UCLA School of Law

This paper critiques Brook Gotberg’s recent proposal to reform preference law by creating a new safe harbor for preferences in chapter 11 while repealing certain existing preference defenses in chapter 7. The proper path of reform in this area would preserve preference recovery as a feature of chapter 11 reorganization law while raising the monetary limits on minimum recoveries, restricting financial contract safe harbors and bolstering ordinary trade creditor defenses across both chapter 11 and chapter 7.

Abstract: The International Criminal Court (ICC) is a legal institution embedded in international politics. Politics shaped the Rome Statute of the ICC, which is rooted in norms and rules of European lineage and security interests of party states. Politics constrains and influences the operation of the Court, which has adapted in response to oversight and governance of the Assembly of States Parties, and to political actions extrinsic to institutional rules. The ICC also has political effects in situation states. A brief history shows that application of Rome Statute triggers across state parties with different social conditions skewed geographic distribution of its investigations and prosecutions towards Africa, a structural bias that catalysed a legitimation crisis for the ICC. Subsequent exercises of expansive jurisdiction aimed at nationals of non-African, non-party states – including Israel and some of the world's great powers – have dampened African complaints and advanced the ICC agenda, but intensified non-legitimacy claims by powerful non-party states. To survive, Court organs must follow legal mandates, yet be responsive to pressing international political demands, continuously risking the legitimacy of the ICC as a legal institution and adverse political reactions by antagonised governments. Careful management of the tension between law and politics at the ICC may modestly reduce antagonism towards the Court, but that tension cannot be resolved, and confrontations over the ICC's legitimacy are certain to recur.

In admitting DNA sample taken at the crime scene in 2010 to compare it with a DNA sample taken from the defendant in 2020 courts assume that the defendant’s DNA has not changed in the prior ten years. This article questions that assumption using scientific findings published in the journals Scientific American and Science News.

Documenting contemporary difficulties in realizing indigenous property rights, this article posits that human rights and property rights are inextricably linked. The ability to hold property and wield power is essential to the exercise of other basic human rights. Thus, the recognition of property rights is critical as it allows groups to function as “economic actors” in society. Because classical property models operate to deprive indigenous peoples of the right to control their own property — tangible and intangible — they are often powerless to exercise their human rights. This article contends that the human rights goals of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) will only be realized through a fundamental shift in thinking from an individual rights-oriented property model to one capable of accommodating both the rights and responsibilities inherent in property ownership. Finally, this article asserts that it is necessary to move beyond the classical property model — one which considers the rights but not the obligations of individual property owners — to new models of property capable of reconceptualizing ownership and entitlement for the protection of indigenous peoples’ human rights and continued existence.