In the United States, women are routinely forced to undergo cesarean sections, episiotomies, and the use of forceps, despite their desire to attempt natural vaginal delivery. Yet, the current American legal system does little to provide redress for women coerced to undergo certain medical procedures during childbirth. Courts and physicians alike are prepared to override a woman's choice of childbirth procedure if they believe this choice poses risks to the fetus, and both give little value to the woman's right to bodily autonomy. This Note proposes a solution for addressing the problem of coerced medical procedures during childbirth by importing a framework created in Venezuela and Argentina that characterizes this issue as "obstetric violence." First, this Note contains an overview of the shortcomings of the existing American legal framework to address the problem. Second, it explains the advantages of the obstetric violence framework and argues that its adoption in the United States would address many of the failures of the existing system. And third, this Note introduces a few legislative and litigation strategies that can be used to implement this framework in the United States and briefly addresses some of the challenges these strategies may pose.

Commercial activities abound in public schools. These activities range from direct advertisements to product sales, from instructional materials to market research.1 This Note examines one type of commercial activity: soft-drink sales through pouring-rights contracts in public schools. Pouring-rights contracts refer to large payments from soft-drink companies to [schools or] school districts in return for the right to sell that company's products-and only those products.2 The legal response to these contracts is a tattered patchwork of local, state, and federal regulations.3 This Note argues that pouring-rights contracts cause several problems, and that these problems demand a legal solution. Principally, they harm students by encouraging the frequent consumption of soft drinks, which increases obesity. These contracts also undermine the integrity of public education by using compulsory education laws to expose children to unhealthy soft drinks, they dilute the curriculum by discouraging soft-drink consumption in nutrition classes while encouraging soft-drink consumption the rest of the day,

Increasing concerns over children's health have focused the nation's attention on what children are eating, especially in school. According to federal statistics, between 1963 and 2004, obesity rates quadrupled for children ages six to eleven, and rates tripled for adolescents ages twelve to nineteen.2 This alarming trend continues, with the latest data showing that more than one-third of American

Despite the fact that medical malpractice reform has been the subject of political speeches and legislation for nearly three decades, it continues to attract a great deal of attention from both state and federal politicians who aim to solve the perceived medical malpractice crisis.2 With health care costs continuing to soar, frustrated consumers and voters have proven to be receptive audiences for politicians with legislative reform proposals. Many of the proposed reforms, however, have also drawn sharp criticism from groups like consumer watchdogs and trial lawyer associations.3

Public international law requires that states and governments inherit (“succeed to”) the debts incurred by their predecessors, however ill-advised those borrowings may have been. There are situations in which applying this rule of law strictly can lead to a morally reprehensible result. Example: forcing future generations of citizens to repay money borrowed in the state’s name by, and then stolen by, a former dictator. Among the purported exceptions to the general rule of state succession are what have been labeled “odious debts”, defined in the early twentieth century as debts incurred by a despotic regime that do not benefit the people bound to repay the loans. The absconding dictator is the classic example. The removal of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 2003 sparked a resurgence of interest in this subject. By enshrining a doctrine of odious debts as a recognized exception to the rule of state succession, some modern commentators have argued, a successor government would be able legally to repudiate the loans incurred by a malodorous prior regime. This, they contend, would have two benefits: it would avoid the morally repugnant consequence of forcing an innocent population to repay debts incurred in their name but not for their benefit, and it would simultaneously force prospective lenders to an odious regime to rethink the wisdom of advancing funds on so fragile a legal foundation. The authors argue that in this recent debate the adjective “odious” has quietly migrated away from its traditional place as modifying the word “debts” (as in “odious debts”), so that it now modifies the word “regime” (as in “debts of an odious regime”). This is a major shift. If this new version of the odious debt doctrine is to be workable, someone must assume the task of painting a scarlet letter “O” on a great many regimes around the world. Who will make this assessment of odiousness and on what criteria? The stakes are high. An unworkable or vague doctrine could significantly reduce cross-border capital flows to sovereign borrowers generally. The authors are skeptical that this definitional challenge can be met. Rather than jettison the whole initiative as quixotic, however, the authors investigate how far principles of private (domestic) law could be used to shield a successor government from the legal enforcement of a debt incurred by a prior regime under irregular circumstances. A wholesale repudiation of all contracts signed by an infamous predecessor may be more emotionally and politically satisfying for a successor government, but establishing defenses to the legal enforcement of certain of those claims based on well-recognized principles of domestic law may be the more prudent path. The authors believe that such defenses exist under U.S. law (and presumably elsewhere) and could be used to address many, although admittedly not all, cases of allegedly odious debts.

The Military Order of November 13 establishes that, unlike trials in federal district courts, judicial review of the commission proceedings will be strictly prohibited. 2 The commissions also differ considerably from the courts-martial provided under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). 3 Courts-martial are appealable on all issues of fact

Author(s): Post, Robert | Abstract: This article analyzes the Supreme Court's view of federalism during the decade of the 1920s. It offers a detailed discussion of four jurisprudential areas: congressional power, dormant Commerce Clause doctrine, intergovernmental tax immunity, and judicial centralization through the enforcement of federal common law and constitutional rights. The resurgent federalism of the contemporary Court is typically characterized as reviving pre-New Deal principles. The article concludes, however, that any such is highly implausible. It offers four reasons for this conclusion.First, the pre-New Deal Court conceived federalism in terms of the ideal of dual sovereignty, which imagined that the federal government and the states regulated distinct and exclusive spheres of social and economic life. But because the national market had by the 20th Century become thoroughly integrated, this ideal produced doctrinal incoherence in the areas of both intergovernmental tax immunity and the dormant Commerce Clause. The application of this ideal also significantly undercut state power, because the dual sovereignty invited the pre-New Deal Court to prohibit states from regulating the exclusively federal area of interstate commerce. For these reasons the modern Court has abandoned the ideal of dual sovereignty in its doctrine of intergovernmental tax immunity and the dormant Commerce Clause. Contemporary opinions in these areas imagine federal and state interests as intermingled and overlapping, rather than as separated into discrete spheres. The modern view actually offers more protection for state regulations than did the ideal of dual sovereignty espoused by the pre-New Deal Court.Second, the pre-New Deal Court understood itself as a common law court authorized to articulate the deepest experiences and values of the American people. This authority transcended the distinction between federal and state power, which is why the pre-New Deal Court never conceived itself as an agent of a federal government that was potentially in tension with state sovereignty. The Court never understood the centralization resulting from judicial decisionmaking as a federalism issue. The Court freely regulated intimate areas of state life through the promulgation of general common law. The pre-New Deal Court's common law authority was even regarded as more fundamental than Congress's claim to articulate the national will. The triumph of Holmesian positivism in Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins fundamentally transformed the Court into an instrument of specifically federal law. The federalism implications of judicial decisionmaking in the areas of common law and constitutional rights were thus made manifest for the first time. The Court's authority to impose structural limitations on congressional power was also profoundly altered.Third, the pre-New Deal Court, like the country generally, regarded the federal government as a potentially distant, bureaucratic, and oppressive institution. States were by contrast conceptualized as sites of democratic Federalism was typically conceived as the problem of reconciling centralization with self-government. Thus federal and state regulations, even of the same subject matter, were not regarded as equivalent. State regulation was self-chosen; federal regulation was potentially coercive. This view of the federal government was pushed to the margins of American political culture when the crisis of the New Deal legitimated the national government's authority to speak as the genuine representative of an authentic national democratic will. Combined with the demise of the Court's common law authority, this transformation of Congress's legitimacy undercut the Court's ability to second-guess Congress's vision of national priorities when reviewing the limits of congressional power.Fourth, the pre-New Deal Court conceived structure and rights as complementary and mutually dependent concepts. The Court defined individual rights in ways designed to serve structural principles, like the integration of the national market. And it defined structural principles, like the limits of congressional power, in terms of the individual rights affected by federal legislation. Because the Lochnerism of the pre-New Deal Court inclined it to protect freedom of contract, it sought to impose limits on congressional power that were highly sensitive to the nature of the economic transactions regulated by federal legislation. Modern constitutional thinking, by contrast, sharply distinguishes structure from rights, and it does not seek to protect the same kind of economic rights as did pre-New Deal Lochnerism.The revival of pre-New Deal federalism, in short, would require the contemporary Court to restore an ideal of dual sovereignty that in important doctrinal areas is not only incoherent, but deeply antagonistic to state power; to reassert its authority as a common law court; to resurrect an image of Congress as a national legislature unsupported by a genuine national democratic will; and to dismantle the contemporary distinction between structure and rights so as to limit congressional power in ways designed to protect rights of substantive due process.

In recent years, the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies have greatly expanded their presence abroad, investigating everything from narcotics trade and Internet fraud schemes to terrorism.Where this law enforcement activity includes custodial interrogation of non-American citizens abroad, must American law enforcement officials provide Miranda warnings to such suspects?In 2001 in United States v. Bin Laden, a federal district court held that the Fifth Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination applies to non-American citizens interrogated abroad, thus requiring Miranda warnings in this context.

The exigencies of the times powerfully influence conceptions of the proper scope of presidential power. In times of war or other national emergency, citizens expect strong leadership from the president in his role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, presidential power is at its zenith as Congress and the public unite behind President George W. Bush’s efforts to respond to the unprovoked slaughter of thousands of civilians on American soil. Although the president’s powers as commander-in-chief are expansive, there are constitutional bounds. Even in wartime presidents can overstep the limits of their constitutional authority in pursuit of seemingly important ends. President Truman’s attempt during the