Human Rights Law Commons^™

Agency Costs In International Human Rights, David H. Moore

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Speaking Law To Power: Joan Fitzpatrick, 1950-2003 (Obituary), Jennifer Moore

Faculty Scholarship

Her scholarship embraced the rights of refugees and migrants, legal limits on the waging and methodology of war, due process before international tribunals, and essential restraints on the exercise of state power in self-proclaimed emergencies, including the war on terrorism.

Exploring White Resistance To Racial Reconciliation In The United States, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Factors Impacting The Selection And Positioning Of Human Rights Class Actions In United States Courts: A Practical Overview, Morris A. Ratner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Inter-American Court Of Human Rights Amicus Curiae Brief: The United States Violates International Law When Labor Law Remedies Are Restricted Based On Workers' Migrant Status, Sarah H. Cleveland, Beth Lyon, Rebecca Smith

Faculty Scholarship

Immigrant workers in the United States of America are among the most poorly paid and poorly treated in the workforce. Amici’s attempts to protect the rights of immigrants, including unauthorized workers, have been severely hampered by domestic U.S. laws that discriminate on the basis of alienage and immigration status, and especially by a recent decision of the United States Supreme Court in Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. National Labor Relations Board, 535 U.S. 137 (2002).

Immigrant workers in particular employment-related visa categories are explicitly excluded from the protections of certain U.S. labor and employment laws. So, too, immigrant workers …

Protecting Transgender Families: Strategies For Advocates, Taylor Flynn

Faculty Scholarship

For a transgender (trans) man or woman, what begins as the dissolution of a relationship may be transformed into a public nightmare in which the individual is forced to defend the authenticity of his or her gender in the face of relentless, brutal, and humiliating questions about the most intimate details of personal anatomy and sexual practices. This Article discusses this reality in the case of Michael Kantaras, a transsexual man in Clearwater, Florida in 2002.

Proposals To Expel Palestinians From The Occupied Territories As Catalyst For A Civil Adjudication Campaign, Catherine A. Rogers

Faculty Scholarship

I begin in Part II with a brief sketch of the history of stated policies to expel Palestinians from what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories, and then examine recent proposals that have been made and actions that have been taken to implement modern re-articulations of those historic policies. In Part III, I then review the grounds on which international law proscribes mass expulsions of indigenous and occupied peoples. While international law governing this issue is clear in its application and has been overwhelmingly endorsed by the larger international community, international law seems to have little influence on Israel's …

A Signaling Theory Of Human Rights Compliance, David H. Moore

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Child Citizenship Act And The Family Reunification Act: Valuing The Citizen Child As Well As The Citizen Parent, Victor C. Romero

Faculty Scholarship

Leading civil rights advocates today lament the degree to which current immigration law fails to maintain family unity. The recent passage of the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 is a rare bipartisan step in the right direction because it grants automatic citizenship to foreign-born children of U.S. citizens upon receipt of their permanent resident status and finalization of their adoption. Congress now has before it the Family Reunification Act of 2001, which aims to restore certain procedural safeguards relaxed in 1996 to ensure that foreign-born parents are not summarily separated from their children, many of whom may be U.S. citizens. …

Human Rights And Intellectual Property: Conflict Or Coexistence?, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

Human rights and intellectual property, two bodies of law that were once strangers, are becoming increasingly intimate bedfellows. Over the past three years, human rights bodies within the United Nations have devoted unprecedented attention to intellectual property issues, including patented medicines, digital copyrights, technology transfers, economic, social and cultural rights, plant variety protection, and economic development. Unlike the approaches adopted in established intellectual property lawmaking organizations such as the WTO and WIPO, the new human rights approach to intellectual property is often critical of existing standards of protection and it seeks to address legal and policy issues that intellectual property …

The Aftermath Of September 11, 2001: The Targeting Of Arabs And Muslims In America, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

THE DEMONIZING OF ARABS AND Muslims in America began well before the terrible tragedy of September 11, 2001. It can be traced to deliberate mythmaking by film and media,² stereotyping as part of conscious strategy of 'experts' and polemicists on the Middle East,³ the selling of a foreign policy agenda by US government officials and groups seeking to affect that agenda,⁴ and a public susceptible to images identifying the unwelcome 'other* in its midst.⁵ Bearing the brunt of these factors are Arab and Muslim non-citizens in this country. A series of government laws and policies since …

Palestinian Refugees And Their Legal Status: Rights, Politics, And Implications For A Just Solution, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

The Palestinian refugee problem is one of the longest-lasting refugee crises in the world——now exceeding fifty-three years——without a real solution in sight. Although at its core a political problem, the Palestinian refugee crisis is also a problem of legal distortion: Palestinian refugees fall into a legal lacuna that sets them outside minimal international protections available for all other refugee groups in the world. This paper provides background to the legal anomaly that sets Palestinian refugees apart; discusses the legal, practical, and political implications of that status; and proposes a framework and mechanisms aimed at promoting a rights-based solution for the …

The Settlement Of Nazi-Era Litigation Through The Executive And Judicial Branches, Morris A. Ratner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Human Rights, Terrorism, And Trade – Remarks By Lori Fisler Damrosch, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

By putting human rights first and terrorism in the middle, I hope to open up questions about linkages among these regimes and whether measures within one regime can advance objectives of the others.

Interpreting U.S. Treaties In Light Of Human Rights Values, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

International treaty law occupies a more secure place in U.S. constitutional text than customary international law. Treaties, we know, are the “supreme law of the land” under Article VI of the Constitution and are routinely applied both in state courts and in federal courts under Article III. So the “awkward relationship” to which I will address myself is how U.S. courts should determine the meaning of an international treaty to which the United States is bound, when the parties involved in court have different views on the substance of the obligation that the United States has undertaken. Thus my general …

New Death Penalty Debate: What's Dna Got To Do With It, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

The nation is engaged in the most intensive discussion of the death penalty in decades. Temporary moratoria on executions are effectively in place in Illinois and Maryland, and during the winter 2001 legislative cycle legislation to adopt those pauses elsewhere cleared committees or one or more houses of the legislature, not only in Connecticut (passed the Senate Judiciary Committee) and Maryland (where it passed the entire House, and the Senate Judiciary Committee) but in Nevada (passed the Senate) and Texas (passed committees in both Houses). In the last year, abolition bills have passed or come within a few votes of …

Overlegalizing Human Rights: International Relations Theory And The Commonwealth Caribbean Backlash Against Human Rights Regimes, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

This article raises the intriguing claim that international law can be overlegalized. Overlegalization occurs where a treaty's substantive rules or its review procedures are too constraining of sovereignty, causing governments to engage in acts of non-compliance or even to denounce the treaty. The concept of legalization and its potential excesses, although unfamiliar to many legal scholars, has begun to be explored by international relations theorists analyzing the effects of legal rules in changing state behavior. This article bridges the gap between international legal scholarship and international relations theory by exploring a recent case study of overlegalization. It seeks to understand …

United States Human Rights Policy In The 21st Century In An Age Of Multilateralism Respondent, Catherine Powell

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Harold Koh's thoughtful article, A United States Human Rights Policy for the 21st Century, 46 ST. Louis U. L.J. 293 (2002), ends with the observation that "globalization has both sinister and constructive faces."' Indeed, we live in a world that is increasingly interdependent. Even some of those opposed to the project of globalization ironically depend on the tools of globalization to undermine it. Consider the terrorists who hijacked airplanes on September 11, 2001 and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing thousands of innocent civilians from many different nations. The terrorists used the Internet and …

Book Review, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Recognizing The Interdependence Of Rights In The Antidiscrimination Context Through The World Conference Against Racism , Catherine Powell, Jennifer H. Lee

Faculty Scholarship

This background paper assesses the importance of integrating gender into efforts to address racial discrimination and related intolerance in the WCAR process. While this background paper primarily focuses on racial discrimination, the analysis may be applied to xenophobia and related intolerance where these experiences are "raced" experiences. Addressing these forms of intolerance in a comprehensive manner requires unmasking the ways in which race intersects with gender and other status. A gender analysis is needed to make racism more fully visible, because "racial discrimination does not always affect men and women equally or in the same way." Women often experience compounded …

The Optional Protocol To The Women's Convention: An Argument For Ratification, Heidi Gilchrist

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

European Court Of Human Rights Case Comments, ‘Salgueiro Da Silva Moutav’ And ‘A.D.T. V. United Kingdom’, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Lena Olive Smith: A Minnesota Civil Rights Pioneer, Ann Juergens

Faculty Scholarship

Lena Olive Smith and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) created a spirited partnership in the public interest during the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout their long collaboration, this woman lawyer, her clients, and the Minneapolis branch of a national grassroots organization faced similar challenges: to stay solvent, to end segregation and increase equality, and to live with dignity. This article is divided into four sections. The first three roughly correspond with stages in Smith’s life and work. Part II briefly chronicles Smith’s first thirty six years, 1885 to 1921, as a single African-American woman in the …

Norm Internalization And U.S. Economic Sanctions, Sarah H. Cleveland

Faculty Scholarship

The fifty years since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have seen a revolution in the promulgation and universalization of human and labor rights. Human rights conventions have proliferated in the areas of civil and political rights, social and economic rights, and the rights of women, children, minorities, and refugees. Many of these conventions have been ratified by a majority of the nations of the world. International monitoring of human and labor rights compliance is conducted by international institutions such as the U.N. Human Rights Commission and the International Labour Organization (ILO), by regional entities such as …

Racial Profiling: Driving While Mexican And Affirmative Action, Victor C. Romero

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay will focus on "racial profiling" not just in the way people think about the term - that is, with respect to stopping motorists for traffic violations based solely on their race, so-called "Driving While Mexican" or "Driving While Black" - but also in the context of "affirmative action - namely, using race as a factor in employment and educational decisions. More broadly, then, I want us to think of "racial profiling" as simply "the use of race to develop an understanding of an individual" which moves us slightly away from more pejorative notions of the phrase that have …

On Elián And Aliens: A Political Solution To The Plenary Power Problem, Victor C. Romero

Faculty Scholarship

The poignant story of a little boy fished out of the sea after losing his mother to the elements captured the country's imagination and ignited a political firestorm. The Elián González saga drew conflicting opinions from nearly every branch of American local, state, and federal governments.

This article takes no specific position on Elián's situation. Rather, this artivle values the González story for putting a human face on often faceless legal issues. More specifically, Elián's saga raises the following important question: When should the right of the human being to be treated as an individual trump the right of government …

Outrelativizing Relativism: A Liberal Defense Of The Universality Of International Human Rights, Robert D. Sloane

Faculty Scholarship

This Article seeks to provide a new framework, rooted in classical liberalism, for understanding and defending the universality of international human rights. After reviewing the philosophical and historical development of the idea of universality, I argue in Part II that none of the traditional justifications for conceiving of international human rights as universal succeed. Cultural pluralism therefore must be accepted as a descriptive truth. But to acknowledge the cultural contingency of values as a descriptive claim does not, by itself, undermine the normative claim that human rights are, or should be, universal. Instead, it points to the need to justify …

Expedited Removal, Karen Musalo

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Terrorism And Human Rights, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dialogic Federalism: Constitutional Possibilities For Incorporation Of Human Rights Law In The United States Social Movements And Law Reform, Catherine Powell

Faculty Scholarship

Discussions about the allocation of authority between federal and subfederal systems in the implementation of international human rights law typically proceed by staking out one of two initial positions. At one end of the spectrum, a traditional constitutional theory takes a restrictive view of state and local authority, envisioning hierarchical imposition of federally implemented international law norms through the federal treaty power and determination of customary international law by federal courts. At the other end of the spectrum, a revisionist theory assumes greater fragmentation and authority reserved to the states based on federalism and separation of powers limits on federal …