Human Rights Law Commons^™

Transgender Inpportunity And Inequality: Evaluating The Crossroads Between Immigration And Transgender Individuals, Alexandra Caggiano

Seattle University Law Review

Despite being married to a U.S. citizen, non-citizen transgender individuals and non-citizen spouses married to transgender U.S. citizens still face deportation today due to current immigration policies. When forced to return to their home countries, transgender individuals are likely to encounter violence from those who perpetuate hate towards transgender and gender non-conforming individuals. Instead of protecting these individuals, the United States continues to send people back to their native countries solely because those individuals do not fall within the narrowly constructed definition of marriage some states use that is legally recognized by federal courts. Transgender individuals receive disparate ...

When Art Becomes Free: On Artistic In-Expression & Personal Convictions, Amir H. Khoury

Amir Khoury

In this paper I argue that just as there are moral rights in copyright law, which secure attribution and integrity, so too, there should be 'inverse' moral rights that can protect artists from being impelled or compelled to create in the first place. This research comes against the backdrop of one of the most contentious issues in the Western world today, that pertaining to same-sex marriage. But the discussion applies to all other fields where creativity finds itself in a battle over personal convictions. In my view, the inverse moral rights construct is the true reflection of the extent of ...

Road To Nowhere: Hong Kong's Democratisation And China's Obligations Under Public International Law, Alvin Y. Cheung

Alvin Y Cheung

Does public international law have anything to say about how Hong Kong's Chief Executive should be chosen? The Hong Kong and Beijing Governments have framed the debate on electoral reforms for 2017 purely in terms of domestic law. They reject the relevance of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and have rebuffed any role for the United Kingdom under the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 (Joint Declaration). In so doing, they seek to justify Beijing's insistence on powers of veto over nomination and appointment of the Chief Executive.

However, an analysis purely in terms of ...

In Defense Of Disparate Impact: An Opportunity To Realize The Promise Of The Fair Housing Act, Valerie Schneider

Valerie Schneider

Abstract:

Twice in the past three years, the Supreme Court has granted certiorari in Fair Housing cases, and, each time, under pressure from civil rights leaders who feared that the Supreme Court might narrow current Fair Housing Act jurisprudence, the cases settled just weeks before oral argument. Settlements after the Supreme Court grants certiorari are extremely rare, and, in these cases, the settlements reflect a substantial fear among civil rights advocates that the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in cases such as Shelby County v. Holder and Fisher v. University of Texas are working to dismantle many of the protections ...

Marriage Equailty: Why Laws Restricting Same-Sex Couples' Rights Should Be Subject To Heightened Scrutiny Under Equal Protection Challenges., Cory A. Delellis

Cory A DeLellis

This thesis discusses why laws that restrict marital rights and recognition, on the basis of the couple’s sexual orientation, should be subject to a heightened or intermediate level of judicial scrutiny under Equal Protection challenges. This thesis addresses, analyzes, and suggests why sexual orientation – within the context of same-sex couples – should be considered a quasi-suspect class, rather than a non-suspect class, so that laws negatively impacting couples based on their sexual orientation are subjected to a fairer and more reasonable level of judicial scrutiny.

Coercing Pregnancy, A. Rachel Camp

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Intimate partners coerce thousands of women in the U.S. into pregnancy each year through acts that deliberately interfere with the use of, or access to, contraception or abortion. Although the harm of forced sex has been well-identified in our cultural dialogue and in our laws, the harm of pregnancy through reproductive coercion remains largely unrecognized in both spheres. Indeed, despite their prevalence, these intentional acts have remained largely invisible within our culture and within our laws. Although pregnancy can result from sexual intercourse, and can result in motherhood, it is nonetheless conceptually separate and discrete from both. The cultural ...

Arizona's New Religious Freedom Law: License To Discriminate Against Gays?, Neil J. Foster

Neil J Foster

Discusses Arizona's controversial new Bill which has been labelled a "license to discriminate". The paper concludes that while the aim of crafting a religious freedom exemption for those who do not want to support or celebrate same sex unions is a laudable one, on balance the Arizona law seems to be too broad and should not be supported.

Beyond '"Crimigration"A Nd The Civil- Criminal Dichotomy -Applying Mathews V. Eldridge In The Immigration Context, Ramanujan Nadadur

Yale Human Rights and Development Journal

Policies and regulations from the past decade underscore the need for

strong constitutional safeguards in removal proceedings, which are administrative

proceedings where an Immigration Judge adjudicates whether a

noncitizen should be deported from the United States under the Immigration

and Nationality Act (INA). Deportation has accelerated; the Obama

Administration has removed nearly 400,000 noncitizens in each of the last

three years. Congress and the Executive have limited appellate review of

final orders of removal and sharply curtailed avenues of discretionary relief.

Immigration detention has increased significantly; Immigration and

Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained a record total of 384,000 noncitizens ...

Review Of Conflicting Commitments: The Politics Of Enforcing Immigration Worker Rights In San Jose And Houston, By Shannon Gleeson, Alexander Osei-Bonsu

Yale Human Rights and Development Journal

One way to understand a social phenomenon is to interrogate the forces

that come to bear on that phenomenon. Couched against the exigencies of

immigration policy, Shannon Gleeson's book Conflicting Commitments:

The Politics of Enforcing Immigration Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston

attempts to call out the forces that bear on geographic disparities in

access to legal recourse for the undocumented immigrant worker. To this

end, Gleeson, through case study, examines the localized implementation

of immigrant rights enforcement between two cities with notable undocumented

immigrant populations: San Jose, California, and Houston, Texas.

Gleeson's overarching account of the ...

The Road To Decriminalization: Litigating India's Anti-Sodomy Law, Danish Sheikh

Yale Human Rights and Development Journal

Late in the afternoon on an early spring day, the Supreme Court of India

began hearing the final arguments that would determine the legal status

of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in India. Earlier

that very week, I told my parents that I was a member of the litigation team

- and that I was gay. Without warning, I found arguments from a heated

family discussion reverberating in the chambers of a court of law.

These dialogues were inevitable: both the ones in the courtroom and

the ones with my parents. In 2009, the Indian LGBT community took its ...

Restricting The Freedom Of Contract: A Fundamental Prohibition, David P. Weber

Yale Human Rights and Development Journal

This article argues that the general right to contract, that is to say the

ability of one to obligate himself in exchange for another's obligation in return,

is a fundamental (or basic) though not all-encompassing right and

one that is subject to additional legal protections especially when limitations

are sought to be imposed discriminatorily or based on status rather

than capacity or subject matter of the contract. While post-Lochner decisions

have given states considerable leeway to regulate the scope of freedom

of contract, restrictions based on status, especially the status of unauthorized

immigrants, are invidious and go beyond the ...

Disabilityqueer: Federal Disability Rights Protection For Transgender People, Kevin M. Barry

Yale Human Rights and Development Journal

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) does not protect everyone. It

notably excludes people with Gender Identity Disorder (GID), an impairment

involving the misalignment between one's anatomy and gender

identity. Many would say this is as it should be - gender nonconforming

people are not impaired and so they should not be covered by disability

law. But this argument misapprehends the reason that GID was excluded

from the ADA in the first place.

GID was excluded from the ADA because, in 1989, a small handful of

senators believed that gender nonconformity - like pedophilia, pyromania,

and kleptomania -was morally harmful to ...

A Punitive Bind: Policing, Poverty, And Neoliberalism In New York City, Jeremy Kaplan-Lyman

Yale Human Rights and Development Journal

Narrowly conceived, neoliberalism is a system of economic ideas and policy

initiatives that emphasize small government and market-based solutions to social

and economic problems. Adopted in response to the fiscal, welfare and racial crises

of the Keynesian state, neoliberalism has become the dominant governing principle

in the United States over the last forty years. A growing body of literature has

shown how the rise of neoliberalism has underwritten the massive expansion of the

American criminal justice system and the growth of its incarceral arm. Yet

theorists of neoliberalism have largely ignored how the rise of neoliberalism has

affected policing practices ...

On The Uses And Disadvantages Of History For Human Rights Law: Reading Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia: Human Rights In History, Justin Zaremby

Yale Human Rights and Development Journal

In The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Samuel Moyn attempts to

correct the recent historiography of human rights and international law. He

criticizes historians who fail to understand that theories of contemporary human

rights, which envision rights in a world not dominated by the sovereignty of

nation-states, did not evolve out of historic discussions of political and human

rights. Moyn argues that international lawyers and advocates who fail to

understand that today's idealistic definition of human rights arose unexpectedly in

the 1970s lack the understanding and drive to properly advocate for today's

utopian vision of rights. In ...

Could This Train Make It Through: The Law And Strategy Of The Gold Train Case, Charles Tiefer, Jonathan W. Cuneo, Annie Reiner

Yale Human Rights and Development Journal

In 1944-45, the Nazis seized personal belongings of the Hungarian

Jewish population and dispatched some of the most valuable of them on a

train. The United States Army took control of this "Gold Train" and gave

reassurances that it would keep the valuables safe. However, the items

were plundered by individual soldiers, including officers, and diverted to

various uses. After decades of dormancy, a Presidential Commission

exposed the facts, but the government still did not right the wrong - until

there was litigation.

The "Gold Train" case (Rosner v. United States) represents a measure of

justice for the victimized community of ...

The Millennium Development Goals: Milestones Or Millstones? Human Rights Priorities For The Post-2015 Development Agenda, Mac Darrow

Yale Human Rights and Development Journal

In September 2010, world leaders met for the High Level Plenary

Meeting on the Millennium Development Goals ("MDGs Summit"). The

MDGs Summit took place with great fanfare, attracting close to 140 heads

of state and government, as well as leaders from civil society, foundations

and the private sector. It launched important aid initiatives and generated

unprecedented agreement by Member States on the importance of human

rights in efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals ("MDGs").

But how successful was this event, measured against its goals, and what are

the human rights implications of the MDGs Summit with regard to future ...

Tying Off All Loose Ends: Protecting American Citizens From Torture Beyond America's Borders, Landon Wade Magnusson

Yale Human Rights and Development Journal

In the United States, the law prohibits the government from torturing its citizens.

U.S. law also prohibits the government from sending its citizens to another

country where they would likely be tortured. These two scenarios seemingly

covered all possible ways that the U.S. government could bring about the torture of

its own citizens - until Munaf v. Geren, 553 U.S. 674 (2008). In Munaf, the

Supreme Court posed an intriguing question: Does the law also forbid the U.S.

government from transferring custody of an American citizen to a country that

will likely torture him, when the U ...

Obligatory Health, Noa Ben-Asher

Yale Human Rights and Development Journal

The Supreme Court will soon rule on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection

and Affordable Care Act passed in March 2010. Courts thus far are divided on the

question whether Congress had authority under the Commerce Clause to impose

the Act's "Individual Mandate" to purchase health insurance. At this moment, the

public and legal debate can benefit from a clearer understanding of the underlying

rights claims. This Article offers two principal contributions. First, the Article

argues that, while the constitutional question technically turns on the

interpretation of congressional power under the Commerce Clause, underlying

these debates is a tension ...

Broke, Usa: From Pawnshops To Poverty, Inc. - How The Poor Became Big Business, By Gary Rivlin, Taylor Asen, Nicholas Serafin

Yale Human Rights and Development Journal

Gary Rivlin's Broke, USA tells the story of the birth, growth, and

flourishing of fringe lending, the business of extending credit to the

working poor. Beginning in the 1980s, and accelerating in the 1990s and

2000s, fringe lenders sprung up in gas stations and pawnshops across

America, and by loaning small sums at high interest rates, ultimately

created a multi-billion dollar consort to CitiBank, Bank of America, and

other major financial institutions. While payday outlets, rent-to-own shops,

and check cashers are now fixtures of the urban landscape, this was not

always so. Through interviews with the entrepreneurs behind one ...

Entrenching Poverty In Egypt: Human Rights Violations That Contributed To The January 25 Revolution, Sarah El-Ghazaly, Erin Evers, Sirine Shebaya

Yale Human Rights and Development Journal

Recent events in Egypt have instigated much discussion about the

causes of the January 25 revolution and the ongoing demonstrations and

labor unrest. Both within Egypt and around the world, commentators have

noted the deep connection between the uprisings and deteriorating

socioeconomic conditions. Moreover, as images of tear gas canisters

marked "Made in the U.S.A." that were thrown at peaceful protestors in

Tahrir Square made their way around the world, commentators and experts

have also directed greater scrutiny at U.S. foreign policy and, in particular,

at the United States foreign aid program in Egypt and its failure ...