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Why is There No Social Citizenship in Puerto Rico? The Demise of Section 20
Get PDFPart I will define T.H. Marshall’s theory of citizenship rights and explain how that framework pertains to the denial of social welfare rights in Puerto Rico’s constitution. It will also delineate the larger context of social welfare in the United States using the contract versus charity paradigm posited by two historians, New School Professor Nancy Fraser and New York University Professor Linda Gordon. Part II will explore the legislative history of the Puerto Rican Constitution at the Puerto Rican Constitutional Convention and the U.S. Congress debates following the convention. Part III will examine the ramifications of the removal of Section 20 to the present day and offer policy recommendations to at least begin to remedy the worst of Puerto Rico’s economic ills. The trajectory of Puerto Rico’s economy is inextricably tied to its political status and the broader right to self-determination which prompted Public Law 600. Therefore, Part III will also briefly consider Puerto Rico’s political status and which option might best serve the aims of social welfare and the realization of social citizenship
Hudson earns Community Leadership Award
Get PDFEmpathetic. Driven. Supportive. Engaged.
Those are just a few of the many adjectives nominators used to describe Nashuba Hudson, the recipient of the 2024 Student Leadership in Fostering Community and Inclusiveness Award. Hudson, a 3L from Chicago, was presented the award today (Aug. 16) as part of the concluding events of this year’s 1L Orientation.
Established in 2018, the award, which comes with a $2,000 scholarship, celebrates a student who “goes above and beyond to foster our diverse, inclusive, supportive, and welcoming community.” Recipients are honored for their work in the previous year.
Hudson is the first Black woman to hold the editor-in-chief position of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies and is past-president of the award-winning Black Law Students Association
Thusi selected as John Hope Franklin Prize recipient
Get PDFThe Law and Society Association will honor an Indiana University Maurer School of Law professor this week at its 2024 Annual Meeting in Denver from June 6-9.
Professor India Thusi will receive the John Hope Franklin Prize, recognizing exceptional scholarship in the field of Race, Racism and the Law.
Thusi’s winning work, “The Racialized History of Vice Policing,” was published in the UCLA Law Review in 2023.
“The article provides an enduring scholarly contribution at the intersection of policing, abolition, and legal history,” according to the LSA. “Thusi adopts an abolitionist framework and provides a much-needed analysis of vice policing as a mechanism to sustain racism and racialized marginalization. This well-written and compelling article is the beginning of a rich and important project that will continue to open up new avenues in research on race, racism, and law for years to come.
Alternative Routes for Military Grievance
Get PDFOnce a country experiences a coup, that country is likely to experience another coup within six years and, since 1950, there have been at least 240 military coups. On average, about half of all coup attempts involve fatalities, with most resulting in governmental and civilian deaths. So, once a country experiences a coup, it is statistically likely that another coup will expose citizens to more uncertainty about their safety. For a citizen whose country has experienced a recent coup, this data is alarming as an incident of one coup starts the stopwatch for another coup occurring within a few years.
This paper contributes to this underdeveloped area of constitutional design by proposing a framework for the constitutional contextualization of military provisions so that constitutions can better respond to coups. Specifically, this paper focuses on the constitutional contextualization of military provisions for countries with a history of recurring military coups. Considering the statistics, countries with recurrent coups suffer from an acute risk to the security of their citizens. More-over, these countries face the greatest democratization challenges as one coup effectively jeopardizes constitutional order. This paper proposes that a new military constitutional design frame-work may advance democratization by thwarting subsequent coups, which otherwise significantly stall progress.
This paper is organized into four sections. The first section overviews what I have termed the “common military constitution design model.” In this section, I lay out the typical model and explain how this model fits within the broader separation of powers structure. The second section analyzes the coup experiences of Thailand, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Burma; details the motivations that prompted the coup; and discusses the consequences of the first and subsequent coups. Through all four countries, I show how the legislative and judicial branches failed as constitutional avenues for the military to express its grievances against the executive. In providing these histories, I do not claim that any of the militaries’ rationales for waging coups were legitimate. Rather, the purpose of this section is to demonstrate how—legitimacy notwithstanding—military officers’ subjective perspective that they lack adequate means to air their grievances thereby justifies a coup that dismantles democratization progress.
The third section builds off the first two sections by explaining how the common military constitutional design framework perpetuates coup occurrences in democratizing countries that have already experienced a coup. Finally, the fourth section outlines my military constitutional design framework, which reorients the constitutional position of the military to provide the military an appropriate method to air its grievances against the executive. The goal is to deter the military from waging a coup by providing a constitutional avenue for military officers to air their grievances against the executive
A Taxonomy of Impeachment Methods Used Worldwide
Get PDFImpeachment is a charge of misconduct against a government official who, if convicted, is removed from office before the term is set to end. A country can impeach any number of elected or appointed officials but is most frequently discussed in its use against the president of a particular country. This paper explores impeachment by looking at the impeachment methods used world-wide, attempting to draw a correlation between the method of impeachment used and the frequency of impeachment. The analysis shows that a correlation exists between the frequency of impeachment and the impeachment method used. It will also demonstrate how other factors can affect that correlation
Broadening the Community, Strengthening the Movement: An Introduction to the Innocence Project Just Data 2024 Scholarship Issue
Get PDFThis special issue of The Wrongful Conviction Law Review features a collection of seven research papers presented at the Innocence Project’s 2023 Just Data: Advancing the Innocence Movement conference. This annual event, organized by the Innocence Project and partners in the larger Innocence Network, brings together a diverse group of scholars and advocates, including those who have been wrongfully convicted themselves, to share the latest social science, discuss emerging issues, and make connections to inform our collective work and promote new applied research. Social science research, often conducted quietly and behind the scenes, is critical to data-driven litigation and policy work in courthouses and statehouses around the world. It informs social work and public education about wrongful convictions. Rigorous, robust research is an essential tool in the mission to free innocent people, prevent future wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone
Interlocal Power Roulette
Get PDFLocal governments inhabit a crowded ecosystem. Cities, counties, and school districts—and many more—share overlapping territorial jurisdictions. Overlapping jurisdiction goes hand-in-hand with redundant local power, defined as a scenario where multiple governments hold independent authority to take the exact same action in the exact same territorial space. In Maine, for example, state law empowers three local bodies to operate the same sewer infrastructure. In Detroit, two separate entities are equally tasked with managing the city’s streetlights. And in communities across the country, local governments are broadly authorized to own the same parcels of public land, including in Oakland, California, where public properties are splintered between a grand total of fifteen different government bodies.
How do localities navigate their shared powers in a shared governance ecosystem? In the absence of state guidance, local governments fashion ad hoc, largely circumstantial, and often informal regimes of interlocal power. Sometimes they compete with each other to control a public asset, while at other times they coordinate and exercise power in a joint manner. Sometimes they abstain from acting, on the hope or expectation that another local entity will take the lead, and at other times they bandwagon onto the governance decisions of another body. Rarely are these relationships set in stone. Instead, a relationship built on collaboration may devolve suddenly into competition, while even written agreements that delineate how two governments will exercise their redundant powers can prove illusory on the ground.
Uncertainty reigns supreme in this interstitial universe, yielding an interlocal governance haze that this Article aims to highlight and moderate. The Article demonstrates why redundant and muddled power is so common, how it manifests in practice, and why state legislatures generally take a hands-off approach to the issue. Yet as it also demonstrates, legislatures sometimes do intervene, at times aggressively, to reorder interlocal power in pursuit of substantive policies or particular political goals. Intergovernmental power dynamics can thus lurch between the polar nodes of local indeterminacy and haphazard, state-imposed change.
To break the impasse, this Article considers a counterintuitive strategy for local government officials: proactively asking the state to limit their power by creating an administrative oversight framework where none currently exists. Such a framework would enhance local democracy by shedding sunlight on conversations that today often occur in the shadows. It could also carve a middle-ground approach between the well-trod and often politically-fraught poles of state fiat and local autonomy, one where, instead, local actors can pursue a procedural initiative today to ward off unpredictable state interventions down the road
Patent Term Tailoring
Get PDFPatent rights are designed to encourage innovation with both the promise of a patent and with its expiration. Currently, patent term lasts from issuance until twenty years from the application date, with minor exceptions. The patent term is limited so that rewards for past invention do not overly hinder future progress. Although the goal is laudable, a uniform patent term is a blunt instrument to achieve such a nuanced balance. Historically, the patent system was not averse to tailoring terms through, for example, individually granted extensions to undercompensated inventors or term curtailment when a foreign patent holder failed to “work” a patented invention in the country. Currently, patent extensions are primarily granted to counteract time spent on administrative processes, and patent terms may be curtailed only by a patent holder through failure to pay maintenance fees or terminal disclaimer.
This Article examines current and historical law and doctrine affecting patent duration and suggests changes to better pursue patent policies, making two contributions to the literature. First, this Article groups together all the various term-tailoring mechanisms for analysis, bringing theoretical consistency to analysis of rules that are often considered and analyzed separately. This grouping suggests potential avenues for reform, which is the second contribution. This Article argues that patent maintenance fees are an underused policy lever that allow patent holders rather than administrative agencies to evaluate the worth of inventions, ex post, and choose among simple term curtailment options, lowering third party costs. At the same time, patent term extension and adjustment result in variable extensions and potential term variations globally, while expedited examination remains an underused policy tool. These extensions, too, are ripe for modifications
The Trade Origins of Privacy Law
Get PDFThe desire for trade propelled the growth of data privacy law across the world. Countries with strong privacy laws sought to ensure that their citizens’ privacy would not be compromised when their data traveled to other countries. Even before this vaunted Brussels Effect pushed privacy law across the world through the enticement of trade with the European Union, Brussels had to erect privacy law within the Union itself. And as the Union itself expanded, privacy law was a critical condition for accession.
But this coupling of privacy and trade leaves a puzzle: how did the U.S. avoid a comprehensive privacy law yet retain access to trade? The Article explains U.S. exceptionalism as resting on its enormous economic leverage, which enabled it to negotiate sui generis regimes to ensure access to foreign data.
Even those accepting this historical account as account might yet argue that privacy should not be subjected to trade law disciplines. “Privacy is not bananas,” as the great Spiros Simitis famously proclaimed. But food safety is also a human right, and trade law has shown that we can protect human health even when we consume food produced abroad. Similarly, we can protect privacy even while enabling trade in digital services. Trade disciplines need not undermine privacy, but rather help ensure that claims of privacy protection are not merely disguised protectionism
