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Full-Text Articles in Law
Human Rights In Hospitals: An End To Routine Shackling, Neil Singh Bedi, Nisha Mathur, Judy D. Wang, Avital Rech, Nancy Gaden, George J. Annas, Sondra S. Crosby
Human Rights In Hospitals: An End To Routine Shackling, Neil Singh Bedi, Nisha Mathur, Judy D. Wang, Avital Rech, Nancy Gaden, George J. Annas, Sondra S. Crosby
Faculty Scholarship
Medical students (NSB, NM, JDW) spearheaded revision of the policy and clinical practice for shackling incarcerated patients at Boston Medical Center (BMC), the largest safety net hospital in New England. In American hospitals, routine shackling of incarcerated patients with metal restraints is widespread—except for perinatal patients—regardless of consciousness, mobility, illness severity, or age. The modified policy includes individualized assessments and allows incarcerated patients to be unshackled if they meet defined criteria. The students also formed the Stop Shackling Patients Coalition (SSP Coalition) of clinicians, public health practitioners, human rights advocates, and community members determined to humanize the inpatient treatment of …
Book Review Of Law In The Time Of Covid-19, Jessie Wallace Burchfield
Book Review Of Law In The Time Of Covid-19, Jessie Wallace Burchfield
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Closing International Law's Innocence Gap, Brandon L. Garrett, Laurence R. Helfer, Jayne C. Huckerby
Closing International Law's Innocence Gap, Brandon L. Garrett, Laurence R. Helfer, Jayne C. Huckerby
Faculty Scholarship
Over the last decade, a growing number of countries have adopted new laws and other mechanisms to address a gap in national criminal legal systems: the absence of meaningful procedures to raise post-conviction claims of factual innocence. These legal and policy reforms have responded to a global surge of exonerations facilitated by the growth of national innocence organizations that increasingly collaborate across borders. It is striking that these developments have occurred with little direct help from international law. Although many treaties recognize extensive fair trial and appeal rights, no international human rights instrument—in its text, existing interpretation, or implementation—explicitly and …
Petition Alleging Violations Of The Human Rights Of Lisa Montgomery By The United States Of America And Urgent Request For Precautionary Measures, Sandra L. Babcock, Zohra Ahmed, Veronica Cinibulk, Allison Franz, Gabriela Markolovic, Kelley Henry, Amy D. Harwell, Lisa G. Nouri
Petition Alleging Violations Of The Human Rights Of Lisa Montgomery By The United States Of America And Urgent Request For Precautionary Measures, Sandra L. Babcock, Zohra Ahmed, Veronica Cinibulk, Allison Franz, Gabriela Markolovic, Kelley Henry, Amy D. Harwell, Lisa G. Nouri
Faculty Scholarship
This is a petition filed on behalf of Lisa Montgomery. More about the case, as well as press releases and case documents, can be found on the case page at Cornell Center for Death Penalty Worldwide.
Disaggregating Corporate Liability: Japanese Multinationals And World War Ii, Timothy Webster
Disaggregating Corporate Liability: Japanese Multinationals And World War Ii, Timothy Webster
Faculty Scholarship
The past two decades have witnessed unprecedented attention to corporate legal liability for human rights abuses. Yet the supporting jurisprudence is relatively thin. Scholars generally agree that corporations can incur legal liability for serious violations of international human rights law. But courts find any number of ways to avoid such a result. This Article finds qualified support for an emergent norm of corporate civil liability from recent litigation in Japan. Specifically, the transnational war reparations litigation of the past three decades has yielded a consistent jurisprudence of qualified liability. Courts detail the abuses committed by Japan's largest multinational corporations, and …
Copyright Exceptions Across Borders: Implementing The Marrakesh Treaty, Laurence R. Helfer, Molly K. Land, Ruth L. Okediji
Copyright Exceptions Across Borders: Implementing The Marrakesh Treaty, Laurence R. Helfer, Molly K. Land, Ruth L. Okediji
Faculty Scholarship
This article reviews state ratification and implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty since its conclusion in 2013. We find that most states have adhered closely to the Treaty’s text, thus creating a de facto global template of exceptions and limitations that has increasingly enabled individuals with print disabilities, libraries and schools to create accessible format copies and share them across borders. The article argues that the Marrakesh Treaty’s core innovation—mandatory exceptions to copyright to promote public welfare—together with consultations with a diverse range of stakeholders, may offer a model for harmonising human rights and IP in other contexts.
The Past As Present, Unlearned Lessons And The (Non-) Utility Of International Law, Susan M. Akram
The Past As Present, Unlearned Lessons And The (Non-) Utility Of International Law, Susan M. Akram
Faculty Scholarship
The contemporary moment provides an acute illustration of the dangers of historical amnesia—as if the Trump Administration’s policies of exclusion, extremist nationalism, and presidential imperialism were singular to ‘now,’ and entirely reversible in the next election. This Article argues to the contrary; that we have been down this road before, and the current crisis in immigration and refugee policies is the inevitable development of trends of racism, including anti-Arab, anti-Muslim racism and xenophobia, that have only become normalized by the populist resurgence of Trumpism. If this premise is correct—that we are experiencing a culmination of a historical trajectory—what lessons from …
Defending Refugees: A Case For Protective Procedural Safeguards In The Persecutor Bar Analysis, Charles Shane Ellison
Defending Refugees: A Case For Protective Procedural Safeguards In The Persecutor Bar Analysis, Charles Shane Ellison
Faculty Scholarship
For refugees and asylum seekers, application of the so-called persecutor bar is tantamount to a death sentence. However, the Board of Immigration Appeals -- without any real deliberation--has arrived at an interpretation of a generic-relief, burdenshifting regulation to allow for application of the persecutor bar based upon very little evidence. Even mere membership in a group with a poor human rights record has been held sufficient to switch the burden of proof and apply the bar. While the recent holding of Matter of Negusie, 27 I&N Dec. 347 (June 28, 2018) can be read and understood largely as a victory …
Trauma, Depression, And Burnout In The Human Rights Field: Identifying Barriers And Pathways To Resilient Advocacy, Sarah Knuckey, Margaret Satterthwaite, Adam Brown
Trauma, Depression, And Burnout In The Human Rights Field: Identifying Barriers And Pathways To Resilient Advocacy, Sarah Knuckey, Margaret Satterthwaite, Adam Brown
Faculty Scholarship
Human rights advocates often confront trauma and stress in their work. They are exposed to testimony about heinous abuses; work in insecure locations; visit physical sites of abuse; review forensic, photographic, and video evidence; directly witness abuses; experience threats; and can also suffer detention, be attacked, or be tortured themselves. Such exposure risks adversely impacting the wellbeing and mental health of advocates. While the human rights field is diverse and work varies widely, most – if not all – advocates are likely directly or indirectly exposed to potentially traumatic events or material in the course of their work. The degree …
The Trafficking Victim Protection Act: The Best Hope For International Human Rights Litigation In The U.S. Courts?, Sara Sun Beale
The Trafficking Victim Protection Act: The Best Hope For International Human Rights Litigation In The U.S. Courts?, Sara Sun Beale
Faculty Scholarship
The article focuses on uses Alien Tort Statute as a vehicle for litigating human rights abuses in both civil and criminal prosecutions in the U.S. Topics discussed include developments in International Criminal Law in addressing human rights violations; judicial attitudes that could affect the interpretation of the Trafficking Victim Protection Act; and Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain court case on the same.
Valuing Life: A Human Rights Perspective On The Calculus Of Regulation, William J. Aceves
Valuing Life: A Human Rights Perspective On The Calculus Of Regulation, William J. Aceves
Faculty Scholarship
How much is a human life worth? This is both a puzzling and subversive question for human rights advocates to consider. The concept of human rights is premised on the sanctity and inviolability of human life as well as the equality of all human beings. Indeed, the right to life and the corollary right to be free from the arbitrary deprivation of life constitute the defining human right. To place a price on the value of human life is, thus, unsettling. And yet, monetary valuation of human life occurs frequently. Governments use cost-benefit analysis and calculations regarding the value of …
(Public) Health And Human Rights: Of Bridges And Matrixes, George J. Annas
(Public) Health And Human Rights: Of Bridges And Matrixes, George J. Annas
Faculty Scholarship
Responding to President Trump's anti-Muslim executive order restricting immigration, the American Public Health Association (APHA) issued a press release recommitting the organization to human rights, noting that "health and human rights are inextricably linked." The organization underlined the basic human rights norm of nondiscrimination, noting that "all people should be valued equally, no matter their race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, immigration status, income or geographic region" and that whenever any groups of people are prevented from "experiencing basic human rights, all of our communities suffer" (APHA 2017). Human rights, especially the right to health, have also been at the core …
Corporate Criminal Responsibility For Human Rights Violations: Jurisdiction And Reparations, Kenneth S. Gallant
Corporate Criminal Responsibility For Human Rights Violations: Jurisdiction And Reparations, Kenneth S. Gallant
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Sub-Regional Courts In Africa: Litigating The Hybrid Right To Freedom Of Movement, Laurence R. Helfer
Sub-Regional Courts In Africa: Litigating The Hybrid Right To Freedom Of Movement, Laurence R. Helfer
Faculty Scholarship
Human rights attorneys and civil society groups in Africa have recently focused their advocacy efforts on sub-regional courts associated with economic integration communities in East, West and Southern Africa. The East African Court of Justice (EACJ), the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and the Tribunal of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have received few suits challenging trade restrictions and other barriers to sub-regional integration. Instead, and surprisingly, the courts’ dockets are dominated by complaints alleging violations of international human rights law.
This article offers the first analysis of EACJ, ECOWAS Court and …
Obama’S National Security Exceptionalism, Sudha Setty
Obama’S National Security Exceptionalism, Sudha Setty
Faculty Scholarship
This Article discusses how continued national security exceptionalism engenders a view of the United States as considering itself to be above international obligations to investigate and prosecute torturers and war criminals, and the view by the global community that the United States is willing to apply one standard for itself, and another for the rest of the world. Exceptionalism not only poses real challenges in terms of law, morality, and building useful relationships with allied nations, but acts as a step backward for the creation of enforceable international norms and standards, and in efforts to restore a balance in the …
Dignity Rights: A Response To Peggy Cooper Davis's Little Citizens And Their Families, Jane M. Spinak
Dignity Rights: A Response To Peggy Cooper Davis's Little Citizens And Their Families, Jane M. Spinak
Faculty Scholarship
Professor Spinak responds to Professor Davis’ comment by considering how the concept of human dignity can be used to reassert human rights – of individual members of the family and the family as an entity – that have been diminished, if not destroyed, by poverty and inequality.
Backlash Against International Courts In West, East And Southern Africa: Causes And Consequences, Karen J. Alter, James T. Gathii, Laurence R. Helfer
Backlash Against International Courts In West, East And Southern Africa: Causes And Consequences, Karen J. Alter, James T. Gathii, Laurence R. Helfer
Faculty Scholarship
This paper discusses three credible attempts by African governments to restrict the jurisdiction of three similarly-situated sub-regional courts in response to politically controversial rulings. In West Africa, when the ECOWAS Court upheld allegations of torture by opposition journalists in the Gambia, that country’s political leaders sought to restrict the Court’s power to review human rights complaints. The other member states ultimately defeated the Gambia’s proposal. In East Africa, Kenya failed in its efforts to eliminate the EACJ and to remove some of its judges after a decision challenging an election to a sub-regional legislature. However, the member states agreed to …
Pharmaceutical Patents And The Human Right To Health The Contested Evolution Of The Transnational Legal Order On Access To Medicines, Laurence R. Helfer
Pharmaceutical Patents And The Human Right To Health The Contested Evolution Of The Transnational Legal Order On Access To Medicines, Laurence R. Helfer
Faculty Scholarship
Disputes over the regulation of access to medicines are occurring in multiple transnational, national, and local venues. Competing groups of states and non-state actors shift horizontally and vertically among these forums in an effort to develop competing legal rules over the propriety of granting intellectual property (IP) protection to newly developed life-saving drugs. This chapter applies the framework of Transnational Legal Orders (Terence C. Halliday & Gregory Shaffer, eds. 2015) to explain the origins of these controversies and their consequences. The chapter argues that the current state of affairs arose from a clash between two previously discrete TLOs—one relating to …
The Impact Of Law On The Right To Water And Adding Normative Change To The Global Agenda, Michael Ulrich
The Impact Of Law On The Right To Water And Adding Normative Change To The Global Agenda, Michael Ulrich
Faculty Scholarship
A resolution was passed at the United Nations Water Conference in 1977 to achieve universal access to sufficient water by 1990. This bar was lowered significantly as part of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). However, as the MDGs come to an end this year, even this reduced benchmark will not be reached. Water is inescapably intertwined with every other MDG, as well as the ability to exercise any human right. Consequently, the failure to achieve this goal implores an exploration of its causes. As the global community embarks on setting a new post-MDG agenda, one currently overlooked aspect is the …
Mapping The Interface Between Human Rights And Intellectual Property, Laurence R. Helfer
Mapping The Interface Between Human Rights And Intellectual Property, Laurence R. Helfer
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Mental Health Functioning In The Human Rights Field: Findings From An International Internet-Based Survey, Amy Joscelyne, Sarah Knuckey, Margaret Satterthwaite, Richard A. Bryant, Meng Li, Meng Quian, Adam D. Brown
Mental Health Functioning In The Human Rights Field: Findings From An International Internet-Based Survey, Amy Joscelyne, Sarah Knuckey, Margaret Satterthwaite, Richard A. Bryant, Meng Li, Meng Quian, Adam D. Brown
Faculty Scholarship
Human rights advocates play a critical role in promoting respect for human rights world-wide, and engage in a broad range of strategies, including documentation of rights violations, monitoring, press work and report-writing, advocacy, and litigation. However, little is known about the impact of human rights work on the mental health of human rights advocates. This study examined the mental health profile of human rights advocates and risk factors associated with their psychological functioning. 346 individuals currently or previously working in the field of human rights completed an internet-based survey regarding trauma exposure, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), resilience and occupational …
The Growing Public Domain In Medicine, Saurabh Vishnubhakat
The Growing Public Domain In Medicine, Saurabh Vishnubhakat
Faculty Scholarship
This essay describes the growing public domain of inventions associated with drugs and medicine, and geographies associated with identifiable shifts in the balance of innovation that may be especially favorable for promoting wider access to socially useful technologies. To do so, it departs from the largely ex ante perspective that currently informs the intersectional debate regarding human rights and patent rights and, instead, looks backward to inquire what innovations from past patents have already become publicly available in service of the human rights objective of greater access to technology. Ex post analysis of this kind may help public and private …
International Courts As Agents Of Legal Change: Evidence From Lgbt Rights In Europe, Laurence R. Helfer, Erik Voeten
International Courts As Agents Of Legal Change: Evidence From Lgbt Rights In Europe, Laurence R. Helfer, Erik Voeten
Faculty Scholarship
Do international court judgments influence the behavior of actors other than the parties to a dispute? Are international courts agents of policy change or do their judgments merely reflect evolving social and political trends? The authors develop a theory that specifies the conditions under which international courts can use their interpretive discretion to have system-wide effects. The authors examine the theory in the context of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) rulings on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues by creating a new dataset that matches these rulings with laws in all Council of Europe (CoE) member states. The …
Tibetan Diaspora In The Shadow Of The Self-Immolation Crisis: Consequences Of Colonialism, Robert D. Sloane
Tibetan Diaspora In The Shadow Of The Self-Immolation Crisis: Consequences Of Colonialism, Robert D. Sloane
Faculty Scholarship
This chapter for a book on protracted refugee crises argues that the origins of both the unresolved Tibetan refugee crisis and the tragic and unprecedented wave of some 120 self-immolations in Tibet since 2009 lie in Tibet’s unacknowledged status as a colony. China illegally invaded and annexed Tibet in 1950, and it remains under belligerent occupation to this day. Contrary to the official views of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the United States, and (to my knowledge) every other state in the world, it is a fiction to refer to the Tibetan people as a Chinese 'minority nationality'. Every …
The Successes And Challenges For The European Court, Seen From The Outside, Laurence R. Helfer
The Successes And Challenges For The European Court, Seen From The Outside, Laurence R. Helfer
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Formalism And State Secrets, Sudha Setty
Formalism And State Secrets, Sudha Setty
Faculty Scholarship
The state secrets privilege has received a tremendous amount of scholarly attention in the U.S. in the last decade. In September 2009, the Obama administration created a new policy that mandated a more rigorous internal administrative review prior to invoking the state secrets privilege. It appears as though this internal review process has resulted in little difference with regard to the invocation of the privilege at the pleadings stage in cases that allege torture and other human rights abuses. This chapter of the forthcoming comparative law volume Secrecy, National Security and the Vindication of Constitutional Law (David Cole, Federico Fabbrini …
Freedom From Ignorance: The International Duty To Provide Public Education, Areto A. Imoukhuede
Freedom From Ignorance: The International Duty To Provide Public Education, Areto A. Imoukhuede
Faculty Scholarship
This paper argues that public education is an international human right that the U.S. ought to recognise and protect. Recognising a right to public education would correct a major inconsistency in U.S. law by bringing education rights docrtine more in line with international human rights law. This piece discusses how current U.S. education rights doctrine is inconsistent with U.S. tradition and legal precedent. It then demonstrates how international law recognises public education as a fundamental duty of government before arguing for why the U.S. is obligated to follow international law regarding the right to public education.
The Dilemma Of Piratical Ransoms: Should They Be Paid Or Not: On The Human Rights Of Kidnapped Seamen And Their Families, Barry H. Dubner, Kimberly Chavers
The Dilemma Of Piratical Ransoms: Should They Be Paid Or Not: On The Human Rights Of Kidnapped Seamen And Their Families, Barry H. Dubner, Kimberly Chavers
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Globalization And Law: Law Beyond The State, Ralf Michaels
Globalization And Law: Law Beyond The State, Ralf Michaels
Faculty Scholarship
The chapter provides an introduction into law and globalization for sociolegal studies. Instead of treating globalization as an external factor that impacts the law, globalization and law are here viewed as intertwined. I suggest that three types of globalization should be distinguished—globalization as empirical phenomenon, globalization as theory, and globalization as ideology. I go on to discuss one central theme of globalization, namely in what way society, and therefore law, move beyond the state. This is done along the three classical elements of the state—territory, population/citizenship, and government. The role of all of these elements is shifting, suggesting we need …
Human Rights And The Evolution Of Global Environmental Law, Robert V. Percival
Human Rights And The Evolution Of Global Environmental Law, Robert V. Percival
Faculty Scholarship
Environmental problems that jeopardize the health of humans increasingly implicate concerns that have played an important role in the development of international human rights. While some have questioned the wisdom or effectiveness of focusing human rights concerns on environmental problems, it seems an inevitable response to the failure of many countries to protect their citizens adequately from harm caused by environmental degradation. This paper reviews efforts to apply human rights concerns to environmental problems. It describes how these developments illustrate the growth of a kind of “global environmental law” that blurs traditional distinctions between domestic and international law and public …