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 Rise and Fall of the Implied Warranty of Habitability

Abstract: Growing concern about poverty in the late 1960s produced two sweeping legal revolutions. One gave welfare recipients rights against arbitrary eligibility rules and benefit terminations. The other gave low-income tenants recourse when landlords failed to repair their homes. The 1996 welfare law exposed the welfare rights revolution's frailty. Little-noticed by legal scholars, the tenants' rights revolution also has failed, and for broadly similar reasons.Withholding rent deliberately to challenge landlords' failure to repair is unduly risky for most tenants in ill-maintained dwellings: either moving to better housing is a better option or the risk of retaliation is too great. The implied warranty could still motivate landlords to repair if it limited evictions of low-income tenants who fall behind on their rent for other reasons, but a set of little-noticed doctrines deemed these tenants unworthy to claim the warranty's protection. Moreover, reformers left implementation to courts with neither the resources not the inclination to transform landlord-tenant relations.None of this was inevitable. The doctrines effectively limiting the warranty to deliberate rent withholding have weak justificiations. And contemporaneous procedural innovation in other areas of law offered alternatives to the unresponsive courts.More daunting was the transformation of the housing market. Fewer low-income tenants live in decrepit dwellings, but many suffer housing problems whose consequences may be even more severe: overcrowding, locations remote from jobs and good schools, and rents that crowd other necessities from their budgets. Looking at a clear, unified purpose, the tenants' rights revolution cannot begin to adapt to these changes.

Calling Genocide by its Rightful Name: Lemkin's Word, Darfur, and the UN Report

Abstract: When the United Nations commission investigating Darfur issued its report in January 2005, it concluded that the Darfur atrocities represented war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not genocide. This had the harmful effect of deflating efforts to mobilize political support to halt the Darfur atrocities. But the Commission's conclusion was based entirely on technicalities in the legal definitions of the international crimes, not on denial that extermination is going on in Darfur. In this paper, I argue that the legal and popular meanings of genocide have diverged in harmful ways: where laymen understand that mass killings and rapes that are exterminating a civilian population simply are genocide, lawyers also require a specific intent to destroy a "protected" group as such. The original motivation for defining genocide differently from extermination (a crime against humanity) lay in a theory that religious, racial, and national groups have value over and above the value of the individuals in them. But, I argue, subsequent developments have thinned the connection between the crime of genocide and the theory of group pluralism. Hence, there is no longer a good reason to draw a sharp legal distinction between genocide and extermination, which today functions to provide a fig leaf for inaction by the world community. I propose adding the crime against humanity of extermination to the other crimes in the definition of genocide.

Public Health Law Reform

Abstract: Public health law reform is necessary because existing statutes are outdated, contain multiple layers of regulation, and are inconsistent. A model law would define the mission and functions of public health agencies, provide a full range of flexible powers, specify clear criteria and procedures for activities, and provide protections for privacy and against discrimination. The law reform process provides an opportunity for public health agencies to draw attention to their resource needs and achievements and to form ties with constituency groups and enduring relations with the legislative branch of government. Ultimately, the law should become a catalyst, rather than an impediment, to reinvigorating the public health system.

Beyond FATCA: An Evolutionary Moment for the International Tax System

Abstract: The international tax system is in the midst of a novel contest between information reporting and anonymous withholding models for ensuring that states have the ability to tax offshore accounts. At stake is the extent of many countries’ capacity to tax investment income of individuals and profits of closely held businesses through an income tax in an increasingly financially integrated world. Four incongruent initiatives of the European Union, the OECD, Switzerland, and the United States together represent an emerging international regime in which financial institutions act to facilitate countries’ ability to tax their residents’ offshore accounts. The growing consensus that financial institutions should act as “tax intermediaries” cross-border represents a remarkable shift in international norms that has yet to be recognized in the literature. What remains is a contest as to how financial institutions should serve as tax intermediaries cross-border, and for which countries. Different outcomes in this contest portend starkly different futures for the extent of cross-border tax administrative assistance available to most countries. The eventual triumph of an information reporting model over an anonymous withholding model is key to (1) allowing for the taxation of principal, (2) ensuring that most countries are included in the benefit of financial institutions serving as tax intermediaries cross-border, and (3) encouraging taxpayer engagement with the polity and supporting sovereign policy flexibility, especially in emerging and developing economies. The article closes with proposals to help reconcile the emerging automatic information exchange approaches and produce an effective multilateral system.

Treaties as Law of the Land: The Supremacy Clause and the Judicial Enforcement of Treaties

Abstract: Courts in recent years have perceived threshold obstacles to the enforcement of treaties deriving from their nature as contracts between nations that generally depend for their efficacy on the interest and honor of the parties, rather than on domestic adjudication. This approach to treaty enforcement is in tension with the Constitution's declaration that treaties are part of the law of the land and its instruction to judges to give them effect. The Founders understood that treaties depended on interest and honor on the international plane, but they made treaties enforceable in our courts anyway in order to avoid the international friction that could be expected to result from treaty violations and to capture the benefits of a reputation for treaty compliance. The Supremacy Clause gives treaties a domestic judicial sanction that they would otherwise lack. It makes treaties enforceable in the courts in the same circumstances as the other two categories of norms specified in the clause - federal statutes and the Constitution itself.The sole exception to this rule is for treaties that are non-self-executing in the sense contemplated by the Court in Foster v. Neilson. The concept of a non-self-executing treaty fits uneasily with the Supremacy Clause, as reflected in the common but untenable view that non-self-executing treaties lack the force of domestic law. According to Foster, a non-self-executing treaty is not enforceable in the courts because it is addressed to the political branches. But determining which treaties are so addressed has been challenging. Treaties generally leave the question of domestic implementation to the domestic laws of the states-parties, and our domestic law (the Supremacy Clause) directs judges to give them effect. The author argues that the Supremacy Clause establishes a default rule that treaties are directly enforceable in the courts like other laws, rebuttable only by a clear statement that the obligations imposed by the treaty are subject to legislative implementation.If the stipulation had to appear in the text of the treaty, the clear statement rule would present problems for U.S. treaty makers seeking to control the domestic consequences of multilateral treaties. To address this problem, the treaty makers have developed a new form of clear statement, the "declaration" of non-self-execution. However, scholars have questioned the compatibility of such declarations with the Supremacy Clause. The author concludes that the treaty makers have the power to limit the domestic effects of treaties through declarations of non-self-execution. On the other hand, if the Constitution were understood to establish a default rule of non-self-execution, declarations of self-execution would stand on more tenuous ground. Thus, a default rule of self-execution is not only more consistent with the constitutional text and structure and with Supreme Court precedent, it is also normatively attractive because it leaves the treaty makers with the power to control the domestic consequences of the treaties they conclude.