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No full textBook: Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity
This outstanding comprehensive sourcebook of the worst in human behavior throughout history also includes instances of some of the best responses. It is aimed at the adult general reader but will be valuable for both specialists and older students studying the destruction of a people. The editor and contributors are broadly representative of academic experts around the world, and some of them have had extensive involvement with the subject.
The 350 signed, well-documented entries, varying from 500 to 5,000 words, as appropriate, are arranged alphabetically. The topics comprise the diverse aspects of crimes against humanity--acts and consequences, cultural memory and representation, international institutions and laws. Each article is well written, balanced (such as the entry on the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps), and includes see also references and a bibliography. The set covers judicial decisions and events as recent as mid-2004. There is some overlap (for example, in treating different aspects of the crimes in the Balkans), but each entry is fresh and shows careful editing.
Every continent and likely every people have had their share of the crimes, and while the impact of the Nazi Holocaust drives much of the work, the editorial team has cast its net wide, encompassing, for example, less-known crimes against the Beothuk people in Newfoundland and Labrador. Birth and death dates of persons and specific dates of the crimes are given. Entries cover ancient and modern genocides, perpetrators and Victims, incitement and resistance, denial and documentation, international tribunals and national trials, and cultural aspects, such as the ways in which genocide intersects with music and dance. The work includes separate two-page entries on the atrocities at Carthage, Srebrenica, and Wounded Knee as well as concise biographies for individuals ranging from Klaus Barbie, chief of the gestapo in France, to Louise Arbor, chief prosecutor for the International Tribune for the Former Yugoslavia. Concluding the set are a glossary, an excellent filmography, 190 pages of primary sources (historical and international texts and judicial decisions), and an accurate index, which is supplemented by a topical list of entries. Black-and-white photos convey some of the horror of what humanity has wrought. The layout of this very accessible work is noteworthy.https://scholarship.stu.edu/faculty_book_chapters/1028/thumbnail.jp
The Poetics of Evidence: Some Applications From Law & Literature
No full textEvidence thus has force beyond any linear scheme of reasoning, and as its pieces come together a narrative gains momentum, with power not only to support conclusions but to sustain the willingness of jurors to draw the inferences, whatever they may be, necessary to reach an honest verdict .... Thus, the prosecution may fairly seek to place its evidence before the jurors, as much to tell a story of guiltiness as to support an inference of guilt .... A syllogism is not a story, and a naked proposition in a courtroom may be no match for the robust evidence that would be used to prove it. The above quotations seem astonishing at first glance. The Supreme Court, in the process of analyzing the 403 balancing test under the Federal Rules of Evidence, appears to be moving beyond a simple rationalist tradition by acknowledging the legitimacy of evidence that is beyond any linear scheme of reasoning. Even the most jaded legal reader must pause at such a phrase in a Supreme Court opinion. What could lie beyond linear reasoning? (Elliptical reasoning, perhaps?) What kind of force will such evidence have? (Emotional force, rather than logical force? The aesthetic force of a well-constructed narrative?) And what in heaven\u27s name is the Supreme Court doing by speaking approvingly of a prosecutor\u27s right to tell a story of guiltiness ? This sounds suspiciously as if the prosecutor is a creative fiction writer, rather than a rational, scientific presenter of proofs. Why not employ more sober, judicious phrasing, perhaps something along the lines of the right to present the evidence from which jurors could logically infer guilt ?But perhaps all this is not so astonishing after all. In Old Chief Justice Souter\u27s majority opinion underscores the importance of storytelling and narrative integrity as factors worthy of consideration in a 403 balancing of probative value versus prejudicial effect. And, of course, we get it. Evidentiary alternatives, such as stipulations, may be perfectly good evidence, but bad storytelling. We understand that the right to tell a richly detailed story at trial is crucial in persuading a jury. A good, juicy story is more than a match for a logical, dry syllogism any day. So what else is new? There has, in fact, always been a profound connection, a synergy between storytelling and law. There is a similar (although often unacknowledged) synergy between evidence and law and literature scholarship.In the same way that the Supreme Court\u27s comments on the role of narrative in Old Chief may at first strike us as perhaps radical or new, but then seem familiar, so, too, the affinities between evidence scholarship and the law and literature movement, which may at first seem tenuous, are in fact robust. The question is not so much whether there is a poetics of evidence, but rather, of what does it consist? This essay will suggest some possibilities for ways to begin thinking about a poetics of evidence, and attempt to make explicit some already implicit connections between evidence and law and literature.First, I will briefly define poetics, characterizing it generally as a form of narratology, or a particular interest in the techniques of story. Second, I will provide an overview of some of the existing evidence scholarship, which draws on literary theory or storytelling, and include some suggestions for future scholarship advancing a poetics of evidence. Third, I will borrow a page from the law as literature school, and read the Federal Rules of Evidence as a story. By reading the statute as a narrative (and looking at familiar material with new eyes), I hope to advance the ongoing scholarly conversation concerning how to interpret the Federal Rules. I argue that identifying potential themes and plots in the Rules can assist us in imagining interpretive possibilities for this sometimes vexing statute. In particular, identifying the thematic heart of the rules assists us in envisioning a certain kind of interpretive argument: an argument for flexibility and organic growth of evidence law, and a reminder to think of the Rules holistically
Human Capabilities and Human Authorities: A Comment on Martha Nussbaum\u27s Women and Human Development
No full textIn these comments, I want to fill in that gap. I will highlight and then amplify what I think is missing or underplayed in Nussbaum\u27s treatment of capabilities and women, and that is the role that authority plays-and the role it should and should not play-in guiding states toward a recognition of their obligation to nurture, promote, or protect women\u27s-and men\u27s and children\u27s-human capabilities
Revisiting the Impact of California\u27s Mandatory Custody Mediation Program on Victims of Domestic Violence through a Feminist Positionality Lens
No full textIn 1981, California became the first state in the country to enact mandatory child custody mediation legislation. Today, all family law cases, even those with histories or allegations of domestic violence, are subject to mediation. The legislative intent in promulgating the mandatory custody mediation program was noble. The program was designed to reduce animosity between parents, develop agreements that keep children\u27s best interests paramount, and allow children close and continuing contact with both their parents. However, the question of whether mediation is an appropriate process to use in cases of domestic violence has been widely debated. A significant amount of the criticism on the mandatory custody mediation legislation was generated when California\u27s mandatory mediation laws and programs were nascent and few measures had been taken to protect the victims of domestic violence engaging in the mediation process from further emotional and physical abuse. Among the original critics were a number of feminist legal scholars and advocates for the legal rights of victims of domestic violence? While opposition persists, a review of relevant state laws and Rules of Court show that California has made substantial progress in developing a mandatory custody mediation process that protects the rights of victims of domestic violence. This article employs the feminist legal methodology of positionality to analyze California\u27s mandatory custody mediation program. It posits that the program offers victims of domestic violence a necessary alternative to the traditional dispute resolution system. It opines that a number of the harms originally assigned to the coupling of mandatory mediation and domestic violence in the context of the California Family Court system have been eliminated, mitigated, or should be reconsidered from a new standpoint. In addition, this article concedes that California\u27s mandatory custody mediation program still poses certain threats to victims of domestic violence and advocates for changes in California\u27s approach to the use of mediation in domestic violence cases. Part I of this article looks at the five categories of arguments against court-mandated mediation in family law cases with histories or allegations of domestic violence. Part II looks at California\u27s legislative and judicial response to these concerns. Part III introduces positionality as a feminist method of legal analysis and applies it to an analysis of California\u27s mandatory custody mediation program, and Part IV offers suggestions from a positional standpoint on the changes that should be made to California\u27s mandatory custody mediation system
Improving Education-Delivery in the Twenty-First Century
No full textDean Mary Kay Kane has really put her finger on what law librarians need to do to promote the law school of the future. But I will dare to venture a step further and assert that legal education is in serious trouble right now because of the disconnect between advancements in technology and the continuing, almost exclusive, attachment of law school faculties to the Langdellian tradition. My exploration of the vital role law librarians can play in addressing this problem also will lead me to touch on the nature of the tenure and promotion standards and process for law library directors in the latter part of this article. T2 Law library directors are certainly the leaders in most law schools when it comes to understanding the world of technology. They are the ones who usually are the most technologically proficient and the most aggressive in pushing for change in the use of technology. Law professors for the most part still operate under the same format for teaching in the classroom that existed in the time of Harvard Law School Dean Christopher Langdell. The Socratic method championed by Langdell still dominates the methodology for analysis and discussion of cases in a face-to-face engagement, if not confrontation, with the student. While faculty have exercised great creativity in the substance of their presentations, the format itself has not changed. Therefore, it is up to the law librarian to nudge the law professor away from this nineteenth-century tradition toward the new future that we now face
Between Reality and Rhetoric: The Epistemic Schism in the Recognition of Traditional Medicine in International Law
No full textThis article is divided into five parts. The foregoing Part I, a brief introduction, highlights a few contemporary policy issues in the discourse about TM in international law and public health arenas. It identifies the epistemic schism between TM and the allopathic system as being at the root of the grandiose policy of integrating TM into national health systems. Premised on a multi-juridical framework, Part II examines select international legal and quasi-legal instruments, and probes the extent to which they make provisions for the protection of TM. Part III evaluates the international policy regime on TM, specifically as championed by the WHO, by examining the WHO\u27s TM program. Part IV evaluates state practices in the context of national cultures and amongst constituent peoples and belief systems as they relate to TM in an attempt to situate its worldwide status. Part V is a perspective on the paradigmatic divergence between TM and Western biomedicine as well as their underlying theories of illness which is central to the epistemic schism. The conclusion re-sketches the central theme of the article, affirming, I contend, that TM attracts adequate recognition in the international law and policy framework reviewed. However, for undermining the epistemic question posed, discussions and policies about TM have limited consequence for effective medical pluralism and consequently the optimization of humanity\u27s ability to tackle the burden of illness. The continued undermining of TM by the allopathic episteme fosters the reductionist assimilation of TM. A realistic future for TM is one linked to addressing the epistemic question. That question needs to be the focus of the discussions about TM in the context of global public health policy
Semblances of Sovereignty: The Constitution, The State, and American Citizenship, T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Harvard University Press, 2002. PP. 223
No full textA major contribution to the contemporary thinking about immigration, citizenship, and assimilation is offered by Georgetown Law Center Law Professor T. Alexander Aleinikoff in his recent volume, Semblances of Sovereignty: The Constitution, the State, and American Citizenship. The book helps to advance the immigration debate and define what it means to be an American. Aleinikoff paints with broad theoretical strokes with academics in mind. Relying on theory, he asks readers to consider how the court has treated the issue of citizenship and how it has defined its boundaries and limitations. He also addresses the reasons why traditional notions of immigrant citizens need to be re-conceptualized. Semblances of Sovereignty provides an in-depth discussion of the rights and obligations of citizenship and offers an ambitious schematic for social change
Unhappy Anniversary - Thirty Years since Miller v. California: The Legacy of the Supreme Court\u27s Misjudgement on Obscenity
No full textIf it is true, as Aristotle suggested, that man is by nature a political animal, the current state of American society demonstrates, to any who might doubt the proposition, that man is equally, if not more so, a sexual one. With successive blessings by the Supreme Court, and so, with legal and social impunity, the companion American realms of commerce and entertainment are now thoroughly suffused with images of an openly sexual nature and purpose. These images, generated with conscious calculation and without discrimination as to the age or interest of potential recipients, are employed primarily for pecuniary purpose-that is, to engage prospective patrons and to sustain existing ones. With the invention of the Internet and the universal presence of the personal computer, electronic links that provide free and immediate access to such images, now reach daily, nay, hourly, into virtually every home and office of these, the former United Colonies, now known as the United States. The year 2003 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Supreme Court\u27s holding in Miller v. California, the judicial decision that solidified the rule of law confirming the legal status of obscenity in American society. However, considering the profoundly adverse, indeed, radically transformative consequences of the decision for the United States, it would seem to be an anniversary better suited for national mourning rather than, as it must be for some, a cause for private celebration. For the Miller opinion, unsuccessfully challenged and unscathed these past thirty years, holds the regrettable distinction of having unwittingly paved the way for the successful establishment of prostitution, mediated through still and motion picture cameras, as a thoroughly conventional, and now, pervasive cameras, as a thoroughly conventional, and now, pervasive institution in American society
Front Matter
No full textFront Matter includes Masthead and Table of Contents for St. Thomas Law Review Volume 16, Issue 2, Winter 2003
Prenatal Tort Law and the Personhood of the Unborn Child: A Separate Legal Existence
No full textThis article will examine the state of prenatal tort and wrongful death law at the time the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade and compare such examination to Justice Blackmun\u27s assessment of it in his Roe opinion. Justice Blackmun\u27s opinion in Roe v. Wade briefly takes up the area of prenatal tort law wherein he discusses some of the (allegedly) inchoate rights of the unborn: In areas other than criminal abortion, the law has been reluctant to endorse any theory that life, as we recognize it, begins before life birth or to accord legal rights to the unborn except in narrowly defined situations and except when the rights are contingent upon life birth. For example, the traditional rule of tort law denied recovery for prenatal injuries even though the child was born alive. That rule has been changed in almost every jurisdiction. In most States, recovery is said to be permitted only if the fetus was viable, or at least quick, when the injuries were sustained, though few courts have squarely so held. In a recent development, generally opposed by the commentators, some States permit the parents of a stillborn child to maintain an action for wrongful death because of prenatal injuries. Such an action, however, would appear to be one to vindicate the parents\u27 interest and is thus consistent with the view that the fetus, at most, represents only the potentiality of life. Having struck down this straw man, Blackmun concludes, [i]n short, the unborn have never been recognized in the law as persons in the whole sense. As the reader can see from the foregoing, Blackmun indirectly cited the cases from William Prosser\u27s The Law of Torts ( Prosser ) and an article from the American Law Reports, Annotation, Action for Death of Unborn Child ( ALR ), and then he cited those two articles and a third one by William Maledon, Th\u27e Law and the Unborn Child: The Legal and Logical Inconsistencies from the Notre Dame Lawyer ( Maledon ). The development of prenatal tort law case history and the change of the traditional rule of tort law, as presented in both the cases and the legal writings, will be thoroughly scrutinized in this article-a change which William Prosser described it as up till that time the most spectacular abrupt reversal of a well settled rule in the whole history of the law of torts. The purpose of this article is not just to challenge Blackmun\u27s understanding of prenatal tort law. Rather, the issues presented in this area of law are of stunning consequences with far-reaching implications affecting and affecting the legal status of unborn children at the time Roe was decided. How so? Consider the case, Dietrich v. Northampton, which came to stand for the traditional rule of tort law. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. decided Dietrich when he was a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice. Holmes held that a fetus at five months of gestation was just part of its mother and had no separate legal existence.9 Consequently, even though the fetus survived a few minutes after a premature birth, as a result of prenatal injuries, its estate could not recover under the wrongful death statute. Dietrich was a very influential decision and was to be followed in nearly every jurisdiction for the next sixty years. So much so that the 4th edition of Black\u27s Law Dictionary (the edition that was in circulation at the time Roe was promulgated) cited to Dietrich in its definition of the word person: [a] child en ventre sa mere is not a person. Now then, if at the time Roe was written the traditional rule of tort law, exemplified by Dietrich, had been changed in almost every jurisdiction, would that mean that almost every jurisdiction had conversely recognized the unborn child as a person ? Yes, exactly! Forty-eight states had recognized the unborn child as being a separate legal entity from his mother at the time of Blackmun\u27s opinion in Roe. Section I will examine a number of cases that laid the groundwork for rejecting Dietrich and Section II will study the cases that did repudiate Dietrich. Then, in Section III, the treatises Blackmun cited will be reviewed and his treatment of them critiqued and will be found woefully inadequate. Indeed, it is this author\u27s belief that the reader will be left with the distinct impression that Blackmun intentionally misstated the law. Why Blackmun dissembled in reviewing prenatal tort and wrongful death law will become apparent in Section IV, wherein the personhood issue is more fully discussed