Law Commons^™

Virtually Incredible: Rethinking Deference To Demeanor When Assessing Credibility In Asylum Cases Conducted By Video Teleconference, Liz Bradley, Hillary Farber

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The COVID-19 pandemic forced courthouses around the country to shutter their doors to in-person hearings and embrace video teleconferencing (VTC), launching a technology proliferation within the U.S. legal system. Immigration courts have long been authorized to use VTC, but the pandemic prompted the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) to expand video capabilities and encourage the use of video “to the maximum extent practicable.” In this technology pivot, we must consider how VTC affects cases for international humanitarian protections, where an immigration judge’s ability to accurately gauge an applicant’s demeanor can have life-or-death consequences.

This Article takes a deep dive …

The Changing Landscape Of Women's Rights Activism In China, Rangita De Silva De Alwis, Katherine Schroeder

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The Beijing Conference was a watershed moment in the history of the global women’s movement and had an unprecedented impact in the Global North and South on lawmaking, institution building, and movement building. This Article details the development of women’s activism in China since the Beijing Conference and how a changing legal landscape impacts this activism. While its progress is emblematic of the inconsistencies in the progression of women’s rights activism since the Beijing Conference, China’s efforts have been significant and varied and represent a model for other countries seeking to reform women’s rights legislation. This Article identifies important lines …

Local Elected Officials’ Receptivity To Refugee Resettlement In The United States, Robert Shaffer, Lauren E. Pinson, Jonathan A. Chu, Beth A. Simmons

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Local leaders possess significant and growing authority over refugee resettlement, yet we know little about their attitudes toward refugees. In this article, we use a conjoint experiment to evaluate how the attributes of hypothetical refugee groups influence local policymaker receptivity toward refugee resettlement. We sample from a novel, national panel of current local elected officials, who represent a broad range of urban and rural communities across the United States. We find that many local officials favor refugee resettlement regardless of refugee attributes. However, officials are most receptive to refugees whom they perceive as a strong economic and social fit within …

Testing For Negative Spillovers: Is Promoting Human Rights Really Part Of The “Problem”?, Anton Strezhnev, Judith G. Kelley, Beth A. Simmons

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The international community often seeks to promote political reforms in recalcitrant states. Recently, some scholars have argued that, rather than helping, international law and advocacy create new problems because they have negative spillovers that increase rights violations. We review three mechanisms for such spillovers: backlash, trade-offs, and counteraction and concentrate on the last of these. Some researchers assert that governments sometimes “counteract” international human rights pressures by strategically substituting violations in adjacent areas that are either not targeted or are harder to monitor. However, most such research shows only that both outcomes correlate with an intervention—the targeted positively and the …

The Proof Is In The Process: Self-Reporting Under International Human Rights Treaties, Cosette D. Creamer, Beth A. Simmons

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Recent research has shown that state reporting to human rights monitoring bodies is associated with improvements in rights practices, calling into question earlier claims that self-reporting is inconsequential. Yet little work has been done to explore the theoretical mechanisms that plausibly account for this association. This Article systematically documents—across treaties, countries, and years—four mechanisms through which reporting can contribute to human rights improvements: elite socialization, learning and capacity building, domestic mobilization, and law development. These mechanisms have implications for the future of human rights treaty monitoring.

Measuring Norms And Normative Contestation: The Case Of International Criminal Law, Beth A. Simmons, Hyeran Jo

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One way to tell if an international norm is robust is to assess the breadth of its support from a wide variety of important actors. We argue that to assess norm robustness, we should look at the general beliefs, rhetorical support, and actions of both primary and secondary norm addressees (states and non-state actors) at various levels: international, regional, domestic and local. By way of example, we evaluate the robustness of international criminal law (ICL) norms by looking at the rhetoric and actions of a diverse set of international actors, including not only states and intergovernmental organizations but also ordinary …

Brief For Justice Richard J. Goldstone As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Petitioner, Sarah Paoletti

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Amicus curiae herein argue the present petition for a writ of certiorari should be granted as it rightly questions the very legitimacy of the military commission used to try Petitioner based on a theory of equality. International and comparative law further bolster Petitioner’s argument that the Military Commissions Act’s establishment of a segregated criminal justice system in which only non-citizens are subject to military commission jurisdiction violates the equal rights of Petitioner and all non-citizens subject to its jurisdiction.

Equality is a central principle undergirding human rights law that pre-dates the founding of the United Nations and the drafting of …

Can The International Criminal Court Deter Atrocity?, Hyeran Jo, Beth A. Simmons

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Whether and how violence can be controlled to spare innocent lives is a central issue in international relations. The most ambitious effort to date has been the International Criminal Court (ICC), designed to enhance security and safety by preventing egregious human rights abuses and deterring international crimes. We offer the first systematic assessment of the ICC's deterrent effects for both state and nonstate actors. Although no institution can deter all actors, the ICC can deter some governments and those rebel groups that seek legitimacy. We find support for this conditional impact of the ICC cross-nationally. Our work has implications for …

Governing Disasters: The Challenge Of Global Disaster Law And Policy, Eric A. Feldman, Chelsea Fish

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This chapter uses the analytical framework of transnational legal ordering (TLO) developed by Halliday and Shaffer and applies it to the area of law and disasters. In contrast to the increasingly transnational legal nature of social ordering highlighted by Halliday and Shaffer, it argues that the emergence of transnational regulatory networks and cross-border principles or policies in the area of disaster management has been uneven and incomplete. Although there are many factors that help to explain why the law/disasters area has resisted the trend toward “transnationalization,” two stand out. One is the relative dearth of national laws and policies governing …

Framing For A New Transnational Legal Order: The Case Of Human Trafficking, Paulette Lloyd, Beth A. Simmons

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How does transnational legal order emerge, develop and solidify? This chapter focuses on how and why actors come to define an issue as one requiring transnational legal intervention of a specific kind. Specifically, we focus on how and why states have increasingly constructed and acceded to international legal norms relating to human trafficking. Empirically, human trafficking has been on the international and transnational agenda for nearly a century. However, relatively recently – and fairly swiftly in the 2000s – governments have committed themselves to criminalize human trafficking in international as well as regional and domestic law. Our paper tries to …

Politics By Number: Indicators As Social Pressure In International Relations, Judith Kelley, Beth A. Simmons

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The ability to monitor state behavior has become a critical tool of international governance. Systematic monitoring allows for the creation of numerical indicators that can be used to rank, compare and essentially censure states. This article argues that the ability to disseminate such numerical indicators widely and instantly constitutes an exercise of social power, with the potential to change important policy outputs. It explores this argument in the context of the United States’ efforts to combat trafficking in persons and find evidence that monitoring has important effects: countries are more likely to criminalize human trafficking when they are included in …

Academic Extremism Threatens Democratic Values (Commentary), Kenneth Lasson

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Veritas vos liberabit, chanted the scholastics of yesteryear — "the truth will set you free." It's hard to see how that mantra could be echoed by latter-day counterparts in the academy. Consider the recent resolution by the American Studies Association that advocated an academic boycott of Israel. Its argument — that Israeli universities are complicit in state policies violating Palestinians' human rights — belies the truth: Israel has long been the most diverse, inclusive and tolerant of any Middle Eastern country.

Could This Train Make It Through: The Law And Strategy Of The Gold Train Case, Charles Tiefer, Jonathan W. Cuneo, Annie Reiner

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In 1944-45, the Nazis seized personal belongings of the Hungarian Jewish population and dispatched some of the most valuable of them on a train. The United States Army took control of this "Gold Train" and gave reassurances that it would keep the valuables safe. However, the items were plundered by individual soldiers, including officers, and diverted to various uses. After decades of dormancy, a Presidential Commission exposed the facts, but the government still did not right the wrong — until there was litigation.

The "Gold Train" case (Rosner v. United States) represents a measure of justice for the victimized community …

Book Review (Reviewing Leonard Orland's A Final Accounting), Adeen Postar

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Leonard Orland is the Oliver Ellsworth Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut. He has written a fine, if a bit unwieldy, book that traces the sad history of money and other assets deposited in supposedly sacrosanct Swiss banks by European Jews during the Nazi era to its long overdue resolution by the American justice system. The book provides background and perspective on how and why the $12.1 billion in pre-war dollars (about $250 trillion today) of financial assets of Holocaust victims disappeared into thin air in the years following World War II. These assets were given over to …

Quick - Somebody Call Amnesty International! Intel Says Eu Antitrust Fine Violated Human Rights, Robert H. Lande

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This articles discusses Intel's claim that the EU's fine against it for a competition law violation was so large that its human rights' were violated.

Bloodstains On A "Code Of Honor": The Murderous Marginalization Of Women In The Islamic World, Kenneth Lasson

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In the real world of the Twenty-first Century, deep biases against women are prevalent in much of Muslim society. Although there is no explicit approval of honor killing in Islamic law (Sharia), its culture remains fundamentally patriarchal. As unfathomable as it is to Western minds, "honor killing" is a facet of traditional patriarchy, and its condonation can be traced largely to ancient tribal practices. Justifications for it can be found in the codes of Hammurabi and in the family law of the Roman Empire. Unfortunately, honor killings in the Twenty-first Century are not isolated incidents, nor can they be regarded …

Defending Truth: Legal And Psychological Aspects Of Holocaust Denial, Kenneth Lasson

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From the still-burning embers of the Holocaust we have come once again to learn the terrible truth, that the power of Evil still lurks among the nations of the world, and cannot be underestimated. Nor can the effect of the spoken and written word, which in modern times must be taken in tandem with the violence of terrorism. Part I describes the background and nature of Holocaust denial, tracing the Nazis' adoption of a plan for the A "Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" through the post-War Nuremberg Trials to the present day. Part II examines the tension between free …

Comments, Cynthia Dipasquale, Seeking Options For Human Trafficking Victims, Elizabeth Keyes

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No abstract provided.

Casa Of Maryland And The Battle Regarding Human Trafficking And Domestic Worker Rights, Elizabeth Keyes

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At the November 2006 symposium presented by the University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class, the panelists discussed various issues regarding human trafficking. One entity at the forefront of the fight against human trafficking is CASA of Maryland. This article contains remarks originally made by the author that focused the topic of human trafficking on one particular group of workers: domestic workers. That particular group provides an interesting study because of the many race and gender issues that are wrapped up in the treatment of domestic workers under the law.

Rehabilitation Or Revenge: Prosecuting Child Soldiers For Human Rights Violations, Nienke Grossman

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International law provides no explicit guidelines for whether or at what age child soldiers should be prosecuted for grave violations of international humanitarian and human rights law such as genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. This paper argues that the hundreds of thousands of children under age eighteen participating in armed conflicts around the globe should be treated primarily as victims, not perpetrators, of human rights violations and that international law may support this conclusion. In the case of children, the world community should choose rehabilitation and reintegration over criminal prosecution because of children's unique psychological and moral development, …

Scholarly And Scientific Boycotts Of Israel: Abusing The Academic Enterprise, Kenneth Lasson

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Veritas vos liberabit, chanted the scholastics of yesteryear. The truth will set you free, echo their latter-day counterparts in the academy.

Universities like themselves to be perceived as places of culture in a chaotic world, protectors of reasoned discourse, peaceful havens for learned professors roaming orderly quadrangles and pondering higher thoughts-a community of scholars seeking knowledge in sylvan tranquility.

The real world of higher education, of course, is not quite so wonderful.

Instead of a feast for unfettered intellectual curiosity, much of the modern academy is dominated by curricular deconstructionists who disdain western civilization, people who call themselves multiculturalists but, …

Rettungsfolter (“Rescue Torture”): Report On The Gäfgen V. Germany Case Pending Before The European Court On Human Rights, James Maxeiner

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This comment reports on a case pending before the European Court of Human rights which raises the question whether torture can ever be supported to save human life.

Incitement In The Mosques: Testing The Limits Of Free Speech And Religious Liberty, Kenneth Lasson

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In times of terror and tension, civil liberties are at their greatest peril. Nowadays, no individual rights are more in jeopardy than the freedoms of speech and religion. This is true particularly for followers of Islam, whose leaders have become increasingly radical in both their preaching and practice. "Kill the Jews!" and "Kill the Americans!" are chants heard regularly in many Middle Eastern mosques, as frightful echoes of the fatwa are issued by today's quintessential terrorist, Osama bin Laden. The incitement continues unabated to this day. In April of 2004, for example, a Muslim preacher at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in …

Is It Too Late For Title Vi Enforcement?: Seeking Redemption Of The Unequal Long Term Care System In The United States Through International Means, Ruqaiijah Yearby

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Legal and medical experts have noted continued racism in the health care system that prevents the equal distribution of quality care. Initially most racism was intentional and expressed through de jure segregation, as evidenced by federal funding of the construction of racial segregated health care facilities. Now most racism, expressed through de facto segregation, is subtly incorporated into the daily practices of institutions causing an adverse disparate impact on African-Americans. This institutional racism establishes separate and independent barriers through the neutral denial of opportunities and equal rights to individuals and groups that results from the normal operations of the institutions …

Expansion And Restriction: Competing Pressures On United Kingdom Asylum Policy, Elizabeth Keyes

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Analysis of asylum policy in the United Kingdom thus requires examination of the complex interaction between domestic and international pressures, between legislative and judicial action, and between expansionism and restrictionism. In Part I, this paper considers the history of asylum in the UK through the 1990s, looking at the changes that occurred over the 20th century, and the international legal obligations at the core of the UK's asylum policy. The paper specifically addresses Britain's new commitments to European Union asylum policies, and the ways in which Britain's overall relationship with the EU affects Britain's domestic asylum policy. In Part II, …

Accountability In The Aftermath Of Rwanda's Genocide, Jason Strain, Elizabeth Keyes

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Over the span of 100 days in 1994, almost one million Rwandans died in a genocide that left Rwandan society traumatized and its institutions in disarray. The genocide implicated not only the actual instigators and killers, who came from all levels of Rwandan society, but also the culture of impunity that had thrived in Rwanda for decades. This culture of impunity and inaction in the face of atrocities eerily mirrored the international community's failure to intervene to prevent or respond to the genocide. The genocide provoked a process of reflection within Rwanda and the broader international community about how the …

The Thirteenth Amendment And Slavery In The Global Economy, Tobias Barrington Wolff

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The globalization of industry has been accompanied by a globalization of labor exploitation. With increasing frequency, U.S.-based multinational corporations are carrying on their foreign operations through the deliberate exploitation of involuntary or slave labor. This development in the foreign labor practices of U.S. entities heralds a new era of challenge and transformation for the Thirteenth Amendment and its prohibition on the existence of slavery or involuntary servitude. It has become necessary to reexamine the range of activities in American industry - and American participation in global industry - that the amendment reaches. I begin that reexamination here. In this article, …

Book Review: Limits Of Law, Prerogatives Of Power: Interventionism After Kosovo, By Michael J. Glennon, Charles Tiefer

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The author reviews Michael Glennon's Limits of Law, Prerogatives of Power: Interventionism After Kosovo, discussing Glennon's approach to NATO's 1999 bombing to stop the Milosevic regime's ethnic cleansing of Kosovo in the face of the UN Charter's absolute ban on states using force except in self-defense. Finding Glennon's study at once provocative and readable, the author emphasizes the strength of Glennon's core point - the inability for the Kosovo campaign to be reconciled with the UN charter - but points to the dangers of using one instance (Kosovo) to prove bad law.

Globalization And The Design Of International Institutions, Cary Coglianese

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In an increasingly globalized world, international rules and organizations have grown ever more crucial to the resolution of major economic and social concerns. How can leaders design international institutions that will effectively solve global regulatory problems? This paper confronts this question by presenting three major types of global problems, distinguishing six main categories of institutional forms that can be used to address these problems, and showing how the effectiveness of international institutions depends on achieving “form-problem” fit. Complicating that fit will be the tendency of nation states to prefer institutional forms that do little to constrain their sovereignty. Yet the …

Our First Televised Genocide, Kenneth Lasson

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It is absolutely appalling that we have come so casually to observe the carnage, so passively to view the starvation over breakfast papers or dinnertime newscasts, so helplessly to watch these totally bereft human beings trudging barefoot over treacherous terrain toward the middle of nowhere.

There are other questions as well, of course, not as easily answered. Where are all their voices now, those demonstrators who so vociferously opposed war, ostensibly out of an overweening reverence for life? Is the latter-day holocaust being systematically perpetrated in northern Iraq any less horrifying than a direct hit on a camouflaged bomb shelter …