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Implementing Recommendations From The Universal Periodic Review: A Toolkit For State And Local Human Rights And Human Relations Commissions, Human Rights Institute

Human Rights Institute

The United States’ international leadership in promoting human rights around the world is strengthened by state and local officials’ efforts to employ and advance human rights close to home. Indeed, state and local human rights and human relations commissions can play a pivotal role in help- ing the U.S. meet its own human rights obligations by ensuring fairness, dignity and opportunity for all in their communities.

This Toolkit provides information about a recent review of the United States’ human rights record under the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review (“UPR”), which revealed a number of areas in which the United States …

Using Human Rights Mechanisms Of The United Nations To Advance Economic Justice, Risa E. Kaufman, Joann Kamuf Ward

Human Rights Institute

As a growing number of social justice lawyers employ human rights standards and strategies to advocate for their clients. human rights mechanisms of the United Nations have become a promising way for lawyers to work toward economic justice. These mechanisms are not only an alternative to traditional litigation and administrative advocacy but also unique opportunities for collaboration among U.S. civil society groups and engagement with policymakers. Because they are grounded in international human 1ights norms. human rights mechanisms have the potential to deal with social and economic issues beyond the reach of traditional domestic protections. By strategically using these mechanisms. …

Gender Justice In The Americas: A Transnational Dialogue On Violence, Sexuality, Reproduction, And Human Rights University, Human Rights Clinic, Centro De Derechos Humanos De La Universidad Diego Portales, Center For Reproductive Rights

Human Rights Institute

On February 23-25, 2011, over 100 women's rights, gender, and sexuality advocates and scholars from twenty countries in North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean gathered at the University of Miami in Miami, Florida to attend a groundbreaking convening, Gender Justice in the Americas: A Transnational Dialogue on Violence, Sexuality, Reproduction, and Human Rights. The Convening, hosted by the University of Miami School of Law Human Rights Clinic, University of Diego Portales Human Rights Center, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute, brought together key players in the region to exchange views and …

Serving 99 To 149 Years For Wearing Butt-Huggers And Resisting To Subscribe To Cable Tv: The Presence Of The Law In Chicano Theatre, Maria Patrice Amon

Studio for Law and Culture

In the canon of Chicano theatre, the law holds a prominent role; the relationship between Chicanos and the law is a theme explored widely across Chicano theatre in both comedy and tragedy. This paper discusses how the comedy of Chicano theatre conceals the insidiousness of unchallenged racial stereotypes and acts as a safety valve to release the pressures of an abjected community. Yet, where comedy conceals the structure of abjection, drama critically challenges the status quo Chicano drama is capable of questioning the authority of the dominant hegemony over the cultures it oppresses. Beginning from a framing of the law …

Making Willing Bodies: Manufacturing Consent Among Prisoners And Soldiers, Creating Human Subjects, Patriots, And Everyday Citizens, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In March 1944, doctors at the University of Chicago began infecting volunteer convicts at Stateville Prison with a virulent strand of malaria to test the effectiveness and side-effects of potent anti-malarial drugs. According to Dr. Alf Alving, the principal investigator, malaria "was the number-one medical problem of the war in the Pacific" and "we were losing far more men to malaria than to enemy bullets." This refrain would rehearse one of the most productive ways of speaking about prisoner experimentation. The Stateville prisoners became human once again and regained their citizenship and political voice by sacrificing their bodies to the …

Dignifying Rights: A Comment On Jeremy Waldron’S Dignity, Rights, And Responsibilities, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In Dignity, Rights, and Responsibilities1 Jeremy Waldron offers a characteristically thoughtful and elegant account of rights, or as he calls it, responsibility-rights. As Waldron rightfully acknowledges, rights understood as a form of responsibility are not meant to capture every species of rights, but to provide us with a new analytic resource for better understanding a particular subset of rights that curiously entail a form of responsibility on the part of the rights holder. The link between rights and responsibility, Waldron argues, is built upon a strong foundational commitment to human dignity. The most compelling contribution of Waldron's paper is his …

Public Sex, Same-Sex Marriage, And The Afterlife Of Homophobia, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

The summer of 2011 marked an important turning-point in the geography and politics of sex: public sex, previously a domain dominated by the specter of a hypersexualized gay man, became the province of the irresponsible, foolish, and self-destructive heterosexual man, such as Anthony Weiner. Meanwhile, homosexuals were busy domesticating their sexuality in the private domain of the family. Just as hetero-sex shamefully seeped out into the open, homo-sex disappeared from view into the dignified pickets of private kinship. In this essay I examine the panic that unfolded in connection with Representative Weiner’s tweets as a kind of afterlife of homophobia; …

Minority Practice, Majority's Burden: The Death Penalty Today, James S. Liebman, Peter Clarke

Faculty Scholarship

Although supported in principle by two-thirds of the public and even more of the States, capital punishment in the United States is a minority practice when the actual death-sentencing practices of the nation's 3000-plus counties and their populations are considered This feature of American capital punishment has been present for decades, has become more pronounced recently, and is especially clear when death sentences, which are merely infrequent, are distinguished from executions, which are exceedingly rare.

The first question this Article asks is what forces account for the death-proneness of a minority of American communities? The answer to that question – …

Income Tax Discrimination: Still Stuck In The Labyrinth Of Impossibility, Michael J. Graetz, Alvin C. Warren Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

In previous articles, we have argued that the European Court of Justice's reliance on nondiscrimination as the basis for its decisions did not (and could not) satisfy commonly accepted tax policy norms, such as fairness, administrability, economic efficiency, production of desired levels of revenues, avoidance of double taxation, fiscal policy goals, inter-nation equity, and so on. In addition, we argued that the court cannot achieve consistent and coherent results by requiring nondiscrimination in both origin and destination countries for transactions involving the tax systems of more than one member state. We demonstrated that – in the absence of harmonized income …

Stimulus And Civil Rights, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Federal spending has the capacity to perpetuate racial inequality, not simply through explicit exclusion, but through choices made in the legislative and institutional design of spending programs. Drawing on the lessons of New Deal and postwar social programs, this Essay offers an account of the specificfeatures offederal spending that give it salience in structuring racial arrangements. Federal spending programs, this Essay argues, are relevant in structuring racial inequality due to their massive scale, their creation of new programmatic and spending infrastructures, and the choices made in these programs as to whether to impose explicit inclusionary norms on states and localities. …

The Last Plank: Rethinking Public And Private Power To Advance Fair Housing, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

The persistence of housing discrimination more than forty years after the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA) of 1968 is among the most intractable civil rights puzzle. For the most part, this puzzle is not doctrinal: the Supreme Court has interpreted the FHA only a handful of times over the last two decades – a marked contrast to frequent doctrinal contestations over the statutory scope and constitutionality of federal laws governing employment discrimination and voting rights. Instead, the central puzzle is the inefficacy of the FHA's enforcement regime given that, in formal terms, the regime is the strongest …

Discrimination By Comparison, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Contemporary discrimination law is in crisis, both methodologically and conceptually. The crisis arises in large part from the judiciary's dependence on comparators – those who are like a discrimination claimant but for the protected characteristic – as a favored heuristic for observing discrimination. The profound mismatch of the comparator methodology with current understandings of identity discrimination and the realities of the modern workplace has nearly depleted discrimination jurisprudence and theory. Even in run-of-the-mill cases, comparators often cannot be found, particularly in today's mobile, knowledge-based economy. This difficulty is amplified for complex claims, which rest on thicker understandings of discrimination developed …

The Curious Relationship Of Marriage And Freedom, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores why and how today’s marriage equality movement for same-sex couples might benefit from lessons learned by African Americans when they too were allowed to marry for the first time in the immediate post-Civil War era. Why has the right to marry, rather than say, employment rights, educational opportunity or political participation, emerged as the preeminent vehicle by and through which the freedom, equality and dignity of gay men and lesbians is being fought in the present moment. Why marriage? In what ways are the values, aspirations, and even identity of an oppressed community shaped when they are …