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 Lost Law Professor

Abstract: Of all the groups of thinkers left homeless by the parcelling out of the boundless intellectual domain of the Victorian gentleman, few have felt their loss more keenly than full-time law professors in the United States. Of course, scholars in other fields have sometimes fretted over the costs of the professionalization of their discipline, and several have recently mourned the passing of the public intellectual. In law, however, such anxieties have been endemic. One source of these worries is the unusual, if not unique, dependence of the law schools, in comparison with other university departments, on a powerful and independent profession that never fully relinquished the production of expert knowledge in the field. Compared with the lay consumers of intellectual activity in other disciplines, judges and lawyers are remarkably confident in their assessments of the value of legal scholarship and the quality of legal education. Within the last decade their concerns have acquired a broad audience through widely noted articles and symposia and vigorously argued bar association reports. Such critiques from beyond the legal academy would not have acquired their present force were it not for divisions among the law professors themselves. Rare is the law faculty that agrees on the audience for legal scholarship or its place in the mission of their school, and even scholars who write for other scholars often find themselves on either side of an intellectual divide, separated by their growing sophistication in one or another of the social sciences or humanities, with no shared disciplinary competence to bridge the chasm. In many cases this extralegal expertise was self-acquired, but often the interdisciplinarians became what they are after extensive peri-

Affordable Housing: Of Inefficiency, Market Distortion, and Government Failure

Abstract: In this essay, I examine the types of costs that are imposed on society as a whole due to the absence of a sufficient number of decent housing units that are affordable to the low-income population. These costs present themselves in relation to health care, education, employment, productivity, homelessness, and incarceration. Some of the costs are direct expenditures while others are the result of lost opportunities. My hypothesis is that these costs are significant and offer, at the very least, a substantial offset to the cost of creating and subsidizing the operation of the necessary number of affordable housing units that are currently missing. I suggest a series of reasons why, in the face of this potentially inefficient outcome, the market/society does not produce the required units. The essay is conceptual in nature, not empirical. I recognize the issues associated with the quantification of often opaque costs and with their causal relationship to the lack of affordable housing. It is clear, however, that the costs are sizable and the correlations are strong and therefore, I believe, the hypothesis requires empirical study.

Altmann V. Austria and the Retroactivity of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act

Abstract: In Republic of Austria v Altmann, the US Supreme Court decided that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 (FSIA) generally applies to claims based on events that occurred before the Statute's enactment To decide the retroactivity question, the Court had occasion to consider the essential nature of foreign sovereign immunity: is it merely a procedural immunity providing foreign states with present protection from the inconvenience and indignity of a lawsuit, or is it something more than that? The Court's examination of this question was brief and unsatisfying Its analysis would have been enriched by a recognition that foreign sovereign immunity is regulated not just by federal statute, but also by principles of customary international law that the federal statute sought, in large part, to codify Among the authorities the Court did consider, it found support for the proposition that foreign sovereign immunity is a procedural immunity and also for the proposition that foreign sovereign immunity is an immunity from substantive liability Viewing these authorities as contradictory, the Court concluded that the retroactivity issue had to be resolved on other grounds This brief article maintains that the relevant authorities are not contradictory They are consistent with the conclusion that foreign states enjoy both a procedural and a substantive immunity, a possibility that the Court appears to have overlooked

Limitations on Importation and Transfer of Built-In Losses: Untangling the New Basis Adjustment Rules

Abstract: Eisenberg asserts that new provisions in the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, which are effective for transactions on or after October 22, 2004, alter the general transferred basis rules of sections 362(a) and (b), and 334(b) for certain transactions that involve built-in loss property. Although the new provisions might be characterized as rules that substitute a lower, fair market value basis for transferred basis, they are in fact more complicated according to Eisenberg. He finds three separate new provisions, each triggered by distinct conditions and each yielding consequences different from the others. Moreover, he thinks the new provisions do not resolve some important issues, such as whether transfers are to be evaluated in the aggregate or transferor-by-transferor. This article discusses the three new provisions and evaluates some areas that require further clarification.

Interchange Regulation: Implications for Credit Unions

Abstract: This research brief reviews the potential implications of the Durbin Interchange Amendment on credit unions based on an original survey of credit unions debit and credit card programs.