Alabama Law Scholarly Commons - The University of Alabama
Not a member yet
1539 research outputs found
Sort by
Kant, Constitutionalism and Systems of Constitutional Justice in Europe and Beyond
No full textIn A Cosmopolitan Legal Order: Kant, Constitutional Justice, and the ECHR, we sought to demonstrate the power of Kantian theory to explain – or at least meaningfully illuminate – (1) the defining characteristics of modern, rights-based constitutionalism; (2) the evolving law, politics and constitutional architecture of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR); and (3) the emergence of a global, cosmopolitan commons, featuring inter-judicial dialogue at its core. This article responds to contributors to the special symposium on the book. In Part I, we defend our account of a Kantian-congruent, domestic system of constitutional justice. Part II reflects on the ECHR as an instantiation of a cosmopolitan legal order, and on the European Court’s case law – particularly its enforcement of the proportionality principle. In Part III, we assess the evidence in support of a broader ‘constitutionalization’ of international human rights law
Reclaiming Black Dignity
Get PDFAs American society seeks to institute police reforms in the wake of the protests following George Floyd\u27s murder, the imperative to include communities that have been disproportionately victimized by police in those reform processes becomes increasingly apparent. For members of these communities, questions of police reform implicate not only physical violence, but violations of human dignity itself. When police discriminate against individuals from a particular community, they enact a dignity taking on that community and claim that dignity for themselves. Therefore, for reform to be meaningful, the dignity taken by the police must be restored to the communities it was taken from. This can be achieved by excluding the police and their unions from the reform process, creating elected civilian review boards with the power to fire, and removing an assortment of police privileges
Health Justice Strategies to Eradicate Lead Poisoning: An Urgent Call to Safeguard Future Generations
Get PDFDespite over a century of evidence that lead is a neurotoxin that causes irreparable harm, today, lead continues to pervade children\u27s environments and remains a constant threat to health and wellbeing. One in three homes across the United States housing children under the age of six has significant lead-based paint hazards that place occupants at risk of permanent neurological harm and lifelong poor health risks. Federal, state, and local governments must use a range of primary prevention strategies in order to fully eradicate the risks and protect children from lead poisoning. This Article provides a comprehensive examination of best practices for addressing lead poisoning and proposes urgent reform measures at the local and state levels. Successful interventions ultimately prioritize health justice strategies and rely on community ownership and cross-sector participation; dedicate significant resources and funding to completely eliminate lead in the environment; and prioritize primary prevention practices that identify lead-based paint hazards before children are exposed
ALL-CAPS
No full textA hallmark of consumer contracts is their use of long blocks of capitalized text. These “all-caps” clauses are meant to alert consumers to nonstandard, risky, or important aspects of the transaction that would otherwise be hidden in the fine print. Based on a belief in the power of all-caps, courts will often deny enforcement of many key terms—such as warranty disclaimers, liability releases, arbitration clauses, and automatic billing—unless they are presented in all-caps. This article is the first to empirically examine the effectiveness of all-caps. Using an experimental methodology, the article finds that all-caps fail to appreciably improve consent. Moreover, some evidence suggests that all-caps are harmful to older consumers. We collect evidence from standard form agreements used by the largest companies in the United States and find that, despite its limitations, three-quarters of consumer contracts contain at least one all-caps paragraph. Based on these findings and other evidence reported here, this article lays out the dangers and risks of continued reliance on all-caps and calls for abandoning all-caps
Paying for Pretrial Detention
Get PDFAmerican criminal law vastly overuses pretrial detention even as it purports to presume defendants innocent. This Article compares financial incentives in pretrial detention to those in civil preliminary injunctions. Both are procedures where one of the parties seeks relief before judgment. And yet, these two procedures employ financial incentives in opposite ways. Civil procedure discourages interim relief by requiring plaintiffi to bear financial risk when they obtain a preliminary injunction. Criminal law does the opposite-encouraging interim relief by requiring defendants to pay to avoid pretrial detention. The reasons that civil procedure relies on financial incentives to discourage requests for interim relief-to avoid undue settlement pressure and compensate for losses inflicted on defendants because of hasty procedure-apply with at least as much force in criminal law. Thus, this Article contends that employing diametrically opposed approaches to interim relief in the two systems is not justifiable.
This disparity is troubling because it better protects the property rights of the wealthy over the liberty rights of the poor. Perhaps this troubling disparity should not be altogether surprising, however, because it embodies well-recognized pathologies in criminal law. The incentive disparity is one more way in which criminal law allows prosecutors not to bear the full costs of their decisions and averts the budget discipline that could constrain prosecutors-a variant of the correctional free lunch. This Article brings together several different strands of criminal law literature under the correctional free lunch umbrella while adding the financial incentive disparity regarding interim relief as yet one more correctional free lunch. Lastly, the comparative lens provides further support for widespread concern that criminal law is racist and classist because the financial incentive disparity tracks predictable disparities in race, wealth, and power between the civil and criminal systems