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.

You're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat: Alternatives to the UN Security Council for Enforcing Nuclear Disarmament and Human Rights

Abstract: Under traditional international law, there are two primary justifications for the international use of armed force: individual or collective self-defense (under article 51 of the U.N. Charter) and authorization by the Security Council (pursuant to chapter VII of the Charter). Both criteria are stringent; they were designed to reflect the framers’ immediate post-World War II perspective that war was such a horrible scourge that it should be avoided at (almost) any cost.In the intervening decades, however, global public opinion has shifted somewhat, and the world community increasingly feels that some additional values, not fully appreciated in 1945, are worth fighting for, as well. This article explores two of those issues: a) the protection of international human rights, especially the prevention of the worst atrocities of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, perpetrated by a government against its own population, and b) the pursuit of complete, global nuclear disarmament, a seemingly far-distant desiderata that has recently been placed on the agenda for more active consideration and development.In each case, “enforcement” remains a critical, underdeveloped issue. How can the parties to an ambitious human rights treaty or a disarmament agreement effectively ensure that recalcitrant parties live up to their obligations? If the “muscle” for enforcement comes exclusively from the Security Council, then the threat or exercise of the veto power by the five Permanent Members (the P5) will too often frustrate the accomplishment. If the violator is aligned with (or is) one of the P5, then the breach may persist, and the other parties may lack effective enforcement.One potential solution to this legal and policy dilemma is to “contract around” the Security Council. The treaty that establishes the new human rights or nuclear disarmament obligations could simultaneously create a new international organization to operate and oversee it. That new institution could be empowered to authorize a use of military force, without regard to the Security Council, and could do so via a majority (or supermajority) vote, without allowing any state a unilateral veto.But the U.N. Charter was deliberately crafted to avoid such facile circumvention. Article 103 specifies that in the event of a conflict between a state’s obligations under the Charter and its obligations under any other treaty, the Charter shall prevail. Similarly, the hoary doctrine of jus cogens, referring to peremptory norms of international law from which no derogation is permitted, also over-rules any attempt to evade the Charter’s fundamental limitations on the use of military force.This article examines this cluster of legal and policy issues, and argues that the concept of state consent – a fundament element in international law – should suffice to permit this enforcement of a human rights or nuclear disarmament treaty. While the continued operation of the Security Council, including the veto power, may suffice for most areas of international life, when dealing with these two vital areas, a new process, operated through new international organizations, should be available.The article analyzes the scant precedents for this concept, most of which are drawn from the realm of human rights. It also assembles the prior scholarship on point, all of which focuses on human rights, and extends the analysis to nuclear disarmament, as well.

Implied Certification under the False Claims Act

Abstract: The False Claims Act prohibits fraud by government contractors, including a contractor's false certification of compliance with the contract, statutes or regulations. In the early 1990s, some courts began holding that the mere act of requesting payment from the government implicitly represents such compliance, exposing breaching contractors to the FCA’s penalty regime. Circuits are today split on the implied certification doctrine. This Article provides a theory of the FCA in general, and implied certification in particular, that explains the value of extracompensatory remedies in this area of contract law. There good reasons for the implied certification rule. It is an information-forcing majoritarian default. It tracks the special ethical obligations of government contractors. And it addresses agency lassitude in drafting and monitoring. But implied certification also has its costs. Most importantly, it lowers the bar to frivolous qui tam actions and threatens to impose FCA liability for violations better addressed by more discretionary and nuanced regulatory tools. This Article recommends rule for implied certification that both addresses these considerations and rationalizes case outcomes. It also argues that, by paying attention to the FCA when drafting contracts, agencies can approximate first-best results by requiring express certification of compliance with those duties for which FCA liability makes sense, and contracting-out of implied certification for those duties that are better enforced in other ways. In addition to these practical suggestions, the Article draws some general lessons about contractual duties to cooperate, interpretive defaults in contract and tort, and the special ethical obligations of government contractors.

Seasonal Affective Disorder: Clerk Training and the Success of Supreme Court Certiorari Petitions

Abstract: We investigate why the Supreme Court grants a smaller percentage of cases at the first conference of each term compared to other conferences. According to received wisdom, Supreme Court law clerks are overly cautious at the beginning of their tenure because they receive only a brief amount of training. Reputational concerns motivate clerks to provide fewer recommendations to grant review in cert. pool memos written over the summer months. Using a random sample of petitions from the Blackmun Archives, we code case characteristics, clerk recommendation, and the Court’s decision on cert. Nearest neighbor matching suggests clerks are 36% less likely to recommend grants in their early cert. pool memos. Because of this temporal discrepancy, petitions arriving over the summer have a 16% worse chance of being granted by the Court. This seasonal variation in access to the Court’s docket imposes a legally-irrelevant burden on litigants who have little control over the timing of their appeal.

Latent Class Analysis Offers Insight into the Complex Food Environments of Native American Communities: Findings from the Randomly Selected OPREVENT2 Trial Baseline Sample

Abstract: Native Americans (NAs) experience a high burden of obesity and diabetes, yet previous research has not holistically described the unique food environments of NA communities. The objective of this paper is to describe the subgroups and demographic characteristics related to NA household food environments. Surveys collected food getting, food assistance, and sociodemographic variables from randomly selected adults from three NA communities (n = 300) in the Midwest and Southwest. Exploratory latent class analysis (LCA) identified the appropriate number of subgroups based on indicator responses. After assigning participants to classes, demographic differences were examined using bivariate analyses. NA household food environments could be described using two subgroups (“lower” and “higher access household food environments”). The “lower access” group had significantly higher age, smaller household size, and fewer children per household than the “higher access” group, while body mass index (BMI) did not significantly vary. This is the first LCA of NA household food environments and highlights the need for approaches that characterize the complexity of these environments. Findings demonstrate that NA household food environments can be described by developing subgroups based on patterns of market and traditional food getting, and food assistance utilization. Understanding NA household food environments could identify tailored individual and community-level approaches to promoting healthy eating for NA Nations.

How Do Nonprofit Firms Respond to Tax Policy

Abstract: We investigate the effects of variations in the value of the charitable contribution deduction on nonprofit firm behavior, including exploring for the first time the effects of the tax price of giving on fund-raising. We find that a 1 percent increase in tax subsidies is correlated with a 2.0 percent increase in fund-raising, while the elasticity of real charitable output to changes in tax price is less than one in absolute value for most firms. We derive a new equation for treasury efficiency in the presence of fund-raising and find that while our point estimates still support treasury efficiency, our confidence intervals are wide enough to allow some possibility that the deduction is not cost effective. Further, the modest elasticity of charitable output to tax price implies that tax subsidies can crowd out other revenue sources, such that the efficacy of the subsidy depends on the relative efficiency of these alternative sources.