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Articles 1 - 17 of 17
Full-Text Articles in Law
Interpretations Of Intent: Sovereignty, The Second Amendment, And Us Gun Culture, Lola I. Brown
Interpretations Of Intent: Sovereignty, The Second Amendment, And Us Gun Culture, Lola I. Brown
Political Science Honors Projects
In this paper, I engage foundational theorists such as Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke to examine the philosophies of sovereignty that underpin the US Constitution and the creation of the Second Amendment. I find that the US Founders' reaction to these foundational theories of sovereignty allowed for a breakdown in the system of sovereignty in the country, and made way for the implementation of the Rule of Law. The Rule of Law, in turn, created the conditions of possibility for the psyche of radical individualism that now permeates the US. This radical individualism allowed for the reinterpretation of …
Notoriously Ruthless: The Idolization Of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Lucille Moran
Notoriously Ruthless: The Idolization Of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Lucille Moran
Political Science Honors Projects
It is now a fixture of mainstream commentary in the United States that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become a popular idol on the political left. Yet, while Justice Ginsburg’s image and story has reached an unprecedented level of valorization and even commercialization, scholars have yet to give sustained attention to the phenomenon and to contextualize it: why has this idolization emerged within this context, and what is its impact? This paper situates her portrayal in the cultural imagination as the product of two political forces, namely partisanship and identity politics. Considering parallel scholarly discourses of reputation, celebrity, …
Female Autonomy: An Analysis Of Privacy And Equality Doctrine For Reproductive Rights, Elizabeth Levi
Female Autonomy: An Analysis Of Privacy And Equality Doctrine For Reproductive Rights, Elizabeth Levi
Political Science Honors Projects
What is the constitutional basis for women’s equality? Recently, scholars have suggested that as the right to privacy has floundered against the political undoing of women's access to abortion, equal protection arguments have grown stronger. This thesis investigates the feminist utility and limits of the equality and privacy arguments. Taking liberal feminism and feminist legal theory as analytical lenses, I offer interpretations of gender discrimination, reproductive rights, and marriage equality case law. By this framework, I argue that while an equality argument is less inherently oppressive towards women than the privacy doctrine, equality doctrine has been constructed thus far to …
Constructed Borders And Conditional Belonging: Refugee Narratives In Literature And Law, Rachel C. Wilson
Constructed Borders And Conditional Belonging: Refugee Narratives In Literature And Law, Rachel C. Wilson
English Honors Projects
Merging literary criticism and political theory, this project explores the representations of refugees in contemporary fiction and human rights law. Through a close reading of reports and press releases published by human rights organizations, I trace how NGOs’ moral and expert authority creates a narrow emphasis on refugees’ fear and victimhood. As novels by Dave Eggers, Susan Choi, Caryl Phillips, and Chris Cleave show, literature is not bound by the same constraints. These novels reveal the internal borders that continue to compromise refugees’ belonging after resettlement. Employing a metanarrative that considers the uses and limits of its own project, literature …
Defining Biometrics: Toward A Transnational Ethic Of Personal Information, Nicola Morrow
Defining Biometrics: Toward A Transnational Ethic Of Personal Information, Nicola Morrow
International Studies Honors Projects
Innovations in biotechnology, computer science, and engineering throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries dramatically expanded possible modes of data-based surveillance and personal identification. More specifically, new technologies facilitated enormous growth in the biometrics sector. The response to the explosion of biometric technologies was two-fold. While intelligence agencies, militaries, and multinational corporations embraced new opportunities to fortify and expand security measures, many individuals objected to what they perceived as serious threats to privacy and bodily autonomy. These reactions spurred both further technological innovation, and a simultaneous proliferation of hastily drafted policies, laws, and regulations governing the collection, …
Finding Autonomy: The Impact Of Judicial Discretion For Disabled Individuals In The American Guardianship System, Katherine Davis
Finding Autonomy: The Impact Of Judicial Discretion For Disabled Individuals In The American Guardianship System, Katherine Davis
Political Science Honors Projects
This study examines the conflict between guardianship and the American disability rights movement, specifically the shift from a medical to a capability model of disability. Legal guardianship presents judges with a dilemma of favoring individual autonomy or societal protection. This dichotomy manifests in the construction of state statutes where legislators can influence judicial discretion and sway decisions. Through analysis of state statutes, case law, and interviews with judges in Connecticut and Minnesota, this study found that higher levels of discretion do not necessarily translate to increased protection of individual autonomy or the use of alternatives to guardianship. The research points …
Courtroom To Classroom: Judicial Policymaking And Affirmative Action, Dylan Britton Saul
Courtroom To Classroom: Judicial Policymaking And Affirmative Action, Dylan Britton Saul
Political Science Honors Projects
The judicial branch, by exercising judicial review, can replace public policies with ones of their own creation. To test the hypothesis that judicial policymaking is desirable only when courts possess high capacity and necessity, I propose an original model incorporating six variables: generalism, bi-polarity, minimalism, legitimization, structural impediments, and public support. Applying the model to a comparative case study of court-sanctioned affirmative action policies in higher education and K-12 public schools, I find that a lack of structural impediments and bi-polarity limits the desirability of judicial race-based remedies in education. Courts must restrain themselves when engaging in such policymaking.
Lawyered Up: Local Communities, Courts, And Urban Renewal, Madeline Spolin
Lawyered Up: Local Communities, Courts, And Urban Renewal, Madeline Spolin
Sociology Honors Projects
What is the role of the judicial system in solving issues of urban renewal? I propose that communities use courts as a redress to become part of the decision making process on urban renewal issues, because courts provide procedural issues that are easily open to challenge in federal statute. I analyze public statements made throughout the construction of the Green Line in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, a federally funded urban renewal project. In spite of built in public consultation processes, changes to transit design do not occur when concerns are raised at public consultation meetings; instead, they come from …
The Mary Poppins Problem: Enforcing Protective Legislation For Domestic Workers In America, Anna Pickrell
The Mary Poppins Problem: Enforcing Protective Legislation For Domestic Workers In America, Anna Pickrell
Sociology Honors Projects
State-level legislation to advance employment rights for domestic workers is on the rise in the United States, but implementation is largely ineffective due to a lack of representation on behalf of employees. This study analyzes the roles of two specific types of organizations — public policy networks pushing legislation for domestic workers and employment agencies placing workers into jobs — to better understand how enforcement of existing laws in this field can be improved through the services that protective organizations provide. Can domestic workers rely on these groups to secure their rights when individual employers may not, or do they …
The Kolla Of Argentina: Neoliberal Trends And The Promise Of Law In The Process Of Reframing, Claiming And Maintaining Land Rights, Courtney C. Nussbaumer
The Kolla Of Argentina: Neoliberal Trends And The Promise Of Law In The Process Of Reframing, Claiming And Maintaining Land Rights, Courtney C. Nussbaumer
The Macalester Review
Indigenous groups around the world have faced countless hardships—the Kolla of northwestern Argentina are no exception. While there is no doubt that the Kolla are a minority group both oppressed and marginalized, they have only recently begun to reconceptualize themselves as indigenous. Kolla identity struggles coupled with larger Latin American trends explained below make the Kolla an excellent case study to conceptualize the larger struggle between neoliberal governments and indigenous employment of international legal norms. Processes of legal globalization have led to the increasing codification of the collective rights of indigenous peoples in Latin America. This can be seen in …
The Kolla Of Argentina: Neoliberal Trends And The Promise Of Law In The Process Of Reframing, Claiming And Maintaining Land Rights, Courtney C. Nussbaumer
The Kolla Of Argentina: Neoliberal Trends And The Promise Of Law In The Process Of Reframing, Claiming And Maintaining Land Rights, Courtney C. Nussbaumer
The Macalester Review
Indigenous groups around the world have faced countless hardships—the Kolla of northwestern Argentina are no exception. While there is no doubt that the Kolla are a minority group both oppressed and marginalized, they have only recently begun to reconceptualize themselves as indigenous. Kolla identity struggles coupled with larger Latin American trends explained below make the Kolla an excellent case study to conceptualize the larger struggle between neoliberal governments and indigenous employment of international legal norms. Processes of legal globalization have led to the increasing codification of the collective rights of indigenous peoples in Latin America. This can be seen in …
Deciphering A Duality: Understanding Conflicting Standards In Sex & Violence Censorship In U.S. Obscenity Law, Rushabh P. Bhakta
Deciphering A Duality: Understanding Conflicting Standards In Sex & Violence Censorship In U.S. Obscenity Law, Rushabh P. Bhakta
Political Science Honors Projects
This research examines the division in US obscenity law that enables strict sex censorship while overlooking violence. By investigating the social and legal development of obscenity in US culture, I argue that the contemporary duality in obscenity censorship standards arose from a family of forces consisting of faith, economy, and identity in early American history. While sexuality ingrained itself in American culture as a commodity in need of regulation, violence was decentralized from the state and proliferated. This phenomenon led to a prioritization of suppressing sexual speech over violent speech. This paper traces the emergence this duality and its source.
Peace Through Justice?: Evaluating The International Criminal Court, Katherine Ann Snitzer
Peace Through Justice?: Evaluating The International Criminal Court, Katherine Ann Snitzer
International Studies Honors Projects
This thesis looks at the recently created International Criminal Court (ICC) and its early cases in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan. The central questions are: how does the Court impact peace building in the war-torn countries whose cases it handles? And is there a tension between peace and justice in these cases? The case studies demonstrate that while rhetoric linking peace and justice dominates the Court, the ICC is ill equipped to address the complex interaction of the two in specific countries. The Court’s narrow mandate and powers mean that practical and political concerns dominate its decision-making …
The Mother-Love Myth: The Effect Of The Provider-Nurturer Dichotomy In Custody Cases, Kalie Caetano
The Mother-Love Myth: The Effect Of The Provider-Nurturer Dichotomy In Custody Cases, Kalie Caetano
The Macalester Review
This paper is a discursive analysis that evaluates the effect of gender stereotypes relating to parenting roles and how they have influenced custody cases. Specifically it looks at the historically gendered distinction between the provider (typically the father) and the nurturer (typically the mother) and speculates as to how those identities may have initially formed in US society, what changes they have undergone and how these stereotypes still affect family court outcomes in cases of divorce. Particular focus is given to an article appearing in Working Mother magazine entitled “Custody Lost,” detailing a new trend in custody cases, which allegedly …
Carving Out A Niche For Humanitarianism Within The Responsibility To Protect, Oana D. Alexan
Carving Out A Niche For Humanitarianism Within The Responsibility To Protect, Oana D. Alexan
The Macalester Review
Humanitarian action aims to alleviate the humanitarian symptoms of crises, yet humanitarian ideals have been stretched in ways relief workers never expected. For one, the right of humanitarian intervention rests on the premise that war, whose nature provides the rationale for killing, may be labeled a humanitarian act if waged for humanitarian ends. Humanitarian relief organizations oppose the misleading and manipulative labeling of conflicts that contradict the fundamental rationale of humanitarian action—the alleviation of suffering. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the international community engaged in a dialogue that gave birth to the concept of the “Responsibility to Protect.” …
At The Intersection Of Neoliberal Development, Scarce Resources, And Human Rights: Enforcing The Right To Water In South Africa, Elizabeth A. Larson
At The Intersection Of Neoliberal Development, Scarce Resources, And Human Rights: Enforcing The Right To Water In South Africa, Elizabeth A. Larson
International Studies Honors Projects
The competing ideals of international human rights and global economic neoliberalism come into conflict when developing countries try to enforce socio-economic rights. This paper explores the intersection of economic globalization and the enforcement of 2nd generation human rights. The focus of this exploration is the right to water in South Africa, specifically the recent Constitutional Court case Mazibuko v City of Johannesburg. While a right to water can be constructed at the international level, the right disappears in the face of neoliberal development measures such as those that are instituted by democratic governments in developing nations faced with limited resources.
Think Outside The Cell: Are Binding Detention Standards The Most Effective Strategy To Prevent Abuses Of Detained Illegal Aliens?, Federico D. Burlon
Think Outside The Cell: Are Binding Detention Standards The Most Effective Strategy To Prevent Abuses Of Detained Illegal Aliens?, Federico D. Burlon
Political Science Honors Projects
In the last twenty years the U.S. government has increasingly utilized detention to control illegal immigration. This practice has become controversial because it has caused numerous in-custody abuses and deaths of immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees and even citizens. Immigrant rights advocates have called for the passage of binding detention standards to prevent in-custody abuses. This thesis’s policy analysis reveals, however, that while they may finesse the practice of immigration detention, such binding standards would be ineffective in protecting immigrants’ rights. Instead this policy analysis calls for and explains the feasibility of discontinuing the practice of mass immigrant detention.