Monthly Archives: March 2009

Briefing Paper on the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights

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Chathan House  Briefing Paper on the African Court on Human and People’s Rights. Chathan House is a UK based NGO focusing on internatioanl affairs.

Africa’s New Human Rights Court: Whistling in the Wind?

Sonya Sceats

March 2009

http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/files/13587_bp0309sceats.pdf

 

 

 

Summary of the briefing

_ Human rights abuses on a massive scale continue to afflict the lives of millions of

people across the continent of Africa. As in other parts of the world, the obstacles

in pursuing justice are currently insurmountable for most victims.

 

_ Against this troubling backdrop, the African Union (AU) has decided to add a

human rights section to its new court which has been agreed upon but not yet set

up. This court is called the African Court of Justice and Human Rights.

 

_ In the meantime, another pan-African human rights court, the African Court on

Human and Peoples’ Rights, has recently opened in Arusha, Tanzania. This court will

be wound down to make way for the African Court of Justice and Human Rights but

is expected to operate for the next few years at least.

 

_ These two courts represent the third instalment in efforts since the Second World

War to create regional human rights courts. Because they have broad powers to

enforce socio-economic rights and the collective rights of peoples, they may be

setting an example for new developments around the world.

 

_ This briefing paper focuses on the African Court of Justice and Human Rights, but it

also explains key features of the interim African Court on Human and Peoples’

Rights. It addresses questions including:

_ Can victims of human rights abuses bring cases?

_ Will the Court be able to try African heads of state?

_ Will governments comply with judgments?

Selling the Law: The Business of Public Access to Court Records

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Stephen Schultze and Shubham Mukherjee – Selling the Law: The Business of Public Access to Court Records

“As government documents are increasingly digitized and put online, two orthogonal approaches to distributing these documents have developed. Under one approach, the documents are made easily and freely accessible. In others, the government retains or introduces barriers to access that are inspired by traditional physical access. When these barriers are fee-based, the government can inadvertently create downstream monopolies or architectures of control over public information. This problem is especially severe in the case of federal district court documents, which are available only via an outdated, fee-based, court-run system or from expensive aggregators like Lexis or Westlaw. Indeed, evidence indicates that the courts are using public access fees to subsidize other activities. If we are to be a nation of laws, citizens must have access to the law. The upfront cost of making court documents freely available is far outweighed by the long-term benefits to society. Widespread digitization combined with Internet connectivity has placed these benefits within reach. The courts must now address the task of revamping outmoded policies and funding structures in order to align their practice with this reality.”

http://citp.princeton.edu/events/lectures/stephen-schultze-and-shubham-mukherjee/?/

Video of Schultze and Mukherjee Lecture
http://citp.princeton.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/citp_200925.html

Source: Special Libraries Association San Andreas Chapter, Intersect Alert March 29, 2009

Southern Africa Case Citator from SAFLII

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The Southern African Legal Information Institute (SAFLII) has created a link to the LawCite citator  for case law from Botswana, Kenya, Lesotho, Mauritius, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Search results list subsequent cases that cite your case. For selected cases, a table of authorities is also provided. The citator database is searchable by citation, party name, jurisdiction, and key word.  Access is free.

Hat tip to Karen Shear of the Constitutional Court of South Africa.

Law Cite – SAFLII

http://www.saflii.org/LawCite/

Research and Practice in International Commercial Arbitration

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“Research and Practice in International Commercial Arbitration”

S.I. Strong, RESEARCH AND PRACTICE IN INTERNATIONAL COMMERCIAL ARBITRATION: SOURCES AND STRATEGIES, Oxford University Press, 2009
University of Missouri School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2009-05

S.I. STRONG, University of Missouri School of Law

This first-of-its-kind book provides an insider’s guide to the strategies associated with researching international commercial arbitration as well as detailed treatment of its unique sources of law. Chapter 1 is presented here. Substantive chapters discuss:

* What constitutes legal authority in international commercial arbitration and where it can be found;
* How experienced advocates use and present their research in international commercial arbitration;
* How international commercial arbitrators evaluate the weight of competing authority; and
* How to research common types of disputes.

The book also includes a user-friendly bibliography of sources in international commercial arbitration to help practitioners find the materials they need. The bibliography includes tips on how each type of resource is used and where it can be found in electronic or printed form, thus helping to increase understanding in this complex area of law.

Providing practical guidance on a little-discussed topic, Research in International Commercial Arbitration: Sources and Strategies will appeal to practitioners and students new to the field of international commercial arbitration as well as more experienced practitioners looking to improve their knowledge of specialist sources.

The author is presenting an audio webcast for ALI-ABA on this subject on April 13, 2009. Information about the program is available at http://ali-aba.org/TSPKC10

Written by Dr. S.I. Strong, Associate Professor of Law and Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution at the University of Missouri. Dr. Strong, who is an English solicitor as well as an attorney qualified in New York and Illinois, practised as an international disputes specialist with Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP in New York and London before being named Counsel at Baker & McKenzie LLP in Chicago. Dr. Strong holds a Ph.D. in law from the University of Cambridge, a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford and a J.D. from Duke University.

 

Source:  LSN: University of Missouri School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series Vol. 4 No. 2,  03/27/2009

The Strategic Content Model of Supreme Court Opinion Writing

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“The Strategic Content Model of Supreme Court Opinion Writing”

YONATAN LUPU, University of California, San Diego – Department of Political Science

JAMES H. FOWLER, University of California, San Diego – Department of Political Science

The Supreme Court’s reasoning in a decision, including the precedent it cites in support of that reasoning, can be as significant as the outcome in determining the long-term impact of a case. As a result, the content of opinions can be used to provide important new insights into existing debates regarding judicial politics. In this article we present a strategic content model of the judicial process, which demonstrates how opinion content results from the strategic interaction between justices during the Court’s bargaining process. This is the first article to show on a large scale that the extent to which a majority opinion writer cites authoritative precedent is systematically influenced by the decisions and ideology of other justices. We find that the Court generates opinions that are better grounded in law when more justices write concurring opinions. This demonstrates that justices write concurring opinions based not just on a preference for making their opinions known, but also to influence the reasoning relied on by the majority opinion. We also show that diversity of opinion on the Court, a factor often overlooked in the political science literature, has a significant impact on the extent to which a Court opinion cites authoritative precedent. Finally, our results provide a novel test of the agenda-control and median-justice models. We find that the ideology of the median justice influences the citation of precedent in the majority opinion, whereas the majority opinion writer’s ideology does not, suggesting that agenda-setting powers are not as strong as previously claimed.

 

Source:  LSN Law & Rhetoric Vol. 2 No. 24,  03/27/2009

Empirical Tests for Midnight Regulations and Their Effect on OIRA Review Time

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“Empirical Tests for Midnight Regulations and Their Effect on OIRA Review Time”

PATRICK A. MCLAUGHLIN, Mercatus Center at George Mason University

The midnight regulations phenomenon – an increase in the rate of regulation promulgation during the final months of an outgoing president’s term – is empirically tested using data on the number of economically significant regulations reviewed each month. Submissions of economically significant regulations to Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) are found to increase by seven percent during midnight periods. Spikes in regulatory activity, such as those of midnight periods, are shown to decrease the amount of time regulations are reviewed at OIRA, perhaps because of budget and staff limitations. Evaluated at the mean, one additional economically significant regulation submitted to OIRA decreases the mean review time for all regulations by about half a day. If OIRA review improves the quality of regulations, then any phenomenon such as midnight regulations that leads to spikes in regulatory activity and decreases review time could result in the proliferation of low quality regulations.

Source: LSN Experimental & Empirical Studies Vol. 10 No. 19,  03/26/2009

Including ‘Political’ Reasons in Agency Decision Making

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“Including ‘Political’ Reasons in Agency Decision Making”

Michigan State University Law Review, Forthcoming
U of Michigan Public Law Working Paper No. 145

NINA A. MENDELSON, University of Michigan Law School

Presidential supervision has been central to arguments for the legitimacy of executive branch agency action, including on difficult questions of value. Yet very little about that supervision is transparent. Meanwhile, some scholars have argued that political reasons may serve to taint, rather than to legitimize, an agency decision. Agencies generally report neither whether their significant decisions are consistent with presidential preferences nor the content of supervision by presidential offices such as the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. This paper presents some current evidence on silence regarding White House influence on agency rulemaking. It then recommends greater transparency through requiring agencies to summarize presidential office influence on significant rulemaking decisions. Finally, it suggests that some, but not all, political reasons for agency action are legitimate, but that only a more transparent system can fully resolve the question of which reasons are legitimate and which are not.

Source: LSN: University of Michigan Law School, Public Law & Legal Theory
 Vol. 9 No. 2,  03/24/2009

PixeLegis: University of Seville Digital Legal Books Project

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The University of Seville Library has an ongoing project to digitize its law related titles. The PixeLegis project is posting out of  copyright texts online., The majority of texts are from the 19thCentury. The focus of the collection is Spanish law and civil law in general. Books are available in Spanish, Latin, French, German and English.  A nice feature of the site is the breakdown of texts by area of law. This should prove useful to scholars interested in historical legal developments in Spain or Latin America. Un millón de gracias a nuestros colegas en la Universidad de Sevilla. 

PixeLegis  http://bib.us.es/derecho/recursos/pixelegis/index-ides-idweb.html

President Obama’s social-networking maven

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From a feature article in today’s San Jose Mercury News, “Obama’s Bay Area brain trust:”

Sonal Shah

Google.org

The White House hasn’t made it official, but Google.org’s Shah has e-mailed her work colleagues that she’s headed to the White House as director of social innovation and civic engagement. Easiest translation for her title: social-networking maven. Obama has often promised to make the inner workings of government, and his own White House, more transparent and interactive. Shah will be part of a team, including a chief information officer and still-to-be-named chief technology officer, charged with figuring out how to integrate Web 2.0 tools into a government digital network historically hobbled by massive bureaucracy. . . .  ”Tweets” from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. could be coming soon.

Dispatch from Seattle on the Association of College and Research Libraries conference and the coming Borg Collective

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Our Serials and E-Resources librarian Brian Provenzale just returned from Seattle where he attended the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) conference, and files this very interesting report:

This was an unusual conference for me in that it didn’t involve either cataloging or law librarianship. ACRL itself is also unusual for library conferences in that it consists mostly of presentations based on contributed, peer-reviewed papers. The sessions I attended were all about Web-based services. The Twitter session was provocative because the speaker declared that blogs were “old-fashioned” and that he had no interest in reading them because they are too long. The jury is still out on the usefulness of Twitter, but there’s no denying it is a sweeping phenomenon that could end up changing library services and the way we deliver information.

My favorite session was on “post-literacy.” Although wildly speculative, the presentation made a good case that literacy would eventually be replaced just as literacy replaced oral tradition. But what would it evolve into? Some examples: Is life too short to learn everything you want? Live on by downloading your consciousness to a silicon-based body. Too much information to talk/write/read about? Get a chip implanted to interface directly with computers. Need to learn French immediately? Take a pill. There was also talk about electronic enhancements that would allow our brains to communicate “telepathically” and enable us to work as a hive mind. Think: the Borg on Star Trek.  Some creepy implications here, but at least most of it isn’t likely to happen in our lifetimes. The overarching implication, though, is that the information age isn’t  going to end for a long time. If anything, it’s only beginning.