Digital Collections @ Suffolk
Not a member yet
8574 research outputs found
Sort by
Bearing Witness: Testimony and Transitional Justice in the Aftermath of Mass Violence
Full text linkThe act of telling one’s story in a post-conflict setting—whether as a witness testifying in a criminal trial, recounting events before a truth commission, or speaking up at a community meeting—demands resolution and courage. This chapter explores the role testimony plays in transitional justice processes after mass violence. Psychological, social, and political factors, as well as the nature of the violence itself, influence witness testimony and memorialisation. Collective memories of violence evolve as societies pass through processes of social reconstruction and community reckoning. The chapter provides guidance to court investigators and researchers about the complexities of survivors’ testimonies and the risks and ethical obligations of doing fieldwork in post-conflict settings
Suffolk Journal, vol.86, no. 11, 2/15/2023
Full text linkhttps://dc.suffolk.edu/journal/2350/thumbnail.jp
Flipped Constitutional Supremacy: Inferior Local Law Blocking Federal Policy
Full text linkCongress enacted the massive 2021 Infrastructure law and to construct what President Biden calls the “most significant long-term investment in our infrastructure and competitiveness in nearly a century.” However, this unprecedented federal climate change infrastructure policy is eclipsed by municipal governments ’zoning out’ this sustainable infrastructure. Recent Supreme Court precedent upholding the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution reserves for each of 35,000 separate U.S. cities and towns exclusive control over what sustainable infrastructure will or will not be sited on their land. Hundreds of cities and town already have enacted ‘aesthetic’ zoning to prevent sustainable infrastructure, notwithstanding supposedly preemptive federal climate policy requiring expedited implementation of these renewable technologies./= / \u3e/= / \u3eThis article analyzes local ‘aesthetic’ zoning laws constructing impassible bottlenecks to federally-mandated Biden sustainable Infrastructure. This article analyzes the Supreme Court’s most recent opinion and federal court precedent preventing the federal government from preempting local and state land-use regulation regarding nationally mandated sustainable infrastructure. This article analyzes each of the 50 states’ infrastructure siting laws: Concluding that 90 percent of U.S. states have not exercised state authority to preempt or override their local cities’ land-use controls./= / \u3e/= / \u3eMunicipal governments now exercise final approval on, and veto over, siting the sustainable technology embodied in the Biden sustainable infrastructure law. This article designs 6 innovative alternative mechanisms within existing U.S. law to circumvent local ‘aesthetic’ zoning barricades now blocking sustainable infrastructure, to be available within the short time-frame of the 2035 net-zero carbon Biden infrastructure commitment
A Historical Evaluation of the Position of the United States on Genocide Designations: Framing Implications for Xinjiang
Full text linkThis paper evaluates the historical stances of the United States with the international norm against genocide. It further examines how U.S. positions in precedent cases of genocide may help frame the U.S. response to the current crisis in Xinjiang, China. This paper reviews the historical record of the instances when the U.S. government has designated past atrocities to be considered genocides, and identifies patterns of continuity and change in the decision-making process of the U.S. This work then applies the theories of liberalism, constructivism, and realism to interpret the actions of the United States when deciding to recognize genocide formally.
Using this historical framing allows for the discussion and exploration of the motivations and implications of the U.S. decision to call the ongoing violence in Xinjiang a genocide. This decision highlights the ongoing tension between the international norm against genocide and the legal definition of genocide. This paper finds that while the U.S. is affected by both continuity and change in its relationship to genocide, its current acknowledgment of genocide in Xinjiang more strongly reflects a change in the historical relationship of the U.S. to genocide designations
Heterotopia as a site of resistance in a global city: How informal practices can subvert the state and finance capital
Full text linkDavid Harvey and Michel Foucault have both theorized the concept “heterotopia” as a site of resistance. In this site, “informal” and mundane activities are enacted to resist measures and practices imposed by the state and finance capital. To Harvey, heterotopia is constituted by acts, affects, and meaning-making among residents in an urban space. To Foucault, heterotopia is formed when the wrong people showing up in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. Both senses of heterotopia threaten spaces that the state designed to maximize capital flows in a global city.
Hong Kong is a good case study because recent crises such as the anti-extradition protests and COVID-19 lockdown have probed local populations to build a heterotopia to counter curtailed political, economic, cultural, and physical freedoms. Local residents adopted informal practices to challenge what space and time mean. Some examples are leaving post-it notes in public places that asked passersby to pause their daily commute; residents building informal networks of face mask production and distribution that interfere with the market.
Informal activities form a heterotopia with multiple spatialities and temporalities. Space issimultaneously physical and imaginary, material and digital. In this space, time is objective, relational, as well as subjective. These multiple spatialities and temporalities enable a more sustainable future for local residentsby unsettling one meaning of space and time in a global city
Lawyering Somewhere Between Computation and the Will to Act: A Digital Age Reflection
Full text linkThis is a reflection on machine and human contributions to lawyering in the digital age. Increasingly capable machines can already unleash massive processing power on vast stores of discovery and research data to assess relevancies and, at times, to predict legal outcomes. At the same time, there is wide acceptance, at least among legal academics, of the conclusions from behavioral psychology that slow, deliberative “System 2” thinking (perhaps replicated computationally) needs to control the heuristics and biases to which fast, intuitive “System 1” thinking is prone. Together, those trends portend computational deliberation – artificial intelligence or machine learning – substituting for human thinking in more and more of a lawyer’s professional functions./= / \u3e/= / \u3eYet, unlike machines, human lawyers are self-reproducing automata. They can perceive purposes and have a will to act, characteristics that resist easy scientific explanation. For all its power, computational intelligence is unlikely to evolve intuition, insight, creativity, and the will to change the objective world, characteristics as human as System 1 thinking’s heuristics and biases. We therefore need to be circumspect about the extent to which we privilege System 2-like deliberation (particularly that which can be replicated computationally) over uniquely human contributions to lawyering: those mixed blessings like persistence, passion, and the occasional compulsiveness
Equilibrium State of an Electron-positron Pair
Full text linkIt is shown that a stable electron-positron pair can exist and be in equilibrium, without recombining. The unlike charges in the electron-positron pair are held apart from each other near the equilibrium position where the attractive Coulomb’s force between unlike charges and the repelling force between the spin magnetic moments balance out each other. An electron-positron pair can be considered as an oscillator consisting of two masses on a spring. The calculations of the equilibrium distance and the effective “spring constant” of an electron-positron pair are presented. We suggest that free space might be a network of interacting electrons and positrons (the matter and antimatter particles) bounded together but held from recombining by the combination of the attractive Coulomb’s forces and the repelling magnetic forces between electrons and positrons
Ford Hall Youth Forum program advertising Syphilis: Our Oldest Public Enemy, undated
Full text linkFlyer for Ford Hall Youth Forum lecture with Dr. M.A. Nelson, held at Ashburton Place at Bowdoin Street, on Wednesday, November 17th, unknown year. Transcription: Concerning ourselves with more colorful problems, we have been allowing a dangerous enemy to make gigantic inroads. Syphilis, long nurtured by hypocrisy and false morality, has become one of the most prevalent diseases in the country. Today, one out of every ten citizens is its victim. The Youth Forum takes this opportunity of presenting a discussion of the social and economic, as well as medical, aspects of this disease. Dr. M. A. Nelson, outstanding authority on this subject, is a member of the faculties of Harvard, Tufts, and Simmons. Youthful, alert, and forceful, he has earned an enviable reputation as a speaker on syphilis. Dr. Nelson\u27s presentation will be non-medicalhttps://dc.suffolk.edu/fhf-docs/1001/thumbnail.jp