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Reassessing Aspects Of The Contribution Of African States To The Development Of International Law Through African Regional Multilateral Treaties, Tiyanjana Maluwa

Michigan Journal of International Law

For decades, debates about Africa’s contribution to the development of international law have been dominated by two opposing schools of thought. First, that European colonial powers deliberately erased Africa and Africans from the history of the creation and use of international law. Second, that, on the contrary, over the last six decades (since the emergence of the newly independent African states in the late 1950s and early 1960s), Africa has contributed to the making of international law and has not been merely a passive recipient of a Eurocentric international law.

This article underscores the role of the postcolonial periphery in …

International Law And Contemporary Slavery: The Long View, Rebecca J. Scott

Michigan Journal of International Law

The three essays in this special issue come together to confirm the value of exploring varying domestic expressions of and adaptations to international legal ideals. In each polity, lawmakers have viewed the terms “slavery” and “slave labor” in part through a domestic historical lens, and have drafted (or failed to draft) legislation accordingly. The United States inherited core concepts dating back to the moment of abolition of chattel slavery, and thus initially built its prohibitions of modern slavery on nineteenth-century rights guarantees and anti-peonage statutes, later reinforced by modern concepts of human trafficking. Having just emerged from a long dictatorship, …

Challenging Monohumanism: An Argument For Changing The Way We Think About Intercountry Adoption, Shani King

Michigan Journal of International Law

In Part I, this Article provides a brief history of ICA. In Part II, using a post-colonialist theoretical framework, the work of legal scholars from the past twenty years on the subject of ICA is explored. This analysis exposes the centrality of MonoHumanism to our discourse on ICA. In Part III, this Article illustrates how our discourse regarding intercountry adoption contributes to our violating the rights of children (and families) as they are defined in the CRC. Lastly, in Part IV, this Article explores how this argument fits into the current and somewhat polarized debate on ICA and how the …

No Black Names On The Letterhead? Efficient Discrimination And The South African Legal Profession, Lisa R. Pruitt

Michigan Journal of International Law

Although there have long been black lawyers in South Africa, during apartheid only a handful joined the ranks of the country's large commercial firms. Now, in the post-apartheid period, these firms are keenly aware of a range of economic and political incentives to hire black attorneys, and most are doing so at a record pace. Very few black attorneys, however, are enduring the path to partnership in these firms. Based on more than seventy-five interviews conducted in South Africa in 1999 and 2000, this Article both documents and critically examines the reasons for black attrition. While firms' incentives to integrate …

Extremist Threats To Fragile Democracies: A Proposal For An East European Marshall Plan, Victor Williams

Michigan Journal of International Law

Review of Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia by Walter Laquer, and Free to Hate: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia by Paul Hockenos