The Politics of Preclearance

This Essay examines recent charges of political motivation against the Department of Justice and its enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. These accusations appear well-deserved, on the strength of the Department\u27s recent handling of the Texas redistricting submission and Georgia\u27s voting identification requirement. This Essay reaches two conclusions. First, it is clear that Congress wished to secure its understanding of the Act into the future through its preclearance requirement. Many critics of the voting rights bill worried about the degree of discretion that the legislation accorded the Attorney General. Supporters worried as well, for this degree of discretion might lead to under-enforcement of the Act. Yet Congress chose not to act on those concerns while placing the Department of Justice at the center of its voting rights revolution. By and large, this is the way that the Supreme Court has understood the Department\u27s role. Second, the currently available data do not support the charge that politics has played a central role in the Department\u27s enforcement of its preclearance duties. This conclusion holds true for preclearance decisions up until the Clinton years. The data are ambiguous with respect to the Justice Department of President George W. Bush

The Politics of Preclearance

This Essay examines recent charges of political motivation against the Department of Justice and its enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. These accusations appear well-deserved, on the strength of the Department\u27s recent handling of the Texas redistricting submission and Georgia\u27s voting identification requirement. This Essay reaches two conclusions. First, it is clear that Congress wished to secure its understanding of the Act into the future through its preclearance requirement. Many critics of the voting rights bill worried about the degree of discretion that the legislation accorded the Attorney General. Supporters worried as well, for this degree of discretion might lead to under-enforcement of the Act. Yet Congress chose not to act on those concerns while placing the Department of Justice at the center of its voting rights revolution. By and large, this is the way that the Supreme Court has understood the Department\u27s role. Second, the currently available data do not support the charge that politics has played a central role in the Department\u27s enforcement of its preclearance duties. This conclusion holds true for preclearance decisions up until the Clinton years. The data are ambiguous with respect to the Justice Department of President George W. Bush

Fusing drug enforcement: a study of the El Paso Intelligence Center

This article examines the evolution of the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC), a key intelligence component of the Drug Enforcement Administration, to shed light on fusion efforts in drug enforcement. Since 1974, EPIC has strived to fuse the resources and capabilities of multiple government agencies to counter drug trafficking and related threats along the Southwest US border. While undergoing a steady growth, the Center has confronted a host of challenges that illuminate the uses and limits of multi-agency endeavors in drug enforcement. An evaluative study of the Center shows that it is well aligned with the federal government priorities in the realm of drug enforcement; however the extent to which the Center’s activities support the government’s efforts in this domain is not so clear. The Center needs to improve the way it reviews its own performance to better adapt and serve its customers

Whose Law of Personal Jurisdiction? The Choice of Law Problem in the Recognition of Foreign Judgements

It is black-letter law that in order to recognize and enforce a foreign judgment, the rendering court must have had personal jurisdiction over the defendant. While the principle is clear, it is an open question as to whose law governs the question of personal jurisdiction: that of the rendering court or that of the recognizing court. In other words, is the foreign court\u27s jurisdiction over the defendant governed by foreign law (the law of F1), domestic law (the law of F2), or some combination thereof? While courts have taken a number of different approaches, it seems that many courts regard foreign law as relevant to the question of whether the foreign court possessed personal jurisdiction over the defendant. In this Article, I argue that U.S. courts should not be looking to foreign law (in whole or in part) to determine whether a foreign court had jurisdiction over the defendant in the original action. I present five arguments in support of this contention: (1) there is no statutory authority pointing to the application of foreign law; (2) U.S. courts are not well-positioned to apply foreign jurisdictional law; (3) re-examining assertions of jurisdiction under foreign law violates international comity, (4) an examination of foreign law is usually unnecessary because jurisdiction is also assessed according to U.S. standards; and (5) U.S. courts do not do a good job applying foreign jurisdictional law. Instead, I argue that courts should apply American law to assess whether a foreign court was jurisdictionally competent. This, in turn, raises the question: What is American law? I maintain that courts should apply broad federal standards of jurisdiction, and not state-based ones, to determine whether the rendering court had personal jurisdiction over the defendant. This Article also looks closely at two particular areas of jurisdiction law that are particularly complicated as they relate to the choice of law issue: submission and notice. With respect to submission, U.S. courts seem to be unclear as to whose law applies in assessing whether a defendant in a foreign action submitted to the jurisdiction of the foreign court. In particular, many U.S. courts defer to the foreign court\u27s interpretations as to whether the acts of the defendant constituted submission. With respect to notice, there is a lack of clarity as to how notice relates to personal jurisdiction in the context of the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments. Here too, there is confusion as to whose law of notice applies in assessing whether a defendant received adequate notice of the proceeding. Consistent with the argument above, this Article takes the position that U.S. standards, and not foreign ones, should ultimately guide the submission and notice inquiries in the recognition context. Finally, because much of the law in this area is codified in either the 1962 Uniform Foreign Money-Judgments Recognition Act or the 2005 Uniform Foreign-Country Money Judgments Recognition Act, I propose concrete changes to the language of the uniform acts that would address the choice of law problem in the recognition of foreign judgments and would clarify the intersection between notice and personal jurisdiction in the uniform acts

Access to Medicines: the Role of Intellectual property Law and Policy

Intellectual property (IP) policy is an important structural determinant of health. Patent policy influences the rate and direction of innovation for health, playing a positive or negative role depending on how it is shaped and implemented. Patent policy also has critical implications for access to existing medicines and medical technologies. This has been illustrated most dramatically in the context of the global Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)/ Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) pandemic. Prices for a three-drug combination of anti-retroviral (ARV) HIV therapy in 2000 from patent-holding companies exceeded USD $10,000 per person per year, ensuring that treatment could not be extended to the vast majority of those living with HIV around the world. Generic competition led to precipitous price reductions, so that today treatment can be provided for less than USD$75 per person per year. This history has contributed to the growing recognition that strong patent law applied to pharmaceuticals in developing countries undermines access to medicines and compromises the human right to health. While the relationship between IP and innovation is covered in a separate paper, it is worth noting here that there is little reason to expect that stronger patent rights in developing countries will lead to any substantial offsetting gains in innovation for the affected countries. Developing countries represent a very small share of the world’s pharmaceutical market, meaning that the marginal added value of stronger patent protection will be small, and is unlikely to outweigh the costs to access

NAFTA\u27s Labor Side Accord: A Three-Year Accounting

[Excerpt] Any number of idealized social charters with universal standards and swift, powerful enforcement powers could be drafted by critics of the labor side agreement. But the NAALC was negotiated by sovereign governments with clashing business, labor, and political concerns. The result is a hybrid agreement, one that preserves sovereignty but creates mutual obligations and combines broad cooperation and consultation programs alongside contentious review, evaluation, and dispute resolution mechanisms. Most of all, the NAALC promotes engagement on labor rights and labor standards in an experiment not tested in any other international forum

Fatal Gaps: How Missing Records in the Federal Background Check System Put Guns in the Hands of Killers

This report analyzes newly released FBI data showing millions of records identifying seriously mentally ill people and drug abusers are missing from the NICS database because of lax state reporting. The data also show that 52 of 61 federal agencies that are required to submit records have not done so. The 50-state analysis identifies which states are best and worst at reporting, and examines the strategies that have helped some states succeed