The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (“FSIA”) is the primary domestic statute codifying foreign sovereign immunity—the immunity that foreign nations enjoy in U.S. courts. With scattered exceptions, questions involving foreign immunity outside of FSIA are matters of federal common law. Those questions include foreign-official immunity, whose importance has increased dramatically as the international travel of foreign… Continue reading →
The creation of the federal courts was an exercise in nation-building. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention worried that unduly expansive federal jurisdiction would suggest mistrust of, and eventually eclipse, state courts. An elusive quest to ensure impartiality pulled in the opposite direction, with the specter of state-court bias against out-of-state defendants animating the desire to… Continue reading →
In trying to promote innovation and competition in pharmaceutical drugs, America has allowed the pharmaceutical industry to increase prices well beyond what other developed countries pay and the market should bear. While a majority of Americans say that prescription drugs have made their lives better in the last ten years, nearly 80% find the price… Continue reading →
California has a rich and varied stock of water resources, which has enabled it to survive years of drought. But although scientists have long known that surface and groundwater are interdependent (both for recharge and with respect to pollution), the state has treated the state’s surface water and groundwater as legally and institutionally separate resources.… Continue reading →
When Governor Jerry Brown signed California’s drug transparency law, Senate Bill 17 (SB-17), in 2017, the state took a crucial first step towards increased transparency and accountability in a landscape of skyrocketing prescription-drug prices. Not only does SB-17 require drug manufacturers and health insurers to disclose information about rising prescription-drug prices, but it also represents… Continue reading →
The United States remains the world’s largest foreign-aid donor yet lacks a coordinated system of guidelines and protections to ensure that the aid does more good than harm. Professor Naomi Roht-Arriaza investigates this problem in “Safeguarding Development: Risk Reduction in U.S. Government Foreign Aid and Investment Facilitation Beyond the Current Patchwork,” a new paper published… Continue reading →
As all lawyers remember fondly from civil procedure, personal jurisdiction under the modern “minimum contacts” approach protects defendants from being haled into remote forums with which they have no substantial connection. It normally has no significance for plaintiffs. Plaintiffs, after all, consent to litigation in the forum by bringing suit there. But is that always… Continue reading →
In “Mourning King: The Civil Rights Movement and the Fight for Economic Justice,” recently published in the journal New Labor Forum, Reuel Schiller takes on the commonly espoused view that Martin Luther King’s assassination undermined the use of the Civil Rights Movement as a vehicle for broader efforts to combat multiracial economic equality. King was,… Continue reading →
In her forthcoming book Yesterday’s Monsters (UC Press, Feb. 2020), my colleague Hadar Aviram examines the members of the Manson family and their journey through and impact on the criminal-justice system. Unlike other books about these infamous individuals, Professor Aviram uses the stories of Charles Manson and his followers as a starting point to study… Continue reading →
Malcolm Feeley is a widely respected—and, indeed, beloved—criminologist, who has had an extraordinary influence on the discipline as well as on the many scholars who came within his orbit. Cambridge has just published a collection of essays in his honor that highlights the extraordinary range and subtlety of his work. Titled “The Legal Process and… Continue reading →
