The Role of International Human Rights Law and Comprehensive Historical Methodology in Resolving the Conflict between Positive Law and Natural Law Theories

An age-old dispute persists over a fundamental problem of jurisprudence: what makes law law at its greatest level of generality ("Law").' There have been many schools of thought on the subject. Two of the major ones integral to solving the problem-positive law and natural law theories-have been locked in a battle royal for centuries.2 Disengaging and reconciling them so as to inform the concept of Law is this article's central agenda

For Recognition of a Peoples' Right to U.N. Authorized Armed Intervention to Stop Mass Atrocities

This Article calls for recognition under international law of a conditional peoples' right to United Nations (U.N.) authorized armed intervention to stop mass atrocities. The condition is that non-violent strategies must have failed or must reasonably be expected to fail in achieving this goal. If recognized, the new right will for the first time place power to obtain armed intervention in the people who are most at risk and impose a correlative duty on the U.N. to provide that intervention in qualifying cases. The right will concomitantly lift people out of the passivity of victimhood and make them active agents of their own deliverance-an amelioration consistent with and furthering human dignity. Juridically, the new right stands on remarkably strong ground. This Article relies on standard legal reasoning to discern compelling bases for the right within no less than three different categories of international law, i.e., human rights law, jus in bello, and jus ad bellum. To give the new right optimal leverage, this Article also urges certain structural reforms in the U.N. system. These include the addition of thematic mandates dedicated to stopping mass atrocities and the creation of another U.N. court, this one limited exclusively to reviewing and countermanding, where appropriate, Security Council deadlocks over or rejections of armed interventions thwarting mass atrocities

The Plot to Overthrow Genocide: State Laws Mandating Education about the Foulest Crime of ALl

2 This Article shines a light on a little noticed phenomenon in American law: the promulgation of ten state statutes and one state regulation, each requiring education about genocide in elementary and/or secondary schools. The mandates, adopted from 1989 through 2018, appear to be only the beginning inasmuch as in 2017 another nineteen states publicly pledged to pass such mandates as well

Nuclear Weapons' Negation of the Rule of Law

This Article demonstrates that nuclear weapons are inconsistent with and destructive of the rule of law. Of course, use of nuclear weapons would completely abrogate any extant rule of law in regions subject to nuclear attack. That much is obvious, though hardly ever considered. The Article's other theses are much less intuitive and focus on the United States in its role as a colossus among nuclear armed nations. Due to some little-known political history and the myths it has engendered, the rule of law, ab initio, has never applied to the Commander in Chief's power to decide on using, or his or her actual use of, nuclear weapons. This means that, during every moment of every day, the President's mere ownership of a boundless destructive power has no legal or rule of law guardrails. Finally, the President's sole possession of the nuclear prerogative, or implementation of it, profoundly undermines the rule of law by thwarting the Constitution's commitment to democratic governance, especially over matters of national defense

We Had a Dream in Brown v. Board of Education

Article published in the Detroit College of Law Review

Anthology of Articles Based on Presentations at Symposium on Whether the United States Should Become a Party to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child

Article published in the Michigan State International Law Review

Spare the Rod, Embrace Our Humanity: Toward a New Legal Regime Prohibiting Corporal Punishment of Children

This article proceeds from the simple premise that hitting children hurts them-even when the hitting does not rise to the level of child abuse as traditionally conceived. There is convincing evidence that corporal punishment is a hidden cruelty in child rearing that has serious adverse consequences for its victims and society at large. Yet forty-nine states permit parental corporal punishment of children and approximately half of the states permit such punishment in elementary and secondary schools The main purpose of this Article is to question the advisability of continuing the legalized status of corporal punishment of children in the United States, especially when the punishment is administered by parents or guardians The Article presents a new framework for analysis by surveying the laws of those countries and the one state that have prohibited all corporal punishment of children and by examining international human rights instruments that may be interpreted to support such laws. The Article also explores the psychological, sociological, and ethical considerations warranting prohibition and presents a new proposal for law reform on the subject

Of Originalism, Reality, and a Constitutional Right to Education

Article published in the Northwestern University Law Review