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Nations Eager To Compete Must Account For What Impacts K-12 Students
No full textInternational assessments improve education policy and reform. To find success, nations must examine and act upon systemic factors that influence K-12 student outcomes
The Proper Role of Judicial Opportunism in Constitutional Rights Scrutiny
Get PDFTo one degree or another, judges in constitutional rights cases may exploit their available range of discretion in a narrowly political, ideologically rigid, or partisan way. But there are also important contexts in which a court’s ample discretion under tiered scrutiny and related tests can be turned toward some more nearly consensual or reasonably well-established basic public good. These opportunities to judicially promote the public good remain available even in our age of political polarization, hostility, fragmentation, and distrust.
Where such important opportunities exist, and where it is otherwise constitutionally permissible and generally prudent to do so, courts should feel free to exploit the inevitable discretion they have in selecting among, and then in applying, levels of constitutional scrutiny and related tests. As contentious as constitutional rights adjudication may often be, there is ample low-hanging fruit to be judicially harvested in the form of protecting constitutional interests along with promoting basic common goods. Constitutional rights adjudication in such cases should thus be open to what may be called legitimately opportunistic judicial scrutiny.
This article illustrates and develops these themes. For simplicity and clarity, the focus is on the crucial context of the constitutional and other costs imposed upon often powerless persons who wish to safely and responsibly pursue an ordinary trade or occupation, but are burdened by some protectionist licensing or related legislative barrier. This merely illustrative focus, however, should not detract from the broader applicability of legitimate judicial opportunism in a variety of individual constitutional rights contexts
Firearm Deaths of American Minors: Perceptions vs. Facts
Get PDFFirearm violence is now the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of eighteen. This article demonstrates that widely held misconceptions about the true nature and extent of this violence have led to legislative proposals narrowly tailored toward firearm violence in schools, despite facts and data showing school firearm violence to be a small fraction of the problem. These misconceptions are caused by both the narrow focus of national media attention and the deceptive propaganda of the gun industry. The article concludes by examining several bills proposed during the Virginia General Assembly session of 2022 to show how many of the solutions that legislators are proposing are not only ineffective, but also potentially harmful
The Voting Rights Act of Virginia: Overcoming a History of Voter Discrimination
Get PDFWhile Virginia is the birthplace of American democracy, it has struggled with ensuring the voting rights of all of its citizens for over 400 years. For most of that history, voting rights only expanded in Virginia in response to federal action in the wake of the Civil War, and contracted in response to federal inaction. This article chronicles the history of voting rights in Virginia, from the birthplace of American democracy in Jamestown and its influence on the United States Constitution, its efforts to expand and restrict voting rights, to becoming a leader in the South with the Voting Rights Act of Virginia
Post-conflict restitution of customary land: Guidelines and trajectories of change
No full textSince the 1990s a body of soft international law and public policy has developed around property restitution after conflict. The Pinheiro Principles and the Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (VGGT) both proffer remedies for property losses experienced due to violent conflict and forced displacement. These international guidelines for remediating harm caused by property loss or damage in conflict at best only partially address losses in customary tenure systems. This article has two goals: first, to delineate where the international guidelines are out of step with the nature of customary tenure; and second, to identify trajectories of change for customary land tenure systems after violent conflict. These two issues are fundamentally linked. The characteristics of post-conflict environments– contested authority structures, displaced and returning populations, and contentious land relations – make customary land vulnerable to expropriation and elevate the threat of asset loss for customary rights holders. This challenges the assumption that people can always return to rural agricultural livelihoods when displaced from customary land; that is only true if those customary land systems function the way they did before the violence. This article draws on a socio-legal analysis of secondary sources and qualitative data gathered by the authors through focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews in rural communities in Burundi, Liberia, and Uganda over the past decade. Because customary land tenure systems are prevalent over much of the territory currently affected by violent conflict in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, the absence of specific restitution policies for customary tenure systems is a significant gap in international public policy
Implementing War Torts
Get PDFUnder the law of armed conflict, no entity is accountable for lawful acts in war that cause harm, and accountability mechanisms for unlawful acts (like war crimes) rarely create a right to compensation for victims. Accordingly, states now regularly create bespoke institutions, like the proposed International Claims Commission for Ukraine, to resolve mass claims associated with international crises. While helpful for specific and politically popular populations, these one-off institutions have limited jurisdiction and thus limited effect. Creating an international “war torts” regime—which would establish route to compensation for civilians harmed in armed conflict—would better address this accountability gap for all wartime victims.This Article is the first attempt to map out the questions and considerations that must be navigated to construct a war torts regime. With the overarching aim of increasing the likelihood of victim compensation, it considers (1) the respective benefits of international tribunals, claims commissions, victims’ funds, domestic courts, and hybrid systems as institutional homes; (2) appropriate claimants and defendants; and (3) the elements of a war torts claim, including the necessary level and type of harm, the preferable liability and causation standards, possible substantive and procedural affirmative defenses, and potential remedies.Domestic law has long recognized that justice often requires a tort remedy as well as criminal liability; it is past time for international law to do so as well. By describing how to begin implementing a new war torts regime to complement the law of state responsibility and international criminal law, this Article provides a blueprint for building a comprehensive accountability legal regime for all civilian harms in armed conflict