Human Rights Law Commons^™

Owning Red: A Theory Of Indian (Cultural) Appropriation, Angela R. Riley, Kristen A. Carpenter

Publications

In a number of recent controversies, from sports teams’ use of Indian mascots to the federal government’s desecration of sacred sites, American Indians have lodged charges of “cultural appropriation” or the unauthorized use by members of one group of the cultural expressions and resources of another. While these and other incidents make contemporary headlines, American Indians often experience these claims within a historical and continuing experience of dispossession. For hundreds of years, the U.S. legal system has sanctioned the taking and destruction of Indian lands, artifacts, bodies, religions, identities, and beliefs, all toward the project of conquest and colonization. Indian …

Zero-Tolerance Comes To International Law, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

Rationed Justice, Jennifer M. Smith

Journal Publications

In the United States, "equal justice under law" is at the very forefront of our American justice system. "Equal justice" is meant to guarantee equal access to the justice system. "Equal access to the judicial process is the sin qua non of a just society." Many Americans, however, do not have any access to the justice system, never mind that of equal access. "Equal justice" has not reached the nation's indigent, or even many of our moderate-income citizens.

The Color Of Pain: Blacks And The U.S. Health Care System--Can The Affordable Care Act Help To Heal A History Of Injustice?, Part Ii, Jennifer M. Smith

Journal Publications

The state of Americans' health care has been troubling, especially before health care reform.The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is often touted as universal health care, and the initial intention was for the U.S. to have universal health care. However, with all of the compromises involved in its passage, the ACA resulted in comprehensive health insurance reform, significantly increasing the accessibility, affordability, and quality of health care for most, but not all, Americans. The ACA is a substantial step toward universal health care-a near-universal mandate-that may soon provide coverage to all Americans, and even include undocumented immigrants. Americans can find excellent …

Ocean Iron Fertilization And Indigenous Peoples' Right To Food: Leveraging International And Domestic Law Protections To Enhance Access To Salmon In The Pacific Northwest, Randall S. Abate

Journal Publications

Ocean iron fertilization (OIF) is a new and controversial climate change mitigation strategy that seeks to increase the carbon-absorbing capacity of ocean waters by depositing significant quantities of iron dust into the marine environment to stimulate the growth of phytoplankton blooms. The photosynthetic processes of these blooms absorb carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it to the ocean floor. OIF has been criticized on several grounds. including the foreseeable and unforeseeable adverse consequences it may cause to the marine environment, as well as the daunting challenge of reconciling several potentially overlapping sources of international and domestic environmental law, which may …

Myths Meet Reality: How We Are Not Fighting Trafficking Or Supporting Trafficking Survivors, Denise Brennan

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Innovations In The Fight Against Human Trafficking: Advocates’ Perspectives And Proposals, Florrie Burke

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Innovation At The Front Lines, Pamela K. Chen

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

An Organizing Approach To Human Trafficking In Domestic Work, Tiffany Williams, Leah Obias

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

You're Gonna Need A Bigger Boat: Alternatives To The Un Security Council For Enforcing Nuclear Disarmament And Human Rights, David A. Koplow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

There is a serious problem with the Security Council. That institution endowed by the United Nations Charter with "primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security" -- has stood at the apex of the global political, diplomatic, and legal structure for seventy years, responding (more or less) to the full panoply of incessant dangers and provocations. The Charter could not have been crafted or sustained without it, and the Security Council has, at least, assisted in preserving a measure of fundamental world order-in particular, it has helped avoid the cataclysm of a World War III.

But a central …

Justice, Reconciliation, And The Masculinist Way: What Role For Women In Truth And Reconciliation Commissions?, Penelope Andrews

Articles & Chapters

During periods of armed conflict, women and girls are frequently subjected to violence because of their gender. National governments have attempted to address this issue through transitional justice mechanisms like truth and reconciliation commissions. The record of women’s input and participation in these processes, however, is rather poor. In this article, I highlight the role of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SATRC) and the opportunity the SATRC missed in failing to comprehensively confront andexamine the systemic nature of violence against women under apartheid. Many transitional justice mechanisms, the SATRC being one of the more vivid examples, have adopted a …

Of Human Dignities, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Dignitatis Humanae: “Of Human Dignity.” The Second Vatican Council’s 1965 declaration on religious liberty must have seemed a triumph—an exclamation mark signaling the success of a decades-long project, begun during the Second World War, to restore human rights to the center of Catholic social teaching. In wartime addresses, Pope Pius XII had called for recognition of human rights, based in human dignity, as the foundation for a stable peace. In 1963, Pope John XXIII had made universal human rights, including religious liberty, part of the Magisterium. The project had had effects outside the Church as well. In 1948, …

The Struggle For The Rule Of Law In South Africa (Symposium: Twenty Years Of South African Constitutionalism: Constitutional Rights, Judicial Independence And The Transition To Democracy), Stephen J. Ellmann

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Advocacy At The Leading Edge Of Social Change: The Importance Of Front Line Innovators, Frank W. Munger

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Merchants And Thieves, Hungry For Power: Prosecutorial Misconduct And Passive Judicial Complicity In Death Penalty Trials Of Defendants With Mental Disabilities, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

In spite of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Ford v. Wainwright (1986), Atkins v. Virginia (2002), and Hall v. Florida (2014), persons with severe psychosocial and intellectual disabilities continue to be given death sentences, in some cases leading to actual execution. Although the courts have been aware of this for decades -- dating back at least to the infamous Ricky Rector case in Arkansas -- these base miscarriages of justice continue and show no sign of abating. Scholars have written clearly and pointedly on this issue (certainly, more frequently since the Atkins decision in 2002), but little has changed.

I …

Justice Brennan And The Foundations Of Human Rights Federalism, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

In a well-known and widely cited 1977 law review article, Justice William J. Brennan called on state courts to “step into the breach” and use their authority as independent interpreters of state constitutions to continue on the state level the expansion of individual liberties begun on the national level by the Warren Court. Justice Brennan was right about the importance of independent state constitutional law, but he was wrong about the reason. The benefits of independent state constitutional law have little to do with expanding human rights and everything to do with federalism. The confusion is understandable; both individual rights …

White Paper: Options For A Treaty On Business And Human Rights, Douglass Cassel, Anita Ramasastry

Journal Articles

The United Nations Human Rights Council decided in June 2014 to establish an Intergovernmental Working Group to “elaborate an international legally binding instrument to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises.” The first meeting of the Working Group will take place in Geneva in July 2015.

The Council did not further specify what sort of instrument should be drafted. The Center for Human Rights of the American Bar Association and the Law Society of England and Wales have asked the present authors to prepare a “White Paper” on possible options for a …

Children, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

This chapter, which appears in The Cambridge Companion to International Criminal Law (William A. Schabas ed. 2016), discusses how international criminal law instruments and institutions address crimes against and affecting children. It contrasts the absence of express attention in the post-World War II era with the multiple provisions pertaining to children in the 1998 Statute of the International Criminal Court. The chapter examines key judgments in that court and in the Special Court for Sierra Leone, as well as the ICC’s current, comprehensive approach to the effects that crimes within its jurisdiction have on children. The chapter concludes with a …

The Problematic Applicability Of Subsidiarity To International Law, Paolo G. Carozza

Journal Articles

This article seeks to explore some of the reasons why the principle of subsidiarity, although applicable in some sectors of international law and particularly in the field of international human rights law, has difficulty in serving as a general principle of public international law more broadly. The obstacles to advancing a more robust understanding of subsidiarity's place in the current structure of global norms and institutions include: the normative and institutional fragmentation of international law; the continuing centrality of state sovereignty in the international legal system; and the endemic weaknesses and incapacity of states and sub-state communities with respect to …

International Legal Protections For Migrants And Refugees: A Response To Father Brennan, Mary Ellen O'Connell

Journal Articles

Father Brennan’s Essay, “Human Rights and the National Interest: The Case Study of Asylum, Migration, and National Border Protection,” is a complex legal and ethical analysis of refugee law. This Commentary focuses on one aspect of the international law relevant to the Essay, namely, state obligations to migrants. Father Brennan’s main argument that migrants and refugees may be turned back, so long as the action respects human rights law, is consistent with the human right to life. Justly stopping migrants and refugees requires states to stop them before they enter either international waters or the state’s territorial waters. Further, Father …