Legal Theory Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …