Human Rights Law Commons^™

Dilemmas Of Cultural Legality: A Comment On Roger Cotterrell's 'The Struggle For Law' And A Criticism Of The House Of Lords' Opinions In Begum, John Mikhail

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In “The Struggle for Law: Some Dilemmas of Cultural Legality,” Professor Roger Cotterrell argues that the law’s most distinctive aspiration is to promote a respectful exchange of ideas among different parts of a multicultural society. He illustrates his thesis with the House of Lords’ decision in Begum, describing it as “a relatively successful contribution to the process by which battlefields of rights are turned into areas of routine structuring” and finding much to admire in the messages communicated by the Lords in this case. I am more troubled by the Lords’ opinions in Begum and less convinced than Cotterrell seems …

Exporting Harshness: How The War On Crime Helped Make The War On Terror Possible, James Forman Jr.

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Essay responds to a consensus that has formed among many opponents of the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war on terror. The consensus narrative goes like this: America has a long-standing commitment to human rights and due process, reflected in its domestic criminal justice system’s expansive protections. Since September 11, 2001, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and their allies have dishonored this tradition. It is too simple, I suggest, to assert that the Bush administration remade our justice system and betrayed American values. This Essay explores the ways in which our approach to the war …

Human Dignity, Humiliation, And Torture, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Modern human rights instruments ground human rights in the concept of human dignity, without providing an underlying theory of human dignity. This paper examines the central importance of human dignity, understood as not humiliating people, in traditional Jewish ethics. It employs this conception of human dignity to examine and criticize U.S. use of humiliation tactics and torture in the interrogation of terrorism suspects.

Tinkering With Torture In The Aftermath Of Hamdan: Testing The Relationship Between Internationalism And Constitutionalism, Catherine Powell

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Bridging international and constitutional law scholarship, the author examines the question of torture in light of democratic values. The focus in this article is on the international prohibition on torture as this norm was addressed through the political process in the aftermath of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Responding to charges that the international torture prohibition--and international law generally--poses irreconcilable challenges for democracy and our constitutional framework, the author contends that by promoting respect for fundamental rights and for minorities and outsiders, international law actually facilitates a broad conception of democracy and constitutionalism. She takes on the question of torture within …

No Reason To Believe: Radical Skepticism, Emergency Power, And Constitutional Constraint, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay reviews Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule’s Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts, which I consider the most serious, sustained, and thoughtful effort to defend the Bush administration’s aggressive tactics in the war on terror yet written. That the book is ultimately deeply flawed only underscores the failure of the Bush administration’s approach.

Where most historians view with regret the excesses of past security crises, from the criminalization of speech during World War I to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, Posner and Vermeule advance the contrarian view that the system worked exactly …

Equality's Future: An Introduction, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

We stand at an extraordinary moment: never before have so many powerful men wished to be women. For the first time in history, a massive number of male and female voters--18 million in fact--cast their ballots to nominate a woman, Senator Hillary Clinton, to be President of the United States. Disappointed at Senator Clinton's failure to win the Democratic Party's nomination, many women threatened to bolt the party. Sensing opportunity, the Republican Presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, promptly named as his vice-presidential running mate the first woman ever nominated by the Republican Party to a Presidential ticket. And, not to …

Panel: Restrictions On Freedom Of Association Through Material Support Prohibitions And Visa Denials, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the 1950s, we were afraid of communism. We were afraid, in particular, of the Soviet Union, the world's second greatest superpower, which was armed with masses of nuclear warheads aimed at all our largest cities. As a result, we fought the Cold War, engaged in espionage, proxy wars, and an arms race. We also took aggressive preventive measures at home. The principal preventive measure of that period was guilt by association. We made it a crime to be a member of the Communist Party, and we created a whole administrative scheme to implement and enforce this notion of guilt …

Rights Over Borders: Transnational Constitutionalism And Guantanamo Bay, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay argues that the most profound implications of the Supreme Court’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush may lie not in what it says about the place of law in the war on terror, but in what it reflects about the Supreme Court’s altered conceptions of sovereignty, territoriality, and rights in the globalized world.

Boumediene was groundbreaking in at least three respects. For the first time in its history, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a law enacted by Congress and signed by the president on an issue of military policy in a time of armed conflict. Also for the first …

The Man Behind The Torture, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

The Grand Inquisitors, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Social Justice: The Moral Foundations Of Public Health And Health Policy, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay is a review of Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Policy by Madison Powers & Ruth Faden (2006).

In this pathbreaking book, senior bioethicists Powers and Faden confront foundational issues about health and justice. How much inequality in health can a just society tolerate? In a world filled with inequalities in health and well-being, which inequalities matter most and are the most morally urgent to address? In order to answer these questions, Powers and Faden develop a unique theory of social justice that, while developed for the specific contexts of public health and health …

Sosa V. Alvarez-Machain And Human Rights Claims Against Corporations Under The Alien Tort Statute, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Contrary to the claims of some observers, the Supreme Court's decision in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain does not sound the death knell for the use of the Alien Tort Statute to maintain human rights claims against private corporations in the U.S. courts. The decision clarifies the nature of claims under the Alien Tort Statue to some extent, and places some limits on the theories available in actions against private corporations, but for the most part such suits remain as viable after Sosa as they were before. That is not to say, however, that victims of corporate human rights violations in developing …

The Idea Of Humanity: Human Rights And Immigrants' Rights, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay asks whether international human rights arguments are likely to be effective in advancing immigrants' rights in the United States. There are certainly reasons to be pessimistic. Despite its history as a nation of immigrants and the ever-increasing diversity of its populace, the United States remains a deeply parochial and nationalist culture. International human rights arguments are often seen as the advocates' last refuge. In the absence of an international forum that can hold the United States accountable, and in the face of Congressional directives that the international human rights treaties it has ratified are not self-executing, international human …

Calling Genocide By Its Rightful Name: Lemkin's Word, Darfur, And The Un Report, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

When the United Nations commission investigating Darfur issued its report in January 2005, it concluded that the Darfur atrocities represented war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not genocide. This had the harmful effect of deflating efforts to mobilize political support to halt the Darfur atrocities. But the Commission's conclusion was based entirely on technicalities in the legal definitions of the international crimes, not on denial that extermination is going on in Darfur. In this paper, the author argues that the legal and popular meanings of genocide have diverged in harmful ways: where laymen understand that mass killings and rapes …

Lifting Our Veil Of Ignorance: Culture, Constitutionalism, And Women's Human Rights In Post-September 11 America, Catherine Powell

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

While we live in an Age of Rights, culture continues to be a major challenge to the human rights project. During the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in the 1940s and during the Cold War era, the periodic disputes that erupted over civil and political rights in contrast to economic, social and cultural rights could be read either explicitly or implicitly as a cultural debate.

Gender has figured prominently in this perceived culture clash, for example, with the Bush administration's use of Afghan women as cultural icons in need of liberation--a claim that helped justify the …

Failed States, Or The State As Failure?, Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article seeks to challenge a basic assumption of international law and policy, arguing that the existing state-based international legal framework stands in the way of developing effective responses to state failure. It offers an alternative theoretical framework designed to spark debate about better legal and policy responses to failed states. Although the article uses failed states as a lens to focus its arguments, it also has broad implications for how we think about sovereignty, the evolving global order, and the place of states within it.

State failure causes a wide range of humanitarian, legal, and security problems. Unsurprisingly, given …

Direct Vs. Indirect Obligations Of Corporations Under International Law, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

International law today addresses the conduct of private corporations in a variety of areas. With very few exceptions, however, international law regulates corporate conduct indirectly--that is, by requiring states to enact and enforce regulations applicable to corporations and other non-state actors. Only a small number of international legal norms--primarily those relating to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and forced labor--apply directly to non-state actors. Scholars have argued forcefully that international law should move in the direction of directly imposing obligations on corporations. These arguments overlook important aspects of the problem. If international legal norms were extended to corporations and backed …

Protecting Rights In The Age Of Terrorism: Challenges And Opportunities, Rosa Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Depending on whom you speak to these days (and the mood in which you find them), international law is either practically moribund, or it's more vibrant and important than it has been for years. To take the good news story first, international law issues have been at the forefront of public discourse over the past few years. Pick your issue: the U.N. Charter and the international law on the use of force? The Convention Against Torture? The Geneva Conventions? You'll find it on the front page these days. Journalists are phoning international law professors for background briefings, and students are …

Torture's Truth, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this Article, I argue that the obstacles to having a serious conversation about torture are exacerbated by a truth that torture teaches us - a truth that we cannot afford fully to know and, so, frantically try to obscure. Law is about respect for commitments and limits, and the existence of torture challenges the possibility of such respect. If we are prepared to torture, then, it would seem, we are prepared to do anything, and the restraint that law purports to impose upon us is a fraud. Torture's truth, then, is that all of our promises to ourselves and …

Refugee Protection In The United States Post-September 11, Andrew I. Schoenholtz

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The U.S. refugee resettlement program, was the first refugee protection casualty of the terrorist attacks. American officials perceived resettlement as being particularly vulnerable to security problems. That was not the case with the other major U.S. refugee protection program, the asylum system. That system was effectively revamped in 1995 to address a variety of abuses, in part connected to individuals involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Yet, even though official attention did not focus on asylum, subtle, significant changes have occurred. This article delineates and assesses these changes by closely examining data and developments at all levels of …

The Politics Of The Geneva Conventions: Avoiding Formalist Traps, Rosa Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Geneva Conventions were drafted in 1949, in another world. The world of the Geneva Conventions' "framers" is still familiar to all of us, though increasingly it is familiar from movies and books rather from the evening news or, still less, our own lived experience. The world in which the Conventions were drafted was a world of states: powerful states, weak states, predatory states, law-abiding states, but states all the same. Soldiers wore uniforms designed by their states, carried weapons issued by their states, obeyed orders given by their commanders, and fought against the armies of other states.

Well--most of …

Liberalism, Torture, And The Ticking Bomb, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Torture used to be incompatible with American values. Our Bill of Rights forbids cruel and unusual punishment, and that has come to include all forms of corporal punishment except prison and death by methods purported to be painless. Americans and our government have historically condemned states that torture; we have granted asylum or refuge to those who fear it. The Senate ratified the Convention Against Torture, Congress enacted antitorture legislation, and judicial opinions spoke of "the dastardly and totally inhuman act of torture.” Then came September 11.

The Human Rights Of Persons With Mental Disabilities: A Global Perspective On The Application Of Human Rights Principles To Mental Health, Lawrence O. Gostin, Lance Gable

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article examines the human rights of persons with mental disabilities and the application and development of these rights by the various international and regional systems that have been established to protect human rights. An international system of human rights with universal application has been developed under the auspices of the United Nations. Regional human rights systems have applied additional human rights protections to their respective geographic regions. Both the international and regional systems have addressed the human rights of persons with mental disabilities through treaties, declarations, and thematic resolutions. Moreover, regional institutions have incrementally formulated a body of law …

The Non-Monetary Value Of Reparations Rhetoric, Emma Coleman Jordan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I have several comments to offer on the subject of reparations. Reparations is not a single idea. The forty acres and a mule that General Sherman promised to the slaves was the beginning of the idea of reparations in America, but not the end. Reparations is a multi-part idea; until we get that straight, we are vulnerable to the feeling that we are lost again. There are at least three arenas in which the reparations issue may be contested. One is the political arena. In the arena of legislation and political maneuvering, bills must be submitted for majoritarian acceptance. It …

Constitutional Dialogue And Human Dignity: States And Transnational Constitutional Discourse, Vicki C. Jackson

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The U.S. Supreme Court has been slower than some other national courts to become familiar with and discuss, distinguish, or borrow from related constitutional approaches of other nations and systems. The growth in transnational judicial discourse, especially on constitutional issues relating to human rights, has been remarked by many. National courts in Argentina, Botswana, Canada, Germany, India, South Africa, and elsewhere not infrequently refer to the constitutional jurisprudence of other nations in resolving domestic constitutional questions. Although such references are not unheard of in the United States, transnational discourse involving national courts, supranational and international tribunals is still subject to …

War Everywhere: Rights, National Security Law, And The Law Of Armed Conflict In The Age Of Terror, Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Both international and domestic law take as a basic premise the notion that it is possible, important, and usually fairly straightforward to distinguish between war and peace, emergencies and normality, the foreign and the domestic, the external and the internal. From an international law perspective, the law of armed conflict is triggered only when a armed conflict actually exists; the rest of the time, other bodies of law are applicable. Domestically, U.S. courts have developed a constitutional and statutory jurisprudence that distinguishes between national security issues and domestic questions, with the courts subjecting government actions to far less scrutiny when …

The Priority Of Morality: The Emergency Constitution's Blind Spot, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Three aspects of Bruce Ackerman’s thesis, which is a proposal to legitimate the practice of suspicionless preventive detention during emergencies, are discussed in this essay—its premises, its efficacy, and its morality. Part I critiques three of Ackerman’s premises—his underestimation of courts and overestimation of legislatures as guardians of liberty, his misguided belief that the supermajoritarian escalator provides a one-size-fits-all solution to the conundrum of emergency powers, and his contention that the short-lived character of emergencies makes it sensible to cede to a minority of our popular representatives control over critically important and largely unpredictable decisions concerning the appropriate duration of …

A Theory Of Crimes Against Humanity, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The answer I offer in this Article is that crimes against humanity assault one particular aspect of human being, namely our character as political animals. We are creatures whose nature compels us to live socially, but who cannot do so without artificial political organization that inevitably poses threats to our well-being, and, at the limit, to our very survival. Crimes against humanity represent the worst of those threats; they are the limiting case of politics gone cancerous. Precisely because we cannot live without politics, we exist under the permanent threat that politics will turn cancerous and the indispensable institutions of …

Trade Sanctions And Human Rights–Past, Present, And Future, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The relationship between the international law of trade and the international law of human rights has commanded an increasing amount of scholarly attention in the past few years, perhaps spurred by the well-known events at Seattle in 1999. This article offers some reflections on this relationship, focusing on the permissibility under international law of imposing trade sanctions against nations that commit violations of international human rights. Part I begins with some reflections on the historical relationship between these two bodies of law. Part I also considers why the human rights community appears to feel threatened by the international trade system, …

Their Liberties, Our Security: Democracy And Double Standards, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Some maintain that a "double standard" for citizens and noncitizens is perfectly justified. The attacks of September 11 were perpetrated by nineteen Arab noncitizens, and we have reason to believe that other Arab noncitizens are associated with the attackers and will seek to attack again. Citizens, it is said, are presumptively loyal; noncitizens are not. Thus, it is not irrational to focus on Arab noncitizens. Moreover, on a normative level, if citizens and noncitizens were treated identically, citizenship itself might be rendered meaningless. The very essence of war involves the drawing of lines in the sand between citizens of our …