The Territorial Exception to the Act of State Doctrine: Application to French Nationalization

This Note reaches the contrary conclusion that the French nationalization of American subsidiaries fits within the territorial exception to the act of state doctrine

Gamble v. United States: A Commentary

Under the judicially created dual-sovereignty exception, a defendant may be prosecuted by state and federal governments for the same conduct, due to the fact that the state and federal government constitute two separate sovereignties. The doctrine is grounded in the idea that each sovereign derives its power from independent sources—the federal government from the Constitution and the states from their inherent police power, preserved to them by the Tenth Amendment—and thus, each sovereign may determine what constitutes an offense against its peace and dignity in an exercise of its own sovereignty. Under this exception, defendants, by a single act, may violate the laws of both sovereigns and therefore be liable to prosecutions by both governments for the same conduct without their Fifth Amendment rights being infringed. This Commentary will proceed by examining the precedents behind the current separate-sovereigns doctrine and analyzing the anachronistic results they have produced. It concludes by arguing that although the Court will most likely not overrule the dual-sovereignty exception to the Double Jeopardy Clause, the Court should examine how the legal and factual underpinnings of the doctrine have changed and, ultimately, choose to overrule the exception

Arguments for exception in US security discourse

In his influential State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben proposes that, even in apparently liberal western democracies, the state will routinely use the contingency of national emergency to suspend civil liberties and justify expansion of military and police powers. We investigated rhetorical strategies deployed in the web pages of US security agencies, created or reformed in the aftermath of the 9/11 events, to determine whether they present argumentation conforming to Agamben’s model. To expose rhetorical content, we examined strategies operating at two levels within our corpus. Argument schemes and underlying warrants were identified through close examination of systematically selected core documents. Semantic fields establishing themes of threat and danger were also explored, using automatic corpus tools to expose patterns of lexical selection established across the whole corpus. The study recovered evidence of rhetoric broadly consistent with the logic predicted by State of Exception theory, but also presented nuanced findings whose interpretation required careful re-appraisal of core ideas within Agamben’s work

Entertaining Satan: Why We Tolerate Terrorist Incitement

Words are dangerous. That is why governments sometimes want to suppress speech. The law of free speech reflects a settled decision that, at the time that law was adopted, the dangers were worth tolerating. But people keep dreaming up nasty new things to do with speech. Recently, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and other terrorist organizations have employed a small army of Iagos on the internet to recruit new instruments of destruction. Some of what they have posted is protected speech under present First Amendment law. In response, scholars have suggested that there should be some new exception to the law of free speech. Thus far, no workable exception has been suggested

Developing a Consumer Right to Invoke the Boycott Exception to the Insurance Company Exemption from Federal Antitrust Laws

The McCarran-Ferguson Act provides that the business of insurance shall be subject to the laws of the several states which relate to the regulation or taxation of such business. The Act further provides that the business of insurance shall be exempt from federal antitrust laws if state regulation exists. However, an exception to this exemption exists in section 3(b) of the McCarran Act. Section 3(b) provides that nothing within the McCarran Act shall render the Sherman Act inapplicable to any agreement to boycott, coerce, or intimidate, or any act of boycott, coercion, or intimidation. Despite the seemingly clear statutory language of section 3(b), the trend of judicial construction of this statute until recently had been to narrow substantially this exception to the federal antitrust exemption. Note examines the legislative history of section 3(b) of the McCarran-Ferguson Act, the authorities which provided the traditional narrow interpretation of the boycott exception, and the effects of the Barry and Proctor decisions on insurance companies and consumers

Miniaturized haploscope for testing binocular vision

Device can reproduce virtually all binocular stimulus conditions (target configuration, vergence angle, and accommodative distance) used to test binocular performance. All subsystems of electronic controls are open-loop and solid-state-controlled and, with the exception of vergence angle drive, utilize dc stepping motors as prime movers. Arrangement is also made for readouts of each variable