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.

'Old' and 'New' Institutions for Persons with Mental Illness: Treatment, Punishment, or Preventive Confinement?

Abstract: In 1972, I covertly entered a brutal, inhumane institution for the criminally insane in Eastern North Carolina as a pseudo-patient under a U.S. Department of Justice study. What I experienced during those many weeks would shape how I view what Irving Goffman called "total institutions." Since that formative experience as a young law student I have closely observed institutions that warehouse persons with mental illness in many regions of the world ranging from the Americas and Europe to the Indian subcontinent and Asia. Those experiences, together with the careful study of human rights reports and judicial decisions, have led me to one simple conclusion. Despite countless promises for a better life by national commissions, governments, and the international community, there has evolved a vicious cycle of neglect, abandonment, indignity, cruel and inhumane treatment, and punishment of persons with mental illness. This is not true in every place, time, and circumstance - there are pockets of deep caring and compassion. But for the vast majority, and in most geographic regions, this sad fact remains a tragic reality. The shameful history of benign, and sometimes malignant, neglect of persons with mental illness is well understood: the deep stigma and unredressed discrimination, the deplorable living conditions, and the physical and social barriers preventing their integration and full participation in society. The maltreatment of this vulnerable population has been reinforced by the hurtful stereotypes of incompetency and dangerousness. This article is based on a lecture at the Sheldonian, Oxford University, for Amnesty International. In this article I will show how this vulnerable population has been unconscionably treated. First, I will examine the gross human rights violations that have occurred, and continue to occur, in what I am calling "old" psychiatric institutions. During the mid-to-late twentieth century, however, many of these old institutions were closed as part of a social compact with mentally ill persons and their families to provide community care. The deinstitutionalization movement, however, resulted in new places of confinement for this population - jails, prisons, and homeless shelters. In the second part of this lecture, I will explore the new realities of criminal confinement of persons with mental illness. As we will see, incarceration of this vulnerable population in the criminal justice system has caused enormous suffering. And, if Dostoyevsky was correct that the "degree of civilization ... can be judged by entering its prisons," then by that measure we are a deeply uncivilized society.

The Poverty of the Moral Stimulus

Abstract: One of the most influential arguments in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science is Chomsky's argument from the poverty of the stimulus. In this response to an essay by Chandra Sripada, I defend an analogous argument from the poverty of the moral stimulus. I argue that Sripada's criticism of moral nativism appears to rest on the mistaken assumption that the learning target in moral cognition consists of a series of simple imperatives, such as "share your toys" or "don't hit other children." In fact, the available evidence suggests that the moral competence of adults and even young children is considerably more complex and exhibits many characteristics of a well-developed legal code, including abstract theories of crime, tort, contract, and agency. Since the emergence of this knowledge cannot be explained by appeals to explicit instruction, or to any known processes of imitation, internalization, socialization and the like, there are grounds for concluding it may be innate. Simply put, to explain the development of intuitive jurisprudence in each individual, we must attribute unconscious knowledge and complex mental operations to her that go well beyond anything she has been taught.

After the Honeymoon Reflections on the Current State of International Criminal Justice

Abstract: At the turn of the millennium, international criminal justice (ICJ) was in its honeymoon; today it seems that the honeymoon is over.What comes after the honeymoon? By now we have learned that ICJ cannot bypass politics and become an ordinary part of the rule of law. But normality was never a realistic aim for ICJ, which aims at the world’s most abnormal crimes. The most important goal of ICJ is a radical one: transforming the world’s political imagination to de-sanctify violence committed in the name of state or group, so that it comes to be regarded as mere crime. By this measure, the most important achievement of ICJ is positive complementarity, and the most reactionary is further strengthening of the doctrine of state immunity.

Laboratories of Democracy? Policy Innovation in Decentralized Governments

Abstract: Innovations in government produce positive externalities for other jurisdictions. Theory therefore predicts that local government will tend to produce a lower than optimal amount of innovation, as officials will prefer to free-ride on innovation by others. As Susan Rose-Ackerman observed in 1980, these two predictions, if true, tend to undermine arguments by proponents of federated government that decentralization will lead to many competing "laboratories of democracy." In this paper, which is aimed primarily at legal academics, we review and critically assess nearly three decades of responses to Rose-Ackerman's arguments, none of which have been discussed in depth in the legal literature. In addition we sketch and evaluate, without rigorously modeling, other possible grounds for believing that local officials may have incentives to innovate in the face of the temptation of free-riding. We also analyze the policy implications that follow from our conclusion that there are no demonstrably overwhelming replies to Rose-Ackerman's skepticism. For instance, we suggest that one conclusion may be that certain regulatory regimes, such as aspects of corporate governance regulation, might best be centered at the national level, where collective action problems affecting public officials are lessened. However, we also caution that this result would depend on the likely effectiveness of industry itself propagating "good" regulation, or the effectiveness of contracting regulatory functions out to intermediaries, such as private consulting firms or non-profit organizations, who might use property rights to more fully capture the gains of policy innovation.

Securities Litigation and its Lawyers: Changes During the First Decade After PSLRA

Abstract: Congress enacted the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PSLRA or the Act) to address problems plaguing securities class action litigation. This Article surveys the empirical evidence on the impact of the PSLRA, examining the specific categories of reforms introduced by the Act. We look at the existing evidence relating to: substantive changes in the definition of fraud necessary to bring a securities class action; the Congressional efforts to empower lead plaintiffs relative to the plaintiffs' attorney bar; and the direct sanctioning of lawyers authorized in the Act. Given the PSLRA's focus on changing the incentives and behavior of plaintiff lawyers, we also provide preliminary data on the role of the lead plaintiff law firm. We report that while the market concentration of plaintiff law firms based on settlement amounts did not change appreciably after the enactment of the PSLRA, the tendency of top tier law firms to associate with lower tier firms did increase significantly in the post-PSLRA period. We also report that institutional investors taking on the role of lead plaintiffs in the post-PSLRA period tended to develop repeat relationships with select top tier law firms. Our survey of the existing evidence and study of new evidence relating to the role of plaintiff law firms leads us to raise several questions for possible new lines of research into the effectiveness of the PSLRA.