Articles

By Martin J. Katz. 114 Penn St. L. Rev. 857 The Supreme Court has done a turn-about on the value of uniformity in employment discrimination law. For many years, the Court embraced the idea that different employment discrimination statutes that use identical language should be understood to impose identical requirements. So, for example, a plaintiff [...]

By Michael J. Kelly. 114 Penn St. L. Rev. 707. The Kurds have long struggled to control their own destiny. Through centuries of cyclical oppression and autonomy, the Kurds of northern Iraq finally united and seized an opportunity to secure a firm legal status for their de facto state within a federal Iraqi state in [...]

By Shoba Wadhia. 114 Penn St. L. Rev. ___. *(forthcoming in Iqbal Symposium Issue) This author welcomes responses to this abstract and the upcoming article.  The author may be contacted at: E-mail: ssw11@psu.edu Phone: (814) 865-3823 Abstract: While the impact of the Iqbal decision on notice-pleading standard is striking, its effects on the permissiveness of [...]

By Jeffrey Rachlinski. 114 Penn St. L. Rev. ___. *(forthcoming in Iqbal Symposium Issue) This author welcomes responses to this abstract and the upcoming article.  The author may be contacted at: Phone: (607) 255-5878 Fax: (607) 255-7193 Email: jjr7@cornell.edu Abstract: The papers in this symposium highlight three basic lessons of Iqbal.  The first, and most [...]

By Ramzi Kassem. 114 Penn St. L. Rev. ___. *(forthcoming in Iqbal Symposium Issue) This author welcomes responses to this abstract and the upcoming article.  The author may be contacted at: Ph: 718-340-4558 ramzi.kassem@mail.law.cuny.edu Abstract: Iqbal’s Entrenchment of Majority Group Skepticism Towards Discrimination Claims Part of what prevents democratic governance from devolving into the tyranny [...]

By Victor C. Romero. 114 Penn St. L. Rev. ___. *(forthcoming in Iqbal Symposium Issue) This author welcomes responses to this abstract and the upcoming article.  The author may be contacted at: E-mail: vcr1@psu.edu Phone: (814) 865-8989 Abstract: In Iqbal, the Court reaffirmed the long-standing equal protection doctrine that government actors can only be held [...]

By James Pfander. 114 Penn St. L. Rev. ___. *(forthcoming in Iqbal Symposium Issue) This author welcomes responses to this abstract and the upcoming article.  The author may be contacted at: Phone: (312) 503-1325 E-mail: j-pfander@law.northwestern.edu Abstract: Widely noted for the pleading revolution it furthers at the district court level, the Supreme Court’s decision in [...]

By Steven B. Lichtman. 114 Penn St. L. Rev. 415. As arguably the most ferocious conservative on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas is not usually associated with civil liberties causes, except insofar as popular myth portrays him as hostile to those causes.  Contrary to this mythology, however, Thomas has carved out a definitively speech-protective path [...]

The following remarks are reprinted as the Penn State Law Review’s contribution to the 175th anniversary celebration of the Dickinson School of Law. INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE JOSEPH, ESQUIRE, ‘82 PRESIDENT OF THE GENERAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION OF THE DICKINSON SCHOOL OF LAW Each year, the General Alumni Association of the Dickinson School of Law is proud [...]

By Seth Barrett Tillman.  114 Penn St. L. Rev. 391. Legal academics and the public are fascinated by both constitutional text and the processes by which it is interpreted.  The precise role for legal academics in the interpretation of such charters is controverted.  Doctrine and case law as established by the courts remain the core [...]

By Devera B. Scott, Esq., Keith J. Feigenbaum, Esq., Kelley M. Huff, Esq., and the Honorable Jan R. Jurden.  114 Penn St. L. Rev. 217. In the early years of the American democratic experiment, one of the foremost observers of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote that “the courts correct the aberrations of democracy and [...]

By John Linarelli.  114 Penn St. L. Rev. 119. Commercial lawyers working across borders know that globalization has changed commercial law.  To think of commercial law as only the law of states is to have an inadequate understanding of the norms governing commercial transactions.  Some have argued for a transnational conception of commercial law, but [...]

By William E. Butler.  113 Penn St. L. Rev. 1189. The mythology of arbitration holds that this method of settling disputes is “private,” “informal” (even when arbitration is institutionalized), “effective,” “expedient,” “neutral,” “flexible,” “confidential,” “expert,” “fair,” and “inexpensive.” This is widely believed to remain the case even though these days arbitrations are “held in place [...]

By Richard C. Reuben.  113 Penn St. L. Rev. 1103. The Alternative Dispute Resolution movement of the last quarter of a century has been built on the pillar of party autonomy.  Indeed, the very predicate of the movement is that parties can do a better job of resolving their disputes through private ordering than public [...]

By George A. Bermann,  Jack J. Coe, Jr., Christopher R. Drahozal, and Catherine A. Rogers,  113 Penn St. L. Rev. 1333. In December 2007, the American Law Institute (”ALI”) approved the development of a new Restatement, Third, of the U.S. Law of International Commercial Arbitration (the “Restatement”). On February 23, 2009, the Restaters and authors [...]

By Sarah R. Cole and Kristen M. Blankley.  113 Penn St. L. Rev. 1051. In 2007, Public Citizen, a “national, non-profit public interest organization,”  issued a report entitled “The Arbitration Trap: How Credit Card Companies Ensnare Consumers,” concluding that the arbitration process routinely exploits consumers.  Public Citizen drew this sweeping conclusion after analyzing approximately 34,000 [...]

By Andrea Bjorklund,  113 Penn St. L. Rev. 1269. In 1993 Samuel Huntington wrote about a looming clash of civilizations – what he predicted would be a cataclysmic showdown between civilizations characterized by different religions, history, languages, and traditions.  Investment arbitration can also be viewed as a clash (albeit non-violent) of civilizations.  It is where [...]

By Jack J. Coe, Jr., 113 Penn St. L. Rev. 1369. Among International Commercial Arbitration (“ICA”) specialists, the suggestion that recent years have been eventful would likely pass without objection. In the Anglo-American context alone there have occurred important decisions, legislative proposals to limit arbitration, and the launching of an American Law Institute Restatement on [...]

By Hans Smit.  113 Penn St. L. Rev. 995. In the beginning, arbitration was straight forward. Once a dispute had arisen, the parties agreed to submit it for resolution to a third party. The courts stayed out of the process. They did not even enforce the agreement to arbitrate. But they did enforce the arbitrator’s [...]

By Thomas Carbonneau, 113 Penn St. L. Rev. 1343. The contemporary law of arbitration originated in North America and Europe.  Among like-minded States with conflicting legal traditions,  arbitration represented a means of transcending the diversity of legal systems. It had the additional advantages of neutrality and enforceability. Arbitration’s regional success and the globalization of national [...]

By George A. Bermann.  113 Penn St. L. Rev. 1013. Supreme Court case law teaches us that the federal interest in arbitration does not consist of enforcing agreements to arbitrate according to some sort of abstract or ideal arbitral model, but rather according to the particular arbitral model upon which the parties had agreed.   This [...]

By Larry Catá Backer.  113 Penn St. L. Rev. 671. Academic and policy engagements with constitutions and constitutionalism have largely been built around unstated frameworks within which legitimated activity can take place. The essay suggests both the disorientation of much of the discussion and proposes an ideological framework that captures the assumptions about which constitutionalist [...]