Law Commons^™

Human Trafficking And Pornography: Using The Trafficking Victims Protection Act To Prosecute Trafficking For The Production Of Internet Pornography, Allison J. Luzwick

Northwestern University Law Review

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) was passed to “combat trafficking in persons, a contemporary manifestation of slavery whose victims are predominantly women and children, to ensure just and effective punishment of traffickers, and to protect their victims.”1 Since the passing of the Act, federal courts have construed the statute broadly to achieve this stated purpose. One way in which the TVPA has been underutilized, however, is in prosecuting pornography cases. Pornography enjoys wide latitude under the law, protected by a vast net of First Amendment protections. While these protections may preserve freedom of speech, they do nothing …

Water Security, Rhett B. Larson

Northwestern University Law Review

Climate change, as the dominant paradigm in natural resource policy, is obsolete and should be replaced by the water security paradigm. The climate change paradigm is obsolete because it fails to adequately resonate with the concerns of the general public and fails to integrate fundamental sustainability challenges related to economic development and population growth. The water security paradigm directly addresses the main reasons climate change ultimately matters to most people—droughts, floods, plagues, and wars. Additionally, this new proposed paradigm better integrates climate change concerns with other pressing global sustainability challenges—including that economic development and population growth will require 50% more …

The Normalization Of Immigration Law, Mac Lebuhn

Northwestern Journal of Human Rights

In “The Normalization of Foreign Relations Law,” Professors Ganesh Sitaraman and Ingrid Wuerth argue that the Supreme Court increasingly treats foreign relations law like other bodies of law—it has “normalized” this body of once-exceptional law. However, a subset of foreign relations law, immigration law, receives little attention in their account, which obscures the fact that immigration law, unlike the rest of foreign relations law, has not normalized in nearly the same fashion.

To understand the normalization of immigration law, this paper proposes a theory of rights normalization: the Court has been reluctant to normalize immigration law except where immigrants’ rights …

Transferring Away Human Rights: Using Human Rights To Address Corporate Transfer Mispricing, Monica Iyer

Northwestern Journal of Human Rights

An estimated sixty percent of international trade happens within multinational enterprises. Transfer pricing occurs when one part of a firm sets a price in order to sell to another division in another country. When these prices are deliberately set at something other than market rate in order to minimize the firm’s tax liability, this is known as transfer mispricing, or abusive transfer pricing. These practices account for an enormous portion of global illicit financial flows. This paper will consider transfer mispricing as a violation of human rights, and will look at the ways in which various human rights instruments and …

Keynes, Sen, And Hayek: Competing Approaches To International Labor Law In The Ilo And The Wto, 1994–2008, Pascal Mcdougall

Northwestern Journal of Human Rights

In discussions of recent human rights-driven developments in the International Labour Organization (ILO), as well as in other international legal debates, many scholars have suggested that human rights and “neoliberalism” intrinsically tend to converge. Such purported convergence is at once deplored by critics of “globalization” and applauded by its defenders. This article offers an empirical refutation of this convergence thesis by documenting the potential for systematic divergences between human rights, neoliberalism and a third omnipresent discourse, social legal thought (i.e. tropes associated with the welfare state and Keynesianism). I support this claim by taking as a case study three interrelated …

Workers, Dignity, And Equitable Tolling, Duane Rudolph

Northwestern Journal of Human Rights

When workers allege that mental illness prevented the timely filing of a federal employment discrimination lawsuit, courts subject them to extreme standards at the equitable tolling stage, which ends workers’ lawsuits against their employers. Such an approach to workers suffering from mental illness is indicative both of judicial misunderstanding of equitable remedies and judicial ignorance of equity’s historical engagement with those afflicted with mental illness. More importantly, subjection of workers to high threshold requirements at equity is an affront to workers’ dignity. Dignity, like equity, has a powerful moral basis that focuses on the individual. Dignity requires that workers alleging …