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A Firm Pillar of Local Justice: The Failures of the New York Town and Village Justice Courts Supporting Statewide Adoption of the District Court Model
Get PDFTown and village justice courts have been the center of municipal law, both civil and criminal, since the mid-nineteenth century. However, in the modern world, they have become corrupt, poorly managed institutions, creating issues involving procedural integrity and civil rights. In order to remedy these failures and modernize the New York State Unified Court System, state legislators must look to the district court model as it currently exists in Nassau and Eastern Suffolk Counties. The district court model offers several benefits, including the imposition of educational and experiential requirements for judges, the creation of internal and external oversight institutions, the expansion of jurisdiction for local judges, and increased transparency in records and court dealings. By creating such a centralized, professionalized system of municipal courts, oversight can be expanded, procedural uniformity can be promoted, and basic civil rights now left unguarded or outright denied by justice courts can be protected. Moreover, to preserve the spirit of democratically elected local judicial offices, the Vermont justice of the peace model may be adopted in New York, creating popularly elected positions responsible for handling key local functions, such as giving oaths of office, solemnizing marriages, and hearing tax appeals. By moving away from the unwieldy, outdated town and village justice court regime, New York can catch up with a growing number of similarly minded states, move forward with its efforts to reform the justice system, and ensure that fair local justice is guaranteed to all New Yorkers—not just those living downstate
Iranian Music Censorship & International Human Rights Law
Get PDFThe 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran saw sweeping changes in the country’s cultural policies, including the restriction of nearly all types of musical production. Today, the music production environment in Iran remains incredibly hostile to all but a select few. Iran’s government prohibits the production of most types of music and routinely prosecutes musicians. This Note seeks to examine the ways in which the existing U.N. framework for promoting musician’s rights fails to apply to the situation in Iran. Despite Iran being a signatory to the foundational UN Human Rights treaties, the country routinely flouts these rights. This Note argues that while the UN is making changes to the way it classifies and defends cultural rights, these changes will take time. In the interim, this Note proposes there are several measures the international community may take to mitigate the repression of musician’s rights in Iran and elsewhere
Venezuelan Prisons\u27 Human Rights Violations and Suggested Reforms Based on the Success of Norway\u27s Restorative Justice-Focused Approach to Incarceration
Get PDFVenezuela holds the title for having the highest crime index in the world, serving as a microcosm of the country’s widespread and devastating political and humanitarian inadequacies. Its prisons are rife with deadly disease, severe overcrowding, and starving prisoners whose entry into these facilities calls into question their guaranteed human rights under the Venezuelan Constitution. This Note highlights these injustices and argues that the starvation, physical and mental abuse, and extreme neglect that Venezuela’s prisoners are subject to, violate the protection of their guaranteed human rights under Articles 46 and 83 of Venezuela’s Constitution. A comparative analysis of Norway, which has one of the lowest rates of recidivism and follows a restorative justice-focused approach to incarceration, is offered as a progressive model for Venezuela to follow
The Law of License Plates and Other Inevitabilities of Free Speech Context Sensitivity
Get PDFThis article, written for a symposium on Ronald Collins’s and Professor David Hudson’s catalogue of the Roberts Court’s First Amendment free speech jurisprudence, reconsiders the longstanding tension between rigid free speech rules and more contextual standards. It examines that debate by considering a set of relatively recent free speech cases in which the Court ostensibly adopted rigid rules, but in doing so arguably cloaked its reliance on more contextual factors by manipulating those rules. In cases dealing with national security and judicial electoral speech, the Court manipulated the strict scrutiny the Court insists applies to nearly every content-based speech restriction by, respectively, hiding the formal statement of the standard it was applying and applying strict scrutiny in a decidedly non-strict way. In deciding a compelled speech case involving a state requirement that anti-abortion pregnancy clinics post notices about the state’s provision of low-cost abortion services, the Court flirted with extending the content-neutrality rule to nearly all compelled speech situations, but provided a vague and unexplained carve-out to that all-but announced rule. Finally, in deciding a case involving a state specialty license plate program, the Court adopted a rigid government speech/private speech binary rather than recognizing that the program featured elements of both government and private speech. This critique is not intended to deny the appropriateness of rigid First Amendment rules. However, the Roberts Court’s expansion of those rules’ domain threatens to erase any recognition of the context -specificity that plays a necessary role in any coherent, transparent, and truly principled system of First Amendment adjudication. Justice White, writing the majority opinion in a 1981 First Amendment case involving restrictions on billboards, pithily observed, “we deal here with the law of billboards.” So too, it may behoove the Court to develop a law of specialty license plates—and many other context-specific doctrines as well
Karmel’s Dissent: The SEC’s Use and Occasional Misuse of Section 21(a) Reports of Investigation
Get PDFSection 21(a) of the Securities Exchange Act gives the SEC the option of publishing a report of its findings after conducting an investigation. Typically, the SEC issues such reports about once a year to highlight major compliance and enforcement issues. This Article examines the SEC’s use of Section 21(a) investigative reports with special attention to its 1979 report in Spartek, where Commissioner Roberta Karmel filed a famous dissent. In that opinion, she argued that the report effectively sanctioned conduct over which the SEC did not have jurisdiction and that Spartek did not have sufficient notice of its regulatory obligations. While such concerns have not been at issue in most Section 21(a) reports of investigation, they were recently raised by the SEC’s report in DAO, which analyzed whether a digital token was a security under the Howey test. While the SEC’s conclusion was reasonable, it was a close call, and the report did little to clarify the scope of the SEC’s jurisdiction over tokens. The SEC should be cautious in using reports of investigation to define its own jurisdiction and should actively seek adjudication to confirm the scope of its authority
