constitutional law

Georgia Law Professor Amann presents “Child-Taking” at Yale University

Professor Diane Marie Amann recently presented her research on “Child-Taking” as a guest lecturer in a course on the Russo-Ukrainian War taught at Yale University this semester. Students from Yale’s law school, management school, and school of global affairs comprise the class, which is taught by Yale Law Professor Eugene R. Fidell and Margaret M. Donovan.

Amann is Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Chair in International Law, and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center here at the University of Georgia School of Law. She writes and teaches in areas including child and human rights, constitutional law, transnational and international criminal law, and global legal history.

Amann’s online guest lecture drew from her article, “Child-Taking,” soon to be published in the Michigan Journal of International Law. (Preprint draft available at SSRN.) As Amann theorizes it, child-taking occurs when a state or similarly powerful entity abducts children from their community and then endeavors to remake the children in its own image. This conduct, involving children taken from Ukraine, lies at the heart of the International Criminal Court warrants pending against President Vladimir Putin and another top Russian official. The article also examines other examples of the phenomenon, including the Nazis’ kidnappings of non-German children during World War II and the forced placement of Indigenous children into boarding schools in North America, Australia, and elsewhere.

Amann also has presented this scholarship at meetings of the American Society of International Law and at University College London Faculty of Laws and King’s College London Department of War Studies.

Georgetown Law Professor Cliff Sloan discusses “The Court at War” at Georgia Law

Georgetown Law Professor Cliff Sloan recently discussed his new book, The Court at War: FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made, in an event sponsored by the Dean Rusk International Law center here at the University of Georgia School of Law.

Sloan was joined in conversation by two of the law school’s professors: Nathan S. Chapman, Pope F. Brock Professor of Law; and Diane Marie Amann, who is Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and the Center’s Faculty Co-Director.

Below is a description of the book:

By the summer of 1941, in the ninth year of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt had molded his Court. He had appointed seven of the nine justices—the most by any president except George Washington—and handpicked the chief justice.

But the wartime Roosevelt Court had two faces. One was bold and progressive, the other supine and abject, cowed by the charisma of the revered president.

The Court at War explores this pivotal period. It provides a cast of unforgettable characters in the justices—from the mercurial, Vienna-born intellectual Felix Frankfurter to the Alabama populist Hugo Black; from the western prodigy William O. Douglas, FDR’s initial pick to be his running mate in 1944, to Roosevelt’s former attorney general and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson.

The justices’ shameless capitulation and unwillingness to cross their beloved president highlight the dangers of an unseemly closeness between Supreme Court justices and their political patrons. But the FDR Court’s finest moments also provided a robust defense of individual rights, rights the current Court has put in jeopardy. Sloan’s intimate portrait is a vivid, instructive tale for modern times.

Sloan joined Georgetown – where he teaches constitutional law, criminal justice, and death penalty litigation – following a distinguished legal career, in all three branches of the federal government, at leading law firms, and in-house at the Washington Post.  He is also the author of The Great Decision: Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme Court, a 2009 history of the Court’s foundational decision in Marbury v. Madison.

Immigrants and rights of free speech, free exercise of religion topic of Georgia Law Review symposium March 18

“Immigrants and the First Amendment: Defining the Borders of Noncitizen Free Speech and Free Exercise Claims” is the title of this year’s annual day-long symposium of the Georgia Law Review, to be held Friday, March 18, in hybrid format at the University of Georgia School of Law. Featured will be a keynote by immigrant activist Ravi Ragbir, the plaintiff in a high-profile federal lawsuit alleging retaliation for activism.

Here’s the concept note:

“Immigration law, as well as immigrant activism, are intersecting with the First Amendment in new and surprising ways. This year’s Georgia Law Review Symposium will bring together a diverse set of voices to discuss these exciting new crossovers, providing a forum to explore the nuances of the First Amendment’s scope as applied to immigrants, immigrant advocates, and potential immigrants outside of the country. This is an area of law that is becoming increasingly more topical, and many questions that arise from these areas remain unanswered or ambiguous.”

Details and registration here for the conference, which will take place in-person in the Larry Walker Room on the 4th floor of Georgia Law’s Dean Rusk Hall, and which also welcomes online attendees.

Following opening remarks at 9 a.m., panels will proceed as follows:

9:10-10:35 a.m., “Immigrant Speech and Government Retaliation”

“Despite being entitled to First Amendment rights, immigrants, particularly those without documentation, are highly vulnerable to government suppression of, or retaliation against, their exercise of free speech rights. Recent or ongoing cases in this area include Oldaker v. Giles in the Middle District of Georgia, which concerns first amendment claims brought on behalf of women alleging retaliation for medical abuse at an immigration detention center; and Ragbir v. Homan, which concerns the government’s retaliatory deportation of prominent immigrant rights activists.”

Speaking within that theme on this first panel of the morning will be: Alina Das, Professor of Clinical Law, New York University School of Law; Charles H. Kuck, Managing Partner of Kuck Baxter LLC, an immigration law firm in Atlanta, and an Adjunct Professor at Emory University School of Law; Daniel I. Morales, Associate Professor of Law and George A. Butler Research Professor, University of Houston Law Center; and Clare R. Norins, Clinical Assistant Professor and Director of the First Amendment Clinic at Georgia Law. Moderating will be Jason A. Cade, who is Associate Dean for Clinical Programs, Experiential Learning and J. Alton Hosch Associate Professor of Law, and Community Health Law Partnership Clinic Director at Georgia Law.

10:35 a.m.-12 noon, “Back to the Future: Immigrant Speech Rights Yesterday and Tomorrow”

“From John Lennon to Charlie Chaplin to many less famous immigrants, United States immigration history is riddled with deportation or exclusion decisions based on immigrants’ expression. Looking to the future, it is possible that constitutional free speech rights are best shored up by legislative and administrative solutions.”

Speaking within that theme on this last morning panel will be: Michael Kagan, Joyce Mack Professor of Law and Director of the Immigration Clinic at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada-Las Vegas; Jennifer Koh, Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Nootbaar Institute for Law at the Caruso School of Law, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California; Julia Rose Kraut, author of Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States (Harvard University Press 2020); and Gregory P. Magarian, Thomas and Karole Green Professor of Law, Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. Moderating will be Jonathan Peters, Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications, who also holds a courtesy appointment on the Georgia Law faculty.

1-2:20 p.m., “The First Amendment’s Limits Abroad After Trump v. Hawaii: Free Exercise, Executive Power, and Justiciability”

“Trump v. Hawaii is the most recent high-profile iteration of immigration actions allegedly taken on the basis of religion. In addition to exploring first amendment issues respecting the religion of potential migrants, this panel will also cover issues relating to the differences in executive power as it pertains to potential immigrants as opposed to immigrants already on U.S. soil, as well as the difficulties associated with immigrants vindicating asserted constitutional rights from abroad.”

Speaking within that theme on this afternoon panel will be: Christopher Lund, Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development and Professor of Law, Wayne State University Law School, Detroit, Michigan; Zachary Price, Professor of Law, University of California Hastings College of the Law; and Shalini Bhargava Ray, Associate Professor of Law, University of Alabama School of Law. Moderating will be Nathan S. Chapman, Pope F. Brock Associate Professor in Professional Responsibility at Georgia Law.

2:20-3:15 p.m., “Keynote Address” by Ravi Ragbir, followed by a closing reception.

University of Georgia Professor Jonathan Peters, of Grady College and School of Law, presents on press freedom to court personnel and journalists in Uzbekistan

Pleased today to welcome a contribution from Jonathan Peters, an associate professor who has faculty appointments in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication and the School of Law here at the University of Georgia. Professor Peters teaches and researches in the area of media law and policy, and his post here discusses his participation December 3 in an online training event hosted in Uzbekistan.

I was delighted recently to deliver two virtual presentations to court personnel and journalists in Uzbekistan, as part of a project facilitated by the United Nations Development Programme and supported by the United States Agency for International Development and the Supreme Court of the Republic of Uzbekistan.

The purpose of the project, called the “Rule of Law Partnership in Uzbekistan,” is to strengthen public access to the nation’s judicial system as well as public trust in it. One related priority has been to improve citizen knowledge of the courts and to encourage collaboration between court personnel and journalists. This has enabled the local media to tour Uzbekistan’s regional courts and to learn about international practices in court-journalist relations.

To those ends, I delivered presentations to a group of journalists and court personnel, including members of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Uzbekistan, on U.S. rights of access to courts and how American journalists cover legal issues. First, I discussed the tension between the First and Sixth Amendments and the various reasons that U.S. courts have generally protected media rights of access to judicial proceedings and records.

For example, the U.S. Supreme Court has observed repeatedly the historical importance of public trials and has reasoned that openness improves a trial’s functioning, that it has therapeutic value by “providing an outlet for community concern, hostility and emotion,” and that it enhances the public’s acceptance that justice is being done.

Moreover, in significant part, American journalists exercise their First Amendment rights as surrogates of the public when reporting on courts. As Justice Lewis F. Powell put it in Saxbe v. Washington Post Co., in his dissent: “For most citizens, the prospect of personal familiarity with newsworthy events is hopelessly unrealistic. In seeking out the news, the press therefore acts as an agent of the public at large. It is the means by which the people receive the … information and ideas essential to intelligent self-government.”

Then, in my second presentation, on how American journalists cover legal issues, I explored how the rule of law is preserved partly by public knowledge of court decisions and activities, and thus the media is a critical link between the judiciary and the public. So it is democratically important for journalists to explain what courts are doing and why—and to convey the implications (if any) for the public.

That means the journalists must be able to translate legal terms and concepts for a lay audience, and they must be able to distill into a short news story a complex legal action. It is also helpful for them to develop sources in the court system, while appreciating and respecting the ethical limits within which judges, lawyers, and court aides usually work.

After these remarks, the Q&A session opened up conversations among the journalists and court personnel in attendance, allowing us to have a dialogue on some of the issues most pressing for them. I hope the ultimate result is a more open judiciary and a freer press in Uzbekistan.

Georgia Law clinics join to assist in litigation by immigrant women alleging abuse, retaliation while in ICE detention

Two clinics here at the University of Georgia School of Law have joined forces on behalf of women who allege they endured abusive gynecological and other medical treatments, as well as inhumane conditions and retaliation, while in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), at a privately run facility in south Georgia.

Comparative constitutional law scholar Lori Ringhand is Center’s Interim Director; outgoing Director Kathleen Doty takes up post in Seattle

We’re delighted to announce that Lori A. Ringhand (near left), J. Alton Hosch Professor of Law, is the new Interim Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center here at the University of Georgia School of Law. She succeeds Professor Kathleen A. Doty (left), who has just taken up a position as an Analyst in the Global Security, Technology, and Policy Group of the National Security Directorate at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Seattle.

Ringhand (prior posts) returned to Athens earlier this academic year from Scotland, having been a Spring 2019 US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Aberdeen. While overseas, she delivered “‘What Law?’ Political Spending on the Internet in the US and the UK,” a Gresham College Fulbright Lecture, at the Museum of London. An article that Ringhand researched and wrote during her Fulbright visit, entitled “First Amendment (Un)Exceptionalism: A Comparative Taxonomy of Campaign Finance Reform Proposals in the US and UK,” is forthcoming in the Ohio State Law Journal.

A well-known scholar of US as well as comparative constitutional law and election law, Ringhand’s publications include two co-authored books, Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings and Constitutional Change (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Constitutional Law: A Context and Practices Casebook (Carolina Academic Press, 2d ed. 2017). After graduating from the University of Wisconsin Law School, she earned her Bachelor of Civil Law degree and was Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky College of Law and a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Institute of European and Comparative Law. Her decorated career at Georgia Law includes service as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and as a Provost’s Women Leadership Fellow, as well as the receipt of multiple teaching awards.

As Interim Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center she will lead the staffers who support the Global Practice Preparation and International Professional Education portfolios – Mandy Dixon, Laura Kagel, Catrina Martin, and Sarah Quinn – along with numerous Student Ambassadors. Georgia Law Professors Harlan Cohen and Diane Marie Amann will continue to serve in advisory capacities as Faculty Co-Directors.

Professor Ringhand’s immediate predecessor, Professor Doty (prior posts), will pursue her career, as an international lawyer specializing in global security governance, at the national laboratory, an affiliate of the U.S. Department of Energy. Just prior to joining the Center as an associate director in 2015, she was Assistant Counsel for Arms Control & International Law at the Office of the General Counsel, U.S. Department of the Navy, Strategic Systems Programs. Doty has also served as attorney-editor at the American Society of International Law and inaugural Fellow of the California International Law Center at the University of California-Davis School of Law, from which she earned her J.D. degree.

Doty’s many Dean Rusk International Law Center initiatives included: teaching the International Advocacy Seminar; leading the Georgia Law-Leuven Centre Global Governance Summer School; launching the Consular Lecture Series; and managing the Center’s interdepartmental grant project relating to the United States’ North Korea sanctions regime. With deep thanks for her service, we wish her well in her new venture.

Australian Broadcasting Co. features Georgia Law Professor Dennis and new coauthored book, “Rap Lyrics on Trial”

A just-published article at ABC News, a digital publication of the Australian Broadcasting Co., features Georgia Law Professor Andrea L. Dennis (right), who holds the law school’s John Byrd Martin Chair of Law.

The article poses this headline question:  “Can violent rap lyrics be evidence of criminality or does the law misunderstand music’s biggest genre?” In seeking an answer, ABC music & pop culture reporter Paul Donoughue focuses on the new book Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America (The New Press 2019), which Dennis, a criminal law expert, has coauthored with University of Richmond Liberal Arts Professor Erik Nielson.

The ABC article notes that the coauthors identified more than “500 cases in the US alone of rap lyrics being used in criminal trials, at times leading to inappropriate or wrongful convictions,” and continues:

“Few would say Johnny Cash’s famous lyric ‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die’ was evidence of the country singer’s murderous leanings, they write.

“‘It is quite clear to us that this [rap] is the only fictional art form that is used in this way,’ Professor Dennis said, adding that race was an essential factor in the story.

“There are very limited examples of it being appropriate, Professor Dennis said. For example, when a lyric accurately describes a specific crime.

“‘Usually, what’s happening is the lyrics are somewhat generic — talking about general crime or very common types of behaviour that almost any rap artist might talk about,’ she said.”

Donoghue further compares the U.S. situation to that in Australia, where speech protections are less strong but where no similar prosecution has yet taken place.

The full Australian article is available here; Dennis’ book, here.

Georgia Law Professor Ringhand presents comparative elections law paper on US, UK at Mercer conference

Lori A. Ringhand, J. Alton Hosch Professor of Law here at the University of Georgia School of Law, presented her comparative elections law scholarship last Friday at the “Contemporary Issues in Election Law” Law Review Symposium at Mercer University School of Law in Macon.

Ringhand, an expert in election law, constitutional law, and comparative law, presented a paper entitled “First Amendment (Un)Exceptionalism: US and UK Responses to Online Electioneering.” It’s a product of her Spring 2019 research as a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland (prior posts here and here).

Ringhand is presenting the same paper this semester at other law schools, including George Washington University and Marquette University.

The Mercer symposium also featured a paper by a United Kingdom-based scholar who’d spoken at Georgia Law last Wednesday: Professor Jacob Eisler, University of Southampton Law School.

Georgia Law Professor Cohen publishes at Just Security on “The National Security Delegation Conundrum”

“How much authority — how much room to make policy choices—can Congress delegate to the president and executive branch?”

So begins “The National Security Delegation Conundrum,” an analysis of the foreign relations jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court, published at Just Security by Harlan Grant Cohen, Gabriel M. Wilner/UGA Foundation Professor in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center here at the University of Georgia Law.

The focus of Cohen’s commentary is Gundy v. United States, a June 20 decision by a divided Court (4 supporting an opinion by Justice Elena Kagan and 3 an opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch; Justice Samuel Alito concurred in the judgment). It declined to revive the nondelegation doctrine — but did so, Professor Cohen points out, in a way that raised further questions on how that doctrine applies to cases involving national security.

Instances in which these questions might be relevant have occurred frequently in the last couple years, Cohen wrote, on issues as varied as migration of peoples and trade in auto parts. After analyzing the issues at hand, Cohen concluded that Gundy did little to resolve them:

“What is clear though is that until a test or principle is found, the national security delegation conundrum will remain.”

The full Just Security analysis is here.

Exploring “Executive Branch Lawyering” with US Judge David Barron, former head of Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel

Executive Branch Lawyering course, from left: Maria Eliot, Wade Herring, Professor Diane Marie Amann, Sarah Mirza, Hanna Karimipour, Jennifer Cotton, Taylor Samuels, Judge David J. Barron, Morgan Pollard, Keelin Cronin, Joe Stuhrenberg

Who decides how America wages war?

What does “commander in chief” mean?

What (national or international) laws govern the United States’ waging of war?

How and by whom are those law identified, interpreted, decided, and implemented?

Those questions and many more arose during the Executive Branch Lawyering course that I just had the honor of co-teaching with David J. Barron, Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit and also The Honorable S. William Green Visiting Professor of Public Law at Harvard Law School, where he had taught full-time before his 2014 appointment to the federal bench.

My own association with Barron – like me, a former law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens – dates to 2008. That year, Barron and I were among the charter contributors to “Convictions,” a legal blog published for a time at Slate. And in 2017 Judge Barron began serving on the Judicial Advisory Board of the American Society of International Law, with which I am affiliated thanks to my editorship of ASIL’s Benchbook on International Law (2014).

For an 18-month period between those years, Barron served as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, providing legal advice to then-President Barack Obama and to agencies in the Executive Branch. That experience formed the basis of the 1-credit course that he and I co-taught last week at my home institution, the University of Georgia School of Law.

Our texts included Barron’s 2016 book, Waging War: The Clash Between Presidents and Congress, 1776 to ISIS, as well as The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration, a 2009 memoir by Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith, who had led OLC from 2003 to 2004 – plus executive orders, congressional enactments, judicial decisions, and other primary materials.

To prepare for sessions with Judge Barron, a topnotch group of 9 Georgia Law students and I examined a selection of historical moments when Presidents’ war-waging generated tensions, with other branches of government established in the U.S. Constitution and with other stakeholders. Of particular concern were instances related to executive detention in time of war, for example: treatment of British officers held during the American Revolution; General Andrew Jackson’s jailing of a judge who issued a writ of habeas corpus during the 1814 military occupation of New Orleans; and 2 capital military trials, the 1st of an Indiana civilian in the Civil War and the 2d of Nazi saboteurs in World War II.

Sessions with Judge Barron concerned US executive detention and related issues since the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. The focus was on OLC’s legal, ethical, and practical duties in advising on such policies – and, through careful and extensive role-playing, on how Executive Branch lawyers go about the day-to-day work of giving such advice.

A most valued, and rewarding, teaching experience.

(Cross-posted from Diane Marie Amann blog)