meant to embody a number of different approaches that apply a literary sensibility and critique to the language, interpretation, and rhetoric of law, legal arguments, and legal representations. It also seeks to capture the ways that law and representations of law (in novels, films, and other cultural artifacts) create certain kinds of enduring social narratives and tropes and perhaps teach normative lessons. Identity is a route paved by a robust scholarship that examines the role of law in developing, negotiating, policing, and enforcing certain kinds of individual and collective identities, including racial, ethnic, sexual, national and subnational identities that have been salient at different times. Lastly, I explore more briefly the smaller path of visuality, a recent effort to critically engage with the prominent portrayals of law and legal institutions in our pervasively visual culture as well as with the increasing use of visual arguments and iconography within law and legal practice.