Law Commons^™

America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions Of Power And Community, Robert Tsai

Robert L Tsai

The U.S. Constitution opens by proclaiming the sovereignty of all citizens: "We the People." Robert Tsai's gripping history of alternative constitutions invites readers into the circle of those who have rejected this ringing assertion--the defiant groups that refused to accept the Constitution's definition of who "the people" are and how their authority should be exercised. America's Forgotten Constitutions is the story of America as told by dissenters: squatters, Native Americans, abolitionists, socialists, internationalists, and racial nationalists. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Tsai chronicles eight episodes in which discontented citizens took the extraordinary step of drafting a new constitution. He examines …

In Search Of A Forum For The Families Of The Guantanamo Disappeared, Peter Honigsberg

Peter J Honigsberg

The United States government has committed grave human rights violations by disappearing people during the past decade into the detention camps in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And for nearly thirty years, beginning with a 1983 decision from a case arising in Uruguay, there has been a well-developed body of international law establishing that parents, wives and children of the disappeared suffer torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment (CID).

This paper argues that the rights of family members were severely violated when their loved ones were disappeared into Guantanamo. Family members of men disappeared by the United States have legitimate claims …