Abstract:

It has been said that constitutional court judges around the world increasingly participate in a "global judicial dialogue" that causes judges to make increased use of foreign law.  This is a dialogue, however, from which the members of the Taiwanese Constitutional Court are largely excluded.  Taiwan’s precarious diplomatic situation and intense lobbying by China have effectively prevented the members of Taiwan's Constitutional Court from participating in international judicial gatherings and official visits to foreign courts. Nevertheless, the Taiwanese Constitutional Court routinely engages in extensive consideration of foreign law, either expressly or implicitly, when deciding cases.  This fact casts doubt on the notion that "global judicial dialogue" explains judicial use of foreign law.  Comparison of the Taiwanese Constitutional Court and U.S. Supreme Court demonstrates that “global judicial dialogue” plays a much smaller role in shaping a court’s utilization of foreign law than institutional factors such as (a) the rules and practices governing the composition and staffing of the court and (b) the extent to which the structure of legal education and the legal profession incentivizes judges and academics to possess expertise in foreign law.

Speaker Bio:

David Law is Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis and Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He works in the areas of law and political science, public law, judicial behavior, comparative constitutional law, and comparative judicial politics. Born and raised in Canada, he holds a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford, a B.C.L. in European and Comparative Law from the University of Oxford, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He has previously taught at the University of San Diego School of Law and the University of California, San Diego political science department and has been a visiting professor at the National Taiwan University College of Law, Seoul National University School of Law, and Keio University Faculty of Law in Tokyo, and a visiting scholar at the NYU School of Law. His current research focuses on the identification, explanation, and prediction of global patterns in constitutional law, and his recent scholarship on constitutional globalization and the declining influence of the U.S. Constitution has been featured in a variety of domestic and international media.

Francis Fukuyama, has written widely on issues relating to democratization and international political economy.  His most recent book, The Origins of Political Order, was published in April 2011. He is a resident in FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins SAIS Foreign Policy Institute, and a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 

Tu Weiming, has been instrumental in developing discourses on dialogue among civilizations, Cultural China, reflection on the Enlightenment mentality of the modern West, and multiple modernities.  He is currently studying the modern transformation of Confucian humanism in East Asia and tapping its spiritual resources for human flourishing in the global community.  He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), and a Member of the International Philosophical Society (IIP).     

Sponsored by Stanford Confucius Institute, Beijing Forum, Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, Peking University

The United States commercial nuclear industry started just a few years following the conclusion of the second world war with the start of operation of the Shippingport reactor. Over a relatively short period of time, the industry grew to over one hundred reactors all based fundamentally on the same light water reactor technology that served the naval nuclear program well. Since the start of the industry, the nuclear power research and development community has explored a large number of reactor concepts for a variety of conventional and not so conventional applications. Many of these technologies were demonstrated as both test reactors and prototypical demonstration reactors. Despite the promise of many of these concepts, the commercialization cases for many of these technologies have failed to emerge. In this talk I will discuss the barriers reactor vendors currently face in the United States and the inherent challenges between promoting evolutionary versus revolutionary nuclear technologies. I will then discuss the prospects for the development of advanced commercial reactor technology abroad with an emphasis on the Chinese nuclear program. In particular, I will discuss recent developments in their advanced light water reactor program, high temperature gas reactor demonstration, and thorium molten salt reactor program.

About the speaker: Dr. Edward Blandford is an Assistant Professor of Nuclear Engineering at the University of New Mexico. Before coming to UNM, Blandford was a Stanton nuclear security fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. His research focuses on advanced reactor thermal-fluids, best-estimate code validation, reactor safety, and physical protection strategies for critical nuclear infrastructure. Blandford received his PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010.

About the Speaker: Mickey Edwards is the director of the Aspen Institute-Rodel Fellowships in Public Leadership and lecturer at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.  He represented the state of Oklahoma as a  Republican member of Congress 16 years (1977-92).  He was a member of the House Republican leadership and served on the House Budget and Appropriations committees.  Since leaving Congress, he has taught at Harvard, Georgetown, and Princeton universities, and has chaired various task forces for the Constitution Project, the Brookings Institution, and the Council on Foreign Relations.  Edwards is the author of The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans (Yale University Press, August 2012) and Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost--And How It Can Find Its Way Back (Oxford University Press, March 2008).