Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Human Rights Law And Military Aid Delivery: A Case Study Of The Leahy Law, Winifred Tate

Faculty Scholarship

Explicitly prohibiting US military counternarcotics assistance to foreign military units facing credible allegations of abuses, Leahy Law creation and implementation illuminates the epistemological challenges of knowledge production about violence in the policy process. First passed in 1997, the law emerged from strategic alliances between elite NGO advocates, grassroots activists and critically located Congressional aides in response to the perceived inability of Congress to act on human rights information. I explore the resulting transformation of aid delivery: rather than suspend aid when no “clean” units could be found, US officials convinced their Colombian allies to create new units consisting of vetted …

Legal Mobilization On The Terrain Of The State: Immigrant Rights Practice In Two National Legal Fields, Leila Kawar

Political Science Faculty Publications

Scholarship on law and social movements has focused attention primarily on the United States, and secondarily on countries that share the Anglo-American legal tradition. The politics of law and social movements in other national legal contexts remains under-examined. The analysis in this article contrasts legal mobilizations for immigrant rights in France and the United States and explores the relations between national fields of power and legal practices. I trace the institutionalization of immigrant rights legal organizations in each country, and argue that the divergent organizational forms and litigation strategies adopted by “professionalized” movement organizations reflect the dynamics of the nationally-distinct …

Climate Torts And Ecocide In The Context Of Proposals For An International Environmental Court, Patrick Foster

Dissertations and Theses

"This thesis is an exploration of two questions that are neither novel nor lacking in exploration: Is an International Environmental Court (IEC) needed? Is such a court feasible? Proposals for an IEC have a rich history, are well founded and numerous. On the issue of necessity, this thesis attempts to pull together historical and current information on two distinct areas of international environmental law and use these analyses to contextualize the need for an international environmental tribunal. Arguments for and against an IEC are presented within a discussion of environmental diplomacy. This thesis begins with a legal discussion of potential …

A More Global Court? Judicial Transnationalism And The U.S. Supreme Court, Angela G. Narasimhan

Political Science - Dissertations

For many decades, Supreme Court justices and legal scholars have argued over the validity of different tools in constitutional interpretation, including social science data, public opinion and, most recently, laws and standards of decency from abroad. Although several of those currently on the bench maintain that foreign laws have no place in American constitutional adjudication, the larger universe in which their institution operates has become increasingly transnational since the end of the Cold War. The term judicial transnationalism has been coined to describe this phenomenon, characterized by unprecedented levels of interaction and exchange between foreign courts and legal activists. This …

Guy Lancaster On Genocide: A Normative Account. By Larry May. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. 283 Pp., Guy Lancaster

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Genocide: A Normative Account. By Larry May. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. 283 pp.

Donald W. Jackson On Prisoners Of America’S Wars: From The Early Republic To Guantanamo. By Stephanie Carvin. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 336pp., Donald W. Jackson

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Prisoners of America’s Wars: From the Early Republic to Guantanamo. By Stephanie Carvin. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 336pp.