Law Commons^™

Why 9/11 Matters To Singapore, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In a commentary, SMU Associate Professor of Law Eugene Tan discussed why 9/11 matters to Singapore. He opined that when it comes to countering the terrorist threat, civil society has an important role to play in strengthening inter-faith engagement and understanding.

Mass Shootings, Mental "Illness," And Tarasoff, J. Thomas Sullivan

Faculty Scholarship

The continuing public attention focused on acts of mass violence, including mass shootings, has understandably created significant concerns over the ability to protect individuals from death and injury attributable to these acts. At least two generalized explanations for this kind of violence have been put forward, based on the nature of the acts and apparent motivation of the perpetrators, who are often killed in the process by themselves or law enforcement officers. Many acts of mass violence are committed by individuals confirmed to be terrorists, acting with political or religious-political motivations. Others are assumed to be committed by individuals acting …

Defeating The Scourge Of Terrorism: How Soft Law Instruments In Singapore Can Develop Societal Trust And Promote Cooperative Norms, Tan K. B. Eugene

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The maintenance of a ‘moderate, mainstream’ Muslim community as a bulwark against the fraying of harmonious ethnic relations has become a key governance concern in multiracial, multi-religious societies post9/11. In light of the global concern, and often paranoia, with diasporic Islam, Islamic religious institutions and civil society have been portrayed in the popular media as hotbeds of radicalism, promoters of hatred, and recruiters for a “conflict of civilisation” between the Muslim world and the modern world. Singapore has taken a broad-based community approach in advancing interreligious tolerance, including a subtle initiative to include the putative Muslim civil society in advancing …

Racial Profiling: Past, Present, And Future, David A. Harris

Articles

It has been more than two decades since the introduction of the first bill in Congress that addressed racial profiling in 1997. Between then and now, Congress never passed legislation on the topic, but more than half the states passed laws and many police departments put anti-profiling policies in place to combat it. The research and data on racial profiling has grown markedly over the last twenty-plus years. We know that the practice is real (contrary to many denials), and the data reveal racial profiling’s shortcomings and great social costs. Nevertheless, racial profiling persists. While it took root most prominently …

Rwu First Amendment Blog: Jared A. Goldstein's Blog: Trump's Order Violates Bedrock Principles Of Roger Williams And Ri 01-30-2017, Jared A. Goldstein

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Newsroom: Order Violates Roger Williams' Principles 01-30-2017, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Newsroom: Law Scholarships For Syrian Refugees 01-26-2017, Karen Sloan, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Essay: Terrorists Are Always Muslim But Never White: At The Intersection Of Critical Race Theory And Propaganda, Caroline Mala Corbin

Articles

When you hear the word "terrorist" who do you picture? Chances are, it is not a white person. In the United States, two common though false narratives about terrorists who attack America abound. We see them on television, in the movies, on the news, and, currently, in the Trump administration. The first is that "terrorists are always (brown) Muslims." The second is that "white people are never terrorists.

Different strands of critical race theory can help us understand these two narratives. One strand examines the role of unconscious cognitive biases in the production of stereotypes, such as the stereotype of …

The Nonexceptionalism Thesis: How Post-9/11 Criminal Justice Measures Fit In Broader Criminal Justice, Francesca Laguardia

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Contrary to the assumption that ‘‘9/11 changed everything,’’ post-2001 criminal justice practices in the area of terrorism show a surprising consistency with pre-2001 criminal justice practices. This article relies on an analysis of over 300 terrorism prosecutions between 2001 and 2010, as well as twenty full trial transcripts, content coding, and traditional legal analysis, to show the continuity of criminal justice over this time in regard to some of the most controversial supposed developments. This continuity belies the common assumption that current extreme policies and limitations on due process are a panicked response to the terror attacks of 2001. To …

Pre-Crime Restraints: The Explosion Of Targeted, Non-Custodial Prevention, Jennifer Daskal

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article exposes the ways in which noncustodial pre-crime restraints have proliferated over the past decade, focusing in particular on three notable examples — terrorism-related financial sanctions, the No Fly List, and the array of residential, employment, and related restrictions imposed on sex offenders. Because such restraints do not involve physical incapacitation, they are rarely deemed to infringe core liberty interests. Because they are preventive, not punitive, criminal law procedural protections do not apply. They have exploded largely unchecked — subject to little more than bare rationality review and negligible procedural protections — and without any coherent theory as to …

Of Civil Wrongs And Rights: Kiyemba V. Obama And The Meaning Of Freedom, Separation Of Powers, And The Rule Of Law Ten Years After 9/11, Katherine L. Vaughns, Heather L. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

This article is about the rise and fall of continued adherence to the rule of law, proper application of the separation of powers doctrine, and the meaning of freedom for a group of seventeen Uighurs—a Turkic Muslim ethnic minority whose members reside in the Xinjiang province of China—who had been held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base since 2002. Most scholars regard the trilogy of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and Boumediene v. Bush as demonstrating the Supreme Court’s willingness to uphold the rule of law during the war on terror. The recent experience of the Uighurs …

Natural Law & Lawlessness: Modern Lessons From Pirates, Lepers, Eskimos, And Survivors, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

The natural experiments of history present an opportunity to test Hobbes' view of government and law as the wellspring of social order. Groups have found themselves in a wide variety of situations in which no governmental law existed, from shipwrecks to gold mining camps to failed states. Yet the wide variety of situations show common patterns among the groups in their responses to their often difficult circumstances. Rather than survival of the fittest, a more common reaction is social cooperation and a commitment to fairness and justice, although both can be subverted in certain predictable ways. The absent-law situations also …

On The Contemporary Meaning Of Korematsu: 'Liberty Lies In The Hearts Of Men And Women', David A. Harris

Articles

In just a few years, seven decades will have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Korematsu v. U.S., one of the most reviled of all of the Court’s cases. Despised or not, however, similarities between the World War II era and our own have people looking at Korematsu in a new light. When the Court decided Korematsu in 1944, we were at war with the Japanese empire, and with this came considerable suspicion of anyone who shared the ethnicity of our foreign enemies. Since 2001, we have faced another external threat – from the al Queda terrorists – …

Immigration And National Security: The Illusion Of Safety Through Local Law Enforcement Action, David A. Harris

Articles

Despite efforts to reform immigration law in the 1980s and the 1990s, the new laws passed in those decades by the Congress did not solve the long-term problems raised by undocumented people entering the United States. The issue arose anew after the terrorist attacks of September, 2001. While the advocates for immigration crackdowns in the 1980s and 1990s had cast the issue as one of economics and cultural transformation, immigration opponents after 9/11 painted a different picture: illegal immigration, they said, was a national security issue. If poor farmers from Mexico and Central America could sneak into the U.S. across …

Aryans, Gender, And American Politics, Robert Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This short essay discusses some of the ways in which the Aryan movement in America activates gendered beliefs for the goal of legal, political, and cultural transformation. In recent years, the community has moved from common law theories of white sovereignty to more robust forms of racial constitutionalism. The piece is drawn from "America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community"

Law Enforcement And Intelligence Gathering In Muslim And Immigrant Communities After 9/11, David A. Harris

Articles

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, law enforcement agencies have actively sought partnerships with Muslim communities in the U.S. Consistent with community-based policing, these partnerships are designed to persuade members of these communities to share information about possible extremist activity. These cooperative efforts have borne fruit, resulting in important anti-terrorism prosecutions. But during the past several years, law enforcement has begun to use another tactic simultaneously: the FBI and some police departments have placed informants in mosques and other religious institutions to gather intelligence. The government justifies this by asserting that it must take a pro-active stance in order …

Out Of The Shadows: Preventive Detention, Suspected Terrorists, And War, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article examines the appropriate and inappropriate role of "preventive detention" in responding to terrorist threats. It offers a constitutional jurisprudence of preventive detention, maintaining that absent a showing that dangerous behaviour cannot be addressed through criminal prosecution, preventive detention is unconstitutional. But criminal prosecution is not always a realistic option, and in those circumstances, preventive detention, carefully circumscribed and meticulously safeguarded by procedural protections, may be permissible. Familiar examples of accepted preventive detention regimes include civil commitment of dangerous persons who because of a mental disability cannot be held criminally responsible, and detention of enemy soldiers in a traditional …

Terror Financing, Guilt By Association And The Paradigm Of Prevention In The ‘War On Terror’, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

"Material support" has become the watchword of the post-9/11 era. Material support to groups that have been designated as "terrorist" has been the U.S. government's favorite charge in post-9/11 "terrorism" prosecutions. Under immigration law, material support is a basis for deportation and exclusion - even where individuals have been coerced into providing support by the terrorist group itself. And under the Military Commissions Act, it is now a "war crime."

This essay argues that the criminalization of "material support" to designated "terrorist organizations" is guilt by association in twenty-first-century garb, and presents all of the same problems that criminalizing membership …

The Fourth Amendment And Terrorism, John Burkoff

Articles

The important questions we need to ask and to answer B in the perilous times in which we live B is whether the Fourth Amendment applies in the same fashion not just to run of the mill criminals, but also to terrorists and suspected terrorists, individuals who are committing or who have committed B or who may be poised to commit B acts aimed at the destruction of extremely large numbers of people? Professor Burkoff argues that we can protect ourselves from cataclysmic threats of this sort and still maintain a fair and objective application of Fourth Amendment doctrine that …

Re-Membering Law In The Internationalizing World, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

This article examines some of the challenges to understanding new, non-national legal configurations as contexts of origin color understandings and evaluations of legal standards allegedly shared across legal communities. It examines a case on assisted suicide, Pretty v. U.K., decided by the European Court of Human Rights. The case illustrates mechanisms of legal integration in the European court, followed by a process of dis-integration that occurred when the decision was reported to the French legal community. The French rendition reflected a legal community's inability to process common law information through civil law cognitive grids. The article addresses both the capacity …

Risk Realization, Emotion, And Policy Making, Chris Guthrie

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In their study of terrorism and SARS, Professor Feigenson and his colleagues report "significant positive correlations between people's risk perceptions and their negative affect." In their review of the judgment and decision-making literature, Professor Slovic and his colleagues document the interplay between reason and emotion in assessing risk. And in the context of a soldier's concerns for himself and his family, Professor Moran provides a powerful narrative of fear. But what happens when such threats are actually realized? Do we accurately predict the emotional impact of such events? Or are there meaningful and predictable differences between the feelings we forecast …

'A Flame Of Fire': The Fourth Amendment In Perilous Times, John Burkoff

Articles

The important questions we need to ask and to answer in the perilous times in which we live is whether the Fourth Amendment applies in the same fashion not just to run of the mill criminals, but also to terrorists and suspected terrorists, individuals who are committing or who have committed B or who may be poised to commit B acts aimed at the destruction of extremely large numbers of people? Professor Burkoff argues that we can protect ourselves from cataclysmic threats of this sort and still maintain a fair and objective application of Fourth Amendment doctrine that respects our …

A Qualified Defense Of Military Commissions And United States Policy On Detainees At Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Kenneth Anderson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article, published in a special post 9-11 issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, offers a defense of the view that terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden should be tried, if captured, outside of regular US civilian courts and in some form of military commission. The article argues that terrorists should be seen as criminals as well as enemies of the United States. Criminals who are simply deviants from the domestic social order are properly dealt with within the constitutionally constituted civilian court structure. Enemies who are not also criminals - legal combatants - are properly …

Where Do We Go From Here? New And Emerging Issues In The Prosecution Of War Crimes And Acts Of Terrorism: A Panel Discussion, Kenneth Anderson

Presentations

Panel discussion.

An International Constitutional Moment, William W. Burke-White, Anne-Marie Slaughter

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Terrorism And Human Rights, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Organised Crime As Terrorism, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In a somewhat belated incursion into the international debate about the threat of organised crime, Federal and State governments in Australia have chosen to represent the 'menace' as an attack on the institution of the state as much as a physical and financial danger to society. This is consistent with the approaches of governments in the United States and Italy in constructing the reality of the Mafia.