Work On! Annual comparative law workshop

(Work On! is an occasional item about workshops, roundtables, and other fora that do not necessarily include publication)

Papers on comparative law once again are being sought for presentation at the Annual Comparative Law Workshop, to be held March 1 and 2, 2013, at the University of Illinois College of Law in Urbana-Champaign.
Organized this year by IntLawGrrls contributor Jacqueline Ross and our colleagues Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton) and Máximo Langer (UCLA), the workshop, cosponsored by the American Society of Comparative Law, presents an opportunity for comparative law scholars to engage in sustained and substantive discussion, by comparative law scholars, of up to 7 scholarly projects.

Details here.
Deadline for paper submissions, to be sent to Jacqueline Ross at jeross1@illinois.edu, is January 5, 2013.

Work On! Comparative works in progress

(Work On! is an occasional item about workshops, roundtables, and other fora that do not necessarily include publication)

Papers on comparative law once again are being sought for presentation at the 7th Annual Comparative Law Workshop, to be held February 10 to 12, 2012, at Princeton University in New Jersey.
Organized by IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Jacqueline Ross and our colleagues Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton) and James Q. Whitman (Yale), the workshop, cosponsored by the American Society of Comparative Law, presents an opportunity for comparative law scholars to engage in sustained and substantive discussion, by up to 20 comparative law scholars, of a number of scholarly projects.
Deadline for electronic submissions, to be sent to Professor Scheppele at kimlane@princeton.edu, is December 1, 2011.

Guest Blogger: Lesley Wexler

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Lesley Wexler (right) as today's guest blogger.
Lesley's an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Illinois College of Law, Urbana-Champaign, also the home institution of IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Jacqueline Ross. Lesley joined the Illinois faculty this year from Florida State University College of Law. She also has taught at the University of Chicago Law School, as a Harry A. Bigelow Law Fellow. Her courses include Torts, Laws of War, and International Environmental Law.
Lesley earned her B.A. with honors from the University of Michigan and her J.D. with honors from the University of Chicago. She was an Articles Editor for the University of Chicago Legal Forum and an Associate Editor of the Chicago Journal of International Law. She clerked for Judges William Wayne Justice, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, and Thomas Reavley, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.
The subject of a prior post by IntLawGrrl Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Lesley focuses her scholarship on the intersection of social norms with the areas of international human rights, the law of war, and anti-discrimination law. The focus is evident in this list of publications and works in progress.
In her guest post below, Lesley uses her recent article on "Resource Curses" as the basis for analysis of recent efforts to put an end to human rights violations in diamond fields in Zimbabwe.
Heartfelt welcome!

Work On! Comparative works in progress

(Work On! is an occasional item about workshops, roundtables, and other fora that do not necessarily include publication)

Papers on comparative law once again are being sought for presentation at the annual Comparative Law Works in Progress Workshop, to be held February 11 and 12, 2010, at Yale Law School (logo below left) in New Haven, Connecticut.
Organized by IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Jacqueline Ross and our colleagues Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton) and James Q. Whitman (Yale), the workshop, cosponsored by the American Society of Comparative Law, presents an opportunity for comparative law scholars to engage in sustained and substantive discussion, by up to 20 comparative law scholars, of up to 6 scholarly projects.
Deadline for electronic submissions, to be sent to Professor Whitman at james.whitman@yale.edu, is next Monday, November 1, 2010.

Work On! Comparative law workshop

(Work On! is an occasional item about workshops, roundtables, and other fora for scholarship-presentation-without-publication) Papers on comparative law once again are being sought for presentation at the annual Comparative Law Works in Progress Workshop, to be held May 20-22, 2010, at the University of Illinois College of Law, Urbana-Champaign (logo below left).

Organized by IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Jacqueline Ross and our colleagues Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton) and James Q. Whitman (Yale), the workshop, cosponsored by the American Society of Comparative Law, presents an opportunity for comparative law scholars to engage in sustained and substantive discussion, by up to 20 comparative law scholars, of up to 6 scholarly projects.

Deadline for electronic submissions, to be sent to Professor Ross at jeross1@illinois.edu, is March 1, 2010. Details here.

Read On! Innocent defendants: Comparing U.S. & French criminal justice systems

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post, dedicated to a new foremother, on my book review forthcoming at 7 Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law (2009))

In my review of The Supreme Court on Trial: How the American Justice System Sacrifices Innocent Defendants (2008), a compelling and provocative new book by Rutgers-Newark Law Professor George C. Thomas III, I explore Thomas’s argument that the adversary system is poorly suited to protecting the innocent, and that the U.S. criminal justice system ought to adopt a number of central features of the French system.
Surprisingly few works have bridged the gap between the study of wrongful convictions and the comparative study of trial systems. As Thomas demonstrates, the comparative approach to the study of wrongful convictions is highly promising. It places several questions in sharp relief:
► If the adversary system is at fault, what aspects of it are to blame?
► To what extent are those aspects culturally imbedded, and to what extent are they amenable to reform?
► Alternatively, how much of the problem is attributable to deeply rooted cross-cultural factors that transcend national boundaries?
Such factors might include cultural and social alignments between judges and prosecutors, institutional pressures toward loyalty and cooperation, and racial and ethnic prejudice.
Thomas argues that the central problem with the adversary system is that it lacks institutions or procedures responsible for seeking the truth. My review, while recognizing that Thomas had limited space to devote to his discussion of the French system, nevertheless raises several concerns about the portrait of that system Thomas paints:
► First, there is the problem, endemic to comparative analysis, of what versions of the French and U.S. systems are being compared. Some central features of the French system Thomas describes are in flux or have changed considerably. Most important, Thomas describes a French system in which the investigative magistrate plays a central role in the truth-seeking process. As IntLawGrrls contributors Jacqueline Ross and Diane Marie Amann have described in posts here and here, the role of the investigative magistrate has diminished dramatically. In addition, as Ross and Warwick Law Professor Jacqueline Hodgson, have described, the investigative magistrate in practice does not appear to be as neutral and independent as his official description suggests. (See Jacqueline Hodgson, French Criminal Justice: A Comparative Account of the Investigation and Prosecution of Crime in France (2005) (right), and Jacqueline Ross, "Review of Hodgson," 55 Am. J. Comp. L. 367 (2007).) This problem is exacerbated by the weak role of the defense attorney (a role that is justified by the strong and independent role of the investigative magistrate).
► Second, there is the question of how certain attributes of the French system could be adopted in the United States. For example, how could the investigative magistrate role, even in its “ideal” form, be implemented in the United States, with its deeply rooted culture of decentralized judicial selection, and given the current reality of widespread plea-bargaining?
Interestingly, the most intriguing reform Thomas proposes is inspired by the British system: the proposal that advocates serve, from time to time, as both prosecutors and defense attorneys. The bottom line: the book is highly recommended, and it illustrates the need for additional comparative study about what causes wrongful convictions and how to prevent them.

Guest Blogger: Jacqueline Ross

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Jacqueline Ross (left) as today's guest blogger.
Professor of Law at the University of Illinois College of Law, Urbana-Champaign, Jacqueline is an internationally noted comparatist in the fields of evidence and criminal law and procedure. Her scholarship -- published in journals in the United States and elsewhere -- includes "Impediments to Transnational Cooperation in Undercover Operations: A Comparative Study of the United States and Italy," 52 American Journal of Comparative Law 569 (2004), winner of the Edward Wise Senior Scholar Prize from the American Society of Comparative Law for best article in comparative criminal procedure.
Jacqueline's a co-founder and co-director of the Michigan-Illinois-Princeton Workshop on Comparative Law Works in Progress, and also the co-organizer of a seminar series on Transnational Intelligence and Policing in Immigrant Communities that alternates between Institut D'Études Politiques de Paris and the University of Illinois College of Law. Her research projects include comparative studies of undercover policing in the United States, Italy, Germany, and France; and of policing in the immigrant communities of the United States and France, for which she's received a Fulbright Research Fellowship and a grant from France's Agence Nationale de Recherche.
An honors graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, Jacqueline clerked for Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, then practiced as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Chicago and Boston before entering academia.
In her guest post below, Jacqueline applies comparative analysis to undercut the claim, made by many a common law expert, that evidence admitted in civil law trials without any form of prior screening.
Heartfelt welcome!

Deception, interrogation & evidence

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post on an article I published at 28 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 443 (2008), downloadable by subscription at the hyperlinked site; earlier, bepress.com version available here)

In my recent article, Do Rules of Evidence Apply (Only) in the Courtroom? Deceptive Interrogation in the United States and Germany, I challenged the commonly held view that civil law legal systems such as Germany do not employ formal rules of evidence comparable to those that govern American courtrooms.

Civil law systems, which commit factfinding to mixed panels of lay and professional judges, are said to have less need for formal rules of evidence that withhold information from decisionmakers. In my article, I argued that scholars have failed to recognize that evidentiary rules can restrict not only the presentation of of evidence at trial, but also the manner of its acquisition during the pretrial investigation. For this reason, existing scholarship overlooks a rich source of German evidentiary norms designed to shore up a German prohibition against deceptive interrogation. (By contrast, of course, the United States permits the police to obtain confessions through investigative lies.)

I argue that German regulation of police interrogation -- particularly its prohibition of deceptive stratagems -- plays an important role in shaping the factual record on which the legal systems assess guilt or innocence. The article identifies a number of institutional factors on which this system of pre-trial evidentiary regulation depends:

► the existence of a case file documenting all investigative acts;

► the accessibility of this case file to defense counsel and judges;

► the fact that information obtained during investigations becomes evidence as soon as it is acquired, rather than when it is presented at trial;

► verbatim transcriptions of all interrogation questions and answers, allowing prohibited investigation methods to become known;

► a more neutral investigative role assigned to police and prosecutors, who must investigate exculpatory as well as inculpatory circumstances;the requirement that convictions be justified in writing, so that appellate judges may more easily determine whether trial judges relied on confessions that should have been suppressed; and

► the fact that German evidentiary regulation centers at least as much if not more on the investigative process than on trial procedure.

(Credit for photo of German courtroom. An earlier IntLawGrrls post, challenging another assumption about civil law systems, is here.)

Work On! Comparative law workshop

(Work On! is an occasional item about workshops, roundtables, and other fora for scholarship-presentation-without-publication) Papers on comparative law are being sought for presentation at the annual Comparative Law Works in Progress Workshop, to be held February 6 and 7, 2009, at Princeton University (logo below left) in New Jersey.
Organized by our colleagues Mathias Reimann, Jacqueline Ross, and Kim Lane Scheppele, the workshop presents an opportunity for comparative law scholars to engage in sustained and substantive discussion, by up to 20 comparative law scholars, of up to 6 scholarly projects. Cosponsors are the American Society of Comparative Law, University of Michigan Law School, University of Illinois College of Law, and Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Affairs.
Deadline for electronic submissions, to be sent to Professor Scheppele at kimlane@princeton.edu: next Wednesday, December 31, 2008. Details respecting requirements for submission and the workshop itself may be found by clicking on "Programs" here.

Work On! Comparative Law Works in Progress

(Work On! is an occasional item about workshops, roundtables, and other fora for scholarship-presentation-without-publication) Banding together for this year's 3d annual Comparative Law Works in Progress Workshop, to be held May 14-16, 2008, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, are the American Society of Comparative Law, University of Michigan Law School, University of Illinois College of Law, and Princeton University's Program for Law and Public Affairs.
This is a great opportunity, among the few events at which comparative law scholars in the United States may study and discuss in depth their ongoing scholarship. Up to 6 papers will be selected for discussion, before small groups of scholars, over the 2 days of this year's workshop.
Time's short to submit; deadline's February 15, 2008. Send draft articles, book chapters, book reviews, etc. -- works that are ready for extended discussion but have not yet appeared in print -- electronically to the organizers, our colleagues Kim Lane Scheppele, kimlane@princeton.edu, Mathias Reimann, purzel@umich.edu, and Jacqueline Ross, jeross1@law.uiuc.edu.