Law Commons^™

Changing The Subject Of Sati, Deepa Das Acevedo

Faculty Articles

Charan Shah's 1999 death was widely considered to be the first sati, or widow immolation, to have occurred in India in over twenty years. Media coverage of the event focused on procedural minutiae-her sari, her demeanor-and ultimately, several progressive commentators came to the counterintuitive conclusion that the ritually anomalous nature of Charan's death confirmed its voluntary, secular, and noncriminal nature. This article argues that the "unlabeling" of Charan's death, like those of other women between 1999 and 2006, reflects a tension between the nonindividuated, impervious model of personhood exemplified by sati and the particularized citizen-subject of liberal-democratic politics in India.

The Wealth Tax: Apportionment, Federalism, And Constitutionality, Alex Zhang

Faculty Articles

Proposals of wealth taxation as a mechanism to combat economic inequality and raise revenue for welfare programs have dominated recent political debate. Despite extensive academic commentary, questions surrounding the constitutionality of a wealth tax remain unresolved. Previous scholarly approaches have drawn a dichotomy between two key cases. Supporters of the wealth tax emphasize Hylton's functional rule for identifying direct taxes, which must be apportioned under the Constitution, and reject Pollock, which invalidated the federal income tax on the grounds that it was a direct tax. Opponents of the wealth tax, in contrast, argue that Pollock, rather than …

Historical Foundations And Enduring Fundamentals Of American Religious Freedom, John Witte Jr.

Faculty Articles

For all of their failures and shortcomings, the eighteenth-century founders did indeed begin on the right “path” toward a free society, and today, Americans enjoy a good deal of religious, civil, and political freedom as a consequence. American principles of religious freedom have had a profound influence around the globe, and they now figure prominently in a number of national constitutions and international human rights instruments issued by political and religious bodies.

To be sure, as Adams predicted, there has always been a “glorious uncertainty of the law” of religious liberty and a noble diversity of understandings of its details. …