Law Commons^™

Seeing Race As We Are: Avoiding, Arguing, Aspiring, Michael A. Cowan

New England Journal of Public Policy

Racial conflict in the United States pushes people to positions of argument or avoidance, more or less intensely and for varying lengths of time, depending on external events like the murder of George Floyd. Neither stance produces the conversations required to seek common ground and compromise around racial issues. Argument alone deepens divisions and avoidance leaves them to metastasize in the social body. In an attempt to go beneath these two positions, this article first explains the role and form of interpretation in all conflict and dispute resolution and how it is shaped. Then it examines the concepts and strategies …

The Youth Inferno: Two-Way Working On Ancestral Lands, Pamela Nathan

New England Journal of Public Policy

In this article I present some of the work of Creating a Safe and Supportive Environment (CASSE) in Central Australia, Northern Territory, with the youth in the justice system, referring to our dual cultural and therapeutic program Shields for Living, Tools for Life. Psychoanalytic concepts and tools that have informed the work and transformed the trauma landscape are detailed. The work is at the epicenter of anger, concern, and politics in Central Australia and this epicenter has been named the “youth crisis.” It is a journey of feeling the heat, of being on a rollercoaster ride in a landscape of …

Understanding Myanmar’S Buddhist Extremists: Some Preliminary Musings, Kumar Ramakrishna

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article examines Buddhist extremism in Myanmar. It argues that Buddhist extremism—like other types of religious extremism—is an acute form of fundamentalism. The article begins with a survey of how extremism is usually understood in the theoretical literature, showing that its religious variant is best conceived of as an acute form of fundamentalism. It then fine tunes this understanding, arguing that religious extremism is a fundamentalist belief system that justifies structural violence against relevant out-groups. The article outlines seven core characteristics of the religious extremist culled from the various theoretical approaches to extremism. It employs these seven characteristics to examine …

Seventeen Pieces: Displacement, Misplacement, And Conservation, Yasmin Merali, Kevork Mourad, Manas Ghanem

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article explores the systemic importance of art in the conservation of images, historical reference, and cultural meaning as displaced victims of humanitarian crises make the transition from the land of their birth to a new country with a different history and cultural landscape. In presenting the work of Kevork Mourad, an artist of Armenian descent displaced from Syria, we show the essential, layered interplay of visceral, lived individual experiences and the historic collective memory of real and imagined pasts that survive the destruction of physical artifacts.

Raising Indigenous Women’S Voices For Equal Rights And Self-Determination, Grazia Redolfi, Nikoletta Pikramenou, Rosario Grimà Algora

New England Journal of Public Policy

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples states that the right to self-determination for Indigenous peoples involves their having the right to freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development. The implementation of this right is linked to the ability and freedom to participate in any decision making that relates to their development. Current laws and practices are considered “unfair to women,” because they sustain traditional and customary patriarchal attitudes that marginalize Indigenous women and exclude them from decision-making tables and leadership roles. Despite the many challenges Indigenous women face in …

Communicative Justice And Reconciliation In Canada, Alice Neeson

New England Journal of Public Policy

Communicative justice co-exists with other dimensions of justice and emphasizes the importance of fair communicative practices, particularly after periods of direct or structural violence. While intercultural dialogue is often assumed to be a positive, or even necessary, part of reconciliation processes, there are questions to be asked about the ethicality of dialogue when one voice has been silenced, misrepresented, and ignored for decades. This article draws on twelve months of ethnographic research with reconciliation activists and organizations in Canada and considers the potential for communicative flows to help compensate for structural inequalities during processes of reconciliation.

Language, Indigenous Peoples, And The Right To Self-Determination, Noelle Higgins, Gerard Maguire

New England Journal of Public Policy

Language has always played a significant role in the colonization of peoples as an instrument of subjugation and homogenization. It has been used to control nondominant groups, including Indigenous peoples, often leading to their exclusion or assimilation. Many Indigenous groups, however, use language as a tool to connect the members of their community, to assert their group identity, and to preserve their culture. Thus, language has been used both as a means of oppression and as a mobilizer of Indigenous groups in their struggles for national recognition. Recognizing the significance of language in the identity and culture of Indigenous peoples, …

Resolving Conflict Between Canada’S Indigenous Peoples And The Crown Through Modern Treaties: Yukon Case History, Kirk Cameron

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article presents an example of how modern treaties with Yukon First Nations have created a foundation for co-relational involvement in the direction and control of land and resource management throughout Canada’s subnational region of Yukon, approximately 470,000 square kilometers in size. The modern treaties with eleven of the fourteen Yukon First Nations create assessment and management structures where appointment to these bodies are nominations not only from the territorial and federal governments but from the Yukon First Nations. The rights captured in the treaties are protected under Canada’s supreme law, the Constitution Act, 1982. The treaty relationship has effectively …

Contextualizing Approaches To Indigenous Peoples’ Experiences Of Intractable Conflict, Michele A. Sam

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article contextualizes intractable conflict within the lived experiences and worldviews of an Indigenous person, imbued with academic and scholarly research. The text illustrates how intractable conflict is experienced within the “developed world,” resulting in both freedom and fragmentation. Whether intractable conflict stems from colonial and postcolonial development and influences current Indigenous Peoples’ self-development efforts in Canada, specifically, and possibly across British colonies in general seems to be a new inquiry. The author relates her intergenerational experiences of contact, unpacking research and development in its many forms alongside the characteristics of intractable conflict and related federal Indian and social policy. …

Gendering Migration: Women, Migratory Routes And Trafficking, Nicolamaria Coppola

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article examines international migration from a gender perspective. It asserts that migration can be empowering for women, and at the same time it may exacerbate their vulnerabilities, including abuse and trafficking, particularly when migrants are low skilled or irregular.

Wars Remembered (2003), Shaun O’Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

O'Connell speaks about his father, among other war veterans, dealing with the effects of the wars they fought in. He explains his father's history from how he enilisted to how he died. He also touches upon other's war experiences and writing about the after effects of them as well.

Reprinted from New England Journal of Public Policy 19, no. 1 (2003), article 3.

Boston And New York: The City Upon A Hill And Gotham (2006), Shaun O’Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article is about the author's experience with visiting New York during it's rebirth after 9/11. He speaks about the history of both cities and how they have each grown into their own to become places of future enterprise and cultural cohesiveness.

Reprinted from New England Journal of Public Policy 21, no. 1 (2006), article 9.

'Listen To What You Say': Rwanda’S Postgenocide Language Policies, Lynne Tirrell

New England Journal of Public Policy

Freedom of expression is considered a basic human right, and yet most countries have restrictions on speech they deem harmful. Following the genocide of the Tutsi, Rwanda passed a constitution (2003) and laws against hate speech and other forms of divisionist language (2008, 2013). Understanding how language shaped “recognition harms” that both constitute and fuel genocide also helps account for political decisions to limit “divisionist” discourse. When we speak, we make expressive commitments, which are commitments to the viability and value of ways of speaking. This article explores reasons a society would decide to say, “We don’t talk that way …

Boston And New York: The City Upon A Hill And Gotham, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article is about the author's experience with visiting New York during it's rebirth after 9/11. He speaks about the history of both cities and how they have each grown into their own to become places of future enterprise and cultural cohesiveness.

Lessons About Reform From “A Very Dangerous Woman”, Sherry H. Penney, James Livingston

New England Journal of Public Policy

We discuss reform in antebellum America through the life of Martha Coffin Wright, an activist in the abolition and early women’s rights movements. Consideration of her motivations for reform; the obstacles faced by these movements; their methods, successes, and failures, may offer guidelines for reformers of today.

The Travels Of Our Bodies, Ourselves, Jane Pincus

New England Journal of Public Policy

The women’s health book, Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women, was first printed in 1970 by the small, radical New England Free Press. Published by the group of women soon too become the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, it was advertised solely by word of mouth. Successive newsprint editions reached a quarter of a million people in the United States through colleges and an extensive network of “underground” bookstores. The book placed female sexuality firmly within the framework of women’s health and combined vividly experienced medical encounters with available health and medical information. It critiqued prevailing cultural …

From Just War To Just Intervention, Susan J. Atwood

New England Journal of Public Policy

What is Just War? What is Just Intervention? This paper examines the evolution of the criteria for Just War from its origins in the early Christian church to the twenty-first century. The end of the Cold War era has expanded the discussion to include grounds for intervention. Indeed, in the 1990s, a number of multilateral interventions took place on humanitarian grounds. But the debate is ongoing about whether the criteria applied in the Just War theory — proper authority, just cause, and right intent — remain valid in an era of Just Intervention. The author examines as case studies some …

Engendering Accountability: Gender Crimes Under International Criminal Law, Richard J. Goldstone, Estelle A. Dehon

New England Journal of Public Policy

Gender crimes, such as rape, sexual assault, sexual slavery, and forced prostitution, have always been perpetrated during war, yet the laws of war have been slow to acknowledge these crimes and to bring their perpetrators to justice. This article examines the response of the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda to this lacuna in international law, and analyzes the mainly positive developments they have made in this area in relation to the definition of rape and to the prosecution of gender crimes as crimes against humanity, war crimes, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and genocide. It …

Shelter The American Way: Federal Urban Housing Policy, 1900-1980, Ronald Dale Karr

New England Journal of Public Policy

American urban housing policy has featured subsidies for the suburban middle class and parsimonious spending for the urban poor. The outlines of this policy took shape during the Progressive Era: acceptance of the capitalistic market economy, support for the deserving poor needing temporary help, toleration of racial segregation, and the designation of overcrowding as the single most important urban problem. Progressive housing reformers championed stricter housing codes and model tenements, but housing conditions for the urban poor showed little improvement.

The U.S. government avoided direct involvement in housing until the early 1920s, when it promoted local zoning legislation. Under the …

Not By Numbers Alone: A New Decade For Women In The Law, Margaret H. Marshall

New England Journal of Public Policy

There has been a dramatic increase in both the percentage and the numbers of women who have entered the legal profession in the last fifteen years, but women have not penetrated its higher echelons — partnerships in law firms, general counsel of corporations, and chiefs of government bureaus — in the same percentage that those advances should be reflecting. While entry-level salaries may be equal for male and female attorneys, are women in the legal world discovering the same glass ceilings and barriers to entry at these top levels of economic empowerment that their corporate counterparts have experienced? The author …

From The Bar To The Bar: Prevailing Despite Gender Bias, Nancy Woolley

New England Journal of Public Policy

The report of the Gender Bias Study of the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was released in May 1989. After a thorough study of the areas of family law, domestic violence and sexual assault, criminal and juvenile justice, civil damage awards, gender bias in courthouse interactions, and court personnel, the study committee concluded that there was significant gender-based bias in the courts. The following article demonstrates how bias affected one woman and her children, and how, in spite of it and with the help of individuals and institutions in the private sector, she has attained empowerment and …

Women, Politics, And The Nineties: The Abortion Debate, Susan Estrich

New England Journal of Public Policy

The fight for political empowerment of women may finally break wide open over the issues of reproductive freedom. This article posits that while public attention has focused on courtroom attempts to limit Roe v. Wade, the issues will ultimately be decided in the political arena. Here, Estrich says, the framer of the question may be the ultimate victor. For those on the pro-choice side of the debate, the next election cycle may be their first real opportunity to vote as a bloc and wield real political power.

Employment Leave: Foundation For Family Policy, Mary Jane Gibson

New England Journal of Public Policy

Women and men in the workforce face difficult dilemmas during family crises. Can one be a responsible family member and a responsible employee when an elderly parent is ill, a spouse is disabled, a baby is born or adopted, a child is sick? Employment leave with insurance for wage replacement is a cornerstone of family policy proposed in a workable format in H. 2191 now before the Massachusetts legislature. It can be a model for other states and, someday, the nation.

The Aids Epidemic: A Prism Distorting Social And Legal Principles, Alec Gray

New England Journal of Public Policy

The AIDS epidemic is affecting American society in far-reaching and unexpected ways. It touches our institutions, our value systems, and our private lives. Social issues seem to change and become distorted by the epidemic 's prismlike effect. This article examines some of the major public health issues raised by the epidemic, ranging from testing to contact tracing and quarantine. It argues that while the civil rights of individuals may have to be sacrificed to stem the spread of the disease, those rights should not be abandoned unless a clear benefit to the public health would result.

Issues of discrimination in …

Poverty Amid Renewed Affluence: The Poor Of New England At Mid-Decade, Andrew M. Sum, Paul E. Harrington, William B. Goedicke, Robert Vinson

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article examines the problem of poverty in New England during the current period of economic prosperity. Major trends in the size and composition of the poor population within the region are analyzed. Striking changes in the relative incidence of poverty have occurred among families in New England. As the economy has moved toward full employment, poverty rates among husband-wife families in the region have fallen sharply. In contrast, female-headed families in New England have not benefited substantially from recent rapid increases in employment opportunities. The result has been a persistent trend toward the feminization of poverty in New England. …

My Life With The Fbi, James Carroll

New England Journal of Public Policy

When I was a child, the FBI was everywhere in my world and I loved my world more for that. My first remembered experience of entertainment — one could even say of story — was listening on the radio in the late forties to "The FBI in Peace and War," and I can still hum its theme. My older brother Joe and I, and then Brian, too, when he came along, huddled together by the old Philco, riveted because those tales of gangbusters, spy catchers, and G-men evoked the world of our father, who was himself an FBI agent. He …