Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Religiosity In Constitutions And The Status Of Minority Rights, Brandy G. Robinson

Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions

Minority rights and religion have never been topics that are simultaneously considered. However, arguably, the two have relevance, especially when combined with the topic and theory of constitutionalism. Historically and traditionally, minorities have been granted certain rights and have been denied certain rights under various constitutions. These grants and denials relate to cultural differences and values, arguably relating to a culture’s understanding and interpretation of religion.

This article explores the relationship and status of minority rights as it relates to religiosity and constitutionalism. Essentially, there is a correlation between these topics and research shows where certain nations have used religion …

A Different Kind Of Justice: Review 2, Claudia Taranto

RadioDoc Review

A Different Kind of Justice tells the story of two people who met across a table in a restorative justice (RJ) conference, facilitated by Karl James, an RJ professional. Margaret’s home is robbed; Ian, a burglar and heroin addict, took a few small items, including a laptop with all her family photos. Margaret reveals that her daughter Jessica died in a car accident a few months after the burglary and the missing photos now mean so much more to the family.

The program is essentially interviews with the two characters, intercut, as they each tell their version of their shared …

A Different Kind Of Justice: A Critical Reflection, Cassandra Sharp Dr

RadioDoc Review

Despite the accepted success of many restorative justice programs with youth and Indigenous offenders, debate still proliferates about the utility of adult restorative justice programs within the criminal justice system. Many important questions are raised about the efficacy and impact of such programs including: ‘What can restorative justice offer adult offenders and victims of crime? What are some of the challenges of using restorative justice in this context? And what can we learn from emerging developments in practice?’ (Bolitho et al, 2012). As will be discussed in this review, Russell Finch’s BBC Radio 4 production of A Different Kind of …

Introduction To The Structure And Limits Of Criminal Law, Paul H. Robinson, Joshua Samuel Barton

All Faculty Scholarship

The book The Structure and Limits of Criminal Law (Ashgate) collects and reprints classic articles on three topics: the conceptual structure of criminal law doctrine, the conduct necessary and that sufficient for criminal liability, and the offender culpability and blameworthiness necessary and that sufficient for criminal liability. The collection includes articles by H.L.A. Hart, Sanford Kadish, George Fletcher, Herbert Packer, Norval Morris, Gordon Hawkins, Andrew von Hirsch, Bernard Harcourt, Richard Wasserstrom, Andrew Simester, John Darley, Kent Greenawalt, and Paul Robinson. This essay serves as an introduction to the collection, explaining how each article fits into the larger debate and giving …

When Harvard Said No To Eugenics: The J. Ewing Mears Bequest, 1927, Paul A. Lombardo

Faculty Publications By Year

James Ewing Mears (1838-1919) was a founding member of the Philadelphia Academy of Surgery. His 1910 book, The Problem of Race Betterment, laid the groundwork for later authors to explore the uses of surgical sterilization as a eugenic measure. Mears left $60,000 in his will to Harvard University to support the teaching of eugenics. Although numerous eugenic activists were on the Harvard faculty, and who of its Presidents were also associated with the eugenics movement, Harvard refused the Mears gift. The bequest was eventually awarded to Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. This article explains why Harvard turned its back …

Ineffective Assistance Of Counsel Before Powell V. Alabama: Lessons From History For The Future Of The Right To Counsel, Sara Mayeux

All Faculty Scholarship

The doctrinal literature on ineffective assistance of counsel typically begins with the 1932 Supreme Court case of Powell v. Alabama. This symposium contribution goes back farther, locating the IAC doctrine’s origins in a series of state cases from the 1880s through the 1920s. At common law, the traditional agency rule held that counsel incompetence was never grounds for a new trial. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, state appellate judges chipped away at that rule, developing a more flexible doctrine that allowed appellate courts to reverse criminal convictions in cases where, because of egregious attorney ineptitude, there was reason …

The Limits Of Regulatory Science In Transnational Governance Of Transgenic Plant Agriculture And Food Systems, Taiwo Oriola

Taiwo Oriola

The current national and transnational regulatory and policy framework for transgenic plant agriculture and food is arguably largely defined by science. Notably, transgenic plant agriculture policy deference to science is ostensibly premised on the general perception that science is neutral, objective, reliable, and agnostic. This is exemplified by cases ranging from Alliance for Bio-integrity v Donna Shalala, European Communities: Measures Affecting the Approval and Marketing of Biotech Products, to European Commission v Republic of Poland, in which conscientious, ethical, religious, and cultural oppositional grounds to transgenic plant agriculture and food were trumped by scientific imperatives. However, the lack of unanimity …

"Not Just A Common Criminal": The Case For Sentencing Mitigation Videos, Regina Austin

All Faculty Scholarship

Sentencing mitigation or sentencing videos are a form of visual legal advocacy that is produced on behalf of defendants for use in the sentencing phases of criminal cases (from charging to clemency). The videos are typically short (5 to 10 minutes or so) nonfiction films that explore a defendant’s background, character, and family situation with the aim of raising factual and moral issues that support the argument for a shorter or more lenient sentence. Very few examples of mitigation videos are in the public domain and available for viewing. This article provides a complete analysis of the constituent elements of …

'Gardens Of Justice': Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2013, Volume 39, Matilda Arvidsson, Leila Brännström, Merima Bruncevic, Leif Dahlberg

Matilda Arvidsson

FOREWARD: GARDENS OF JUSTICE

Matilda Arvidsson, Merima Bruncevic, Leila Brannstrom, Leif Dahlberg

Our Gardens of Justice special themed issue of the Australian Feminist Law Journal grew out of the 2012 Critical Legal Conference in Stockholm and its theme of Gardens of Justice, a conference organised by Matilda Arvidsson, Merima Bruncevic, Leila Brannstrom and Leif Dahlberg. We issued a Call for Papers early in 2013 in which several conference theme questions were repeated. We called for papers devoted to thinking about law and justice as a physical as well as a social environment. The theme suggested a plurality of justice gardens …

Embodying Law In The Garden: An Autoethnographic Account Of An Office Of Law, Matilda Arvidsson

Dr Matilda Arvidsson

Based on an autoethnographical study of the office of the tingsnotarie this article questions the relation between the ethical self and the act of taking up a judicial office, employing the question of how I can live with (my) law. While the office and the ethical self are kept apart, often by recourse to persona, I make a case for the attendance to the self in examinations of ethical responsibility when pursuing an office of law. I propose that the garden, and in particular the practices and notions of (en)closure, (loss of) direction, cultivation, (dis)order, authorship and care-for-the-other which are …

Reflections On Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections Of Race And Class For Women In Academia Symposium - The Plenary Panel, Maritza I. Reyes

Journal Publications

No abstract provided.

Opening Borders: African Americans And Latinos Through The Lens Of Immigration, Maritza I. Reyes

Journal Publications

African-American and Latino voter turnout during the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections hit record numbers. Polls show that the immigration debate influenced Latino voter turnout and preference. Presidential candidate Barack Obama's voiced support of comprehensive immigration reform strengthened his lead among Latino voters in 2008 and, once in office, his executive policy of granting temporary protection to DREAMers solidified his lead among Latino voters in 2012. Both elections showed the power that minority groups can exert when they vote in support of the candidate. If the demographic changes continue as currently estimated, African Americans and Latinos will contribute in large …

Legitimation, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Mark C Modak-Truran

This article identifies three different conceptions of legitimation - pre-modern, modern, and post-secular - that compete both within and across national boundaries for the coveted prize of informing the social imaginary regarding how the government and the law should be legitimated in constitutional democracies. Pre-modern conceptions of legitimation consider governments and rulers legitimate if they are ordained by God or if the political system is ordered in accordance with the normative cosmic order. Contemporary proponents of the pre-modern conception range from those in the United States who maintain that the government has been legitimated by the “Judeo-Christian tradition” to those …

Muslim Radicalization In Prison: Responding With Sound Penal Policy Or The Sound Of Alarm?, Spearit

Articles

This article assesses radicalization among Muslim prisoners in the post- 9/11 era by analysis of ethnographic data in light of the available research. There are two primary motives that drive this inquiry: (1) to determine whether prisons are “fertile soil for jihad” as claimed, and (2) to the extent prisoner radicalization does occur, determine the ideological motives. In the last decade, politicians and analysts have clamored about the “danger” and “threat” posed by Islam in American prisons. Yet these characterizations sit in tension with several decades of sustained Islamic outreach in prison to support inmate rehabilitation and re-entry. They also …

Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Today, most American workers do not have constitutional rights on the job. As The Workplace Constitution shows, this outcome was far from inevitable. Instead, American workers have a long history of fighting for such rights. Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights advocates sought constitutional protections against racial discrimination by employers and unions. At the same time, a conservative right-to-work movement argued that the Constitution protected workers from having to join or support unions. Those two movements, with their shared aim of extending constitutional protections to American workers, were a potentially powerful combination. But they sought to use those protections to …

Triadic Legal Pluralism In North Sinai: A Case Study Of State, Shari'a, And 'Urf Courts In Conflict And Cooperation, Mara R. Revkin

Faculty Scholarship

To the extent that legal scholars have addressed the post-authoritarian transitions underway in the Middle East, the scope of their work has been primarily confined to the formal infra-structure of state-manufactured law. Attention has focused on the activities of high courts, parliaments, and the administrative apparatus of official justice systems, while largely neglecting to acknowledge the importance of non-state institutions and systems of normative rules that operate in the shadow of modern bureaucratic governments. The concept of legal pluralism, defined as the coexistence of multiple legal or normative orders within a common geographical area, has been applied extensively in European, …

Reading Blackstone In The Twenty-First Century And The Twenty-First Century Through Blackstone, Jessie Allen

Book Chapters

If the Supreme Court mythologizes Blackstone, it is equally true that Blackstone himself was engaged in something of a mythmaking project. Far from a neutral reporter, Blackstone has some stories to tell, in particular the story of the hero law. The problems associated with using the Commentaries as a transparent window on eighteenth-century American legal norms, however, do not make Blackstone’s text irrelevant today. The chapter concludes with my brief reading of the Commentaries as a critical mirror of some twenty-first-century legal and social structures. That analysis draws on a long-term project, in which I am making my way through …

Empirical Desert, Individual Prevention, And Limiting Retributivism: A Reply, Paul H. Robinson, Joshua Samuel Barton, Matthew J. Lister

All Faculty Scholarship

A number of articles and empirical studies over the past decade, most by Paul Robinson and co-authors, have suggested a relationship between the extent of the criminal law's reputation for being just in its distribution of criminal liability and punishment in the eyes of the community – its "moral credibility" – and its ability to gain that community's deference and compliance through a variety of mechanisms that enhance its crime-control effectiveness. This has led to proposals to have criminal liability and punishment rules reflect lay intuitions of justice – "empirical desert" – as a means of enhancing the system's moral …

Law And Artifice In Blackstone's Commentaries, Jessie Allen

Articles

William Blackstone is often identified as a natural law thinker for whom property rights were preeminent, but reading the Commentaries complicates that description. I propose that Blackstone’s concept of law is more concerned with human invention and artifice than with human nature. At the start of his treatise, Blackstone identifies security, liberty and property as “absolute” rights that form the foundation of English law. But while security and liberty are “inherent by nature in every individual” and “strictly natural,” Blackstone is only willing to say that “private property is probably founded in nature.” Moreover, Blackstone is clear that there is …

A Proposal To Withhold Divorce Decrees On Grounds Of Equity, J. David Bleich

Faculty Articles

Throughout the medieval period, marriage was acknowledged by temporal rulers to be a religious matter governed by the ecclesiastic law of the Church which, to be sure, incorporated many principles of Roman law. Subsequent to the Reformation, the rulers of many European countries became disposed to regard marriage as a civil act, to withdraw marriage from the control of the church and to entrust it entirely to the state. The Napoleonic Code was the first example of a legal system that treated marriage as a purely civil act. The Napoleonic Code did not deny the religious element present in marriage …

Entender Los Males Económicos Modernos A La Luz De La Doctrina Social Católica, Brian M. Mccall

Brian M McCall

In a general sense, St. Thomas Aquinas predicted the paralysis and chaos of the financial and economic systems in America and Europe which occurred in 2008, when he predicted that in a society where unjust exchanges dominate, eventually all exchanges will cease. St. Thomas also points out that although human law cannot prohibit all injustice, society cannot escape the consequences of transgressing the divine law which leaves “nothing unpunished.” Thus, at least part of the explanation for that crisis whose effects remain with us today lies in continuous violations of natural justice by our economic system. Neither one product nor …

Entender Los Males Economómicos Modernos A La Luz De La Doctrina Social Cátolica (Understanding Modern Economic Woes In Light Of Catholic Social Doctrine), Brian M. Mccall

Brian M McCall

En sentido general, Santo Tomás Aquino predijo la parálisis y el caos del sistema financiero económico en Estados Unidos y Europa que ocurrió en 2008, cuando predijo que en una sociedad donde los intercambios injustos dominan, eventualmente todos los intercambios podrán cesar. Santo Tomás también señala que aunque la ley humana no pueda prohibir todas las injusticias, la sociedad no puede escapar de las consecuencias de trasgredir la ley divina que no deja nada en la impunidad. Así, al menos una parte de la explicación para esta crisis cuyos efectos permanecen con nosotros en la actualidad se encuentra en las …