Let’s talk UN War Crimes Tribunal. Thoughts?
The UN War Crimes Tribunal has said it’s ready for the extradition of Radovan Karadžic from Belgrade. Karadžic was, of course, a war crimes fugitive captured earlier this year by Yugoslavian authorities. A Belgrade court is currently considering extraditing him to the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.
On the one hand, it makes sense to have an international court to adjudicate these issues. Crimes against humanity transcend borders and the entire international community has an interest in enforcing norms for the treatment of people.
On the other, Karadzic terrorized the people in Yugoslavia. The families of his victims are there. The wreckage from his - as well as Milosevic and crew’s - genocidal tendencies are there. Shouldn’t justice reside there? In the legal system that was created following their reign?
I tend to agree with the case for the latter. While these countries may struggle with maintaining control of these trials, these men (and, presumably, some women) should be held accountable by and for the families they terrorized. While The Hague may play an important role in the international community’s desire to enforce human rights standards, whenever possible justice is more properly meted out by the countries who suffer at the hands of these thugs.
So… how can you guarantee justice for the victims by trying these guys a continent away at The Hague?
And, more generally, are international legal tribunals a good thing?
Make your case.
“It’s for the kids.” Ah, yes. The great justification for just about any government program. Of course, it’s the central justification in most states for the Lottery. Revenues are directed into the education department’s coffers for use in schools. That’s all fine and good, but the agreement the ticket purchaser enters into with the state is: I give you a dollar and you promise to give me a chance to win a prize.
Then there’s this:
After a business finance professor tried a Virginia Lottery scratch game for the first time, he became suspicious about how the game was being run. It seemed to him that the rate at which Beginner’s Luck paid out its $75,000 prizes defied the laws of statistics.
His concerns ultimately led him to conclude that the Virginia Lottery continues to sell tickets to its scratch games statewide even after all the top prizes for the game have been claimed.
Monday, a Roanoke law firm announced its intention to sue the lottery on behalf of Scott Hoover, an associate professor at Washington and Lee University who teaches applied business statistics. The letter that lawyer John Fishwick sent to the state claims the lottery has violated its contract with scratch ticket buyers by purposefully selling tickets that have no chance at all of winning a top prize.
“We estimate that since 2003, the state has sold over 26.5 million losing tickets in this way, pocketing an estimated $84.7 million in purchase prices from the shell game,” Fishwick said. “The state cannot continue to boost revenues by knowingly selling its citizens defective tickets based on hollow promises of an opportunity that does not exist.”
Basically, the state gave away all the prizes, but kept selling tickets. Talking with WAMU today, Mr. Hoover said this gives rise to multiple claims against the state, the most serious of which is fraudulent inducement to purchase the tickets.
He’s filed a claim with the state (basically a notice stage required before filing a lawsuit) alleging that the state has misled citizens and that it must rectify the situation. His lawyer told WAMU that they aren’t necessarily looking for damages, but are primarily looking for the state to acknowledge it’s doing something wrong and change the process.
In light of our discussion on the FLDS case, Christopher suggested a thread on the origins of law. I liked that idea and have a few drafts started. But it struck me that it might work better as a series of questions that pull out various views of the law and its role (or source) in our society (or any society). Perhaps this can be a sort of wiki effort at developing and teasing various views of the law and its source.
Question #1: What is your duty to your fellow man (and by “man,” of course, I mean “human being”)? And from where does that duty arise?
[Full disclosure: this question is lifted from our course on Social Justice and the Law that several readers and writers of this blog are taking this summer.]
Here’s a question for you: should someone who requests the death penalty be prohibited from receiving it?
From Friday’s New York Times:
[Khalid Shaikh Mohammed], the former senior operations chief for Al Qaeda, said he would represent himself and dared the Guantánamo tribunal to put him to death.
“This is what I want,” he told a military judge here, in his first appearance to answer war crimes charges for the terrorism attacks that killed 2,973 people and set America on a path to war.
“I’m looking to be martyr for long time,” he said in serviceable English, improved, perhaps, by five years of custody, including three in secret C.I.A. prisons.
We had an okay class discussion about tort reform recently in Torts. (At this point in the semester I think we’re all too exhausted for a heated or animated debate on the topic.)
It amuses me that the words “tort reform” are always put in quotes in our casebook - and even in the way it is mentioned by our professor. As if that’s not really what people mean when they say reform or that they’re just parroting what a lobbyist told them to say.
I have a problem with the change reformers say we need - namely, in its most common expression, that a blanket cap on punitive damages applies to all cases will mitigate whatever negative effects large jury awards have on our economy. This rigidity fails to consider the merits of an individual’s case while, at the same time, negating the role of tort law in discouraging certain corporate and individual malfeasance. It also just feels like - though may not, in fact, be - a thinly veiled handout to bad corporate actors.
Yet, I’m a”tort reform” “supporter” purely because I think the legislature acts well within its authority to ask whether awards are too large and what effect this has on the economy and society. Awards can “shock the conscience” of lawmakers too. Like many things, however, it seems the negative inertia created by opposing lobbies - trial lawyers vs. business - makes it hard to get past the entrenched positions of the two parties.
Nonetheless, based on my extensive two class-meeting consideration of this issue, my initial thought - that I hope we discuss in the comments - is that we should make bad faith a more prominent element in torts cases, particularly strict and product liability cases.
Continue reading ‘Bad Faith As The Key To Tort Reform’
In a RICO case, Judge Posner opined on the post-Twombly standard on motions to dismiss under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6).
(H/T How Appealing)
The case involved an allegation that a municipal government had pre-empted their efforts at building a marina on their land by conspiring in a “continuing violation” of the RICO statute. The trial judge dismissed for failure to state a claim and Posner agreed (the claim was “threadbare”). But, on Twombly, added:
Bell Atlantic must not be overread. The Court denied requir[ing] heightened fact pleading of specifics,” 127 S. Ct. at 1974; “a complaint . . . does not need detailed actual allegations.” Id. at 1964. Within weeks after deciding Bell Atlantic, the Court reversed a Tenth Circuit decision for requiring fact pleading. Erickson v. Pardus, 127 S. Ct. 2197 (2007) (per curiam). A prisoner, proceeding pro se, had complained that he had Hepatitis C, that he was on a one-year treatment program for it, that shortly after the program began the prison officials withheld treatment, and that his life was in danger as a result. That was the ontext in which the Court said that “specific facts” need not be pleaded. Id. at 2200. A complaint must always, however, allege “enough facts to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face,” Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, supra, 127 S. Ct. at 1974, and how many facts are enough will depend on the type of case. In a complex antitrust or RICO case a fuller set of factual allegations than found in the sample complaints in the civil rules’ Appendix of Forms may be necessary to show that the plaintiff’s claim is not “largely groundless.” Phillips v. County of Allegheny, 515 F.3d 224, 231-32 (3d Cir. 2008). If discovery is likely to be more than usually costly, the complaint must include as much factual detail and argument as may be required to show that the plaintiff has a plausible claim. See also Iqbal v. Hasty, 490 F.3d 143, 157-58 (2d Cir. 2007).
This week I made a mistake - the second time I’ve made it really.
In a way, we opened this blog to goof off. I wanted to improve my web design skills and write about this all-consuming experience I was having. After putting up version 1.0 of the design, I found friends wanted to join in the fun. When things around here got serious, our goal was to focus on our law school experience with a hefty dose of sarcasm, snark, and tomfoolery. By and large, we’ve slowly begun to figure out how that works. And we’ll continue to do so.
But we had a relapse in two recent posts (Gong Show and Second Amendment). While I think what we’ve written is good, it’s not new or original or law-related or funny or entertaining or insightful - all qualities we hope define our writing here. For a blogger, politics is like crack or junk food - something eaten when hungry or bored or in need of a quick fix and instead of finding a good snack (nice piece of legal news or gossip), you go to the old standby (political screed). Trouble is, we’re not really that good at writing about politics and there are plenty of people much smarter that we are writing about it. To those put off by our political digression this week, we apologize.
Anyway, it’s been a learning experience. When we approach “serious” topics that have political overtones we will try to tackle them from a legal perspective, rather than debate the political calculus. These are the sorts of things I feel like we should be doing. We’ll have more fun this way and we think you will too.
Also, look for some fun new features coming soon to Fight The Hypo - at least a few design tweaks, launch of the shameless commerce division, petitions, and there are rumors that a love and law school column is in the makings.
