Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

White Supremacy, Police Brutality, And Family Separation: Preventing Crimes Against Humanity Within The United States, Elena Baylis

Articles

Although the United States tends to treat crimes against humanity as a danger that exists only in authoritarian or war-torn states, in fact, there is a real risk of crimes against humanity occurring within the United States, as illustrated by events such as systemic police brutality against Black Americans, the federal government’s family separation policy that took thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the southern border, and the dramatic escalation of White supremacist and extremist violence culminating in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In spite of this risk, the United States does not have …

Justice For Venezuela: The Human Rights Violations That Are Isolating An Entire Country, Andrea Matos

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming.

Roadblocks To Access: Perceptions Of Law And Socioeconomic Problems In South Africa, Kira Tait

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation explores ordinary Black South Africans' perceptions of the law and how these perceptions impact their views of the desirability and appropriateness of appealing to courts when they have problems accessing constitutionally guaranteed services. Specifically, I study why people choose not to use courts to secure access to water, healthcare, education, and housing when it is both legal and possible to do so. Since it transitioned to democracy, South Africa has become one of the leaders of socioeconomic rights protection through courts. It is globally recognized for its progressive constitution buttressed by an expansive system of rights and a …

Strategic Litigation And The Evolution Of Regional Human Rights Norms: Cases From Germany And The Netherlands, Cole Kovarik

Honors Theses

This study seeks to fill gaps in our understanding of how private actors participate in international human rights politics by examining civil society involvement in European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) cases against long-standing democracies. Descriptive analysis of an exhaustive data set of instances of civil society organization (CSO) participation in ECtHR cases against Germany and The Netherlands is complemented by a comparative case study analysis of networks of organizations that mobilized around German and Dutch cases concerning Articles 8 (right to privacy) and 10 (freedom of expression). The data suggest that civil society organizations not only appear before the …

Local Elected Officials’ Receptivity To Refugee Resettlement In The United States, Robert Shaffer, Lauren E. Pinson, Jonathan A. Chu, Beth A. Simmons

All Faculty Scholarship

Local leaders possess significant and growing authority over refugee resettlement, yet we know little about their attitudes toward refugees. In this article, we use a conjoint experiment to evaluate how the attributes of hypothetical refugee groups influence local policymaker receptivity toward refugee resettlement. We sample from a novel, national panel of current local elected officials, who represent a broad range of urban and rural communities across the United States. We find that many local officials favor refugee resettlement regardless of refugee attributes. However, officials are most receptive to refugees whom they perceive as a strong economic and social fit within …

Borders Rules, Beth A. Simmons

All Faculty Scholarship

International political borders have historically performed one overriding function: the delimitation of a state’s territorial jurisdiction, but today they are sites of intense security scrutiny and law enforcement. Traditionally they were created to secure peace through territorial independence of political units. Today borders face new pressures from heightened human mobility, economic interdependence (legal and illicit), and perceived challenges from a host of nonstate threats. Research has only begun to reveal what some of these changes mean for the governance of interstate borders. The problems surrounding international borders today go well-beyond traditional delineation and delimitation. These problems call for active forms …

Youth Activism, Art And Transitional Artist: Emerging Spaces Of Memory After The Jasmin Revolution, Arnaud Kurze

Arnaud Kurze

This project explores the creation of alternative transitional justice spaces in post-conflict contexts, particularly concentrating on the role of art and the impact of social movements to address human rights abuses. Drawing from post-authoritarian Tunisia, it scrutinizes the work of contemporary youth activists and artists to deal with the past and foster sociopolitical change. Although these vanguard protesters provoked the overthrow of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, the power vacuum was quickly filled by old elites. The exclusion of young revolutionaries from political decision-making led to unprecedented forms of mobilization to account for repression and injustice under …

Book Review: Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation By Renate Klein, Kate Rose

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Why We Must Oppose The Full Decriminalization Of Prostitution, Taina Bien-Aime

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Today's Porn: Not A Constitutional Right; Not A Human Right, Patrick Trueman

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Amend The Communications Decency Act To Protect Victims Of Sexual Exploitation, Samantha Vardaman

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Legal Status Of Drones Under Loac And International Law, Vivek Sehrawat

Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs

No abstract provided.

Professor Breaks Ground With Journal On Sexual Violence And Exploitation, Joseph Essig, Donna M. Hughes Dr.

Donna M. Hughes

New Uri Journal Explores Sexual Exploitation, G. Wayne Miller, Donna M. Hughes Dr.

Donna M. Hughes

Uri Professor Launches Online Journal About Sexual Exploitation, Violence, Slavery, Donna M. Hughes Dr.

Donna M. Hughes

Dignity, Vol 1, Issue 1, 2016, Donna M. Hughes Dr.

Donna M. Hughes

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 …

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. …

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 …

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 …

Reconciling Positivism And Realism: Kelsen And Habermas On Democracy And Human Rights, David Ingram

David Ingram

It is well known that Hans Kelsen and Jürgen Habermas invoke realist arguments drawn from social science in defending an international, democratic human rights regime against Carl Schmitt’s attack on the rule of law. However, despite embracing the realist spirit of Kelsen’s legal positivism, Habermas criticizes Kelsen for neglecting to connect the rule of law with a concept of procedural justice (Part I). I argue, to the contrary (Part II), that Kelsen does connect these terms, albeit in a manner that may be best described as functional, rather than conceptual. Indeed, whereas Habermas tends to emphasize a conceptual connection between …

The Ethics Of ‘Responsibility While Protecting’: Brazil, The Responsibility To Protect, And Guidelines For Humanitarian Intervention, James Pattison

Human Rights & Human Welfare

In the aftermath of the NATO intervention in Libya, the responsibility to protect (RtoP) doctrine has received considerable blowback. Various states, most notably some of the ‘BRICS’ states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), claimed that NATO exceeded its mandate given to it by United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1973 (by allegedly focusing on regime change rather than on the protection of civilians), was inappropriate in its target selection, violated the arms embargo by transferring arms to rebels, and generally caused too much harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure.1 It was also suggested that the UK, US, and …

Reconciling Positivism And Realism: Kelsen And Habermas On Democracy And Human Rights, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is well known that Hans Kelsen and Jürgen Habermas invoke realist arguments drawn from social science in defending an international, democratic human rights regime against Carl Schmitt’s attack on the rule of law. However, despite embracing the realist spirit of Kelsen’s legal positivism, Habermas criticizes Kelsen for neglecting to connect the rule of law with a concept of procedural justice (Part I). I argue, to the contrary (Part II), that Kelsen does connect these terms, albeit in a manner that may be best described as functional, rather than conceptual. Indeed, whereas Habermas tends to emphasize a conceptual connection between …

Victory Without Success? – The Guantanamo Litigation, Permanent Preventive Detention, And Resisting Injustice, Jules Lobel

Articles

When the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) brought the first habeas cases challenging the Executive’s right to detain prisoners in a law free zone at Guantanamo in 2002, almost no legal commentator gave the plaintiffs much chance of succeeding. Yet, two years later in 2004, after losing in both the District Court and Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court in Rasul v. Bush handed CCR a resounding victory. Four years later, the Supreme Court again ruled in CCR’s favor in 2008 in Boumediene v. Bush, holding that the detainees had a constitutional right to habeas and declaring the Congressional …

Natural Rights To Welfare, Siegfried Van Duffel

Siegfried Van Duffel

No abstract provided.

November Roundtable: The Palestine Bid For Statehood At The Un, Introduction, Claudia Fuentes Julio

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An annotation of:

“Statehood versus “Facts on the Ground””. By Richard Falk. Aljazeera, September 20, 2011.

Legal Mechanization Of Corporate Social Responsibility Through Alien Tort Statute Litigation: A Response To Professor Branson With Some Supplemental Thoughts, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

This Response argues that as ATS jurisprudence “matures” or becomes more sophisticated, the legitimate limits of the law regress. The further expansion within the corporate defendant pool – attempting to pin liability on parent, great grandparent corporations and up to the top – raises the stakes and complexity of ATS litigation. The corporate social responsibility discussion raises three principal issues about how a moral corporation lives its life: how a corporation chooses its self-interest versus the interests of others, when and how it should help others if control decisions may harm the shareholder owners, and how far the corporation must …

From Rapists To Superpredators: What The Practice Of Capital Punishment Says About Race, Rights And The American Child, Robyn Linde

Faculty Publications

At the turn of the 20^th century, the United States was widely considered to be a world leader in matters of child protection and welfare, a reputation lost by the century’s end. This paper suggests that the United States’ loss of international esteem concerning child welfare was directly related to its practice of executing juvenile offenders. The paper analyzes why the United States continued to carry out the juvenile death penalty after the establishment of juvenile courts and other protections for child criminals. Two factors allowed the United States to continue the juvenile death penalty after most states in …

Notes In Defense Of The Iraq Constitution, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

This paper is a defense of sorts of the Iraqi constitution, arguing that the language used in it was wisely designed to allow some level of flexibility, such that highly divided political forces could find incremental solutions to the deep rooted sources of division that have plagued Iraqi society since its inception. That Iraq has found itself in such dreadful political circumstances since constitutional ratification is therefore not a function of the open ended constitutional bargain, but rather of the failure of Iraqi legal and political elites to make use of the space that the constitution provided them to develop …