Publications | vjtl

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

May 29, 2013

Proportionality in Military Force at War’s Multiple Levels: Averting Civilian Casualties vs. Safegu

To what lengths may a state go to protect its soldiers in war? May it design its military operations to further that goal if this significantly increases civilian casualties? International law currently offers no clear answers. Because recent wars have seen many states prioritize soldier safety over avoiding civilian casualties, spirited debate has arisen over the legal defensibility of this practice. This debate currently focuses on an ethics code proposed by two influential

Feb 12, 2013

Liberalizing the Law in the Land of the Lord: Limits to the Americanization of Israeli Religious Jur

This Note presents an analysis of American and Israeli constitutional jurisprudence concerning matters of religion. Recently, there has been a shift in Israel’s High Court of Justice toward implementing values of individual rights and religious pluralism. Some have analogized this shift in focus to the role played by the U.S. Supreme Court. However, fundamental differences remain between the American and Israeli approaches, stemming from divergent conceptions of national iden

Nov 28, 2012

Judicial Review of Constitutional Transitions: War and Peace and Other Sundry Matters

Constitutional transition periods present a twilight time between two executives. At such times, the outgoing executive’s authority is questionable because of the democratic difficulties and agency concerns that arise at the end of the executive’s term. Thus, parliamentary systems developed constitutional conventions that restrict caretaker governments’ action. These conventions seem to achieve the desired results in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. In

Nov 2, 2012

Reconsidering the U.S. Patent System: Lessons from Generics

Scholars and pharmaceutical industry representatives consider the United States a worldwide leader in pharmaceutical innovation. However, the recent expansion of the international generics market has threatened the strength of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. The pressure has led to the U.S. market’s overreliance on a patentability standard that blocks generics competition without contributing substantially to the state of the art. This Note contrasts the U.S. nonobviousness

Aug 16, 2012

Hamdan, Lebanon, and the Regulation of Hostilities: The Need to Recognize a Hybrid Category of Arme

For more than fifty years following the 1949 revision of the Geneva Conventions, legal scholars, government experts, and military practitioners understood the articles that defined when the protections of these treaties came into force—Common Articles 2 and 3—as the exclusive criteria which triggered the laws of war. From these two articles emerged an “either/or” law-applicability paradigm: inter-state, or international, armed conflicts triggered the full corpus of the laws

Jul 1, 2012

The Legality of the West Bank Wall: Israel’s High Court of Justice v. the International Court of Jus

This Article offers a critique of the decision reached by Israel’s High Court of Justice in the Mara’abe Case (2005) as well as some aspects of the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (2004). The Article takes a socio-legal and facts-based approach to analyzing the decisions’ discussions of settlements, self-determination, and self-defense, examining all three topics in