New Article on Federal Courts and Customary International Law

I just posted a draft of a new article that studies citations in published judicial opinions to evaluate how federal courts go about ascertaining customary international law. For those interested, it’s forthcoming in the Iowa Law Review and available here.

Special thanks to Alex DeGuire and Ami Regele for excellent research assistance.

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Constitution Day Trivia Tidbits

constitutionSeptember 17 marks Constitution Day, the day in 1787 on which delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the United States Constitution. Yesterday, the ABA Journal posted an interesting article to celebrate. The article contains 10 lesser-known facts about our Constitution, including these:

  • Most voters today would not have had the right to vote under the original Constitution. Voting rights were limited to propertied white males.
  • The word “God” never appears in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. The source of all government power is in “the People.”
  • The word “democracy” never appears in the Constitution or Bill of Rights. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton claimed in the Federalist Papers that democracies were a disaster.
  • The First Amendment was not originally first. It started out as the third. For that matter, the Second Amendment was not originally the second. The original first and second amendments dealt with the size of Congress and with issues relating to Congress’s pay.

See here for the rest of the facts, and test your knowledge of the Constitution with the short quiz How well do you know the U.S. Constitution at the bottom of the page. It’s not as easy as you’d think! Next week, I’ll post on Professor Chad Oldfather’s interesting Constitution Day presentation on constitutional interpretation.

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Urban Neighborhood Expert Gives Hopeful Message to Milwaukee

Yes, there are good things happening in even some of the poorest neighborhoods in urban America.

Yes, there are ways to use data, research, and good policy decisions to strengthen the quality of life in such neighborhoods.

No, it’s not easy and there are no quick solutions.

That can be seen as a summary of a two-day visit to Marquette Law School by one of the most influential figures in America in urban research, Robert Sampson, who is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and director of the Boston Area Research Initiative. Sampson’s 2012 book, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, is playing a significant  role in a surge of big-data projects aimed at thoroughly assessing the strengths and weakness of neighborhoods in cities and using that knowledge to shape more effective ways of preserving and improving neighborhoods.   

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