Court Statute Research Articles

The International Islamic Court of Justice: Towards an International Islamic Legal System?

The present article describes the dispute settlement system of the Organization of the Islamic Conference through the envisaged creation of the International Islamic Court of Justice. The Court's Statute, adopted in 1987, considers the Islamic Shari'ah or Islamic law as the fundamental law to be applied by the Court for the resolution of international disputes. Therefore, the Court will have a religious character considering a local religious code as the primary applicable law. The International Islamic Court of Justice has not yet been set up. Its creation might have the effect of grouping Islamic states under the same international judicial system, and of causing a strong political impact in respect of the relations with the State of Israel and of the Palestinian question.

Statutes in Court: The History and Theory of Statutory Interpretation

Journal Article Statutes in Court: The History and Theory of Statutory Interpretation. By William D. Popkin. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. x, 340 pp. $54.95, ISBN 0-8223-2328-1.) Get access Gordon Morris Bakken Gordon Morris Bakken California State University, Fullerton, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 87, Issue 3, December 2000, Pages 1114–1115, https://doi.org/10.2307/2675417 Published: 01 December 2000

Statutes in Court: The History and Theory of Statutory Interpretation

Statutes in Court: The History and Theory of Statutory Interpretation

The First Five Sessions of the UN Preparatory Commission for the International Criminal Court

On June 30, 2000, at the conclusion of its fifth session, the Preparatory Commission for the International Criminal Court (Preparatory Commission or commission) completed the first phase of its work with the adoption of draft Elements of Crimes and Rules of Procedure and Evidence (Rules). The first five sessions took place from February 16 to 26, July 26 to August 13, and November 29 to December 17,1999, and from March 13 to 31, and J u n e 12 to 30, 2000.On July 17, 1998, the United Nations Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of the International Criminal Court (Diplomatic Conference) had adopted the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Statute). At the same time, it decided “to take all possible measures to ensure the coming into operation of the International Criminal Court without undue delay and to make the necessary arrangements for the commencement of its functions,” purposes for which it established the Preparatory Commission.

Statutes in court: the history and theory of statutory interpretation

How do judges determine the meaning of laws? The extent to which judges should exercise their discretion in interpreting legislation has been a contentious issue throughout American history, involving questions about the balance of power between the legislature and the judiciary. In Statutes in Court William D. Popkin provides an indispensable survey of the history of American statutory interpretation and then offers his own theory of ordinary judging that defines the proper scope of judicial discretion. Popkin begins by discussing the British origins of statutory interpretation in this country. He then maps the evolving conceptions of the judicial role in the United States from Revolutionary times through the twentieth century before presenting his ordinary judging theory - one that asks the judge to use modest judicial discretion to assist the legislature in implementing good government. Claiming that theory cannot account for everything a judge does when determining statutory meaning or writing an opinion, Popkin shows how judges who strive to be conscientious in interpreting the law are often hampered by the lack of both a framework in which to fit their approach and a well-understood common vocabulary to explain what they do. Statutes in Court fills that gap. This work will be valuable to anyone concerned about the judicial role in the interpretation of laws - from judiciary officials and law professors to legal historians and political scientists.

The Privatization of Public Domain?

COURT CASES The legal publishing field offers a prime example of attempts to privatize public domain materials. On May 19, 1997, District Judge John S. Martin, Jr., handed down his decision in Matthew Bender & Co. v. West Publishing Company, which also included Hyperlaw, Inc. v. West Publishing Company. The question before the Court was the extent of the copyright protection available to West Publishing with regard to Supreme Court and Appeals Courts opinions published in its reporter series. Do "the changes West makes to an opinion, either singly or in combination, represent a sufficient creative effort to warrant copyright protection"? Hyperlaw publishes CD-ROM products including ones of recent Supreme Court cases and recent Circuit Court of Appeals cases. Most cases are obtained from other than West sources, but some are scanned from West. Those scanned from West do not include the headnotes or key numbers. Hyperlaw intended to expand its product so that users could see the full text of any case cited in the opinion being viewed. That would mean scanning up to 75% of West's cases. The court agreed with Hyperlaw that it copies the decisions and not West's compilation (i.e., West's arrangement of the cases, indices, headnotes, and selection of cases). It characterized West's changes to each opinion as "trivial." The court held that West had "no copyright interest in those elements of the reported opinions which Hyperlaw is copying and intends to copy, Hyperlaw is entitled to a judgment that its copying on [sic] the opinions from the West reports does not violate West's copyrights." West appealed this decision to the Second Circuit, which affirmed the District Court's decision on November 3, 1998. The Second Circuit summed up the lower court's case as follows: "Bender's complaint sought a judgment declaring that star pagination [Author's note: i.e., shows West's page breaks] to West's case reporters will not copy West's arrangement or infringe West's copyright. HyperLaw intervened seeking the same relief." The District Court concluded that the insertion of star pagination to West's reporters "wouLd not reproduce any protectable element of West's compilation." The text of a court opinion is not copyrightable. "The court further ruled that star pagination would be permitted under the fair use doctrine even if West's pagination were copyrightable." The Second Circuit then explained that West's reporters are compilations. Copyright in compilations only covers materials contributed by the author, not the preexisting material included in the work. The Court looked to Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service (199I), the "seminal Supreme Court decision on copyrights in compilations." The Court reiterated that copyright does not extend to the facts themselves. It quoted the Supreme Court in Feist: "'Notwithstanding a valid copyright, a subsequent compiler remains free to use the facts contained in another's publication to aid in preparing a competing work, so long as the competing work does not feature the same selection and arrangement.'" The Second Circuit therefore held that "Bender and HyperLaw will not infringe West's copyright by inserting star pagination to West's case reporters in their CD-ROM disc version of judicial opinions." Considering Matthew Bender's stance in its lawsuit against West, it is ironic that the year 2000 finds Matthew Bender and Jurisline.com filing Complaints against one another over Jurisline.com's use of court opinions and statutes taken from Matthew Bender's Lexis Law On Disc (a division of Reed Elsevier). Matthew Bender's Complaint, filed in the New York Supreme Court, brings an action for fraud and breach of contract. It claims that Jurisline.com fraudulently obtained Lexis CD-ROMs through "misrepresentation, false pretenses and deceit" and violated restrictions and prohibitions of the access and use access license provisions. Lexis Law On Disc "provides attorneys with comprehensive, reliable, easily used and continuously updated

Inviting Congressional Action: A Study of Supreme Court Motivations in Statutory Interpretation

Theory: The Supreme Court's occasional to Congress to reverse the Court's statutory decisions challenge two influential theories of the Court's behavior and thus merit attention. Hypotheses: Three altemative explanations for invitations are posited: low interest in certain cases on the part of the justices, a desire to maintain the Court's institutional standing, and a desire to achieve both good policy and good law. Methods: These altemative explanations are tested through a logit analysis of the Court's statutory decisions in the 1986 through 1990 terms; the dependent variable is the presence or absence of what we call a strong invitation to Congress in the majority opinion. Results: The results of the analysis give greatest support to the hypothesis that justices have an interest in achieving both good policy and good law. This finding underlines the need to take the Court's invitations into account in the debate over the impact of legal and policy considerations on Supreme Court decisions.

On Rogers Smith's Civic Ideals

Rogers Smith's Civic Ideals is a grand project and an impressive achievement. As one expects from Smith's work, it combines scholarship and moral seriousness, and the effort to relate theory to practice, the present to the past. Notable for Smith's command of the details of policy – court decisions, statutes, and administrative history – Civic Ideals is also an invitation to rethink the nature of the United States as a political society, an inquiry into our political identity and purpose.

The International Criminal Court Statute: Jurisdiction and Admissibility

The International Criminal Court Statute: Jurisdiction and Admissibility

The Confounding Common Law Originalism in Recent Supreme Court Statutory Interpretation: Implications for the Legislative History Debate and Beyond

The Confounding Common Law Originalism in Recent Supreme Court Statutory Interpretation: Implications for the Legislative History Debate and Beyond

Investigation, Trial and Appeal in the International Criminal Court Statute (Parts V, VI, VIII)

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General Principles of Criminal Law in the International Criminal Court Statute (Part III)

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Investigation, Trial and Appeal in the International Criminal Court Statute (Parts V, VI, VIII)

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Discontinuance in the International Court: The Enigma of the Nuclear Tests Cases

ANALYSIS of and commentary upon the work of the International Court have a tendency to overlook the fact that the Court is a collegiate court, whose pronouncements form the conclusion of a structured decisionmaking process conducted in accordance with the provisions of the Court's Statute and Rules of Procedure.' To a lesser extent this is also regulated by the Court's internal judicial practice, which governs the Court's deliberations and drafting procedure.2 Should the Court, without warrant, depart from the requirements imposed by these provisions, questions may arise as to whether justice was properly administered. It is perhaps not surprising that commentators have tended to overlook the influence of procedure on the discharge of the judicial function and on the content of the Court's pronouncements. The classical accounts of judicial reasoning-such as Cardozo, Hutcheson and Levi3-explain the role of the judge in isolation, detached from his institutional surrounding and functioning in a juristic vacuum, freed from the restraints imposed by the requirements of evidence and procedure. This concentration on the text of the decision tends to confuse the outcome of the judicial processthe judgment-with the process of judgment itself, but this view has been influential in casting the received perception of the International Court and in forming the standard attitude to the judicial role and the authority of its judgments.4

The political economy of supreme court constitutional decisions: The case of Roosevelt's court-packing plan

U.S. Supreme Court constitutional decisions are perhaps the most powerful way of designing public policy. While a president may veto congressional legislation, or Congress may reverse a Supreme Court statutory decision, the reversal of a Supreme Court constitutional decision requires an explicit constitutional amendment. Constitutional amendments have to be ratified by state legislatures and can be initiated either by Congress or by the state legislatures. Until this date, however, all amendments to the U.S. Constitution have been initiated by Congress. Article V of the Constitution requires that constitutional amendments initiated by Congress have the support of two-thirds of each house and that to be ratified, amendments must have the support of at least three-fourths of the state legislatures.’ Constitutional amendments, then, demand a substantial political consensus and, consequently, are not easily implemented.? The difficulties in achieving a political consensus to overturn a Supreme Court constitutional decision suggest that the Supreme Court may have substantial discretion in the interpretation of the Constitution, and, furthermore, that changes in the ideological composition of the Supreme Court may have a large impact on Supreme Court decisions. In this paper we develop a theory of Supreme Court constitutional decisions following the approach developed in Gely and Spiller (1990) for statutory deci-

A Rational Choice Theory of Supreme Court Statutory Decisions with Applications to the <italic>State Farm</italic> and <italic>Grove City</italic> Cases

A Rational Choice Theory of Supreme Court Statutory Decisions with Applications to the <italic>State Farm</italic> and <italic>Grove City</italic> Cases

Policymaking and the Modern Court: When do Supreme Court Rulings Prevail?

VAILABLE research offers strikingly different images of the Supreme Court's success as a policy-maker. On one hand, some accounts depict the Supreme Court as a powerful policy-maker, whose rulings are rarely overturned. Only six to nine Constitutional amendments have overturned specific Court rulings (Abraham 1980: 351-58; Library of Congress 1973: 1789-97, 1983: S332-33). Despite periodic Court-curbing efforts in Congress (Nagel 1965; Handberg and Hill 1980), the Court's supporters have usually blocked efforts to overturn specific rulings or to limit the Court's appellate jurisdiction (Adamany and Grossman 1983; Schmidhauser and Berg 1972). Indeed, several unpopular rulings, such as the school prayer decisions (Weissberg 1976: 121-26) have prevailed for long periods of time. Still other accounts, however, challenge this image of a uniformly successful Court. Several authors argue that Congress often revises the Court's statutory construction (Dahl 1957; Harvard Law Review 1958; Handberg and Hill 1980; Krislov 1965: 143; Murphy 1962; Nagel 1969; Pritchett 1961; Stumpf 1965; Ulmer 1960). Other authors contend that the Court seldom successfully defies Congress and mass public opinion (Dahl 1957; Ulmer 1960). Many accounts provide instances of rulings which were ignored or reinterpreted by lower federal or state courts (Harvard Law Review 1954; Johnson 1979; Murphy 1959; Sheldon 1974: 197), by administrative agencies (Shapiro 1968), or by local officials (Barth 1968; Becker 1969; Becker and Feeley 1973; Birkby 1966; Canon 1974; Dolbeare and Hammond 1971; Goldman and Jahnige 1985: 221-22; Patric 1957; Wasby, D'Amato, and Metrailer 1977). The Supreme Court itself may also overrule, erode, distinguish, or otherwise abandon its own rulings (Blaustein and Field 1958; Burnet v. Coronado Gas and Oil Co., 1932; Douglas 1949; Library of Congress 1973, 1983; Murphy 1972: 146-63).

Timeliness of the contents of certain legal publications

Abstract Librarians and lawyers depend on the publishers of legal materials to provide quick access to the court opinions, statutes, and regulations needed for legal research. There has been no systematic study, however, of the comparative speed with which legal publications provide the text of legal documents to users. This article presents a statistical analysis of the performance of certain commonly used legal publications, measured by the time elapsed from the issuance of a legal document to the receipt by a library of a publication containing that document. The article concludes that some of the truisms of legal research (that, for instance, official reporters of court opinions are always slower than commercially published reporters) are questionable, and that more extensive and refined statistical analysis is needed to ascertain the efficiency of the legal publication system.

Remaking Conception and Pregnancy: How the Laws Influence Reproductive Technology

Recent developments in infertility treatment now make it possible for a child to have up to five parents-a sperm donor, egg donor, surrogate who carries the pregnancy, and the couple who raise the child. As more actors get involved in the drama of reproduction, the law is increasingly called upon to sort out the rights and responsibilities of the participants. But the implications of court cases and statutes in this area go far beyond the one in six couples who are infertile. The policy decisions that society makes about alternative reproduction will influence reproductive rights generally and will influence the structure of the family and the role of women in the twenty-first century.

STATUTORY INTERPRETATIONS OF THE SUPREME COURT

Studies of the Supreme Court-Congressional relationship have concentrated on the interaction that occurs between the two institutions in constitutional policy areas while ignoring the presumably more routine aspects of the relationship involving statutory issues. This article focuses on the less visible side of Court-Congressional interaction by examining Congress' response to the Court's interpretations of labor and antitrust statutes. Patterns of reaction are delineated, and several hypotheses linking Congressional response to characteristics of the Court's decision are tested. Factors such as the unanimity and direction of the Court's decision, which are often thought to have some bearing on the response of other political actors to the Court, do not, however, provide clear-cut explanations for Congressional reaction to the Court's statutory decisions. Striking differences are found between the labor and antitrust policy areas, suggesting that those who study judicial impact need to be careful in generalizing about the variables and conditions that affect response to the Court.