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Transition-Denial and Structural Adjustment: Causation and Culpability in the Cuban Economy
Get PDFIn 2020, Cuba implemented the Tarea Ordenamiento (Tarea), the most significant economic reform since the construction of the socialist economy after the Revolution. Signaling an eclectic brand of Cuban socialism, the Tarea clears away three decades of tried and failed economic doctrines, drawing a new fiscal border around state enterprises, nodding to market realities, and preparing the island for greater insertion into the world economy. While the political economy of post-Castro Cuba has changed in this way, the United States continues to subject the island to an unprecedented program of unilateral sanctions, universally condemned as a breach of human rights, international law, sovereignty, and rationality. Given the historic limitations of Cuba’s economic policies and the noxious effects of U.S. policy, how do we assign proximate cause for the mixed results to date of the Tarea
The Human Environment: Awakening to the Indomitable Cuban Spirit--Government, Culture, and People
Get PDFMy thoughts are to write about The Human Environment. I will address the recent events concerning the increased silencing of dissent and the criminal law reforms that prohibit peaceful gatherings
Antidiscrimination Efforts and the Repressive Weight of Culture
Get PDFChatGPT In Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit, sociologist Ashley Mears unveils the opulent world of the ultra-rich party scene, where young women, primarily models, serve as ornamental capital to enhance social status. Drawing parallels, Kerri Lynn Stone\u27s Panes of the Glass Ceiling exposes enduring systemic barriers to gender equality, particularly in male-dominated professions, despite anti-discrimination laws. Stone emphasizes cultural norms and expectations perpetuating male privilege, challenging the efficacy of existing legal frameworks. Proposing a shift from anti-classification to an anti-subordination principle, Stone advocates for direct interventions, citing legislative efforts targeting pay inequality and mandating female representation on corporate boards. In a climate of legal retrenchment, Stone\u27s work urges a reexamination of cultural norms for a more just society
COVID-19 Was the Publicist for Homeschooling and States Need to Finally Take Homeschooling Regulations Seriously Post-Pandemic
Get PDFHomeschooling was rapidly growing in the U.S. even before COVID-19. The pandemic accelerated this growth by quickly exposing nearly every American family to homeschooling in some form. The pandemic has ushered in a new age of homeschooling characterized by flexibility, technology, collaboration, and alternative forms of schooling beyond the traditional parent-teaching-child framework. Although the Supreme Court has never recognized a fundamental right of parents to homeschool their children, it has repeatedly recognized that parents have the right to direct their children’s education and to choose to educate them in the way they deem fit. There is debate as to what level of scrutiny homeschooling statutes and regulations should be subjected to, but it is clear that the states must balance their own interest in ensuring children have access to education with the presumption that parents may direct their children’s education, and the strong historical basis for doing so in the home. States currently impose varying degrees of regulation with no uniformity and little enforcement. As homeschooling grows, the law must develop to support parents who choose to homeschool while imposing enough regulations to which the state can keep records of every student, track students’ progress, and increase the visibility of these students to protect them from abuse. This can be accomplished through annual notice requirements, certification of work by certified educators, minimum education requirements for homeschool educators, and wider homeschooler access to public extracurricular programs
The Application of Law as a Key to Understanding Judicial Independence
Get PDFJudges across China recently declined to apply a law that the National People’s Congress had newly brought into effect. In this article, I describe this startling finding and explore the significance of it. I conclude that it represents an exercise of judicial independence. Using a thickly descriptive approach that focuses on textual analysis and institutional context, I demonstrate that judges in China have no legal duty to apply law and that it is professionally risky for them to apply law; that judges there operate within a professional culture that encourages restraint; and that the court system has developed a strong set of internal rules that encourage reference to judge-made rules rather than to external rules such as those enacted by legislative or executive bodies. I further argue that the topic of judicial independence is important not just for countries outside the United States, but for the United States as well, and that a framework developed from a broadly comparative perspective is the best approach for understanding judicial independence in China, and, likewise, in the United States. Understanding judicial independence in China is important for myriad reasons. It is a gauge of the robustness of the rule of law in China. It is an important proving-ground for judicial independence as a universal phenomenon. It adds perspectives from China to the comparative law literature on judges. It is a bell-weather of the kind of decentralization of authority that famously marks China’s post-Mao government. There is no question that the courts of China were enlisted to play a role in the larger governmental initiatives of the past century. Its courts garnered respect for the People’s Republic of China’s legal system, which in turn helped China participate as an equal in the international legal order, as well as the international economic system. With judicial independence, there is no escaping the fact that to understand it is to measure it. This is because it would be false and misleading to believe that either you have it or you don’t. Each country’s, each county’s, each judge’s independence is affected by a complex of circumstances around it that vary over time. Some of these circumstances are institutional, some are cultural, and some are the products of chance and human agency. Care is needed when framing the measuring project. If we choose to view the degree of judicial independence as arraying itself along a spectrum, then we need to avoid falling into the trap of assuming that every country is making progress along a trajectory toward complete judicial independence. To make such a sweeping conclusion as this requires information so complete that it defies our current abilities to gather it, and its helpfulness is obscured by the false and unproven assumption of progress. Always lurking is the problem of “independence from what?” The more complete our recognition of the types of constraints on judges, the better our understanding of how they are independent from any of them. This is a tall order indeed. We are better off accepting that snapshots of a particular moment give us glimpses into the ways in which judges evade the constraints placed upon them. As minimal as this sounds, we should not dismiss it as of little value. Clifford Geertz’s famous admonition to aim for “thick description”2 fits with this snapshot approach. At the same time, meaningful snapshots should not be facilely linked together into a broader picture that ignores the many gaps with which it is riddled. While no universally accepted definition of, or framework for, judicial independence emerges from the comparative law literature on courts,3 the notion of judicial independence is widely studied. In this literature, judicial independence is portrayed as a prerequisite to the enforcement of constitutional and civil rights.4 During the past several decades, comparative law scholars have noticed a growing intervention by courts into their societies.5 Also emphasized in the literature is how judicial independence attracts investors, because they aim to minimize the risk of loss of capital by having third party neutrals enforce their agreements. The idea here is that judges enjoy enough autonomy to be able to decide cases on their merits. Although positive law binds their decisions, and that positive law at least in theory imposes a kind of uniformity on the outcome of lawsuits, independent judges have the freedom to interpret and apply the law as they see fit in light of the particular circumstances of the instant case. Even just the appearance of independence boosts the legitimacy of the courts.6 This study of the courts of the People’s Republic China aims to understand one recent sign of judicial independence from influence by governmental branches outside the judiciary. By combing through judicial opinions and focusing on how those courts applied law, I uncovered a lag in the application of a then newly enacted national statute to cases that the legislature had intended to be subject to the statute. This lag cannot be explained by regulations or procedures that permitted the judiciary at that time to ignore laws that had recently come into force. Another explanation, however, which credits the internal logic of the judiciary’s own institutional practices, cannot be ruled out. In this article, first I will show that, to their detriment, the frameworks we have for understanding the independence of judges by and large leave out the application of law. Next, I will trace judicial independence in China, including practices in the application of law, during the last century, in order to make the point that any sign of the judiciary in China applying law in a way that runs contrary to the mandates of other parts of government is new. Third, I will display a snapshot of judicial refusal to apply law that suggests an institutionally rooted exercise of independence from China’s central legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC), and, by extension, from the political apparatus that attaches to it, that occurred in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This snapshot presents results from a textual analysis of 499 judicial opinions which reveal an event in 2010 that may reflect a measure of courts’ institutional independence. The conclusion of this paper will draw together several points of significance of this snapshot
Annual Supplement to First Amendment Law: Freedom Of Expression And Freedom Of Religion
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Gender Inequality in Contracts Casebooks: Representations of Women in the Contracts Curriculum
Get PDFGender has always explicitly or implicitly played a critical role in contracting and in contracts opinions—from the early nineteenth century, when married women lacked the legal capacity altogether to contract, through the next century, when women gained the right to contract but continued to lack bargaining power and to be disadvantaged in the bargaining process in many cases, to today, when women are present in greater numbers in business and commerce, but face continued, yet less overt, obstacles. Typical casebooks provide ample offerings for discussions of the ways in which parties can be and have been disadvantaged because of their gender and gender identity. At the core, gender inequity often stems from long-held stereotypes about women in contracting, which are often on full display in the cases. The vast majority of cases in the typical Contracts casebook are drawn primarily from the commercial context; sales, franchise, employment, and transfer of property cases predominate most Contracts casebooks, with many fewer cases in the family context. In the commercial cases, women and other people who do not identify as men, rarely seen as the businessperson, seller, or landowner, are sorely underrepresented, and the “non-male” perspective tends to be obscured. Casebook offerings involving non-male parties still tend to be clustered in certain areas—namely contract defenses, promissory estoppel, and family cases. The result is a Contracts curriculum that typically confines women to certain traditional roles and relegates women’s issues to a secondary status, privileging rational, arms-length market promises at the expense of family-based promises. The overall gender allocation in cases may or may not be reflective of the actual presence of women in the universe of American contracts cases. But either way, it raises some issues regarding how the typical casebook presents women in the realm of contracts cases, and overall, the role of women in contracting. There is, of course, a diversity of viewpoints and a multiplicity of voices among women and feminists, who are divided by age, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnicity, and class, among other things. There are divisions among feminists over the nature and source of gender injustice, as well as over solutions.2 Feminists differ, for example, over the roles of men and women (such as biological differences and cultural frameworks that land women as the primary caretakers most of the time), and whether and how the law should account for those differences.3 When it comes to contract law, some feminists embrace contracting as a means of empowerment,4 while others express concern over whether most women have the bargaining power necessary to protect themselves in the bargaining process. 5 The goal of the Article is not to set out in any detail the contours and fine points of feminist legal theory. Rather, the Article will simply highlight gender-based deficiencies in the ways in which women are portrayed in traditional contracts cases and casebooks, often as either victims, overly-aggressive commercial actors, or in other specific gendered roles such as bride, princess, nurturer, mother, spouse, or mistress. In doing so, the Article will highlight feminist themes and conflicts in contract law and the ways in which reliance on gender-based stereotypes can negatively affect legal analysis in Contracts cases