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Law and Society

Seattle University School of Law

Faculty Articles

2015

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Law

World Poverty And Food Insecurity, Carmen Gonzalez Jan 2015

World Poverty And Food Insecurity, Carmen Gonzalez

Faculty Articles

Our present global economic order produces a stable pattern of widespread malnutrition and starvation among the poor, with some eighteen million persons dying each year from poverty related causes, and there are likely to be feasible alternative regimes that /ill not produce similarly severe deprivations. If this is so, the victims of avoidable deprivations are not merely poor and starving, but impoverished and starved through an institutional order coercively imposed upon them. There is an injustice to this economic order, which it would be wrong for its more affluent participants to perpetuate.


A Homeless Bill Of Rights (Revolution), Sara Rankin Jan 2015

A Homeless Bill Of Rights (Revolution), Sara Rankin

Faculty Articles

This article examines an emerging movement so far unexplored by legal scholarship: the proposal and, in some states, the enactment of a Homeless Bill of Rights. This article presents these new laws as a lens to re-examine storied debates over positive and social welfare rights. Homeless bills of rights also present a compelling opportunity to re-examine rights-based theories in the context of social movement scholarship. Specifically, could these laws be understood as part of a new “rights revolution”? What conditions might influence the impact of these new laws on the individual rights of the homeless or the housed? On American …


Tracermarks: A Proposed Information Intervention, Margaret Chon Jan 2015

Tracermarks: A Proposed Information Intervention, Margaret Chon

Faculty Articles

We live in a world of information. But paradoxically, we simultaneously suffer from a scarcity of “smart” information: information that is traceable and therefore reliable, trust-worthy, and ultimately verifiable. Combining the insights of global governance theory with behavioral economics, this Article approaches this challenge from a knowledge governance framework, sets forth various reasons for this unnecessary deficit and proposes an intervention to address it — tracermarks. Envisioned as a hybrid of trademarks and certification marks, tracermarks would encourage various stakeholders to disclose, disseminate and ultimately make decisions about previously hidden qualities of specific goods and services throughout global value networks. …


Incarcerated Child Birth And “Broader Birth Control”: Autonomy, Regulation, And The State, Deborah Ahrens Jan 2015

Incarcerated Child Birth And “Broader Birth Control”: Autonomy, Regulation, And The State, Deborah Ahrens

Faculty Articles

In recent years, the scholarly literature, the journalistic press, and even pop culture have begun to grapple with the many ways in which prison life works to degrade and dehumanize female prisoners, particularly pregnant women and new mothers. These voices are drawn — quite understandably — to the worst abuses, to practices (such as the shackling of laboring women) that underscore the dichotomy between the brutality of prison life and the allegedly autonomous norms governing pregnancy and parenting in the outside world. This article supplements — and in crucial places challenges — the narrative implicit in those depictions by, first, …


Precarious Existence And Capitalism: A Permanent State Of Exception, Tayyab Mahmud Jan 2015

Precarious Existence And Capitalism: A Permanent State Of Exception, Tayyab Mahmud

Faculty Articles

The contemporary neoliberal era is marked by an exponential expansion of contingent and precarious labor markets. In this context, the construct of precarity emerged to signify labor conditions of permanent insecurity and precariousness. Coming at the heels of the era of Keynesian welfare, precarity is mostly seen as an exception to the normal trajectory of capitalist formations. The basic argument of this paper is that under capitalism, for the working classes precarious existence is the norm rather than the exception. Precarity is the outcome not only of insecurities of labor markets but also of capital’s capture and colonization of life …