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Full-Text Articles in Law
Leahy—Sharpening The Blade, Nandor F.R. Kiss
Leahy—Sharpening The Blade, Nandor F.R. Kiss
Pace International Law Review
Over the course of the last 20 years, the Leahy Law has become one of the cornerstones of foreign and human rights policy. Yet, despite its largely unchallenged importance, field practitioners and other stakeholders have identified a number of substantive and practical deficiencies that greatly diminish the law’s ability to achieve the desired effect, and worse, may pose a risk to the United States’ interests. In reflecting on these deficiencies, and armed with decades of data and anecdotal evidence, this Article proposes adjustments focused on better aligning the law’s intent and effect. These recommendations range from semantic edits to substantive …
Unreasonable Revelations: God Told Me To Kill, Linda Ross Meyer
Unreasonable Revelations: God Told Me To Kill, Linda Ross Meyer
Pace Law Review
This Article focuses on one extreme example of the law’s response to unreasonable revelations that is starkly presented in a series of unsettling murders: those involving criminal defendants who claim they committed their crime because God told them to do it—known as “deific decree” cases. This example of the conflict between revelation and reason tests the limits of law’s ability to understand and countenance revelation when the stakes are highest. The deific decree cases also present the hardest epistemological problems, because the defendant claims that the experience of God’s command is self-authenticating—a position fundamentally at odds with both scientific and …