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The National Security Constitution in the 21st Century
No full textSpeaker: Prof. Harold Hongju Koh, Sterling Professor of International Law, Yale University, 22nd Legal Advisor to the State Department; author, The National Security Constitution in the 21st Century (2024
Transnational Corporate Law Litigation
Full text linkFor nearly half a century, a federal statute colloquially referred to as the Alien Tort Statute has served as a pivotal battleground over whether corporations violating law abroad can be subject to civil suits in the United States. The statute has been used to bring hundreds of lawsuits against corporations involved in some of the most heinous human rights abuses and environmental catastrophes taking place in foreign nations. Recent Supreme Court cases, however, have sounded the death knell for the viability of future cases by restricting the extraterritorial reach of federal statutes.
This Article presents a case for deterring corporate lawbreaking abroad through U.S. corporate law. Unlike Alien Tort Statute cases, corporate governance suits brought by shareholders would frame corporate lawbreaking in foreign nations not as torts actionable under a federal statute but as fiduciary duty claims under state law against directors and officers for enabling U.S. corporations to violate foreign law. In presenting a blueprint for litigators to bring what can be conceptualized as transnational corporate law litigation, this Article clarifies how violations of foreign law—including human rights laws, labor laws, and environmental regulations—can trigger powerful fiduciary duty claims against directors and officers in the United States. These suits promise to deter corporate lawbreaking by provoking the judicial articulation of norms governing transnational business operations with vast implications for understanding the social responsibility of modern corporations
Automating International Human Rights Adjudication
Full text linkInternational human rights courts and treaty bodies are increasingly turning to automated decision-making (“ADM”) technologies to expedite and enhance their review of individual complaints. These tribunals have yet to consider many of the legal, normative, and practical issues raised by the use of different types of automation technologies for these purposes. This article offers a comprehensive and balanced assessment of the benefits and challenges of introducing ADM into international human rights adjudication. We argue in favor of using ADM to digitize documents and for internal case management purposes and to make straightforward recommendations regarding registration, inadmissibility, and the calculation of damages. In contrast, we reject the use of algorithms or artificial intelligence (“AI”) to predict whether a state has violated a human rights treaty. In between these polar categories we discuss semi-automated programs that cluster similar cases together, summarize and translate key texts, and recommend relevant precedents. We weigh the benefits of introducing these tools to improve international human rights adjudication—which include greater speed and efficiency in processing and sorting cases, identifying patterns in jurisprudence, and enabling judges and staff to focus on more complex responsibilities—against two types of cognitive biases—biases inherent in the datasets on which ADM is trained and biases arising from interactions between humans and machines. We also introduce a framework for enhancing the accountability that mitigates the potential harms caused by ADM technologies
Blowing Through the Barriers of Offshore Wind: Leveraging States\u27 Authority to Ensure Energy Justice in Offshore Wind Development
No full textRediscovering Alaska’s Right to Housing
No full textIn the wake of Grants Pass v. Johnson, state constitutions provide an alternative avenue to protect the rights of people experiencing homelessness. While some states contemplate amending their constitutions to encompass a right to housing, this Article argues that such a right already exists in the Alaska Constitution. Article VII, Sections 4 and 5 explicitly direct the legislature to provide for the public health and welfare, and Article I, Section 22 recognizes all Alaskans’ fundamental right to privacy. When read together, these provisions provide for a dual right to housing, encompassing both an affirmative right to adequate and affordable housing, and a corollary negative right to self-shelter. To understand how such a right could be recognized today, Part II of this Article provides an overview of the Alaska Supreme Court’s methods of constitutional interpretation and rights expansion. Part III then applies these methods to existing provisions of the Alaska Constitution to demonstrate how they encompass a right to housing. Section III.A discusses the history of the Alaska Constitution’s Health and Welfare Clauses to illustrate that the text and heritage of the document support a right to adequate and affordable housing. Section III.B then turns to the Privacy Clause to argue that the broader values enshrined in the Alaska Constitution similarly encompass a negative right to self-shelter