Law Commons^™

Book Review: Women Under The Law: The False Promise Of Human Rights, S. I. Strong

Faculty Publications

Though McColgan's book promises much, it fails to persuade the reader for several reasons. First, a number of the examples used to demonstrate the inferiority of entrenched rights actually suggest the opposite. The second reason why McColgan fails to persuade results from her forcing constitutional arguments where there are none. The third problem with this book is its failure to extrapolate its arguments about women to other disadvantaged groups.

Despite these shortcomings, there is much in McColgan's book to recommend it. Her prose is fluid, her presentation of US and Canadian law, particularly regarding abortion, is extensive, and her arguments …

The United Nations And Civil Society, Jayantha Dhanapala

A Cartography of Governance: Exploring the Province of Environmental NGOs (April 7-8)

7 pages.

Capital Punishment: Corporate Criminal Liability For Gross Violations Of Human Rights, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

These remarks were presented on February 24, 2001, in a panel concluding a conference entitled "Holding Multinational Corporations Responsible Under International Law" at Hastings College of the Law, San Francisco, California.

Effective Strategies For Protecting Human Rights: A Conference Engaging The International Community, David R. Barnhizer

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Human rights protection needs teeth. And those who work in the disparate field of human rights need to see the system more comprehensively and strategically. Far too often, political issues interfere with enforcement of human rights laws and allow violators to hide behind the unwillingness of national governments to take action to enforce existing laws against human rights violators. Lack of commitment to human rights enforcement or timely preventative or intervention actions have led to violators being left unpunished for torture, rape and genocide. This failure of governments means that there is a lack of deterent power sufficient to inhibit …

A Trade/Human Rights Linkage By The United States: Is Enforcing Human Rights By Use Of Trade Sanctions Effective?, Blaise Omondi Odhiambo

LLM Theses and Essays

Universally held basic human rights must remain separate from political rights. Such basic human rights are those that are so universal that all societies, systems, nations, and ideology could, and do espouse them. Conversely, political rights are those that are dependent upon compatibility with the system of government in place and arc therefore far less likely to gamer universal support. An effective multilateral enforcement mechanism can only succeed if there are universal agreement and acceptance of the protected rights. Accordingly, at the outset of such a mechanism, only basic human rights may be enforced through trade sanctions. Once such a …

Understanding The "Understanding": Federalism Constraints On Human Rights Implementation, Brad R. Roth

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

On Elián And Aliens: A Political Solution To The Plenary Power Problem, Victor C. Romero

Journal Articles

The poignant story of a little boy fished out of the sea after losing his mother to the elements captured the country's imagination and ignited a political firestorm. The Elián González saga drew conflicting opinions from nearly every branch of American local, state, and federal governments.

This article takes no specific position on Elián's situation. Rather, this artivle values the González story for putting a human face on often faceless legal issues. More specifically, Elián's saga raises the following important question: When should the right of the human being to be treated as an individual trump the right of government …

A Constitutional Confluence: American ‘State Action’ Law And The Application Of South Africa’S Socioeconomic Rights Guarantees To Private Actors, Stephen Ellmann

Articles & Chapters

As constitutional protection of human rights expands around the world, the question of whether constitutional rights should protect people not only against state action but also against the conduct of private actors is once again timely. Few nations have so broadly, or so ambiguously, endorsed the application of constitutional guarantees to constrain private conduct (known outside the United States as "horizontality") as South Africa. The constitution approved in 1996 applies fully and without qualification to all "organs of state," and this term is defined in section 239 in potentially very broad terms, notably embracing "any other functionary or institution ... …

Cultural Relativism, Economic Development And International Human Rights In The Asian Context, Richard Klein

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

A Framework Of Norms: International Human-Rights Law And Sovereignty, Douglass Cassel

Journal Articles

The international legal boundary between states; rights and human rights is not fixed. Long ago, the Permanent Court of International Justice - the judicial arm of the League of Nations and the precursor to the present International Court of Justice - recognized that "the question whether a certain matter is or is not solely within the jurisdiction of a State is an essentially relative question; it depends on the development of international relations." In recent decades international relations concerning both sovereignty and rights have developed quickly. An examination of those rights and the evolving realities of sovereignty are examined.

Latinas, Culture And Human Rights: A Model For Making Change, Saving Soul, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

This essay provides an overview of progresses achieved for women in the Americas by virtue of the use of the human rights model to further women's rights and attain betterment of their lives. Specifically, this work reviews the location of Latinas both within and outside the United States fronteras. As women of color within larger U.S. society and as women within their comunidad Latina, Latinas experience different multifaceted subordinations. A human rights model that recognizes the multidimensional nature of gendered racial discrimination and of racialized gender discrimination can serve to improve the lives of Latinas as well as non-Latina women …

Review Of Human Rights In Global Politics, Christine M. Chinkin

Reviews

The fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1998, coming in the decade after the resurgence of Western-style liberal democracies, has generated much writing and activity over the current status and future development of international human rights law, practice, and discourse. International lawyers tend to take for granted the canon of rights that, in the wake of the Universal Declaration, have been enshrined within the body of international instruments that have been adopted within regional and global arenas. In the 1990s, these lawyers largely turned their attention away from standard setting and to issues of effectiveness. Considerable …

Terrorism And Human Rights, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Does International Human Rights Law Make A Difference?, Douglass Cassel

Journal Articles

Does international human rights law make a difference? Does it protect rights in practice? The importance of these questions for rights protection is obvious: the institutions of international human rights law deserve our energetic support only to the extent they contribute meaningfully to protection of rights, or at least promise eventually to do so. Moreover, at the moment these questions have added urgency. They underlie an ongoing debate, fomented in part by this Journal, on the extent to which the United States should be prepared to cede degrees of its national sovereignty to international human rights institutions, in return for …

Federalism And International Human Rights In The New Constitutional Order, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Essay examines the contours of what I have elsewhere called the new constitutional order with respect to international human rights and federalism. The background is my suggestion that the U.S. political-constitutional system is on the verge of moving into a new constitutional regime, following the end of the New Deal-Great Society constitutional regime. The Supreme Court's innovations in the law of federalism in connection with Congress's exercise of its powers over domestic affairs has provoked speculation about the implications of those innovations for the national government's power with respect to foreign affairs. Most of the speculation has been that …

Introduction To Torture As Tort: From Sudan To Canada To Somalia, Craig M. Scott

Articles & Book Chapters

The present work is chapter 1 of the edited volume, Torture as Tort: Comparative Perspectives on the Development of Transnational Human Rights Litigation (Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2001). At the time the book was generated, the controversial nature of seeking globalised justice through national courts had become starkly apparent in the wake of the Pinochet case in which the Spanish legal system sought extradition of the former President of Chile from the United Kingdom in order to bring him to account under Spanish criminal law for a variety of alleged violations in Chile of human rights, most notably involving torture. Yet, …

Property, Wealth, Inequality And Human Rights: A Formula For Reform, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol, Shelbi D. Day

UF Law Faculty Publications

This essay scrutinizes the persistence of inequality in the United States through a human rights lens and grapples with the troubling disparities unearthed by two works: American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass and Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. These two highly enlightening and, simultaneously, deeply troubling and depressing books elucidate the myriad locations at which inequalities persist and the historical, social, psychological, and legal foundations of, and explications for, such disparities in the African American community.

This work proposes a human rights paradigm that provides a methodology to analyze, deconstruct and unravel …

Women's International Tribunal On Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, Christine M. Chinkin

Articles

From December 8 to 12,2000, a peoples' tribunal, the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal 2000, sat in Tokyo, Japan. It was established to consider the criminal liability of leading high-ranking Japanese military and political officials and the separate responsibility of the state of Japan for rape and sexual slavery as crimes against humanity arising out of Japanese military activity in the Asia Pacific region in the 1930s and 1940s.

The immediate background to the tribunal's establishment was a series of events commencing in 1988 when the women's movement in the Republic of Korea began to learn of the research of …

Caretakers And Collaborators, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A chilling subplot in the twentieth-century saga of state-sponsored mass murder, torture, and other atrocities was the widespread incidence of medical complicity. Nazi doctors’ human “experiments” and assistance in genocidal killing are the most oft-cited exemplar, but wartime Japanese physicians’ human vivisection and other grotesque practices rivaled the Nazi medical horrors. Measured by these standards, Soviet psychiatrists’ role in repressing dissent, Latin American and Turkish military doctors’ complicity in torture, and even the South African medical profession’s systematic involvement in apartheid may seem, to some, almost prosaic. Yet these and other reported cases of medical complicity in human rights abuse …