Law Commons^™

Incentives To Incarcerate: Corporation Involvement In Prison Labor And The Privatization Of The Prison System, Alythea S. Morrell

Master's Projects and Capstones

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. The United States accounts for approximately 5% of the world’s population, yet it accounts for 25% of the world’s prisoners. Not only does the United States mercilessly incarcerate its own citizens, it disproportionately incarcerates African American and Latino men. This fact on its own is disturbing; however, when it is coupled with the fact that corporations profit from and lobby for an overly aggressive and ineffective criminal justice system, makes these statistics even more horrendous. Private prison companies such as Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group admit …

Assessing Baxi’S Thesis On The Emergence Of A Trade-Related Market-Friendly Human Rights Paradigm: Recent Evidence From Nigerian Labour-Led Struggles, Obiora Chinedu Okafor

Obiora Chinedu Okafor

The objective of the article is to assess some of the sub-claims that emerge from Baxi’s thesis on an emergent trade-related market-friendly human rights paradigm in the light of the available evidence regarding the intense contestations and confrontations that have occurred between Nigeria’s politically and economically transitional Obasanjo regime and a local labour-led coalition. The piece sets out to ascertain the contextual and localised validity of these ‘Baxian’ sub-claims, within the wider context of the government vs. labour confrontations in Nigeria during the neo-liberal socio-economic reforms undertaken in that country between 1999 and 2005.

La Búsqueda De Una Agenda En Común: Una Mirada Feminista A Las Organizaciones Lgbti En Nicaragua, Rachel Crane

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

In the global context, we are amidst a rapidly changing rights landscape for people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) as more and more governments begin to recognize same-gender partnerships. This gain in LGBT rights worldwide is in no small part to the political organizing and lobbying done by LGBT-rights organizations. Nicaragua’s history with gaining LGBT rights is relatively new, as the government did not repeal the anti-sodomy law here until 2008, thus stagnating the fight for acceptance in the country. As it stands, Nicaragua has a few legal protections for LGBT people, but they continue to …

Building Bridges Iv: Of Cultures, Colors, And Clashes--Capturing The International In Delgado's Chronicles, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

Sex, race, gender, sexuality, color, religion, language, nationality, ethnicity, culture, poverty - socially constructed categories, social tropes that relegate "others" to subordinated positions in the varied and various cultural and economic marketplaces of both global and local societies. Richard Delgado's transformational work engages all of these tropes insightfully, disturbingly, and illuminatingly. His rich literature conceptualizes persons as multidimensional, complex beings and exposes society as the pre-fabricated stage in which diverse interactions evolve. Delgado's epistemological stance is fluid, non-rigid, and grounded on subjectivity. In this essay I will focus on Delgado's latest book When Equality Ends: Stories About Race and Resistance. …

Ratification, Reporting, And Rights: Quality Of Participation In The Convention Against Torture, Cossette D. Creamer, Beth A. Simmons

All Faculty Scholarship

The core international human rights treaty bodies play an important role in monitoring implementation of human rights standards through consideration of states parties’ reports. Yet very little research explores how seriously governments take their reporting obligations. This article examines the reporting record of parties to the Convention against Torture, finding that report submission is heavily conditioned by the practices of neighboring countries and by a government’s human rights commitment and institutional capacity. This article also introduces original data on the quality and responsiveness of reports, finding that more democratic—and particularly newly democratic—governments tend to render higher quality reports.

Human Rights Treaties In And Beyond The Senate: The Spirit Of Senator Proxmire, Jean Galbraith

All Faculty Scholarship

In 1995, Louis Henkin wrote a famous piece in which he suggested that the process of human rights treaty ratification was haunted by “the ghost of Senator Bricker” – the isolationist Senator who in the 1950s had waged a fierce assault on the treaty power, especially with regard to human rights treaties. Since that time, Senator Bricker’s ghost has proved even more real. Professor Henkin’s concern was with how the United States ratified human rights treaties, and specifically with the packet of reservations, declarations, and understandings (RUDs) attached by the Senate in giving its advice and consent. Today, the question …

Gender, Nutrition, And The Human Right To Adequate Food: Toward An Inclusive Framework, Anne C. Bellows

Food Systems Summit 2015

The food crisis of 2008 was not an isolated incident or unique event from which the world economy and food security has re-stabilized. Rather, as Valente and Suárez Franco (2010, 455) state, "[the 2008 food crisis] is not new for more than 840 million people who have constantly been subjected to hunger over the last thirty years, millions of whom died of malnutrition and associated diseases, or had their quality of life severely affected by the consequences of malnutrition." Although estimates of food insecurity differ, the geography and socio-demographic profile of the food insecure remains unaltered (FAO, WFP, IFAD 2012; …

Stories From The Margins: Refugees With Disabilities Rebuilding Lives, Brent C. Elder

Societies Without Borders

First-hand accounts of resettlement are seldom heard from refugees with disabilities. The purpose of this study was to facilitate a space for refugees with disabilities to tell their life histories, and their experiences related to resettlement. A global ethnographic framework was used to gather life history interview data from six refugees with a label of disability who have resettled in the United States. To better understand participants’ life histories, multiple theoretical perspectives were utilized including: critical cultural theory, critical race theory (CRT), critical disability studies (CDS), and disability studies (DS) which helped to interpret and navigate the nebulous intersections of …

Impact Of The “Nirbhaya” Rape Case: Isolated Phenomenon Or Social Change?, Tina P. Lapsia

Honors Scholar Theses

In December 2012, a twenty-three year old college student, who was given the pseudonym “Nirbhaya” (“fearless”), was fatally gang-raped on a private bus in Delhi, India, galvanizing the country to swiftly adopt new legislative measures and catapulting the issue of violence against women in India into the international spotlight. Although assault and rape cases have made India infamous for its high volume of crimes against women, the reaction to this particular incident was much different from before. This paper investigates whether the governmental and societal responses represent social change, as indicated by changing attitudes towards violence against women in India. …

Ending Female Genital Mutilation And Child Marriage In Tanzania, Lisa Avalos, Naima Farrell, Rebecca Stellato, Marc Werner

Lisa Avalos

Carl Cohen’S ‘Kind’ Arguments For Animal Rights And Against Human Rights, Nathan Nobis

Nathan M. Nobis, PhD

Carl Cohen’s arguments against animal rights are shown to be unsound. His strategy entails that animals have rights, that humans do not, the negations of those conclusions, and other false and inconsistent implications. His main premise seems to imply that one can fail all tests and assignments in a class and yet easily pass if one’s peers are passing and that one can become a convicted criminal merely by setting foot in a prison. However, since his moral principles imply that nearly all exploitive uses of animals are wrong anyway, foes of animal rights are advised to seek philosophical consolations …

Frames And Consensus Formation In International Relations: The Case Of Trafficking In Persons, Volha Charnysh, Paulette Lloyd, Beth A. Simmons

All Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the process of consensus formation by the international community regarding how to confront the problem of trafficking in persons. We analyze the corpus of United Nations General Assembly Third Committee resolutions to show that: (1) consensus around the issue of how to confront trafficking in persons has increased over time; and (2) the formation of this consensus depends upon how the issue is framed. We test our argument by examining the characteristics of resolutions’ sponsors and discursive framing concepts such as crime, human rights, and the strength of enforcement language. We conclude that the consensus-formation process in …

Framing For A New Transnational Legal Order: The Case Of Human Trafficking, Paulette Lloyd, Beth A. Simmons

All Faculty Scholarship

How does transnational legal order emerge, develop and solidify? This chapter focuses on how and why actors come to define an issue as one requiring transnational legal intervention of a specific kind. Specifically, we focus on how and why states have increasingly constructed and acceded to international legal norms relating to human trafficking. Empirically, human trafficking has been on the international and transnational agenda for nearly a century. However, relatively recently – and fairly swiftly in the 2000s – governments have committed themselves to criminalize human trafficking in international as well as regional and domestic law. Our paper tries to …