Georgetown Law Journal

New Student Scholarship on Ecocide as Prosecutable Genocide

October 9, 2023Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Abbey Koenning-Rutherford has published “Dishonoring the Earth: Ecocide as Prosecutable Genocide Against Indigenous People” in the Georgetown Law Journal. PDF

Here is the abstract:

Global Indigenous people exist as one with the environment, with no western binary between people and nature. Destruction of Indigenous people is reciprocal with environmental destruction. Indigenous people, though only six percent of the global population, protect eighty percent of the world’s biodiversity and occupy exceedingly environmentally vulnerable regions. Because of these reasons, the International Criminal Court (the “ICC”) could be utilized to achieve justice by prosecuting ecocide as genocide, should impacted Indigenous peoples choose to utilize it

Sherally Munshi on Dispossession and American Property

August 11, 2022Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Sherally Munshi has published “Dispossession: An American Property Law Tradition” in the Georgetown Law Journal.

The abstract:

Universities and law schools have begun to purge the symbols of conquest and slavery from their crests and campuses, but they have yet to come to terms with their role in reproducing the material and ideological conditions of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. This Article considers the role the property law tradition has played in shaping and legitimizing regimes of racialized dispossession past and present. It intervenes in the traditional presentation of property law by arguing that dis-possession describes an ongoing but disavowed function of property law. As a counter-narrative and critique of property, dispossession is a useful concept for challenging existing property arrangements, often rationalized within liberal and legal discourse.

Interesting. Looks to be expanding on K-Sue Park’s work.

“Is Texas Hold ‘Em a Game of Chance?”: Georgetown Law Journal

March 28, 2013Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here’s a new article in the Georgetown Law Journal asking whether poker is a game of chance or skill, with implications on the enforcement of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. Here is the abstract:

In 2006, Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), prohibiting the knowing receipt of funds for the purpose of unlawful gambling. The principal consequence of the UIGEA was the shutdown of the burgeoning online poker industry in the United States. Courts determine whether a game is prohibited gambling by asking whether skill or luck is the “dominant factor” in the game. We argue that courts’ conception of a dominant factor— whether chance swamps the effect of skill in playing a single hand of poker—is unduly narrow. We develop four alternative tests to distinguish the impact of skill and luck, and we test these predictions against a unique data set of thousands of hands of Texas Hold ‘Em poker played for sizable stakes online before the passage of the UIGEA. The results of each test indicate that skill is an important influence in determining outcomes in poker. Our tests provide a better framework for how courts should analyze the importance of skill in games, and our results suggest that courts should reconsider the legal status of poker.

View .pdf for full Article.

Now we’ll have to fend off the online gaming spammers inundating our comments….

Angela Riley’s “Indians and Guns” Just Published

June 28, 2012Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Angela Riley has published “Indians and Guns” in the Georgetown Law Journal.

Here is the abstract:

The Supreme Court’s recent Second Amendment opinions establish a bulwark of individual gun rights against the state. District of Columbia v. Heller confirmed that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms for self-defense, and the Court applied this analysis to the states via incorporation theory two years later in McDonald v. City of Chicago. As a result of these cases, it is often assumed that individual gun rights now extend across the United States. But this conclusion fails to take account of a critical exception: Indian tribal nations remain the only governments within the United States that can restrict or fully prohibit the right to keep and bear arms, ignoring the Second Amendment altogether. Indian tribes were never formally brought within the U.S. Constitution; accordingly, the Second Amendment does not bind them. In 1968, Congress extended select, tailored provisions of the Bill of Rights to tribal governments through the Indian Civil Rights Act but included no Second Amendment corollary. As a result, there are over 67 million acres of Indian trust land in the United States, comprising conspicuous islands within which individuals’ gun rights are not constitutionally protected as against tribal governments. With Indian nations thus unconstrained—bearing in mind that gun rights and regulations are oftentimes set by tribal law—pressing questions regarding gun ownership and control arise for those living under tribal authority.

Georgetown Law Journal Article on IGRA and Sovereign Immunity

January 31, 2009Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Courtney J.A. DaCosta has published “When ‘Turnabout’ is Not ‘Fair Play’: Tribal Immunity under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act” in the Georgetown Law Journal. An excerpt:

This Note argues that federal courts have interpreted tribal immunity broadly under IGRA; that this approach, while doctrinally sound, produces several normatively undesirable consequences; and that Congress should stem these consequences by amending IGRA to restore the statute’s tribal-state power balance through abrogation of tribal immunity in certain cases.