Law Commons^™

Collective Data Rights And Their Possible Abuse, Asaf Lubin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Human Rights In The New Era? Tools To Increase Participation Of People With Disabilities In The Workplace: An Analysis Of Laws In Hungary And The United States, Renata Bedo

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

People with disabilities face obstacles related to negative attitudes or opinions, deeply rooted stigma, and stereotypes in the workplace and everyday life, which leads to their social exclusion. The cornerstone of new developments in disability studies, the human rights model of disability, recognizes this social problem and aims to provide a catalog of the human rights of people with disabilities. It introduces the concept of human dignity to disability law, the human rights based approach, and advances the concept of inclusive equality. The question of this thesis is whether the human rights model of disability can give appropriate guidance on …

Transformative Events In The Lgbtq Rights Movement, Ellen A. Andersen

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court case holding that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, was widely hailed in the media as a turning point for the LGBTQ rights movement. In this article, I contemplate the meaning of turning points. Social movement scholars have shown that specific events can, on rare occasion, alter the subsequent trajectory of a social movement. Such events have been termed ‘transformative events.’ I ask whether judicial decisions have the capacity to be transformative events and, if so, under what circumstances. I begin by …

Constructing Citizenship Through War In The Human Rights Era, Timothy W. Waters

Articles by Maurer Faculty

War's historical relationship to the creation of territorial nation-states is well known, but what empirical and normative role does war play in creating the citizen in a modern democracy? Although contemporary theories of citizenship and human rights do not readily acknowledge a legitimate, generative function for war - as evidenced by restrictions on aggression, annexation of occupied territory, expulsions, denationalization, or derogation of fundamental rights - an empirical assessment of state practice, including the interpretation of international legal obligations, suggests that war plays a powerfully transformative role in the construction of citizenship, and that international law and norms implicitly accept …

Transnational Constitution-Making: The Contribution Of The Venice Commission On Law And Democracy, Paul Craig

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Commission for Democracy through Law, better known as the Venice Commission. While part of the Council of Europe, the Venice Commission is much less understood than the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), notwithstanding the existing literature. This chapter therefore seeks to explicate and evaluate. It begins by explicating the organizational foundations of the Venice Commission, followed by analysis of its remit and role. The focus then shifts to triggering and working methodology.

The remainder of the article is concerned with evaluation of the Commission’s role in relation to constitution-making as broadly conceived, the analysis being situated within the literature …

Citizens Of Sinking Islands: Early Victims Of Climate Change, Erin Halstead

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This Note discusses the effects of climate change that threaten Small Island Developing States (SIDS). Specifically, with increasing global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting in rising sea levels and higher frequency of extreme weather events, many citizens of SIDS are forced abandon their homelands, which are no longer livable. Although SIDS are some of the smallest contributors to GHG emissions, and therefore contribute the least to climate change, SIDS are some of the countries most heavily affected by the negative effects of climate change. The global community has an obligation to accommodate these displaced people, partially due to the significant …

Transformations In Statehood, The Investor- State Regime, And The New Constitutionalism, A. Claire Cutler

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This paper examines the changing boundaries of statehood resulting from transformations in the nature and operation of public and private authority over local and global politico-legal orders. Transformations in the political purposes of states are being driven by powerful elites who advance a new form of constitutional governance. New constitutionalism, as evidenced by the investor-state regime, subordinates the interests, purposes, and rights of national citizens to those of foreign, transnational politico-legal, and economic elites. This regime is a highly privatized order that is expanding in influence, both in terms of the commercial activities under its remit, and in terms of …

Some Newly Emergent Geographies Of Injustice: Boundaries And Borders In International Law, Upendra V. Baxi

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This conversation examines the relationship between the boundaries and borders in international law and the production of geographies of injustice through the lens of the colonial epistemologies, especially of private international law in the face of mass social disasters like the archetypal Bhopal catastrophe. I also address the languages and logics of coloniality and postcoloniality, as states of consciousness and social organization, under the complex and contradictory unity of neoliberalism.

Statehood, Power, And The New Face Of Consent, Sheldon Leader

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Individuals and groups are often subjected to power, both public and private, by eliciting their consent. Debate usually focuses on whether or not that consent is freely given or is vitiated by imbalances of strength between the bargaining parties. This essay focuses on a different issue, one that is largely passed over in legal and moral analyses: how far does and should consent bind one to accepting in advance changes in the future? There are signs of a fundamental shift in answering this question-a shift that particularly concerns the control of power in the economy. Industrial democracies may be abandoning …

Human Rights And Global Public Goods: The Sound Of One Hand Clapping?, Neil Walker

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Each operating in a presumptively general or universal register, 'public goods" and "human rights" are among the most popular and visible contemporary carriers of ideas of global law and governance and are therefore prime sources for any broader project of global justice. Their combination, moreover, holds out the prospect of a fertile engagement between the two core concerns of modern political morality our collective requirements and potential (public goods) and our individual dignity and well-being (human rights). Yet for all their ambition, public goods and human rights each face the formidable challenge of placing considerations of political authority and political …

Corporations And The Limits Of State-Based Models For Protecting Fundamental Rights In International Law, David Bilchitz

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

At the heart of international law lies a central tension. On the one hand, the fundamental rights recognized in international treaties protect the fundamental interests of individuals, obligating all actors who can affect these rights. One the other hand, international law has often been conceived of as a system in which the only legitimate actors are states. In turn, only states can be bound by the fundamental rights obligations in international treaties. To address this tension, two models have been proposed. The first is an "Indirect duty" approach, whereby the state remains the primary duty-bearer and must itself "create" the …

One Pillar: Legal Authority And A Social License To Operate In A Global Context, Hans Lindahl

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The claim that businesses have a social license to operate acquires concrete form in the second pillar of the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) in the fundamental distinction between "compliance with all applicable laws" and "respect for human rights." The aim of this paper is to critically examine the presuppositions that undergird this distinction and to explain how and why moving beyond state-centered thinking about law, in response to violations of human rights by globally operating businesses, requires acknowledging that there is one pillar that embraces states and businesses: the legal obligation to comply with international …

To Whom It May Concern: International Human Rights Law And Global Public Goods, Daniel Augenstein

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Public goods and human rights are sometimes treated as intimately related, if not interchangeable, strategies to address matters of common global concern. The aim of the present contribution is to disentangle the two notions to shed some critical light on their respective potential to attend to contemporary problems of globalization. I distinguish the standard economic approach to public goods as a supposedly value-neutral technique to coordinate economic activity between states and markets from a political conception of human rights law that empowers individuals to partake in the definition of the public good. On this basis, I contend that framing global …

Le Concept Dé Dignité Le Droit Américain, Elisabeth Zoller

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Unpopular Constitutionalism, Mila Versteeg

Indiana Law Journal

Constitutions are commonly thought to express nations’ highest values. They are often proclaimed in the name of “We the People” and are regarded—by scholars and the general public alike—as an expression of the people’s views and values. This Article shows empirically that this widely held image of constitutions does not correspond with the reality of constitution making around the world. The Article contrasts the constitutional-rights choices of ninety countries between 1981 and 2010 with data from nearly one-half million survey responses on cultural, religious, and social values conducted over the same period. It finds, surprisingly, that in this period, the …

What Is In A Percentage?: Calculation As The Poetic Translation Of Human Rights, Andrea Ballestero

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Increasingly, the efficacy of human rights, international norms, and commercial standards is deposited in numbers as measures of social and financial value. Taking the form of indicators, goals, and targets, these numbers are active participants in the everyday practices through which the law is constituted around the world. This paper examines the normative ability of percentages as numeric devices that transform measures of value across legal domains. The paper draws on two examples: a) the generation of indicators by NGOs promoting the Human Right to Water, and b) the technical work of regulators attempting to regulate water prices to follow …

Making The World In Atlanta's Image: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Morris Abram, And The Legislative History Of The United Nations Race Convention, H. Timothy Lovelace

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Fundamental Rights, Private Law, And Societal Constitution: On The Logic Of The So-Called Horizontal Effect, Florian Roedl

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The paper raises the issue of a normative justification of the horizontal effect of fundamental rights in private law. Justification in this sense means that the reasons given are neither functional nor instrumental, but that the reasons are supposed to be subject to the intrinsic logic of private law. In traditional doctrine, the reason usually given to confer horizontal effect to fundamental rights is a deferral to the constitution: The constitutional text decides whether and how fundamental rights apply to private legal relationships. This answer implies that fundamental rights are either logically or normatively alien to private law, that they …

Transnational Corporations' Outward Expression Of Inward Self-Constitution: The Enforcement Of Human Rights By Apple, Inc., Larry Cata Backer

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Societal constitutionalism presents us with alternatives to state-centered constitutional theory. But this alternative does not so much displace as extend conventional constitutional theory as a set of static premises that structure the organization of legitimate governance units. Constitutional theory, in either its conventional or societal forms, engages in both a descriptive and a normative project-the former looking to the incarnation of an abstraction and the later to the development of a set of presumptions and principles through which this incarnation can be judged. Constitutional theory is conventionally applied to states-that is, to those manifestations of organized power constituted by a …

Regulating The Corporate Tap: Applying Global Administrative Law Principles To Achieve The Human Right To Water, Kristin L. Retherford

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Lochner Disembedded: The Anxieties Of Law In A Global Context, Peer Zumbansen

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This paper explores, in an inevitably cursory manner, some of the main challenges facing a legal theory of transnational governance today. In part building on and responding to William Twining's identification of key problems of law in a global context (2009; 2012), the following paper adopts a two-fold approach. One element is to suggest a conceptual architecture, which captures law in its transformational state through a focus on actors, norms, and processes. Second, the paper proposes case

studies as a central methodological device to explore the nature, scope, and function of governance-both legal and nonlegal-in a global context. Through the …

In The Breach: Citizenship And Its Approximations, Susan C.B. Coutin

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

To analyze the forms of membership that are created in the gap between formal citizenship and social belonging, this paper takes up three examples of citizenship in the breach: (1) the 1980-1992 Salvadoran civil war, in which human rights abuses perpetrated in El Salvador effectively constituted Salvadoran migrants as stateless persons, though technically they held Salvadoran citizenship; (2) informal U.S. membership claims put forward by longtime U.S. residents who were deported to El Salvador; and (3) the legal or documentary problems that emerge when legal permanent residents, some of whom immigrated to the United States from El Salvador during the …

Plugging The Democracy Drain In The Struggle For Universal Access To Safe Drinking Water, Tara Paul

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Privatization of water delivery services has become a global trend as states seek ways to shift both political and economic costs to private actors. The advantage of privatization is that it relieves governments of the daunting expense of repairing and expanding water infrastructure in order to improve quality and reach marginalized communities. But water privatization has also been deeply criticized for corrupt practices, increasing prices to the poor, undermining human rights objectives, and dodging accountability. This note aims to find middle ground, acknowledging that privatization is an important tool to increase freshwater access, but that treating water as a human …

State Court International Human Rights Litigation: A Concerning Trend?, Austen L. Parrish

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The brief symposium contribution explores human rights litigation in U.S. state courts under state law. Faced with higher hurdles to successfully asserting Alien Tort Statute claims in U.S. courts and reluctant to re-embrace more traditional international lawmaking, human rights advocates have begun to experiment with alternative strategies for redressing human rights violations. One strategy involves state court litigation. Some commentators believe that state courts may prove more amenable to enforcing and advancing human rights. This symposium contribution explores the parallels between the recent willingness to consider state court litigation to remedy human rights violations occurring abroad and other state court …

Patents Fettering Reproductive Rights, Scott A. Allen

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Changing Face Of Transnational Business Governance: Private Corporate Law Liability And Accountability Of Transnational Groups In A Post-Financial Crisis World, Peter Muchlinski

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This article seeks to critically assess the recently dominant financialized model of corporate law and governance and its contribution to the creation of the "asocial corporation" geared only to the enhancement of shareholder value. This article places corporate law in a wider context of national and international legal developments that, together, create a framework for the financialization of transnational corporate activity. This article shows that a new approach to transnational corporate governance is emerging from a number of sources. These predate the crisis but have been given impetus by it. In particular, three important phenomena are examined: the rise of …

To The Orphaned, Dispossessed, And Illegitimate Children: Human Rights Beyond Republican And Liberal Traditions, Siba N. Grovogui

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

After the Helsinki Accords, the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire, and the collapse of states in Africa and elsewhere, many in the West have come to envisage the enforcement of human rights as a practical matter. Human rights are thus incorporated in normative regimes under the rubrics of either the rule of law or the responsibility to protect to be held against the purveyors of violence. I do not discount the normative underpinnings of the related stands taken today by states and transnational and national civil society organizations. I wish to insist on the futility of envisaging …

State Power, Religion, And Women's Rights: A Comparative Analysis Of Family Law, Mala Htun, S. Laurel Weldon

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Examining cross-national variation in family law, we find that many countries have reformed to promote sex equality. Yet a significant group retains older laws that discriminate against women. These variations reflect the diverse institutional legacies of these societies, conforming closely-but not entirely-to inherited legal traditions: civil law, common law, and postsocialist countries are the most egalitarian, while countries applying religious law are the least. Yet change is possible, even in unlikely contexts. Political conjunctures that disarm religious, nationalist, and fundamentalist opponents can open windows of opportunity for liberalizing reform.

Human Rights and Legal Systems Across the Global South, Symposium, Indiana …

The Maria Da Penha Case And The Inter-American Commission On Human Rights: Contributions To The Debate On Domestic Violence Against Women In Brazil, Paula Spieler

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This article aims to demonstrate the contributions of the Maria da Penha case and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) Report of 2001 to the debate on domestic violence against women in Brazil, with special emphasis to the adoption of the Maria da Penha Law. The IACHR was the first international human rights organ to bring to light the problem. Beside contributing to internal changes, this case has great relevance as it was the first one of domestic violence analyzed by the Inter-American Commission. It revealed the systematic pattern of violence against women in the country.

Human Rights and …

"Cultural Fatigue": The State And Minority Rights In Botswana, Jacqueline Solway

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The circulation and intersection of supranational rights, discourses, and practices with local struggles have contributed to victories, disappointments, and in many instances, new articulations and understandings of rights for local people. In Botswana, the everincreasing interaction of minority groups with international institutions, laws and conventions, nongovernmental groups (NGOs), and the Botswana courts has created a dialectic that continues to reshape vernacular rights discourses. The state has also been a party in this evolving dialectic and has found new means of intervening in the process. The Botswana state prides itself on its liberal practices and has received international acclaim as a …