Law Commons^™

Incentives To Incarcerate: Corporation Involvement In Prison Labor And The Privatization Of The Prison System, Alythea S. Morrell

Master's Projects and Capstones

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. The United States accounts for approximately 5% of the world’s population, yet it accounts for 25% of the world’s prisoners. Not only does the United States mercilessly incarcerate its own citizens, it disproportionately incarcerates African American and Latino men. This fact on its own is disturbing; however, when it is coupled with the fact that corporations profit from and lobby for an overly aggressive and ineffective criminal justice system, makes these statistics even more horrendous. Private prison companies such as Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group admit …

Nevada Legal Services: The Legal Services Corporation Restrictions And The Diminishing Capacity Of Access To Justice For The Poor, William Todd Ashmore

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The lofty idea of equal justice for all is not the reason legal aid began in the United States. Legal aid was born from the indignation over injustices committed against the poor. Unable to afford an attorney, the poor could not effectively assert their rights within the criminal and civil justice system. Without access to justice through the courts, the extralegal activities required to defend oneself and exact justice such as personally forcing an employer to pay rightful wages, are deemed criminal in most cases. By providing legal resources to the poor, legal aid not only brought order to society …

Never Again: The Genocide Convention In Review, William Chalmers

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was supposed to, as its title states, prevent any further genocides from occurring. In the event the United Nations could not prevent genocide the convention obligates all member States to intervene and punish those perpetrating the crime. Despite the existence of the Genocide Convention the world has witnessed several more cases of genocide, some of which the perpetrators have either not been punished or have been punished long after they have committed the crime of genocide. With a lack of prevention and punishment critics of the Genocide …

Elusive Peace, Security, And Justice In Post-Conflict Guatemala: An Exploration Of Transitional Justice And The International Commission Against Impunity In Guatemala (Cicig), Daniel W. Schloss

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Guatemala has, until today, struggled to achieve security and justice following the end of nearly half a century of civil war in 1996. One specific institution, the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), has been implemented to rectify many of the Guatemalan state’s difficulties in establishing and maintaining the rule of law. In this thesis, I look to better explain CICIG’s role in Guatemala relative to security and justice in a post-conflict setting: I define CICIG as an institution potentially capable of building societal trust, and I explain how the inclusion of procedural justice within transitional justice can help …

Everything That's New Is Old Again: The Impact Of Egypt's Political Culture On The Rule Of Law And Democracy, Hesham Genidy

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Libérte, Egalité, And Fraternité: France, Rwanda, And The Road To Genocide, Rachel Refkin

Honors Theses

The following senior thesis examines France’s political, economic, and military relationship with Rwanda from 1962-present. It analyzes the questionable success of the French humanitarian intervention, dubbed Operation Turquoise, during the Rwandan genocide. Moreover, it explores how the neocolonial relationship between the two countries, and the so-called Françafrique system, while demonstrating the ways in which this relationship juxtaposed certain French notions of libérte, égalité, and fraternité. This paper explains how, before Belgian colonialism, the Hutu-Tutsi division was characterized by considerable ethnic fluidity but also social class differences. Yet, due to the fact that the Tutsi enjoyed a position of privilege during …

The Art Looting Investigation Unit: Finding Their Place In World War Two History, Marykate Farber

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the work done by the Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU) during World War Two. The ALIU was created as a subdivision of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an American intelligence unit created during the war that was the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. The ALIU men sought to collect and build on information regarding the Nazi “art looting machine”. As such, they bore a strong resemblance to the activities of the Museum and Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) commission (known as the “Monuments Men”). Thanks to a recent movie starring Matt Damon and George Clooney, …

Henry Viii And The Irish Political Nation: An Assessment Of Tudor Imperial Kingship In 16th Century Ireland, Emily Schwartz

Honors Theses

Ireland in the 16th century was by far the most self-governed domain under the authority of King Henry VIII. Within Ireland there were two distinct groups of people, the Gaelic Irish and the Anglo-Irish, whose cultural differences divided the island into two distinct political nations. The majority of Ireland was dominated by Gaelic Irish lordships. Gaelic Irish lords recognized the English king as their overlord, but followed Gaelic customs and laws within their lordships. The small sphere of English influence in Ireland was reduced even more by the political hegemony of the Anglo-Irish magnates. The most powerful magnate, the 9th …

Regulating The Dead: Rights For The Corpse And The Removal Of San Francisco's Cemeteries, Lance Muckey

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A specialized facet of American common law developed throughout the nineteenth century; that being mortuary law or the law of the corpse. This jurisprudence transferred limited property rights to dead bodies, which was a radical departure from the treatment of the dead under the English common law tradition that the United States had adopted after the American Revolution.

The dead fit into a unique category in law. Legally they do not exist and therefore have no voice. It thus falls to the state to speak for them in the form of statutes and judicial decisions, which represents a continuation of …

Reviving A Spirit Of Controversy: Roman Catholics And The Pursuit Of Religious Freedom In Early America, Nicholas Pellegrino

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Few subjects in American history have elicited as much scholarly attention as religious freedom. Yet, no study has looked at the long tradition of Catholic dissent in America. That story has been limited to narrow articles and monographs on Maryland or Catholic history even though American Catholics have participated in discourses about religious liberty since the Lords Baltimore founded Maryland in 1632. Andrew White, Thomas Copely, and Charles Carroll the Settler advocated for Catholic rights in the seventeenth century. Peter Attwood, Joseph Beadnall, and Charles Carroll of Annapolis followed in their footsteps in the beginning of the eighteenth. By the …

Resurrecting The "Dead" Second Amendment: How The Libertarian Legal Movement Has Shaped Gun Control Litigation, Anthony M. Sierzega

Politics Honors Papers

For nearly two centuries following its adoption, the Second Amendment was largely ignored and even referred to as a “dead amendment.” Virtually all legal scholarship considered the right protected by the amendment to be a collective right written into the Constitution to protect local militias from a powerful federal standing army. However, beginning in the late 1970s a surge of libertarian scholarship began to emerge promoting the Second Amendment as a safeguard for an individual right to bear arms without any connection to military service. Promoted by the National Rifle Association and libertarian theorists, the individual-right theory began to gain …

Creating Difference: The Legal Production Of Race In American Slavery, Shaun N. Ramdin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the legal construction and development of racial difference as considered in literature written or set during the final years of American slavery. While there had consistently been a conceptual correspondence between black skin and enslavement, race or racial difference did not become the unqualified explanation of enslavement until fairly late in the institution’s history. Specifically, as slavery’s stability became increasingly threatened through the nineteenth century by abolitionism and racial slippage, race became the singular and explicit rationale for its existence and perpetuation. I argue that the primary discourse of this justificatory rationale was legal: through law race …

The Political Economy Of Environmental Justice: A Comparative Study Of New Delhi And Los Angeles, Ratik Asokan

CMC Senior Theses

Though mainstream environmentalism, both in the U.S. and India, was initially rooted in social justice, it has, over time, moved away from this focus. The Environmental Justice Movement consequently arose to reunite social and environmental activism. In this thesis, I trace the historical relationship between the mainstream environmentalism, the Environmental Justice Movement, and marginalized communities. After providing this general overview, I examine two case studies – in Los Angeles and New Delhi respectively – where marginalized communities have been involved in Environmental Justice activities. My analysis reveals that marginalized communities often act in an ‘environmentalist’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ manner, without …

For The Union Makes Us Strong: The İstanbul Metal Workers And Their Struggle For Unionization In Turkey, 1947-1970, Özgür Balkılıç

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

ABSTRACT

This study is an examination of the history of organized metal labor in İstanbul, Turkey after the Second World War. It analyzes and displays the complex and intermingled historical processes within which laborers in the private metal sector of İstanbul experienced workplace relations and actively responded to them. In this regard, although recent immigrants to Istanbul were exposed to unfamiliar conditions and labor relations, they attempted to shape those new relations through several means, in particular through the establishment of trade unions. In an effort to provide a comprehensive picture of class formation in the metal sector after the …

Las Madres De Plaza De Mayo, Then And Now: A Comparative Analysis Of Its Fractured Factions And Lasting Sybolism In Buenos Aires, Argentina, Sondra Anton

Undergraduate Research Symposium Posters

I conducted research on three different factions of the original Madres de Plaza de Mayo cause in Buenos Aires, Argentina: Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Madres de Plaza de Mayo Línea Fundadora, and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. Through interviews and archival research, I have completed a comparison of the three groups. I have concluded that although their original cause of demanding the whereabouts of their disappeared children united them, they are now deeply fragmented among one another due to their differing opinions of how to achieve justice in post-Dirty War Argentina. Furthermore, it is interesting to note the …

Cases Of Conscience: The Supreme Court And Conscientious Objectors To Military Service During The Post World War Ii Era, Robert S. Rutherfurd

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis examines the history of American conscientious objectors to military service during the aftermath of World War II. It describes why conscientious objectors were viewed with distrust and suspicion for their refusal to bear arms in defense of the nation and considers how groups such as the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars attempted to prevent COs from enjoying key benefits of U.S. citizenship by demanding that conscientious objectors be excluded from public employment and denied most forms of government assistance. This thesis focuses on decisions of the United States Supreme Court following World War II that …