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Full-Text Articles in Law
Kenya And The Rule Of Law: The Perspective Of Two Volunteers, Kim Matthews, William H. Coogan
Kenya And The Rule Of Law: The Perspective Of Two Volunteers, Kim Matthews, William H. Coogan
Maine Law Review
Reaction to Kenya’s 2007 national elections was explosive. Riots claimed at least 1000 lives, and upwards of 300,000 people were displaced from their homes. The public lacked faith in both the ballot counting and in the impartiality of dispute resolution by the judiciary. On both counts, public cynicism was justified. No democracy can flourish without the rule of law. In the absence of faith in the rule of law to replace police state oppression, government stability is evanescent. Rule of law is a habit; it grows only through steady erosion of past practices and constant reminders to officials that the …
The Role Of Public Interest Groups In Nation-Building: A Maine Lawyer's Experience In Mongolia, Richard A. Spencer
The Role Of Public Interest Groups In Nation-Building: A Maine Lawyer's Experience In Mongolia, Richard A. Spencer
Maine Law Review
In 2006, I spent three months in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia working as an environmental lawyer with a small Mongolian human rights group called the Center for Human Rights and Development (CHRD). CHRD was working to stop human trafficking, promote human rights, and protect the environment in the face of extreme poverty, government secrecy, corruption, and a post-Soviet government dominated by former members of the Communist party. During my time assisting the staff at CHRD, I felt I could hear the voice of James Madison echoing through the centuries and across the globe. In The Federalist No. 10, Madison suggested that the …
Measuring The Rule Of Law In India: A Volunteer Lawyer's Experience, Linda D. Mcgill
Measuring The Rule Of Law In India: A Volunteer Lawyer's Experience, Linda D. Mcgill
Maine Law Review
When I set off for New Delhi, India in January 2003 to serve as a volunteer with the International Senior Lawyers Project (ISLP), nation-building was not in my mission statement. After all, India is the world’s largest democratic country, sustaining that status for sixty years from its violent birth by partition through the curtailment of individual freedoms in the 1975 “emergency” to its recent emergence as a “giant” of economic development and intellectual capital. India’s hold on democracy is all the more impressive given the religious and cultural differences among its vast population and the legacy of still-simmering resentments from …
Volunteer Lawyers And Nation-Building: Using Experience To Serve The World Community, Jean C. Berman
Volunteer Lawyers And Nation-Building: Using Experience To Serve The World Community, Jean C. Berman
Maine Law Review
It is with great pride that I note the participation of four International Senior Lawyers Project (ISLP) volunteers in this Symposium of the Maine Law Review. These highly accomplished lawyers, three of whom are from Maine and one from Canada, demonstrate perfectly the premises on which ISLP was founded: first, that the skills and experience of senior-level lawyers from the United States and elsewhere can be of great value to emerging democracies, social justice activists, and nations struggling to overcome poverty; and second, that there is a burgeoning pool of such lawyers, both retired and in active practice, who are …
The Role Of A Banking System In Nation-Building, John L. Douglas
The Role Of A Banking System In Nation-Building, John L. Douglas
Maine Law Review
It seems strange to have a discussion of nation-building devoted to the importance of a banking system. After all, when we think of nations, we think of constitutions, borders, and functioning governments. When we think of failed nations, we think of a lack of effective government, a loss of control over society, and a breakdown in law and order. Banks hardly figure into that discussion at all. Indeed, in our society, while banks play an important role, they usually reside quietly in the background. Many of us never set foot in a bank. Our paychecks may be deposited in a …
The Importance Of Commercial Law In The Legal Architecture Of Post-Conflict "New" States, Michael J. Stepek
The Importance Of Commercial Law In The Legal Architecture Of Post-Conflict "New" States, Michael J. Stepek
Maine Law Review
In the era of international relations ushered in by the end of the Cold War, nation-building has become all the rage. In a burst of Wilsonian optimism, Western countries have sought to recreate failed states in their own image, fashioning new governmental institutions from the ashes of violent conflict or civil collapse. These projects became possible in a fresh environment of international consensus that has prevailed since the middle of the 1990s. Developing improved legal institutions has been considered a particularly important component of any state-building project and has been a primary focus of almost all such efforts. A new …
Looking Backward To Address The Future? Transitional Justice, Rising Crime And Nation Building, James L. Cavallaro
Looking Backward To Address The Future? Transitional Justice, Rising Crime And Nation Building, James L. Cavallaro
Maine Law Review
This is not an Article about the Nazi regime’s war on crime, nor does it analyze the possible lawlessness of the Weimar Republic. It does, however, consider the role of crime in transitional states. As such, the observation above is relevant to the issues examined in the pages that follow. Crime and the manipulation of the fear it promotes were essential to the rise of Nazism, the fall of the Weimar Republic, and the historical record of both regimes. I contend that we must recognize the vital role of street crime in the stability and instability of newly democratic and …
Refugees And Internally Displaced: A Challenge To Nation-Building, Rebecca M.M. Wallace, Diego Quiroz
Refugees And Internally Displaced: A Challenge To Nation-Building, Rebecca M.M. Wallace, Diego Quiroz
Maine Law Review
Recent statistics published by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) indicate that there are at least 32.9 million people who are “persons of concern to UNHCR.” This growing population includes “refugees, returnees, [and] stateless and internally displaced persons (IDPs).” Furthermore, it is estimated that there are some “[thirty] states in the world . . . that are at some stage or another along the road to possible failure.” These are weak states beset by invasion, civil war, ethnic rivalry and tribal warfare, or struggling in the wake of any of these catastrophes. Given that 2006 saw a fifty-six …
Culture And Custom In Nation-Building: Law In Afghanistan, Thomas Barfield
Culture And Custom In Nation-Building: Law In Afghanistan, Thomas Barfield
Maine Law Review
Afghanistan’s restoration of the rule of law has set in motion a renewed debate about fundamental legal principles that has not been seen in the West since the time of the Enlightenment: Who is justice for? Who has the right to seek compensation or justice? Does the state or the individual have priority in seeking justice and delivering punishment? Is law a human creation or is it rooted in divine authority? But it is a debate without an audience in the international community that is assisting the Afghan government in restoring its judicial system because the answer appears so self-evident. …
Human Rights And Nation-Building In Cross-Cultural Settings, Burns H. Weston
Human Rights And Nation-Building In Cross-Cultural Settings, Burns H. Weston
Maine Law Review
Values are preferred events, “goods” we cherish; and the value of respect, “conceived as the reciprocal honoring of freedom of choice about participation in value processes,” is “the core value of human rights.” In a world of diverse cultural traditions that is simultaneously distinguished by the widespread universalist claim that “human rights extend in theory to every person on earth without discriminations irrelevant to merit,” the question thus unavoidably arises: when, in human rights decision-making, are cultural differences to be respected and when are they not? The question arises early in the nation-building enterprise where demands to preserve cultural traditions …
Development And Nation Building: A Framework For Policy-Oriented Inquiry, W. Michael Reisman
Development And Nation Building: A Framework For Policy-Oriented Inquiry, W. Michael Reisman
Maine Law Review
We use the term “development” to refer to decision processes and decision outcomes which have been designed to induce the shaping and sharing of all values within and among territorial communities in ways and with consequences approximating the goal values of a world order of human dignity. The component of purposive direction toward these postulated goal values distinguishes development from social change more generally. Social change, it will be noted, is an ineluctable feature of social process, for all actors are constantly seeking to change parts of the social process with the aim of making it discriminate in their favor. …
The Legal Architecture Of Nation-Building: An Introduction, Charles H. Norchi
The Legal Architecture Of Nation-Building: An Introduction, Charles H. Norchi
Maine Law Review
In the future, a historian studying the early twenty-first century will observe a trend: numerous lawyers applying their skill sets to the problems of pathological states. Our future historian will note that the topography of the post-Cold War international system was marked by weakly-governed states failing. Fragile states eroded, frayed, and disintegrated under stress, and their internal social processes became highly susceptible to external forces. Powerful non-state actors, including private armies, operated within the porous boundaries of entities that were once functioning polities. Legal authority became divorced from political control as non-state actors wielded naked power, challenging formal state structures …