The Lisbon Treaty’s change to Council voting rules will have important implications for the democratic legitimacy of the EU

Many of the decisions made in the Council of the European Union are based on qualified majority voting, in which EU legislation can be passed if a certain threshold of support is met among member states. Frank Häge assesses the potential implications of the changes to qualified majority voting rules under the Lisbon Treaty, which came into force in November 2014. He notes that while the precise impact of the changes remains to be seen, they will have important ramifications for the overall legitimacy of the EU’s legislative process

Does Qualified Immunity Matter?

In litigation brought pursuant to Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Fed. Bureau of Narcotics, 403 U.S. 388 (1971), most commentators agree that qualified immunity plays a substantial role in limiting plaintiffs\u27 ability to recover compensation. Many find this tradeoff acceptable, in part because of concerns of fairness to government official defendants and in part because courts may still play a central role in announcing the law without worrying over the retroactive effect their decision will have on the personal funds of the defendant official. This paper considers the different role that qualified immunity may play in Bivens and other civil rights litigation. Empirical support for the proposition that qualified immunity plays a significant role in filed cases is limited and more recent data call it into question. Working from the assumption that qualified immunity plays less of a role in filed cases than has been assumed, this paper considers other ways in which the defense of qualified immunity may affect the course of constitutional litigation. In particular, this paper focuses on the role that qualified immunity may play in case screening and reports on the results of a qualitative survey of civil rights practitioners. The results suggest that lawyers often take qualified immunity into account at the case-screening stage and indeed may in some cases avoid litigation in which qualified immunity is even a potential issue. This observation has ramifications for the theory that qualified immunity enhances the law-announcing function of federal courts

Hiring and Firing the Mentally and Psychiatrically Disabled: Advice for HR Professionals

[Excerpt] According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), an estimated 26.2 percent of Americans aged eighteen and older suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. Contrary to what most people assume, mental disorders are the leading cause of disability in both the U.S. and Canada. Thus, the effect of mental disorders on the American workplace is significant. In an effort to ensure that physically and mentally disabled persons were not discriminated against in employment situations Congress passed the Americans with Disability Act (ADA). Persons entitled to its protection include those with physical disabilities and mental disorders such as anxiety disorder, depression, manic depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, and other psychological disorders. Almost immediately courts began interpreting the statute to make it difficult for those with disabilities, especially psychiatric disabilities, to prevail in cases claiming discrimination under the Act. As a result, Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Amendments Act (ADAAA) in 2008 with the express intent that courts should expand the definition of disabled individuals entitled to accommodation. In this article I will discuss the ramifications of the 2008 amendments on human resource professionals who are tasked with following its mandates when interviewing job applicants and managing employees who allege, or are suspected of having, a psychiatric disability

Reframing Libel - Taking All Rights Seriously and where it leads us

In preparing this paper, we have returned to first principles and re-evaluated fundamental aspects of libel law, its purposes, its substance, and its processes. Our thinking has been informed by, first, philosophical understandings of democracy and the public sphere and in particular the role of freedom of speech and of the media therein, and secondly, the social psychology of reputation and privacy. By doing this, we are able to ground some of the proposals for reform made previously by Index on Censorship, English PEN, Lord Lester, and others. We do so, however, not through the prism of an over-weaned emphasis on freedom of expression, but rather by triangulating the rights and interests of claimants, defendants, and the wider public. Ultimately, we recommend a coherent set of significant substantive and procedural reforms that if enacted would enhance access to justice and reduce costs for all but the most serious and/or most damaging libels. This involves the recommendation of the introduction of a two-track libel regim

A Rationale for Requiring Philosophy of Education in Preservice Teacher Programs

To develop a rationale for requiring a free-standing philosophy of education course in preservice teacher programs, the researchers reviewed prior literature to construct a framework to establish such a requirement. A review of required course content in non-Catholic (private and public) colleges and universities with preservice teacher programs in five Midwestern states in the United States revealed that most do not require such a course, hence the need for programs to reconsider how licensure candidates develop their teaching philosophies and review program articulation and course content. This study proposes a fourfold theoretical rationale for requiring philosophy of education of preservice teachers

What makes a good induction supporter?

The Teacher Induction Scheme, introduced in 2002, marked the first major change to new teacher induction in Scotland in 37 years. This paper gives an outline of these changes set against developments in mentoring theory in the wider context. It argues that the personal qualities of the induction supporter are crucial to developing an effective mentoring relationship. The views of student teachers are used to describe preferred characteristics of effective mentors and effective induction provision. A person specification is created by the comments of the "Class of 2002" — the first probationer teachers to have taken part in the Scheme

The Influence of Government Defenders on Affirmative Civil Rights Enforcement

The focus of this brief Article will be on a conundrum, particularly in the area of civil rights enforcement: the federal government—in particular the DOJ—can be one of the most efficient and powerful vindicators of civil rights, while at the same time one of the most effective advocates for imposing barriers to affirmative civil rights enforcement. At the same time that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division (CRD) is entering federal court to “vindicat[e] rights and remedy[] inequities,” attorneys in the Civil Division (either from Main Justice or in any number of U.S. Attorney’s offices) are appearing in court to prevent the same. No doubt the same observation applies to certain state governments that have active affirmative civil rights enforcement bodies while also maintaining well-resourced defensive litigation bureaus. For my purposes, this observation has important consequences. It might bear on the professional obligations of the government attorney who appears in a defensive posture, a topic that Bruce Green and others have addressed in many thoughtful articles. I will address some potential ethical implications toward the end of this Article, but it is not my principal focus because I am not convinced that that is where the solution lies. Instead, I want to concentrate on what the observation means for executive branch law enforcement priorities, how the dynamic impacts broad access-to-justice concerns, and the implications for institutional design. I am going to try to do so in four parts. First, this Article contrasts agenda setting in defensive bureaus with agenda setting in the affirmative posture. Part I compares the defensive positions taken in two extremely similar cases—Ashcroft v. Iqbal and Ziglar v. Abbasi—that were litigated by the DOJ across two different presidential administrations. This is to help illustrate (admittedly by anecdote) that, even while affirmative enforcement priorities can change significantly from one administration to the other, defensive litigating positions can remain remarkably stable. Parts II and III turn to showing what consequences this has in the context of civil rights enforcement. Part II starts with the DOJ’s affirmative bureaus themselves, with a focus on the CRD. The goal is to show that the defensive bureaus impact the work of the CRD in at least two ways: (1) by channeling enforcement priorities into areas that will not conflict with defensive litigating positions and (2) by making affirmative enforcement priorities more difficult to secure through the spread of transsubstantive doctrine that suppresses rights enforcement, even in the areas in which there are no conflicts with defensive positions. Part III moves beyond the direct impact on CRD because defensive litigation positions taken by the DOJ can also suppress affirmative rights enforcement by “private attorneys general,” enforcement that nonetheless is consistent with the affirmative priorities of Main Justice. Finally, Part IV offers some thoughts on what lessons we might draw from these observations. For the most part, I devote my attention to how institutional design might ameliorate the tensions I identify in this Article

Capitalizing on National Self-Interest: The Management of International Telecommunication Conflict by the International Telecommunication Union

This article will examine the potential for conflict and the need for international cooperation in the contemporary telecommunication industry, with a particular focus on the role of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in international conflict management. After addressing particular aspects of modern telecommunication which invite international conflict, the article will present an overview of the ITU as the principal instrumentality for maintaining world order in telecommunication. The Union\u27s importance in conflict prevention, dispute resolution, and arbitration will be analyzed in detail. Finally, this article will assess the success of the ITU in conflict management and evaluate the need for change in the ITU as it enters a new era of international telecommunication