Digital Commons Network^™

The Right To Feast And Festivals, Juan C. Riofrio

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Festive behavior is a basic characteristic of human life, as evidenced from ancient times. Humans need to use ceremony and ritual in specific places and times to mark their triumphs, joys, and sorrows. However, some categories of individuals are harmed because they cannot celebrate the most important highlights of their lives through such festive feasts: prisoners, mariners at sea, soldiers on the frontlines, workers subject to the pressures of ungenerous employers, towns occupied by oppressive invaders, and impoverished individuals who cannot afford customary celebrations, among others. When feasts and festivals are restricted, societies lose well-being, communities lose identity, and individuals …

Scorched Border Litigation, Briana Beltran, Beth Lyon, Nan Schivone

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Each year, employers bring hundreds of thousands of temporary foreign workers into the United States only to return them to their communities of origin when their visas end. During their short months working in the United States—whether in agricultural fields, hotels, traveling carnivals, or private homes—many of these workers experience violations of their rights: wages are stolen, injuries are ignored, and those who complain are punished on the spot or sent home.

Temporary foreign workers who choose to file a lawsuit to vindicate their rights typically do so once they are no longer in the United States, often litigating from …

Hate Speech On Social Media: Content Moderation In Context, Richard A. Wilson, Molly Land

Faculty Articles and Papers

For all practical purposes, the policy of social media companies to suppress hate speech on their platforms means that the longstanding debate in the United States about whether to limit hate speech in the public square has been resolved in favor of vigorous regulation. Nonetheless, revisiting these debates provides insights essential for developing more empirically-based and narrowly tailored policies regarding online hate.

First, a central issue in the hate speech debate is the extent to which hate speech contributes to violence. Those in favor of more robust regulation claim a connection to violence, while others dismiss these arguments as tenuous. …

Grounding Suicide Terrorism In Death Anxiety And Consumer Capitalism, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article examines an influential theory on suicide attacker motivations, the Significance Quest Theory, and suggests that this death anxiety approach can be improved by shifting its focus toward the related, but more comprehensive, Terror Management Theory. The theoretical productivity of this realignment is tested by examining the relationship between suicide attacks and one of the variables thought to trigger the underlying anxieties: the local pressures from global consumer capitalism. After describing the relationship between death anxiety and suicide terrorism generally, this article concludes by applying these insights to the ethnographic context of Egypt.

Not An Ocean Away, Only A Moment Away: A Prosecutor's Primer For Obtaining Remotely Stored Data, Robert J. Peters, Alicia D. Loy, Matthew Osteen, Joseph Remy, Justin Fitzsimmons

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Pure Theory Of Law Is A Hole In The Ozone Layer, Peter Goodrich

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Facts: The Politics Of Public Health And Medicine In Abortion Law, Aziza Ahmed

University of Colorado Law Review

While a great deal of public scrutiny has focused on how information circulates through online outlets including Twitter and Facebook, less attention has been devoted to how more traditional institutions traffic in factual assertions for the sake of setting a particular distributional agenda into motion.1 Of these more traditional institutions, courts play a central role in legitimating legal and factual claims in the process of applying and clarifying legal rules. In public health-related adjudication, courts play at least two important roles: first, judges and juries make decisions between competing sets of public health and medical claims and second, courts legitimate …

The Common Law And Critical Theory, Charles L. Barzun

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Batman Saves The Congo: How Celebrities Disrupt The Politics Of Development, Alexandra Cosima Budabin, Lisa Ann Richey

Books and Book Chapters by University of Dayton Faculty

How celebrity strategic partnerships are disrupting humanitarian space: Can a celebrity be a "disrupter," promoting strategic partnerships to foster ideas and funding to revitalize the development field, or are they just charismatic ambassadors for big business? Examining the role of the rich and famous in development and humanitarianism, this book argues that celebrities do both, and that understanding why and how yields insight into the realities of neoliberal development.

Contents:

• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Celebrity, Disruption and Neoliberal Development
• Chapter 2. Narrating the Congo: Dangerous Single Stories and the Organizations that Need Them
• Chapter 3. Choosing the Congo: How a Celebrity …

Prosecuting Bride Kidnapping: The Law Isn't Enough; Aligning Cultural Norms With The Law, Alexandria Mckenna Lundberg

Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law

No abstract provided.

Economic Success In The United States, Jason Render Jr.

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In this research project, I examine the factors that impact the economic success of an individual within the United States. In particular, I investigate the impact of inherent privilege and the impact which socioeconomic upbringing has on the economic success of an individual within American society. This investigation into economic success and the impact of inherent privilege will examine both poor and affluent U.S. citizen populations to find common factors present within both groups. The research will then examine how these factors impact an individual’s overall economic success as a result of the barriers which are inherent based on an …

Legal Pluralism And Analytical Jurisprudence: An Inapposite Contrast, Jorge Luis Fabra-Zamora

Journal Articles

The intellectual tradition of legal pluralism characterizes itself by way of a contrast to legal centralism or monism. Self-styled pluralists typically attribute centralist and monist views to mainstream theories of law, which I call here analytical jurisprudence. This article argues that the pluralist foundational contrast with analytical jurisprudence suffers from three recurrent defects. First, the pluralist opposition to analytical jurisprudence conflates conceptual questions with empirical, doctrinal, and politico-moral inquiries. Second, pluralists misattribute to analytical jurisprudents an equation between law and state that they do not hold and have the resources to reject. Third, pluralists address the conceptual problems of legal …

Bargaining Justice: Negotiating Law In An Indian Bazaar, Andy Rotman

Seattle University Law Review

This Symposium Article details the bazaars in the city of Banaras and explains why it is an especially good test case for considering the topic at hand: Corporate Capitalism and the City of God. The article explores how Banaras challenges normative views of “corporate capitalism,” both in terms of how it is practiced in the city and the rules that govern it. It further focuses on the legal system that is mobilized to guide commercial exchange and daily life in the bazaars of Banaras, this legal system’s relationship to the city’s courts and police, and the relationship between these two …

Tribute To Professor Doug Rendleman, Katy Barnett, Alison Bell, Jeff Berryman, Neil Birkhoff, Daniel Friedmann, Thomas P. Gallanis, Claire Hagan Eller, Brandon Hasbrouck, Corey Hauser, Brant Hellwig, Margaret Howard, Alexandra L. Klein, Douglas Laycock, Benjamin V. Madison, Iii, Judith L. Madison, Kyle Mcnew, Linda Mullenix, Rami Rashmawi, Caprice Roberts, Victoria Shannon Sahani, Joan Shaughnessy, Barry Sullivan, Martha Vazquez, Edilson Vitorelli

Washington and Lee Law Review

A tribute to Professor Doug Rendleman, who served on the faculty of the Washington and Lee University School of Law from 1988 to 2020. Rendleman became Professor of Law, Emeritus in 2020.

A Prolegomenon To The Study Of Racial Ideology In The Era Of International Human Rights, Justin Deystone

Publications

There is no critical race approach to international law. There are Third World approaches, feminist approaches, economic approaches, and constitutional approaches, but notably absent in the catalogue is a distinct view of international law that takes its point of departure from the vantage of Critical Race Theory (CRT), or anything like it. Through a study of racial ideology in the history of international legal thought, this Article offers the beginnings of an explanation for how this lack of attention to race and racism came to be, and why it matters today.

Should They Stay Or Should They Go? African Cultural Goods In France’S Public Domain, Between Inalienability, Transfers, And Circulations, Clara Cassan

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

France’s colonialism over Subsharan Africa until the 1960s has had persistant psychological and material consequences. Amongst them is the lingering presence of a significant amount of African objects in French museum collections. In the last five years, Subsaharan African countries have reiterated their desire to receive parts of these collections. Through their “restitution requests,” they identify themselves as the objects’ legitimate owners and claim to have been robbed of their cultural property during colonialism.

The exact conditions under which each Subsaharan artifact arrived on French grounds—whether through theft, donations, sales, or looting—remain unsettled. Even where thefts can be proven, they …

Compassion: A Critical Skill For Law Students, Stephanie Smith Ledesma, Ma, Jd, Cwls

Marquette Benefits and Social Welfare Law Review

No abstract provided.

Race, Risk, And Personal Responsibility In The Response To Covid-19, Aziza Ahmed, Jason Jackson

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 crisis has tragically revealed the depth of racial inequities in the United States. This Piece argues that the disproportion­ate impact of the pandemic on racial minorities is a symptom of a failing approach to public health, one that privileges individual behaviors over the structural conditions that generate vulnerability and inequitable health outcomes. Despite clear racial disparities in illness and deaths, the neoliberal ideology of personal responsibility shifts the onus for mitigation of risk away from the social and legal determinants of health and onto the individual. To understand how and why these disparate racial outcomes arise, this Piece …

Intellectual Property And Ethnography: A Qualitative Research Approach, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter describes the processes of and justifications for qualitative empirical research in intellectual property (IP) as compared to other research methods, such as quantitative empirical approaches and theoretical economic analyses of law. It provides examples of these research methods, explains the reasons for pursuing a qualitative approach, and details a qualitative research agenda in the context of intellectual property law, as well as a step-by-step method of data collection and data analysis.

The Future Of Facts: The Politics Of Public Health And Medicine In Abortion Law, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

While a great deal of public scrutiny has focused on how information circulates through online outlets including Twitter and Facebook, less attention has been devoted to how more traditional institutions traffic in factual assertions for the sake of setting a particular distributional agenda into motion.[1] Of these more traditional institutions, courts play a central role in legitimating legal and factual claims in the process of applying and clarifying legal rules. In public health-related adjudication, courts play at least two important roles: first, judges and juries make decisions between competing sets of public health and medical claims and second, courts …

Nature's Rights, Christiana Ochoa

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Do forests and rivers possess standing to sue? Do mountain ranges have substantive rights? A recent issue of The Judges’ Journal, a preeminent publication for American judges, alerts the bench, bar, and policymakers to the rapidly emerging “rights of nature,” predicting that state and federal courts will increasingly see claims asserting such rights. Within the United States, Tribal law has begun to legally recognize the rights of rivers, mountains, and other natural features. Several municipalities across the United States have also acted to recognize the rights of nature. United States courts have not yet addressed the issue, though in 2017, …

The Toxic Crusaders: Exploring The History Of The Criminal Enforcement Of The Toxic Substances Control Act, Joshua Ozymy, Melissa L. Jarrell

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

The criminal prosecution of defendants who violated federal laws governing chemical substances has been ongoing for roughly four decades. Yet we continue to have a poor understanding of how federal prosecutors use the U.S. Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to charge and prosecute environmental criminals. Through content analysis of all the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) criminal prosecution case summaries from 1983 to 2019, we analyze all TSCA-focused prosecutions for two purposes. First, to gain a better historical understanding of how federal prosecutors have used TSCA as a prosecutorial tool. Second, to understand outcomes of those prosecutions. Results show that 38% …

The Use Of Mediation To Resolve Conflicts Arising From Cultural Appropriation By Western Fashion Brands, Faith Adongo

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

The Cambridge Dictionary defines cultural appropriation as "the act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own, especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture." It is sometimes referred to as cultural misappropriation, and also defined as taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from a culture other than one's own, without permission. Supporters of cultural appropriation see it as the only realistic way of developing, spreading and integrating cultures, while critics see it as a means through which dominant cultures "borrow" from the cultures of minority groups.

Schuette And Affirmative Action: Why There Are Limits To What A Majority Of The People May Do, Rossanna C. Hernandez Mitchell

Intercultural Human Rights Law Review

This article will be divided as follows: Part I will examine American legislative history and its failure to end discrimination in fact. Part II will analyze the claims of the States and the people regarding affirmative action. Part III will explore past trends in judicial decisions and their conditioning factors, including political party platforms and United States Supreme Court appointments. Part IV will evaluate changes in those conditioning factors that may alter future decisions, including the best- and worstcase scenarios. Lastly, Part V will provide recommendations on the best approach to remediate past discriminations.

Native American Oral Evidence: Finding A New Hearsay Exception, Max Virupaksha Katner

Tribal Law Journal

The Federal Rules of Evidence hearsay rules unjustifiably exclude legitimate and trustworthy evidence that support many Native American legal claims. Native American communities traditionally were not literate and rarely recorded the treaties, contracts, and other legal instruments they drew up or honored in any kind of written format, oftentimes recording their histories and diplomatic events in other ways; take for example wampum belts used by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, among others. While the U.S. legal system presupposes that evidence in written statements provides a greater assurance of accuracy and truth than oral statements, this is not always the case. Writing is …

Cryptocurrency And The State: An Unholy Alliance, Lee Reiners

Faculty Scholarship

This article contextualizes the rise of cryptocurrency within the historical relationship between money and the state. It begins by asking two simple yet critical questions: What is money and where did it come from? Armed with the answers, the article proceeds by taking a fresh look at cryptocurrency through the lens of the credit theory of money. It finds that cryptocurrency, by using new technologies and incentive-based design, attempts to overcome the previous geographic limitations that hindered broad adoption of private currencies. Even with these innovations, cryptocurrency appeared unlikely to challenge the supremacy of sovereign money until Facebook announced the …

Non-Indian Reservations, Joshua Matthew Rosenau

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis is a skeptical treatment of the logical distinctions presumed to exist between “Indian” and “non-Indian” people. Despite representing 99 percent of the U.S. population, “non-Indians” represent a legal identity which has no explicit definition. The basis for the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions regarding non-Indians and Indians rests not on any objective, empirical or logical criterion or proof, but rather on the “assumption of a ‘guardian-ward’ status. This thesis investigates this assumption, and recommends that we suspend judgment on whether the difference between “Indians” and “non-Indians” can be determined either by logical argument or by legal assumption.

The Right To Development, Integral Human Development, And Integral Ecology In The Amazon, Diane A. Desierto, Ilaria Schnyder Von Wartensee

Journal Articles

From the Article

This article discusses the reorientation of environmental protection in Amazonia away from the paradigm of individual and collective natural resource management of regional or global commons, to the more radical thesis of Integral Ecology as the vindication of human dignity, environmental stewardship and collective responsibility - a concept deeply related to the Church's own pioneering of Integral Human Development as the 'authentic development development of every person and of the whole person'. Under the concept of integral Ecology, we argue that this expressive elaboration of the Catholic Church's core social teaching of Integral Human Development ultimately hearkens …

Measuring The Art Of International Law, Mary Ellen O'Connell

Journal Articles

Social science methodology is a useful adjunct to law, but it cannot replace the humanist ideas that constitute law. Scholars developed social science at the end of the nineteenth century and were soon using it to measure and assess material facts associated with far older intellectual disciplines like law. They have been able to confirm facts about such issues as the origins and impact of law. These studies rely, however, on a humanist definition of the object of the study. Humanist methods reveal that law is the result of transcendent concepts developed through natural law method. By the early twenty-first …

Preserving The Environment By Serving The Notion Of Common Good: Toward A Responsible Investment, Matin Pedram

Emory International Law Review Recent Developments

Our lives on the planet constitute a bigger image defining the relationship with the environment. Hence, it is worth talking about the common good of people worldwide. In this sense, we envisage a borderless good or better to say a shared good that is the environment, and individuals’ activities can be interpreted by their impacts on it. Environmental protection is a hot topic and states have put their efforts to minimize humans’ footprints by introducing regulations and measures because lack of comprehensive measures leads to regulative imbalances among communities. Less-developed communities (LDCs) intend to attract multinational corporations to invest in …