Legal Theory Commons^™

Dangerous Exhibitions: Erotic Justice And Comparative Constitutional Law, Elena Cohen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The beginning of the 21^st century is widely seen as a time of great progress for LGBTQ people. Gay marriage, gay sex, adoption by same sex couples, and gay people serving in militaries have all been legalized in many countries in the past two decades, often through the decisions of constitutional courts. However, these constitutional protections of sexuality have been found in limited contexts and applied to a limited class of people, such that many are still vulnerable to repression by governments and majoritarian politics. In order to resist this sexual oppression, I widen the focus from gay and …

Shared Deliberations: Learning From The Voices Of Social Justice Lawyers On Their Aspirations, Challenges And Roles, Ian Head

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lawyers in the U.S. who attempt to advocate for social justice issues, often on behalf of those communities most targeted by government institutions and oppressive legal systems, have unique perspectives into the challenges of using the law to create transformative change. This thesis examines the voices of over a dozen attorneys fighting not only on behalf of their clients, but also wrestling with how to best use a set of legal tools not meant for dismantling systems of power. Listening to how these legal advocates navigate their roles inside a system of laws created to consolidate rather than distribute power …

The New American Slavery: Capitalism And The Ghettoization Of American Prisons As A Profitable Corporate Business, David A. Liburd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The labor of enslaved Africans and Black Americans played a large part in the history of colonial America, with the American plantation being the epicenter for all that was to be produced. While the two have never been completely tied together, capitalism and modern day slavery have been linked with one another. Some analysis sees slavery as a remote form of capitalism, a substitute, to an antiquated form of labor in the modern world.

Slave plantations adopted a new concentration in size and management, referred to by W.E. DuBois as a change "from a family institution to an industrial system."1 …

The Racialization And Exploitation Of Foreign Workers By The Law, Seiko Ishikawa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Intense demand for cheap labor in the United States has resulted in a widespread effect of employing high skilled immigrants in STEM fields. Examining how companies use high-skilled visa categories to create a flexible cheaper immigrant workforce, this paper demonstrates that skilled immigrants from Asia are being exploited through neutral skills-based criteria that are de facto racially biased. The purpose of this paper is to raise awareness of how, from the perspective of law and society, skills-based immigration works primarily to benefit the technological industry rather than skilled immigrants.

The Legitimacy Of Global Legal Governance: Institutional Power And Human Rights Bias In International Criminal Justice, Martin J. Burke

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As global legal governance institutions exercise increasing coercive power, including through the prosecution and incarceration of individuals, such institutions require greater legitimacy. An essential but often overlooked source is the right of the accused in mass-atrocity trials to effective legal protection, which constitutes a “legal legitimacy” based on liberal norms of criminal justice. The two most important sources of legal legitimacy are: “legality,” that is, the non-retroactive enforcement of crimes and punishment; and “defense parity,” institutional and procedural guarantees of substantive equality between the defense and prosecution before and during trial. The dissertation argues that the implementation of defendant rights …

Capitalism And Unfreedom: Louis D. Brandeis And A Liberty Of The Left, Eric L. Apar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The American Right features a well-developed—and well-heeled—infrastructure for promoting a conception of freedom as inextricable from capitalism. The American Left, by contrast, has seemed content to cede the territory, abandoning the ground of freedom for the terrain of “equality,” “justice,” “fairness,” and “prosperity.” This paper is an effort to address this asymmetry in the public discourse over the meaning of freedom. Its principal objective is to capture the vision of freedom embodied in the political and economic thought of Louis D. Brandeis, one of the American Left’s ablest expositors of freedom.

In addition, the paper has three subsidiary objectives. The …