Law Commons^™

Justice Without Power: Yemen And The Global Legal System, Amulya Vadapalli

Michigan Law Review

The war in Yemen has remained the world’s worst humanitarian crisis since 2015, and yet it is shockingly invisible. The global legal system fails to offer a clear avenue through which the Yemeni people can hold the state actors responsible for their harm accountable. This Note analyzes international legal mechanisms for vindicating war crimes and human rights abuses perpetrated in Yemen. Through the lens of Yemen’s humanitarian crisis, it highlights gaps in the global legal structure, proposes alternative accountability processes, and uses a variety of sources—including interviews with practitioners and Arabic language legal scholarship—to explicate a victim-centered transitional justice process …

Failed Interventions: Domestic Violence, Human Trafficking, And The Criminalization Of Survival, Alaina Richert

Michigan Law Review

Over the last decade, state legislators have enacted statutes acknowledging the link between criminal behavior and trauma resulting from domestic violence and human trafficking. While these interventions take a step in the right direction, they still have major shortcomings that prevent meaningful relief for survivor-defendants. Until now, there has been no systematic overview of the statutes that require courts to consider a defendant’s history of trauma in the contexts of domestic violence and human trafficking. There has also been no attempt to explore how these statutes relate to each other. This Note fills those gaps. It also identifies essential elements …

A Different Type Of Property: White Women And The Human Property They Kept, Michele Goodwin

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. by Harriet A. Jacobs, and They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers.

Thick Law, Thin Justice, Patrick Macklem

Michigan Law Review

Review of The Thin Justice of International Law: A Moral Reckoning of the Law of Nations by Steven R. Ratner.

Reconciling Expectations With Reality: The Real Id Act's Corroboration Exception For Otherwise Credible Asylum Applicants, Alexandra Lane Reed

Michigan Law Review

The international community finds itself today in the throes of the largest refugee crisis since World War II. As millions of refugees continue to flee violence and persecution at home, the immediate concern is humanitarian, but in the long-term, the important question becomes: What are our obligations to those who cannot return home? U.S. asylum law is designed not only to offer shelter to legitimate refugees, but also to protect the country from those who seek asylum under false pretenses. Lawmakers and policymakers have struggled to calibrate corroboration requirements for asylum claims with the reality that many legitimate asylum seekers …

Holding On To Clarity: Reconciling The Federal Kidnapping Statute With The Trafficking Victims Protection Act, Benjamin Reese

Michigan Law Review

In recent decades, the international community has come to recognize human trafficking as a problem of epidemic proportions. Congress responded to this global crisis in 2000 by passing the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) and has since supplemented that comprehensive enactment. But, in light of the widespread use of psychological rather than physical coercion in trafficking cases, a long-standing split among federal courts regarding the scope of the federal kidnapping statute raises significant concerns about the United States’ efforts to combat traffickers. In particular, the broad interpretation adopted by several circuits threatens effective enforcement of statutes designed to prosecute traffickers, …

The Giving Tree: A Modern-Day Parable Of Mutual Responsibility, Ertharin Cousin

Michigan Law Review

For fifty years, The Giving Tree, a short illustrated tale revered by adults and loved by children, has provoked outrage and acclaim in equal measure. Some readers disliked the story so much that they wrote an alternative ending, while others celebrated it as a modern-day parable. Described by its author, Shel Silverstein, as a simple story of a relationship between two people, The Giving Tree reads like a children’s book while offering much food for thought. Since the initial publication, scholars, students, and many others have offered a variety of interpretations and critiques of this short yet provocative work, calling …

Rank Among Equals, Ben A. Mcjunkin

Michigan Law Review

Dignity is on the march. Once regarded as a subject exclusively within the province of antiquated moral philosophy, dignity—that “shibboleth of all perplexed and empty-headed moralists”—has recently developed into a cornerstone of contemporary legal discourse. Internationally, the concept of human dignity has been central to the emergence and acceptance of universal human rights. Dignity, in some form, is guaranteed by such seminal documents as the Preamble to the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the German Basic Law, and the South African Constitution. Domestically, appeals to dignity undergird popular legal arguments for social and political …

Detention Debates, Deborah N. Pearlstein

Michigan Law Review

Since the United States began detaining people in efforts it has characterized, with greater and lesser accuracy, as part of global counterterrorism operations, U.S. detention programs have spawned more than 200 different lawsuits producing 6 Supreme Court decisions, 4 major pieces of legislation, at least 7 executive orders across 2 presidential administrations, more than 100 books, 231 law review articles (counting only those with the word "Guantanamo" in the title), dozens of reports by nongovernmental organizations, and countless news and analysis articles from media outlets in and out of the mainstream. For those in the academic and policy communities who …

Liberal Legal Norms Meet Collective Criminality, John D. Ciorciari

Michigan Law Review

International criminal law ("ICL") tends to focus on the same question asked by the Cambodian survivor above: who was ultimately most responsible? Focusing on the culpability of senior leaders has powerful appeal. It resonates with a natural human tendency to personify misdeeds and identify a primary locus for moral blame. It also serves political ends by putting a face on mass crimes, decapitating the old regime, and leaving room for reconciliation at lower levels. But what happens when smoking guns do not point clearly toward high-ranking officials? And how can the law address the fact that most atrocities are committed …

Coercion's Common Threads: Addressing Vagueness In The Federal Criminal Prohibitions On Torture By Looking To State Domestic Violence Laws, Sarah H. St. Vincent

Michigan Law Review

Under international law, the United States is obligated to criminalize acts of torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. However, the federal criminal torture laws employ several terms whose meanings are so indeterminate that they inhibit the statutes' effectiveness and fail to provide adequate guidance regarding precisely which forms of mistreatment may result in prosecution. These ambiguous terms have given rise to serious and prolonged controversies within the executive branch regarding what torture is-controversies that confirm, and may further compound, the uncertainty of liability under the laws in question.

In order to solve this problem of vagueness and provide definitive …

Linking International Markets And Global Justice, Jeffrey L. Dunoff

Michigan Law Review

The U.S. government is the planet's largest purchaser of goods and services; worldwide, states spend trillions of dollars on procurement each year. Yet legal scholarship has devoted relatively limited attention to the conceptual and normative issues that arise when states enter the market. Should states as purchasers be permitted to "discriminate" to advance social objectives - say, racial justice - in ways that would be unlawful when they act as regulators? Is each country free to strike its own balance between the pursuit of economic and social objectives through procurement, or do international trade norms limit state discretion in the …

Rational Choice, Reputation, And Human Rights Treaties, Alex Geisinger, Michael Ashley Stein

Michigan Law Review

Part I of this Review sets forth Guzman's general theory of international law with specific consideration of the way reputation influences state behavior. Part II then tests Guzman's overarching thesis by applying it to human rights treaties and concludes that explaining states' entry into human rights treaties requires a broader conception of reputation than Rational Choice allows.

China Reexamined: The Worst Offender Or A Strong Contender?, Yang Wang

Michigan Law Review

These are the questions that Professor Randall Peerenboom sets out to answer from an American legal scholar's perspective in China Modernizes: Threat to the West or Model for the Rest. Peerenboom advances three main arguments in China Modernizes. First, to more accurately assess China's performance in its quest for modernization, one must "plac[e] China within a broader comparative context" (p. 10). Through a careful analysis of empirical data, Peerenboom observes that China outperforms many other countries at a similar income level on almost all key indicators of well-being and human rights, with the sole exception of civil and political …

The "No Property" Problem: Understanding Poverty By Understanding Wealth, Jane B. Baron

Michigan Law Review

Could it be that understanding homelessness and poverty is less a function of understanding the homeless and the poor than of understanding how the wealthy come to ignore and tolerate them? This is one of the more intriguing suggestions of anthropologist Kim Hopper's Reckoning with Homelessness, and it echoes claims made by lawyers who, like Hopper, have spent much of their careers advocating on behalf of the homeless. While Hopper's new book is first and foremost a work of anthropology, its structure strongly parallels recent work by legal scholars who have sought to assess the effects of litigation and lobbying …

Justice For The Collective: The Limits Of The Human Rights Class Action, Paul R. Dubinsky

Michigan Law Review

The class action lawsuit is our grand procedural experiment in collective justice. As against the U.S. legal system's strong orientation toward individual rights rather than group rights, the class action is a countercurrent. Through Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, large numbers of previously unaffiliated individuals can proceed in federal court as a group, litigating through representatives. A recent form of this litigation, the human rights class action, takes this experiment to its far reaches. In the human rights class action, the tension between individual claimants and the group as a whole can be heightened. The class …

The New Imperialism: Violence, Norms, And The "Rule Of Law", Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks

Michigan Law Review

The past decade has seen a surge in American and international efforts to promote "the rule of law" around the globe, especially in postcrisis and transitional societies. The World Bank and multinational corporations want the rule of law, since the sanctity of private property and the enforcement of contracts are critical to modern conceptions of the free market. Human-rights advocates want the rule of law since due process and judicial checks on executive power are regarded as essential prerequisites to the protection of substantive human rights. In the wake of September 11, international and national-security experts also want to promote …

The New Leviathan, Dennis Patterson

Michigan Law Review

Reputation in any field is an elusive phenomenon: part notoriety, part honor, part fame, part critical assessment. Even in legal scholarship it has an uneven, unpredictable quality. It is hard to imagine a book by a law professor that has had more immediate impact on world leaders than Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles. Much of the national-security strategy devised by the U.S. administration after the September 11 attacks expresses ideas Bobbitt conceived long before; and from a different point on the political spectrum is the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose televised nationwide address in January explicitly took the book as …

Foreword: Why Retry? Reviving Dormant Racial Justice Claims, Martha Minow

Michigan Law Review

Two familiar arguments oppose lawsuits and legislative efforts to address racial injustices from our national past, and a third tacit argument can be discerned. "Why open old wounds?": this question animates the first argument. The evidence is stale - this expresses the second argument. The third, less explicit objection reflects worries that exposing some gross and unremedied racial injustices from the past will reveal the scale of imperfections in the systems of justice and government and thereby undermine the legitimacy of those systems. To introduce the meticulous and passionate essays in this Colloquium, I elaborate and respond to each of …

American Racial Jusice On Trial - Again: African American Reparations, Human Rights, And The War On Terror, Eric K. Yamamoto, Susan K. Serrano, Michelle Natividad Rodriguez

Michigan Law Review

Much has been written recently on African American reparations and reparations movements worldwide, both in the popular press and scholarly publications. Indeed, the expanding volume of writing underscores the impact on the public psyche of movements for reparations for historic injustice. Some of that writing has highlighted the legal obstacles faced by proponents of reparations lawsuits, particularly a judicial system that focuses on individual (and not group-based) claims and tends to squeeze even major social controversies into the narrow litigative paradigm of a two-person auto collision (requiring proof of standing, duty, breach, causation, and direct injury). Other writings detail the …

When Interests Diverge, Robert S. Chang, Peter Kwan

Michigan Law Review

In her recent book Cold War Civil Rights, Professor Mary L. Dudziak, sets forth "to explore the impact of Cold War foreign affairs on U.S. civil rights reform" (p. 14). Tracing "the emergence, the development, and the decline of Cold War foreign affairs as a factor in influencing civil rights policy" (p. 17), she draws "together Cold War history and civil rights history" (pp. 14-15), two areas that are usually treated as distinct subjects of inquiry. In mixing the two together, she shows that "the borders of U.S. history are not easily maintained." Perhaps it is fitting that the field …

The Treaty Power And American Federalism, Part Ii, Curtis A. Bradley

Michigan Law Review

In an article published in this Review two years ago, I described and critiqued what I called the "nationalist view" of the treaty power. Under this view, the national government has the constitutional power to enter into treaties, and thereby create binding national law by virtue of the Supremacy Clause, without regard to either subject matter or federalism limitations. This view is reflected in the writings of a number of prominent foreign affairs law scholars, as well as in the American Law Institute's Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations Law of the United States. In my article, I argued that this …

Pinochet And International Human Rights Litigation, Curtis A. Bradley, Jack L. Goldsmith

Michigan Law Review

The British House of Lords recently considered whether Augusto Pinochet was subject to arrest and possible extradition to Spain for alleged acts of torture and other egregious conduct carried out during his reign as Chile's head of state. The Law Lords held that a large majority of the charges against Pinochet were not proper grounds for extradition under British law. They also held, however, that Pinochet could potentially be extradited for alleged acts of torture committed after Britain's 1988 ratifica· tion of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. In reaching this latter conclusion, …

Retroactive Trials And Justice, Stephan Landsman

Michigan Law Review

Seamus Heaney's moving words remind us that we live in an extraordinary time when, at sites of grave injustice ranging from the halls of government of Argentina and South Africa to the killing fields of Bosnia and Rwanda, "The longed-for tidal wave/Of justice can rise up,/And hope and history rhyme." Writers have attempted, in very different ways, to come to terms with the swelling of the tide of justice. For example, the philosopher Alan Rosenbaum, in a recent book about the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, argues that virtually every person implicated in the Nazis' genocidal assault on Europe's Jews …

International Law As A Process, Louis B. Sohn

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Problems and Process: International Law and How We Use It by Rosalyn Higgins

Emerging From Emergency: Human Rights In South Africa, Etienne Mureinik

Michigan Law Review

A Review of In a Time of Trouble: Law and Liberty in South Africa's State of Emergency by Stephen Ellmann

The Age Of Rights, Stephen D. Sencer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Age of Rights by Louis Henkin

Capital Punishment And The American Agenda, John Pierce Stimson

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Capital Punishment and the American Agenda by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins

Human Rights And International Relations, Sandip Bhattacharji

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Human Rights and International Relations by R.J. Vincent

International Law: Process And Prospect, Linda A. Shoemaker

Michigan Law Review

A Review of International Law: Process and Prospect by Anthony D'Amato