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Remarks By Winston Langley, Provost And Vice Chancellor For Academic Affairs At Umass Boston, Winston Langley Dec 2013

Remarks By Winston Langley, Provost And Vice Chancellor For Academic Affairs At Umass Boston, Winston Langley

Winston E. Langley

Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at UMass Boston, Winston Langley, discusses Rita Arditti, human rights, and the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.


The World’S Youngest Political Prisoner, Richard Klein Nov 2013

The World’S Youngest Political Prisoner, Richard Klein

Richard Daniel Klein

Every participant at an international human rights conference in June 1998 received a small pamphlet published by Tibetan supporters of Tibetan Buddhism's highest-ranking figure, the Dalai Lama. Entitled "The World's Youngest Political Prisoner," the pamphlet makes a plea for support for a young boy, now nine years old, who the Chinese government has allegedly kidnapped and detained. The Dalai Lama, who has been living in exile for forty years, claims the boy is the eleventh reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, the second holiest individual in Tibetan Buddhism. This battle over the identification of the reincarnation of a holy man is …


Kosovo's War Victims: Civil Compensation Or Criminal Justice For Indentity Elimination?, Irene Scharf Nov 2013

Kosovo's War Victims: Civil Compensation Or Criminal Justice For Indentity Elimination?, Irene Scharf

Irene Scharf

This Article is presented in three Parts. The first Part examines the likelihood that the displaced war victims could receive some type of civil compensation for their losses through the local courts in Yugoslavia. Part II scrutinizes the basic international human rights doctrines and systems of enforcement to determine whether they may offer remedies for the victims of identity elimination. Part III explores the likelihood that, through the Yugoslav Tribunal, those responsible for identity elimination may be held criminally responsible for their actions in Kosovo.


Constructing Illegality In America: Immigrant Experiences, Critiques, And Resistance, Daniel Kanstroom, Cecilia Menjívar Oct 2013

Constructing Illegality In America: Immigrant Experiences, Critiques, And Resistance, Daniel Kanstroom, Cecilia Menjívar

Daniel Kanstroom

The topic of 'illegal' immigration has been a major aspect of public discourse in the United States and many other immigrant-receiving countries. From the beginning of its modern invocation in the early twentieth century, the often ill-defined epithet of human 'illegality' has figured prominently in the media; in vigorous public debates at the national, state, and local levels; and in presidential campaigns. In this collection of essays, contributors from a variety of disciplines - anthropology, law, political science, religious studies, and sociology - examine how immigration law shapes immigrant illegality, how the concept of immigrant illegality is deployed and lived, …


Solidarity And Rights: Two To Tango: A Response To Joseph A. Mccartin, Lance Compa Oct 2013

Solidarity And Rights: Two To Tango: A Response To Joseph A. Mccartin, Lance Compa

Lance A Compa

[Excerpt] Thanks to Joseph McCartin for advancing this debate with an insightful critique of the workers’-rights-as-human-rights framework and for his generous treatment of the series of Human Rights Watch reports in which I had a hand. McCartin so fairly presents the human rights case, even while disagreeing with it, that it’s hard to respond without simply borrowing from his framing of my own views. But I’ll try.


Subsidiarity In The Tradition Of Catholic Social Doctrine, Patrick Brennan Oct 2013

Subsidiarity In The Tradition Of Catholic Social Doctrine, Patrick Brennan

Patrick McKinley Brennan

This chapter is an invited contribution to the first English-language comparative study of subsidiarity, M. Evans and A. Zimmerman (eds.), Subsidiarity in Comparative Perspective (forthcoming Springer, 2013). The concept of subsidiarity does work in many and varied legal contexts today, but the concept originated in Catholic social doctrine. The Catholic understanding of subsidiarity (or subsidiary function) is the subject of this chapter. Subsidiarity is often described as a norm calling for the devolution of power or for performing social functions at the lowest possible level. In Catholic social doctrine, it is neither. Subsidiarity is the fixed and immovable ontological principle …


The Liberty Of The Church: Source, Scope And Scandal, Patrick Brennan Oct 2013

The Liberty Of The Church: Source, Scope And Scandal, Patrick Brennan

Patrick McKinley Brennan

This article was presented at a conference, and is part of a symposium, on "The Freedom of the Church in the Modern Era." The article argues that the liberty of the Church, libertas Ecclesiae, is not a mere metaphor, pace the views of some other contributions to the conference and symposium and of the mentality mostly prevailing over the last five hundred years. The argument is that the Church and her directly God-given rights are ontologically irreducible in a way that the rights of, say, the state of California or even of the United States are not. Based on a …


Resisting The Grand Coalition In Favor Of The Status Quo By Giving Full Scope To The Libertas Ecclesiae, Patrick Brennan Oct 2013

Resisting The Grand Coalition In Favor Of The Status Quo By Giving Full Scope To The Libertas Ecclesiae, Patrick Brennan

Patrick McKinley Brennan

This paper argues that questions about "religious freedom" must be subordinated to the fundamental principle of the liberty of the Church, libertas Ecclesiae. The First Amendment's agnosticism with respect to the liberty of the Church is not ultimately normative. Catholics and others who merely seek religious "accommodation," as with the HHS mandate, for example, are agents of a status quo that illegitimately has comfortable self-preservation as its highest value. It is Catholic doctrine that "creation was for the sake of the Church," not for the sake of, say, religious freedom. The paper argues that the contingent constitution of …


Readmission Agreements And Refugee Rights: From A Critique To A Proposal, Mariagiulia Giuffré Aug 2013

Readmission Agreements And Refugee Rights: From A Critique To A Proposal, Mariagiulia Giuffré

Mariagiulia Giuffré

Against the backdrop of the bilateral cooperation on migration control between individual EU Member States and third countries, this paper examines whether the implementation of readmission agreements hampers access to protection for asylum-seekers subjected to a return procedure. It concludes that no issue of incompatibility with refugee and human rights law stems from the text of readmission agreements, administrative tools used to articulate the procedures for a smooth return of irregular migrants and rejected refugees to countries of origin or transit. Nonetheless, instances of informal practices of border control, especially in situations of emergency and mass influxes demonstrate how the …


Bioethics And Law In The United States: A Legal Process Perspective, Charles Baron Aug 2013

Bioethics And Law In The United States: A Legal Process Perspective, Charles Baron

Charles H. Baron

An analytical exposition of the law regarding a patient's "right to die" as it has developed in the United States over the last 30 years provides an exemplar overview of the variety of legal mechanisms that American legal institutions can and do bring to bear to deal with the challenges posed by new developments in medicine and the biosciences. Opposing "pro-life" and "pro-choice" ideological and political forces have been channeled through the federal and state legislative, judicial, and executive branches, where the various legal actors have developed legal principles that so far provide patients with a right to refuse any …


Competency And Common Law: Why And How Decision-Making Capacity Criteria Should Be Drawn From The Capacity-Determination Process, Charles Baron Aug 2013

Competency And Common Law: Why And How Decision-Making Capacity Criteria Should Be Drawn From The Capacity-Determination Process, Charles Baron

Charles H. Baron

Determining competence to request physician-assisted suicide should be no more difficult than determining competence to refuse life-prolonging treatment. In both cases, criteria and procedures should be developed out of the process of actually making capacity determinations; they should not be promulgated a priori. Because patient demeanor plays a critical role in capacity determinations, it should be made part of the record of such determinations through greater use of video- and audiotapes.


On Knowing One's Chains And Decking Them With Flowers: Limits On Patient Autonomy In "The Silent World Of Doctor And Patient", Charles Baron Aug 2013

On Knowing One's Chains And Decking Them With Flowers: Limits On Patient Autonomy In "The Silent World Of Doctor And Patient", Charles Baron

Charles H. Baron

In this article Professor Baron continues the debate started by Jay Katz in his book "The Silent World of Doctor and Patient" on the necessity of exploring further patients' reasons for refusing treatment.


Hastening Death: The Seven Deadly Sins Of The Status Quo, Charles Baron Aug 2013

Hastening Death: The Seven Deadly Sins Of The Status Quo, Charles Baron

Charles H. Baron

The seven deadly sins of the status quo -- inhumanity, paternalism, Utilitarianism, hypocrisy, lawlessness, injustice, and the deadly risk of error and abuse -- are seven arguments against maintaining the artificial bright-line distinction between the prohibition against assisted suicide and the allowance of patients’ right to refuse life-prolonging treatment. This article calls on courts and legislatures to follow the successful example of the Oregon Death with Dignity statute.


Human Rights From The Bottom Up: Beyond The Export Model, Anthony Chase Aug 2013

Human Rights From The Bottom Up: Beyond The Export Model, Anthony Chase

Anthony Chase

No abstract provided.


Our Debt To De Vitoria: A Catholic Foundation Of Human Rights, Robert Araujo Mar 2013

Our Debt To De Vitoria: A Catholic Foundation Of Human Rights, Robert Araujo

Robert J. Araujo S.J.

No abstract provided.


Four Ways To Fix Law School, Vincent Rougeau Feb 2013

Four Ways To Fix Law School, Vincent Rougeau

Vincent D. Rougeau

No abstract provided.


Don’T Close Guantánamo, Jennifer Daskal Jan 2013

Don’T Close Guantánamo, Jennifer Daskal

Jennifer Daskal

Thanks to the spotlight placed on the facility by human rights groups, international observers and detainees' lawyers, there has been a significant, if not uniform, improvement in conditions.


The Eighth Amendment As A Warrant Against Undeserved Punishment, Scott Howe Dec 2012

The Eighth Amendment As A Warrant Against Undeserved Punishment, Scott Howe

Scott W. Howe

Should the Eighth Amendment prohibit all undeserved criminal convictions and punishments? There are grounds to argue that it must. Correlation between the level of deserts of the accused and the severity of the sanction represents the very idea of justice to most of us. We want to believe that those branded as criminals deserve blame for their conduct and that they deserve all of the punishments that they receive. The deserts limitation is also key to explaining the decisions in which the Supreme Court has rejected convictions or punishments as disproportional, including several major rulings in the new millennium. Yet, …


Symposium: Building Global Professionalism: Emerging Trends In International And Transnational Legal Education, Anil Kalhan Dec 2012

Symposium: Building Global Professionalism: Emerging Trends In International And Transnational Legal Education, Anil Kalhan

Anil Kalhan

It has become a matter of recurring lament and concern — and periodically, an object of satire and derision — that Americans lack basic knowledge, awareness, or interest concerning the world beyond their borders; whether in terms of history, public affairs, culture, language, or even basic geography. Politicians, corporate leaders, scholars, and other observers across a broad spectrum routinely warn of the potential dangers this global awareness deficit poses to the well-being and security of the United States. In an increasingly interdependent world — with a growing array of economic, political, social, and environmental problems that transcend national borders — …


Thinking Critically About International And Transnational Legal Education, Anil Kalhan Dec 2012

Thinking Critically About International And Transnational Legal Education, Anil Kalhan

Anil Kalhan

It has become a matter of recurring lament and concern — and periodically, an object of satire and derision — that Americans lack basic knowledge, awareness, or interest concerning the world beyond their borders; whether in terms of history, public affairs, culture, language, or even basic geography. Politicians, corporate leaders, scholars, and other observers across a broad spectrum routinely warn of the potential dangers this global awareness deficit poses to the well-being and security of the United States. In an increasingly interdependent world — with a growing array of economic, political, social, and environmental problems that transcend national borders — …


The Innocent Defendant’S Dilemma: An Innovative Empirical Study Of Plea Bargaining’S Innocence Problem, Lucian Dervan, Vanessa Edkins Dec 2012

The Innocent Defendant’S Dilemma: An Innovative Empirical Study Of Plea Bargaining’S Innocence Problem, Lucian Dervan, Vanessa Edkins

Lucian E Dervan

In 1989, Ada JoAnn Taylor was accused of murder and presented with stark options. If she pleaded guilty, she would be rewarded with a sentence of ten to forty years in prison. If, however, she proceeded to trial and was convicted, she would likely spend the rest of her life behind bars. Over a thousand miles away in Florida and more than twenty years later, a college student was accused of cheating and presented with her own incentives to admit wrongdoing and save the university the time and expense of proceeding before a disciplinary review board. Both women decided the …