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 Republican Synthesis and Judicial Biography: Newmyer's Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story

Abstract: The past two decades have seen a major reinterpretation of the politics of the early Republic. The dominant view until the 1960s was that American political institutions in the postrevolutionary period displaced hierarchical and aristocratic social institutions relatively rapidly and put in their place the institutions of a dynamic individualist and capitalist society.' In this view, the Federalists after 1800 were trapped in a nostalgic yearning for a stable society of the sort they recalled from prerevolutionary times, while the Democrats accurately saw that democratic impulses had already transformed American society.2 The "republican synthesis" challenges this view.3 Instead of a break that occurred with the Revolution, it sees a continuous process in which a new theory of politics was gradually developed,4 came to its peak during the revolutionary era,5 and continued to dominate the politics of the early Republic. The earlier view saw American political theory, and the politics it both justified and produced, as irreducibly individualist. The republican synthesis sees a post-revolutionary political theory according to which the government, structured to allow citizens to act as individualists in politics, nonetheless produced public policies that transcended individual or, in Madison's terms, factional interests. To preserve their coherence, earlier theories of civic

Strengthening the Detection of and Early Response to Public Health Emergencies: Lessons from the West African Ebola Epidemic

Abstract: BackgroundIn the year since the World Health Organization (WHO) was notified of an Ebola outbreak in West Africa, more than 24,000 cases have been reported and over 10,000 individuals have died. Moreover, countless non-Ebola deaths have occurred as a result of health system closings and an international aid effort in the $USD billions has been invested in control efforts. While the international response to the West African Ebola virus disease epidemic eventually exemplified the great potential of the global public health community, the protracted early response also revealed critical gaps, which likely resulted in exacerbation of the epidemic. It is incumbent on international health partners to learn from missteps that occurred in the early stages of the epidemic and strengthen our public health capacity to better respond to future public health emergencies.Findings and RecommendationsStrategies to consider to improve capacity to respond global health emergencies include: 1) development of a more precise system to risk stratify geographic settings susceptible to disease outbreaks, 2) reconsideration of the 2005 International Health Regulations Criteria to allow for earlier responses to localized epidemics before they reach epidemic proportions, 3) increasing the flexibility of the World Health Organization director general to characterize epidemics with more granularity, 4) development of guidelines for best practices to promote partnership with local stakeholders and identify locally acceptable response strategies, and, most importantly, 5) making good on international commitments to establish a fund for public health emergency preparedness and response.ConclusionsThe recent success of the global action to stem the Ebola virus disease epidemic is laudable but should not encourage complacency in our efforts to improve the global public health infrastructure. The current epidemic has revealed both the danger posed by disease outbreaks in states with weak health systems and their widespread impact in an increasingly globalized world. The power of global health law and global health institutions will remain seriously unrealized and deeply compromised if the Ebola epidemic does not spur fundamental reform.

Security Management and Leadership in Seaports

Abstract: Port security management is the process of effectively and efficiently protecting things and people in the port, including ships at berth. The port security director is to the port security program what a captain is to a ship. The success of the security program is influenced, in large measure, by the leadership, planning, and management skills of the security director and the training and directing of security personnel and resources. In this chapter, we review and discuss: key leadership and management skills, attributes, and capabilities of the security director; strategic management processes and principles; the planning and conducting of training; the role of intelligence, risk management and conducting threat assessments; contingency planning and development; crisis leadership; and, using exercises and drills to test the training and planning.

Deliberative Constitutionalism in the National Security Setting

Abstract: Deliberative democracy theory maintains that authentic deliberation about matters of public concern is an essential condition for the legitimacy of political decisions. Such deliberation has two features. The first is deliberative rigor. This is deliberation guided by public-regarding reasons in a process in which persons are genuinely open to the force of the better argument. The second is transparency. This requires that requires that officials publicly explain the reasons for their decisions in terms that citizens can endorse as acceptable grounds for acting in the name of the political community. Such requirements would seem to be especially important in the national security setting, where decisions can have profound life-and-death consequences. Yet this is the setting in which transparency often is least feasible on the part of the Executive branch. Officials may be constrained for good reasons from fully explaining the bases for their decisions. While such reason-giving is especially important to the perceived legitimacy of a decision, anticipating the need to provide it also can enhance deliberative rigor. Limited transparency thus creates the risk both that crucial decisions may not be regarded as legitimate, and that the deliberative process will not be as robust as it should be. In this chapter, we argue that ensuring robust internal deliberative processes in the national security setting can compensate at least to some degree for this limitation. Appreciating the demands of deliberative democracy theory can help inform this process by illuminating how various procedural mechanisms may promote the goals that transparency purports to serve. We focus on the Lawyers Group, which includes senior national security lawyers from across the government, as an example of an arrangement that can help further the ends of deliberative democracy by providing a vehicle for deliberation that meets many, even if not all, of the requirements of that theory. Coordinated by the legal advisor for the National Security Council, this group discusses national security issues that will be presented to the President. We regard our analysis as contributing in two ways to deliberative democratic theory. First, it focuses on the possibility of satisfying the requirement of this theory in a setting in which decision-making often falls short of the demands of full transparency. Second, it suggests how legal analysis may play a distinctive role in the deliberative process. There are limits to what the Lawyers Group can accomplish. We believe, however, that it should be assessed in terms of its contribution to the larger national security deliberative system of which it is a part. From this perspective, the Group’s compliance with several prescriptions of deliberative theory helps it strengthen, even if it does not guarantee, the rigor and persuasiveness of the justifications that the President is able to provide for national security decisions.