Despite promises made by presidential candidates, the President has no direct power to pass any legislation. This very important power lies solely with the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The Constitution specifically grants Congress its most important power the authority to make laws. A bill, or proposed law, only becomes a law after both the House of Representatives and the Senate have approved it in the same form. The two houses share other powers, many of which are listed in Article I, Section 8. These include the power to declare war, coin money, raise an army and navy, regulate commerce, establish rules of immigration and naturalization, and establish the federal courts and their jurisdictions.
The American Revolution began the process of creating a new nation in a number of different ways; by protesting British rule through legal and extra-legal actions; by waging a war to end America's status as a colonized territory; and by designing new forms of government for what Patriots hoped would become independent states.
A framework for a new and stronger national government had been crafted at the Philadelphia Convention by a handful of leaders. But how could their proposed system be made into law?
No protesting the government? No immigrants allowed in? No freedom of the press. Lawmakers jailed? Is this the story of the Soviet Union during the Cold War? No. It describes the United States in 1798 after the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts.
California was admitted to the Union as the 16th free state. In exchange, the south was guaranteed that no federal restrictions on slavery would be placed on Utah or New Mexico. Texas lost its boundary claims in New Mexico, but the Congress compensated Texas with $10 million. Slavery was maintained in the nation's capital, but the slave trade was prohibited. Finally, and most controversially, a Fugitive Slave Law was passed, requiring northerners to return runaway slaves to their owners under penalty of law.
At the dawn of the 20th century, nine out of ten African Americans lived in the South. Jim Crow laws of segregation ruled the land. The Supreme Court upheld the power of the Southern states to create two "separate but equal" societies with its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson opinion. It would be for a later Supreme Court to judge that they fell short of the "equal" requirement.
Hammurabi is the best known and most celebrated of all Mesopotamian kings. He ruled the Babylonian Empire from 1792-50 B.C.E. Although he was concerned with keeping order in his kingdom, this was not his only reason for compiling the list of laws. When he began ruling the city-state of Babylon, he had control of no more than 50 square miles of territory. As he conquered other city-states and his empire grew, he saw the need to unify the various groups he controlled.
Three years after the Supreme Court declared race-based segregation illegal, a military showdown took place in Little Rock, Arkansas, when nine black students attempted to attend the all-white Central High School on September 3, 1957.
Slaves did not accept their fate without protest. Many instances of rebellion were known to Americans, even in colonial times. These rebellions were not confined to the South. In fact, one of the earliest examples of a slave uprising was in 1712 in Manhattan. As African Americans in the colonies grew greater and greater in number, there was a justifiable paranoia on the part of the white settlers that a violent rebellion could occur in one's own neighborhood. It was this fear of rebellion that led each colony to pass a series of laws restricting slaves' behaviors. The laws were known as slave codes.
The emergence of the Internet and the digital world has changed the way people access produce and share information and knowledge Yet people in Africa face challenges in accessing scholarly publications journals and learning materials in general At the heart of these challenges and solutions to them is copyright the branch of intellectual property rights that covers written and related works This book gives the reader an understanding of the legal and practical issues posed by copyright for access to learning materials in Africa and identifies the relevant lesson best policies and best practices that would broaden and deepen this access This book is based on the work of the African Copyright and Access to Knowledge ACA2K research network launched in late 2007 as a network of researchers committed to probing the relationship between copyright and learning materials access in eight African countries Egypt Ghana Kenya Morocco Mozambique Senegal South Africa and Uganda
In this course, we’ll introduce you to copyrights and copyright protection. This program is of low difficulty and no prior knowledge of intellectual property law is required.
A copyright is an intellectual property device that protects a creative work from duplication if it is fixed in a tangible medium. The course will look at the types of creations that can be protected by copyright law and discuss federal copyright law as set forth in Title 17 of the United States code.
The course covers the copyright requirements of originality, creativity and fixation in a tangible medium. We will distinguish between non-copyrightable “ideas” and copyrightable expressions. We spend much of our time looking at the important applications of these ideas to computer programs and software, which have often rendered traditional copyright rules anachronistic. Included in this discussion are the effects of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.
The course next turns to copyright duration, renewal and termination and how they are applied to copyrighted works based on the years that the works were created.
Finally, we will look at notice and registration, and compliance with registration and recording procedures with the United States Copyright Office. While these steps are not required for copyright protection to attach, we will discuss the important benefits that they bestow.
The goal of this program is to allow you to apply the copyright rules to determine whether work can be copyrighted, how copyright protection can be established and for how long the protection lasts. Enforcing copyrights and fair use and other defenses against copyright enforcement will be the subjects of another course.
This textbook provides context and essential concepts across the entire range of legal issues with which
managers and business executives must grapple. The text provides the vocabulary and legal acumen
necessary for businesspeople to talk in an educated way to their customers, employees, suppliers,
government officials—and to their own lawyers.
Law has different meanings as well as different functions. Philosophers have considered issues of justice and law for centuries, and several different approaches, or schools of legal thought, have emerged. In this chapter, we will look at those different meanings and approaches and will consider how social and political dynamics interact with the ideas that animate the various schools of legal thought. We will also look at typical sources of “positive law” in the United States and how some of those sources have priority over others, and we will set out some basic differences between the US legal system and other legal systems.
This course is a primer in methods by which legal disputes can be resolved without litigation, both by the parties themselves and under the auspices of the justice system.
This is an introductory level course and no prior knowledge or experience with dispute resolution or the justice system is necessary.
Our first module is an overview of the landscape of alternative dispute resolution and includes discussion of the Federal Arbitration Act, passed in 1925, which still largely governs ADR in the United States, and especially in the federal court system. The first module also introduces various other methods of dispute resolution.
Module 2 focuses on negotiation between the parties, specifically facilitation of settlements and the settlement process. We’ll also look at settlement negotiations that are required and supervised by courts in many cases. Finally, we will discuss settlement agreements and their requirements for enforceability.
Module 3 turns to mediation, which is more formal negotiation supervised by a mediator, but that does not result in a formal decision, as in the case of arbitration. The module looks at when mediation is appropriate and the role and responsibilities of the mediator. We also look at various styles of mediation and the governing bodies and organizations that discuss and encourage best practices.
Modules 4 and 5 discuss the most formal component of the ADR landscape: arbitration. Arbitration allows a binding resolution to be rendered outside of the court system. We will focus on arbitrator qualifications, arbitration procedures and arbitration agreements. In module five, we will look at the enforceability of arbitration awards and the mechanisms by which the awards can be confirmed in federal court so that they can be enforced by normal collection procedures.
This course should give you a thorough introduction to the world of alternative dispute resolution and serve as an important component of a comprehensive understanding of the processes by which disputes are resolved in our system.
An interview conducted by the ACLU in March of 2005, preceding a Supreme Court hearing in the case of Castle Rock, Colorado v. Gonzales. This case determined the accountability of local law enforcement for failing to enforce court orders that protect victims of abuse by a spouse or acquaintance.
American Contract Law for a Global Age by Franklin G. Snyder and Mark Edwin Burge of Texas A&M University School of Law is a casebook designed primarily for the first-year Contracts course as it is taught in American law schools, but is configured so as to be usable either as a primary text or a supplement in any upper-level U.S. or foreign class that seeks to introduce American contract law to students. As an eLangdell text, it offers maximum flexibility for students to read either in hard copy or electronic format on most electronic devices.
Why “American” Contract Law? Nearly all American contract law texts focus on U.S. law. This volume simply makes that focus explicit. Modern American lawyers face an increasingly global world, and the book makes it clear that American law is not the only important commercial law regime in the world. But much of the value that the cosmopolitan and transnational American-trained lawyer brings to the table is an understanding of the contract law of the United States. To this end, the venerable English cases that exemplify common law doctrine are here presented not in their hoary 19th century settings. but in the 21st century forms that students can intuitively grasp.
This course will acquaint the student with some of the ancient Greek contributions to the Western philosophical and scientific tradition. We will examine a broad range of central philosophical themes concerning: nature, law, justice, knowledge, virtue, happiness, and death. There will be a strong emphasis on analyses of arguments found in the texts.
Many textbooks mention the Trail of Tears, but fail to mention that this early displacement of an ethnic minority is only the one of many legally-sanctioned forced relocations. This lesson will address the displacement of American Indians through the Trail of Tears, the forced deportation of Mexican Americans during the Great Depression, and the internment of Japanese American citizens during WWII.
This text Provides a detailed analysis of whether the substantive applicable law in investor-state arbitration, national, international, or a combination of both.