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Epilogue: The Elephant In The Room, Jamal Greene Jan 2022

Epilogue: The Elephant In The Room, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter explores the contrasting role of proportionality discourse in the USA and in Latin America. Although the USA provided an important constitutional model for Latin American countries, the latter does not share the former’s disinterest in the proportionality framework, which is considered foreign to the legal tradition of the country despite the fact it is arguably harmonic with the approach to law creation in the common law tradition. The chapter seeks possible explanations for the contrast in four elements: the importance in Latin America of centralized, specialized constitutional jurisdiction; the tradition of borrowing constitutional jurisprudence from abroad; the openness …


Judging Genocide In Rwanda: Lay Judges And Mass Prosecutions In Local Courts, Chakravarty Chakravarty Jan 2013

Judging Genocide In Rwanda: Lay Judges And Mass Prosecutions In Local Courts, Chakravarty Chakravarty

Studio for Law and Culture

The motivations, attitudes and behaviors of the quarter million lay judges who ran the mass prosecutions for genocide is a curiously under-studied topic in the growing literature on the local gacaca courts in Rwanda. The state would have failed to prosecute thousands of citizens without the cooperation of these judges. Yet this post-genocide Tutsi-dominated authoritarian state allowed these courts to run more or less independently and left this all-important task in the hands of lay judges. The judges too volunteered to work without compensation. Who were the judges? Why did they agree to take on the social and economic risks …