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Full-Text Articles in Law

Natural Hazards, Human Actors, Serious Harm: Refugee Protection Through Understanding The Social Construction Of Disasters, Matthew Scott Jul 2015

Natural Hazards, Human Actors, Serious Harm: Refugee Protection Through Understanding The Social Construction Of Disasters, Matthew Scott

Matthew Scott

The occurrence of a natural hazard event is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the unfolding of a ‘natural’ disaster. Disasters result when individuals and communities are exposed and vulnerable to natural hazards, such as droughts, floods and earthquakes. In their turn, exposure and vulnerability are social facts that are often closely correlated with discrimination, for example against women, children, older people, persons with disabilities, as well as for reasons of race, religion, nationality or political opinion. Adopting the perspective that sees disasters as socially constructed in this way, the scope of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status …


Immigrant Education And The Promise Of Integrative Egalitarianism, Victor C. Romero May 2015

Immigrant Education And The Promise Of Integrative Egalitarianism, Victor C. Romero

Victor C. Romero

Although not an equal protection case, Martinez v. Regents of the University of California challenges us to grapple with the Supreme Court’s post-Brown commitment to equal opportunity within the context of immigrant higher education. Sadly, Brown’s progeny from Bakke to Parents Involved reveals the cost of embracing a color-blind constitutionalism unmoored from a fundamental commitment to vigilantly combat subordination and dismantle unearned privilege. More optimistically, the Supreme Court’s gay rights jurisprudence developed in Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas provides insights into how a conservative court can accurately distinguish irrational discrimination from democratic deliberation, a lesson that might help …


Our Illegal Founders, Victor C. Romero May 2015

Our Illegal Founders, Victor C. Romero

Victor C. Romero

This Essay briefly mines America’s history to argue that the law setting forth where our national borders are and how strictly we patrol them has always been subject to the vagaries of politics, economics, and perception. Illegal (im)migration has long been part of our migration history, engaged in not just by Latin American border crossers, but also by prominent colonists, giving the lie to the claim that upholding border laws should always be sacrosanct. In many school districts today, the usual summary of American history from our childhood civics classes no longer bypasses the uncomfortable truths of conquest and westward …


Postsecondary School Education Benefits For Undocumented Immigrants: Promises And Pitfalls, Victor C. Romero May 2015

Postsecondary School Education Benefits For Undocumented Immigrants: Promises And Pitfalls, Victor C. Romero

Victor C. Romero

Should longtime undocumented immigrants have the same opportunity as lawful permanent residents and U.S. citizens to attend state colleges and universities? There are two typical justifications for denying them such opportunities. First, treating undocumented immigrants as in-state residents discriminates against U.S. citizen nonresidents of the state. Second, and more broadly, undocumented immigration should be discouraged as a policy matter, and therefore allowing undocumented immigrant children equal opportunities as legal residents condones and perhaps encourages "illegal" immigration. This essay responds to these two concerns by surveying state and federal solutions to this issue.


Interrogating Iqbal: Intent, Inertia, And (A Lack Of) Imagination, Victor C. Romero May 2015

Interrogating Iqbal: Intent, Inertia, And (A Lack Of) Imagination, Victor C. Romero

Victor C. Romero

In Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the Court reaffirmed the long-standing equal protection doctrine that government actors can only be held liable for discriminatory conduct when they purposefully rely on a forbidden characteristic, such as race or gender, in promulgating policy; to simply know that minorities and women will be adversely affected by the law does not deny these groups equal protection under the law. This Essay interrogates this doctrine by taking a closer look at Iqbal and Feeney, the thirty-year-old precedent the majority cited as the source of its antidiscrimination standard. Because Feeney was cited in neither of the lower court …


Unseen Exclusions In Voting And Immigration Law, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández Apr 2015

Unseen Exclusions In Voting And Immigration Law, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.


Social Assistance And The Right To Reside At The European Court Of Justice – Dano V Jobcenter Leipzig, Mel Cousins Dec 2014

Social Assistance And The Right To Reside At The European Court Of Justice – Dano V Jobcenter Leipzig, Mel Cousins

Mel Cousins

This case involves an important decision of the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) in relation to when Member States may refuse benefits to non-nationals who do not have a right of residence under EU law. The Court held that Article 24(1) of Directive 2004/38/EC on the right of citizens of the Union and their family members to move and reside freely within the territory of the Member States and Article 4 of Regulation No 883/2004 did not preclude a national law under which nationals of other Member States are excluded from entitlement to certain …