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.

Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice

Abstract: This article introduces to legal scholarship the first sustained discussion of prison abolition and what I will call a “prison abolitionist ethic.” Prisons and punitive policing produce tremendous brutality, violence, racial stratification, ideological rigidity, despair, and waste. Meanwhile, incarceration and prison-backed policing neither redress nor repair the very sorts of harms they are supposed to address — interpersonal violence, addiction, mental illness, and sexual abuse, among others. Yet despite persistent and increasing recognition of the deep problems that attend U.S. incarceration and prison-backed policing, criminal law scholarship has largely failed to consider how the goals of criminal law — principally deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retributive justice — might be pursued by means entirely apart from criminal law enforcement. Abandoning prison-backed punishment and punitive policing remains generally unfathomable. This article argues that the general reluctance to engage seriously an abolitionist framework represents a failure of moral, legal, and political imagination. If abolition is understood to entail simply the immediate tearing down of all prison walls, then it is easy to dismiss abolition as unthinkable. But if abolition consists instead of an aspirational ethic and a framework of gradual decarceration, which entails a positive substitution of other regulatory forms for criminal regulation, then the inattention to abolition in criminal law scholarship and reformist discourse comes into focus as a more troubling absence. Although violent crime prevention and proportional punishment of wrongdoing purportedly justify imprisonment, this article illuminates how the ends of criminal law might be accomplished in large measure through institutions aside from criminal law administration. More specifically, this article explores a form of grounded preventive justice neglected in existing scholarly, legal, and policy accounts. Grounded preventive justice offers a positive substitutive account of abolition that aims to displace criminal law enforcement through meaningful justice reinvestment to strengthen the social arm of the state and improve human welfare. This positive substitutive abolitionist framework would operate by expanding social projects to prevent the need for carceral responses, decriminalizing less serious infractions, improving the design of spaces and products to reduce opportunities for offending, redeveloping and “greening” urban spaces, proliferating restorative forms of redress, and creating both safe harbors for individuals at risk of or fleeing violence and alternative livelihoods for persons subject to criminal law enforcement. By exploring prison abolition and grounded preventive justice in tandem, this article offers a positive ethical, legal, and institutional framework for conceptualizing abolition, crime prevention, and grounded justice together.

Climate change, intergenerational equity and international law: An introductory note

Abstract: The change in the Earth's climate caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may be the most important environmental legacy that we leave to our descendants

Shareholder Liability for Corporate Torts: A Historical Perspective

Abstract: From toxic torts to poison pills, no corporate undertaking is unaffected by the workings of one of corporate law's bedrock principles: limited liability. But in the past forty years, critics of the doctrine's application to corporate torts have argued forcefully that limited liability creates negative externalities, encouraging harmful (and sometimes tortious) corporate behavior. Grotesque accidents, mass torts, environmental abuses, accounting frauds, and other instances of corporate wrongdoing sparked the debate, and each new scandal breathes wind into its embers. Two of the most prominent critics premise their case for unlimited liability on the claim that, historically, the doctrine was meant to protect shareholders from corporate contract liability and claims brought by voluntary creditors, but not from tort liability and involuntary creditors. Believing that the doctrine has little normative or historical justification, several critics have suggested reforms aimed at eliminating limited liability in the case of corporate torts.This Note questions that historical premise and supplies its own historical narrative to explain the origin of the rule. This Note explains how limited liability's application to corporate torts finds its origins not in the complacent or confounding application of contract principles, but instead in attempts by judges to distinguish contract and tort liability. In so doing, judges conferred benefits upon contract claimants that were denied to tort claimants. This Note argues that the rule stems from discrimination, not equivocation. In developing a new historical narrative, the Note aims to challenge the orthodox assumptions underlying the consensus position in the larger normative debate.

Bioterrorism Law and Policy: Critical Choices in Public Health:

Abstract: There is perhaps no duty more fundamental to American government than the protection of the public's health, safety, and welfare. On September 11, 2001, this governmental duty was severely tested through a series of terrorist acts. Developments concerning the intentional spread of anthrax through the US mails provide a modern example of bioterrorism activity in the United States. However, bioterrorism has long been a part of the nation's past. Numerous examples of attempted and actual bioterrorist activity have been documented in American and world history. Given the nation's current level of preparedness for bioterrorism, a large-scale bioterrorist attack would be unprecedented in its impact on morbidity and mortality in the US population. The limited, intentional spread of anthrax has shown that public health authorities are not fully prepared to handle a large-scale bioterrorism event. Responding to a bioterrorism event may require public health authorities to exercise broader powers than they traditionally employ.

The Politics of Equality in Constitutional Law: The Equal Protection Clause, Dr. Du Bois, and Charles Hamilton Houston

Abstract: The principal accomplishment of John Marshall's Supreme Court, according to George Lee Haskins and Herbert A. Johnson, was to subject politics to the discipline of law.1 In the system Marshall helped mold, ordinary politics may lie behind the adoption of constitutional provisions, but once placed in the Constitution, the provisions take on a meaning independent of politics. The rhetoric of discourse is transformed as arguments over principles replace arguments over interests.2 An alternative view of politics and constitutional law remains available even as we acknowledge Marshall's achievement. In the alternative view, constitutional provisions are verbal formulations that could gain substantial agreement while fundamental questions of principle remained unresolved. Politics is the craft of accommodating principled disagreements within a broader framework of agreement, and of developing acceptable compromises on issues when interests conflict. In the alternative view, politics is always present in constitutional law. Both principles and interests shape its formulations and reformulations. Constitutional law is especially political, in that sense, when the principled disagreements reflect deep divisions within the society. In United States history questions arising from the issue of race have regularly involved precisely that sort of principled disagreement. The constitutional law of racial equality has therefore been as political as any area of law could be. Constitutional law results from the litigation of contested cases. The process of