American and Brazilian courts are traveling quite different paths regarding the question of racial justice. Race neutrality has become an influential interpretive approach in both jurisdictions, a perspective that articulates a depiction of these nations as culturally homogenous societies with the defense of liberal principles as a necessary requirement for social cohesion. Because of the representation of Brazil and the United States as democracies that facilitate integration of all racial groups, courts in these countries have developed an equal protection approach that combines the rhetoric of assimilation and formal equality. However, while the discourse of race neutrality gains continuous political force in the United States, race consciousness is acquiring increasing persuasive power in Brazil. As the implementation of affirmative action programs has expanded into different sectors, various social actors have questioned their constitutionality. Although state and federal courts in Brazil have condemned affirmative action because it supposedly subverts liberal principles and moral consensus about equal racial treatment, the Brazilian Supreme Court has recently classified race neutrality as a strategy of racial domination. Differently from American affirmative action cases, this decision formulated a notion of citizenship that functions as a counterhegemonic narrative. In articulating progressive constitutional principles and a group-oriented equal protection perspective, the Brazilian Supreme Court has significantly contributed to the deconstruction of the traditional discourse of race transcendence. The Court’s decisions may serve as an interesting point of comparison for the debate about affirmative action in the United States, since Brazilian history shows very clearly how race neutrality allows majoritarian groups to defend racial privilege while advocating formal equality as a way to promote social inclusion.

This paper is a review of Gerardo Pisarello’s book, Procesos Constituyentes: Caminos para la Ruptura Democratica. This book examines constitution-making as a global phenomenon, both from a historical and comparative perspective. The author of this paper proposes that a more decisive move from the descriptive to the normative would have been desirable, but concludes that Pisarello’s book should become an obligatory point of reference for all scholars.

This bibliography covers private international law or conflict of laws in a broad sense. In particular, it covers judicial or adjudicatory jurisdiction, prescriptive jurisdiction, choice of forum, choice of law, federal-state conflicts, recognition and enforcement of sister-state and foreign-country judgments, extraterritoriality, arbitration and related topics. It includes books and law journal articles published in English during 2015, or earlier but not included in the 2014 bibliography. It does not include articles or essays published in books (as opposed to journals), or writings appearing only in electronic form.

According to the common understanding, tort law is the branch of private law whose set of positive rules, institutions, and procedures aims to shift the costs of accidents from the victim to a different subject. Similar accounts of tort law are widespread and uncontested, yet they fail to do justice to the overall role tort law plays in societies. Tort law does not live in legislatures, law firms, courts, and law books only. It also lives “in the shadow” of the official system of adjudication: in the offices of insurance companies; in people's notions about injury and risk, responsibility and justice; in the languages and images associated with law in mass-generated popular culture; as well as in public debates about what values should be protected and promoted, at what costs, and at the expense of whom. On the assumption that tort law is at the same time a product and a constituent of the very cultural framework in which it is embedded, the aim of this paper is to explore its cultural dimensions in a broad comparative perspective. Combining insights from legal anthropology, socio-legal literature, legal history, and comparative law, the article tries to understand the role that, in Western and non-Western legal traditions, tort law plays in responding to, and managing social conflicts. In this perspective, the paper studies the cultural frameworks that sustain the adjudication process outside and inside the courtrooms, and analyzes how notions, practices, and remedies of tort law “in action” vary across different social and cultural settings. It then puts forward some conclusions about the extent to which tort law notions, ideas, concepts, categorizations, and perceptions influence and, reciprocally, are influenced by the cultural framework of which they are an expression.

Guaranties and suretyships reduce the risk of default and today remain essential arrangements in many commercial and consumer transactions. A guarantor or surety promises to pay for the debt of a third party and may become primarily liable on that debt. Despite the significance of such a promise and the resulting obligation, U.S. law does not clearly distinguish between a guarantor and surety in a consumer or commercial context. This is of particular relevance, because in a consumer context a guaranty often has a gratuitous or sentimental element and a guarantor may not always be fully aware of the risks and liabilities involved with a guarantee promise. U.S. law generally considers guaranties and suretyships simply as third-party beneficiary contracts to which common law contract principles apply. This, in turn, makes guaranties and suretyships primarily a state law concern, resulting in significant differences of suretyship laws among all U.S. jurisdictions. As such, the U.S. lacks a uniform body of law in this area and makes consumer protection in a guaranty and suretyship context perfunctory at best.

In thinking about fidelity and change in constitutional interpretation, many have framed the basic choice as being between originalism and living constitutionalism. Consider, for example, Jack M. Balkin’s Living Originalism, Robert W. Bennett and Lawrence B. Solum’s Constitutional Originalism: A Debate, and John O. McGinnis and Michael B. Rappaport’s Originalism and the Good Constitution. I shall argue for the superiority of what Ronald Dworkin called “moral readings of the Constitution” and what what Sotirios A. Barber and I have called a “philosophic approach” to constitutional interpretation. By “moral reading” and “philosophic approach,” I refer to conceptions of the Constitution as embodying abstract moral and political principles – not codifying concrete historical rules or practices – and of interpretation of those principles as requiring normative judgments about how they are best understood – not merely historical research to discover relatively specific original meanings.I shall argue that Dworkin’s and my conceptions of fidelity and change are superior to those of originalism in its many varieties. For our moral readings enable us to see what originalisms (besides Balkin’s) obscure or deny: that one of the main purposes of the Constitution is to exhort us to change in order to honor our aspirational principles and affirmatively to pursue good things like the ends proclaimed in the Preamble. Thus, the aspiration to fidelity requires rather than forbids change. But it does so in the name of honoring our commitments and building out our framework of constitutional self-government with coherence, integrity, and responsibility, rather than in the name of “updating” a “living” constitution. It aims for something better than preventing “rot,” as Scalia famously put it. I shall attempt to make good on these claims by arguing that moral readings help us better understand the Constitution as both a framework for change and a charter of aspirations to which we owe fidelity. They enable us to see how the multiple modalities of argument in constitutional interpretation (including original public meaning and precedent), rather than preventing change, are sites in which we argue about, and sources through which we justify, change: in particular, how best to realize and thus to be faithful to our constitutional aspirations. Or, as Dworkin put it, how to interpret the Constitution so as to make it the best it can be.In sum, my topic is fidelity without originalism and change without living constitutionalism. I also ponder the reasons for the grip of originalism in our constitutional culture as contrasted with its rejection elsewhere. I shall suggest that the reasons commonly offered in fact demonstrate the grip of the aspiration to fidelity, not the grip of originalism itself. And I shall contend that those reasons in fact show the need for a moral reading or philosophic approach that conceives fidelity as redeeming the promise of our constitutional commitments, not an authoritarian originalist conception of fidelity as following the relatively specific original meaning (or original expected applications) of the Constitution.

The United States legal system seeks to prevent and prohibit and corruption through a myriad of laws, regulations and policies. Anti-corruption jurisprudence is more developed in the context of public sector contracts where the United States criminalizes of public officials through 18 U.S.C. § 201 (Bribery of Public Officials and Witnesses). In addition, the United States was the first country to criminalize of foreign government officials in 1977 with the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The FCPA has since been amended to comply with the adoption of the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (the OECD Convention). The FCPA does not have a private right of action, but FCPA investigations and convictions have led to collateral civil actions, and it is predicted that as FCPA prosecutions increase in number, such collateral FCPA actions will also continue to increase. There is no federal law prohibiting private sector per se, but thirty-seven states have enacted commercial bribery statutes that criminalize and corruption on the state level. In addition, at the federal level, there are a variety of criminal and civil statutes that allow private parties to address corruption, including, but not limited to, mail and wire fraud statutes, securities and anti-trust laws, and the Travel Act. Furthermore, federal government contracts can be voided under certain criminal conflict of interest statutes. Finally, there are contract law principles that have found utility in instances where a contract has been tainted due to actual or potential breach of fiduciary duty, such as illegality, public policy, and unclean hands.

Contracts can be regulated through either ex ante mandatory rules or ex post default rules. Most explanations for why particular classes of contract should be regulated in one manner or the other study microeconomic features of the transactions at issue. The focus is on the dynamics by which terms are privately set, and there is little attention to differences between prospective parties except their level of information and bargaining power, properties they bear as individuals in relation to the transaction at hand. Such explanations are inherently limited in their ability to explain systematic differences between the regulatory strategies of continental Europe and the United States. This Article takes a different approach. It explains a regime’s preferred method of regulating contracts, especially in the employment and consumer contexts, by reference to macro features of its political economy. Both the normative question of whether a mandatory or default approach is superior, and the positive question of which approach is probable, turn on characteristics of the population set that will be subject to the rule, characteristics of market structure in that jurisdiction, and various political institutions. Unlike others commenting on the mandatory-default divide, this Article emphasizes the importance of political and economic features of the transactional environment, not the microeconomics of the transactions themselves. The four environmental factors I study here are heterogeneity, mobility, sectoral composition and institutional capacity. After exploring their effects on domestic regulatory strategy, I discuss the limitations they pose for transnational regulation. Although “private regulation” might appear a third regulatory mode suitable in the transnational context, I argue that private agreements that constrain other private agreements are not properly regarded as an alternative to either ex ante mandatory rules or ex post interpretive defaults imposed by the state.

This is the Twenty-Seventh Annual Survey of American choice-of-law cases. It is written at the request of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Conflict of Laws and is intended as a service to fellow teachers of conflicts law, both in and outside the United States. Its purpose remains the same as it has been from the beginning: to inform, rather than to advocate. This Survey covers cases decided by American state and federal appellate courts from January 1 to December 31, 2013, and posted on Westlaw by January 15, 2014. Of the 1,356 cases that meet these parameters, the Survey focuses on those cases that may contribute something new to the development or understanding of conflicts law — and, particularly, choice of law.This Survey is longer than the Surveys of any of the previous 26 years because 2013 produced more, and more noteworthy, cases than any of the previous years. The following are some of the highlights: (1) Five decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court holding, respectively, that: (a) The Alien Tort Statute does not apply to conduct and injury occurring entirely in another country; (b) Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defines “marriage” for federal law purposes so as to exclude same-sex relationships, is unconstitutional; (c) The Federal Arbitration Act trumps the provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act; (d) The “first sale” doctrine as codified in the Copyright Act applies to copies of copyrighted works lawfully made abroad and first sold abroad; and (e) The National Voter Registration Act preempts an Arizona law that sets more stringent standards for proof of citizenship when registering to vote; (2) A sixth Supreme Court decision explaining the methodology that federal courts should use when evaluating venue challenges in cases involving choice-of-forum clauses; (3) Two federal appellate decisions involving piracy off the Somali coast, and several decisions involving the extraterritorial reach of federal statutes in civil and criminal cases; (4) Several state court decisions striving to protect consumers, employees, and other weak parties through the few cracks left by the Supreme Court’s decisions on arbitration and choice-of-forum clauses; (5) An assortment of interesting cases involving products liability, other cross-border torts, economic torts, and other tort conflicts; (6) A case holding that enforcement of a Japanese tort judgment against a California Church is not “state action” triggering constitutional scrutiny under the Constitution’s Free Exercise clause, and that the judgment is not repugnant to public policy; (7) A case holding that one state’s dismissal of an action on statute of limitation grounds is a dismissal “on the merits,” barring a second action on the same claim in another state; and(8) A case defining “habitual residence” and “wrongful” removal or retention of a child under the Hague Convention on Child Abduction.

This report uses the definition of “social rights” in “The Toronto Initiative for Economic and Social Rights,” and focuses on two of these rights which have been litigated in the United States: the right to social security, at the Federal level, and the right to education, at the state level. We note that the U.S. Constitution does not expressly recognize any of the social rights listed in the introduction to this national report, and that American courts and legal scholars are generally skeptical about protecting social rights through constitutional law. The limited exceptions to this skepticism appear in the prohibition on discrimination against the indigent with respect to the exercise of “fundamental rights” like the right to travel and the guarantee of procedural rights before welfare rights may be terminated. All fifty state constitutions recognize the right to education to varying degrees, although only some deem it a fundamental right. While some state courts consider challenges to educational schemes to be non-justiciable, and defer to the legislature, others have heard such cases, most of which are based on equal protection or educational quality rationales. We conclude, however, that the United States is likely not in total compliance with the education component of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.