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Economic Rationality and Ethical Values in Design-Defect Analysis: The Trolley Problem and Autonomous Vehicles
Get PDFPropping up Corporate Crime with Corporate Character
No full textIn his article, Clockwork Corporations: A Character Theory of Corporate Punishment, 103 Iowa. L. Rev. 507 (2018), Mihailis Diamantis champions character theory as a justification for corporate punishment. According to Diamantis, character theory more usefully guides corporate punishment than either deterrence or retribution. The idea is to identify the supposed character flaw that caused a given corporate violation, and then to rehabilitate the corporation by addressing that flaw.At first glance, Diamantis’s rehabilitative approach appears relatively straightforward. For a corporate crime that is “out of character,” the judicial response might be rather measured; for one that evidences an “errant disposition,” however, the response might escalate into a searching review of corporate policies or an overhaul of the corporation’s internal functions. As Diamantis’s argument makes clear, “character” in this context refers to more than just culture; it also encompasses the corporation’s internal structure, policies and rules.Diamantis’s account is at once engaging and attractive. There remain, however, good reasons for skepticism. First, in many cases, a fact-finder will establish – at best – only a murky connection between a corporation’s character flaws and a specific instance of wrongdoing. As such, the cure may often be less helpful than we anticipate. Moreover, character theory is, in many respects, incomplete. It tells us how to sentence the corporation for its crime, but it declines to say why a corporation is criminally liable in the first place
Legal Pluralism and the Threat to Human Rights in the New Plurinational State of Bolivia
Get PDFBolivia, the chronically poor, landlocked Andean country has long seen its indigenous populations marginalized, languishing in underdevelopment. Spanish colonialists destroyed any vestige of the vibrant, complex civilization that existed in the region – including the religious, political and legal systems in place for centuries. In December 2005, Evo Morales Ayma was the first elected President of indigenous descent. After leading the changes in the country’s Constitution, Morales continued to rule Bolivia until the writing of this Article. The New Political Constitution of Plurinational State of Bolivia of 2009 and a national law for community justice, signed into law by Morales, provided the foundations for a legally pluralistic judicial system – one in which traditional customary law works in parallel with a more Western-styled system. While the right of self- determination and indigenous autonomy are promoted with this bifurcated system of justice, there are many challenges to the international human rights standards to which Bolivia has acceded as part of its participation in the United Nations and Inter-American international legal systems.
This Article lays out the many treaty regimes of which Bolivia is a member and the ways in which Bolivian customary law allowing for indigenous traditions violates Bolivia’s international legal obligations. The final part of the Article provides a brief survey of legal pluralistic projects in other countries around the world and the ongoing struggle in balancing the right of self-determination for Indigenous Peoples with international human rights standards and protections
When Death Becomes Murder: A Primer on Extrajudicial Killing
Get PDFInternational law prohibits the arbitrary deprivation of life, which includes extrajudicial killing. This norm is codified in every major human rights treaty and has attained jus cogens status as a non-derogable norm in international law. In the United States, the Torture Victim Protection Act ( TVPA ) establishes civil liability for extrajudicial killing. As evidenced in the TVPA\u27s text and legislative history, the definition of extrajudicial killing is based on international law. Despite the clear meaning of the TVPA\u27s text and the clarity of international law, the TVPA\u27s definition of extrajudicial killing is still contested in litigation, and some courts express uncertainty about its meaning. This raises a simple question: what constitutes an extrajudicial killing? This Article reviews the status of extrajudicial killing and clarifies its discrete elements under international law. It then considers the status of extrajudicial killings in the case of Mamani v. Berzain, a TVPA case involving the responsibility of the former President and Defense Minister of Bolivia for the killing of civilians in a 2003 government crackdown
The Global Problem of Bisexual Erasure in Litigation and Jurisprudence
No full textAs the rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexual people, and transgender people (“LGBT rights”) have received increasing protections across the globe in recent years, so-called gay marriage and other gay issues, and, more recently, transgender issues, have been prominent in recent legal discourse. In contrast, bisexuality has too often been omitted from legal rights discourse, with bisexual people who are barely acknowledged in LGBT-rights litigation and discourse beyond the minimal inclusion of the letter B in the acronym LGBT. This article examines the problem of bisexual invisibility and erasure within LGBT-rights litigation and legal discourse around the world. Although exposing the problem of bisexual erasure in the legal world, the article also addresses the question this issue always seems to beg when it is raised: why bisexual erasure even matters. The harms of bisexual erasure, including those that can take tragic root in court decisions grounded in misunderstandings about bisexuality, are manifold and are addressed herein along with some potential solutions and next steps toward improving bisexual inclusion in litigation and jurisprudence
Radical Feminist Harms on Sex Workers
Get PDFSex work has long been a site for contesting womanhood, sexuality, race, and patriarchy. Its very existence forces us to examine how we think about two very dirty subjects-money and sex. The radical feminist literature highlights the problems with sex work and often describes it as a form of human trafficking and violence against women. This influential philosophy underlies much of the work in human trafficking courts, was evident in a letter signed by several Hollywood starlets in opposition to Amnesty International\u27s support for decriminalization, and is the premise of several movies and documentaries about sex slavery. Radical feminists aim to abolish sex work but argue that only sex work purchasers should be criminalized for engaging in it. They are concerned with the structural harms of sex work and have formed alliances with groups that oppose sex work due to moralistic reasons. Like radical feminism, this Article considers the structural harms of sex work in assessing whether it should be criminalized.
However, this Article arrives at a very different conclusion and challenges the radical feminist approach to sex work, arguing that the harms of any form of criminalization, particularly to individuals with intersectional identities, are overlooked in much of the radical feminist literature on sex work. This Article incorporates empirical research from nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Johannesburg, South Africa, to illustrate the ways that criminalizing any aspect of the sex work transaction, including the demand-side, is problematic. By recognizing that some sex workers face the effects of multiple systems of oppression and that the criminal justice system has often been a source of oppression for these individuals, this Article argues that decriminalization should be the favored approach for those interested in improving the lives of sex workers. Moreover, the essentialist framing of the harms of sex work in the radical feminist literature is itself a reproduction of patriarchy and white supremacy, silencing the voices and experiences of sex workers themselves
