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Haiti and the Indemnity Question
Get PDF1) Haiti did not agree to pay an indemnity to France in 1825 because it feared a war with its former colonial power. In 1814, France sent envoys to Haiti to demand that King Henry Christophe, who controlled the north of Haiti, and President Alexandre Pétion, who controlled the south and west, resubmit to French sovereignty. Christophe had that envoy arrested and jailed. Pétion, on the other hand, offered to pay an indemnity to France to compensate the former colonial property owners in return for France’s official recognition of Haiti’s independence.
2) Jean-Pierre Boyer succeeded Pétion as president of the Republic of Haiti in 1818 and of the whole of Haiti in 1820 after Christophe’s death by suicide. As had Pétion before him, Boyer consistently opposed all attempts by France to reimpose its sovereignty over Haiti. In 1824 he offered to pay an indemnity to France to compensate the former colonial property owners for the same reason his predecessor did in 1814. France finally did so in 1825.
3) The indemnity, which was fully paid-off in 1883 under Salomon, was not the primary cause of Haiti’s inability to develop its economy. It was instead due to the inability of the successive post-independent governments to expropriate the land-owning/possessing peasant farmers to recreate the large-scale plantation system of the colonial era, on the one hand, and the constant internecine conflicts among factions of the dominant classes to control the state and its prebends.
4) Between 1875 and 1910, successive governments borrowed more money than they had previously, none of which was related to the indemnity. These debts, which amounted to 113,156,500 francs and were more egregious than the indemnity, were not paid off until 1961, and opened the way for direct foreign capital investment in production and for foreign banks to reestablish control over the national economy since the U.S. occupation from 1915-1934
Human Frailty, Unbreakable Victims and Asylum
Get PDFThis article analyzes the asylum decisions of immigration agencies and federal appellate courts and demonstrates that the case law driven standard for persecution is out of step with the original meaning of the term, international law standards, and contemporary understanding of how human beings experience physical and mental harm. Medical and psychological evidence establishes that even trauma at the lower end of the spectrum of severity can inflict lasting and debilitating effects on people\u27s health. Yet over the last three decades, virtually no court decisions have decreased the showing of harm needed to establish persecution. To the contrary, courts have generally ratcheted up what is required. Today, most judicial decisions rest on the unwarranted assumption of an unbreakable asylum applicant who must show systematic and escalating physical mistreatment over a sustained period or a single instance of extraordinary harm that results in a scar, disability, or other lasting physical injury. Although mental harm can qualify as persecution, courts rarely find persecution based solely on mental mistreatment. And courts routinely fail to consider the longstanding mental effects of physical trauma. Court decisions on persecution are consistent with troubling studies suggesting people have difficulty empathizing with, and understanding, the situations of others when there is a lack of immediacy, and that decision makers and authority figures are prone to making racialized attributions of pain on the baseless assumption that people of color can withstand more pain than white people. Decision makers should seek to minimize the tendency to downplay the pain of others in asylum adjudications and adopt a human rights approach, which tags the concept of persecution to the violation of a human right and better tracks the prevailing understanding of how humans experience both physical and mental mistreatment, which grows more encompassing over time
Witness Hide-and-Seek: Why Federal Prosecutors Should Record Pretrial Interviews
Get PDFThis Article pays long-overdue attention to a federal appellate court\u27s warning against playing hide-and-seek with witnesses. Specifically, prosecutors should record interviews. While courtroom cameras dominate the topic of judicial transparency, cameras can play a critical role in a sleepier corner of criminal proceedings: pretrial witness interviews. The Article first tracks the history of open judicial proceedings as a tradition of our Anglo- American jurisprudence. Next, the Article identifies the normative thread running through that history. Fairness may suffer when cameras transform public proceedings into publicized proceedings. Finally, the Article argues that this same issue of fairness applies to pretrial witness interviews. While fairness provides a reason against proceedings that are overly publicized, it provides a reason for interviews that are more public. Judicial proceedings are designed to ascertain the truth; hidden off camera, witness interviews may obscure the truth. Recording witness interviews would lift those interviews on a par with other discovery aspects of a criminal proceeding and put a welcome end to games of witness hide-and-seek
Now Streaming: How Streaming Services Are Following in the Antitrust Footsteps of Hollywood’s Golden Age
Get PDFThe entertainment industry is undergoing quite the transformation following the recent termination of the Paramount Consent Decrees, which effectively regulated the industry to prevent monopolization and promote competition for almost a century. The industry now faces a drastic surge in the utilization of streaming services and a new wave of antitrust issues.
“With great power comes great responsibility;” however, the dominant streaming companies in the industry have raised suspicion about emerging anticompetitive concerns. While long overdue, the termination of the Paramount Consent Decrees leaves a gaping hole in antitrust policy regarding the nuanced business practice of streaming platforms. Existing antitrust laws may be insufficient to protect consumers from potential harms as streaming services gain prominent traction in the film and television arenas. Expansion through vertical integration and related business practices echoes antitrust violations from over 70 years ago, when the Paramount Consent Decrees were first implemented. Thus, anticompetitive consideration is “paramount” to prevent history from repeating itself. This Note seeks to compare past violations with present actions, address one of the most dominant legal challenges in the entertainment media industry, and discuss possible solutions to counter this growing concern
Compassion Fatigue in an Infodemic: A Physician’s Duty to Treat in the Age of Misinformation
Get PDFThis Note considers how misinformation has exacerbated the COVID-19 pandemic and the inevitable burden it has placed on the healthcare industry. It explores the intersection between a doctor’s oath of ethics and their right to refuse care by uncovering the obligations that guide their decisions. Justice dictates that physicians provide care to all who seek it, and it is unconstitutional for a physician to refuse to treat patients based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. Even if a patient’s request is antithetical to a physician’s personal beliefs, the unwavering duty to treat generally mandates that physicians treat any patient who has requested his or her services. However, given the way that misinformation and disinformation has aggravated the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in countless preventable hospitalizations and deaths, this Note will unearth the physical and emotional toll the infodemic has taken on healthcare professionals, explore available remedies to them, and endorse a holistic response modeled upon the collective good
Markets, Regulation, and Inevitability: The Case for Property Rights in Outer Space
Get PDFIn 1967, a number of countries—including the United States— entered into the Outer Space Treaty. This treaty established the fundamental rules by which countries are to conduct themselves in outer space. At the time, there was more concern about the possibility of the Cold War, and thus nuclear weaponry, extending into space and very little consideration of commercial activity, which was largely the province of Science Fiction. Today, commercialization of space includes satellites, private companies contracting for government work, space tourism, and the early stages of testing materials for resource extraction. Interestingly, no international system for the recognition of property rights exists in relation to outer space resources. With the new Artemis space program underway- and its acknowledged intent to lay the groundwork resource extraction- now is the time consider property rights
An Essential Preliminary: The Grand Jury, Its Cloak of Secrecy, and the Misconceived Inherent Authority to Release Grand Jury Materials
Get PDFFederal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e) enumerates the exceptions under which courts may disclose otherwise secret grand jury materials. Until recently, long-standing Eleventh Circuit precedent allowed district courts in its jurisdiction to disclose grand jury records based on an extratextual reading of Rule 6(e) that relied on district courts’ “inherent authority” to disclose grand jury materials. In March of 2020, the Eleventh Circuit moved away from this precedent and held that district courts lack the inherent authority to authorize the disclosure of grand jury records outside of the limited exceptions set forth in Rule 6(e). Although the Eleventh Circuit moved away from its broad interpretation of Rule 6(e)’s grant of authority to release grand jury materials, many of its sister circuits are steadfast in their adoption of the “inherent authority” approach to the disclosure of grand jury materials. The Supreme Court had the opportunity to squarely consider this issue, and it chose not to— but on January 21, 2020, the Court expressly stated that whether district courts may exercise their inherent authority to release grand jury materials outside the enumerated exceptions found in Rule 6(e) is an important question. Ultimately, the resolution of the circuit split examined by this Article lies in the hands of the Advisory Committee on the Criminal Rules.
Accordingly, this Article takes the Eleventh Circuit’s decision in United States v. Pitch one step further and, following Judge Adalberto Jordan’s lead, advocates that district courts should be authorized to order the disclosure of grand jury materials of particular historical significance. Under the current regime, they cannot. With that understanding, this Article argues that the Advisory Committee on the Criminal Rules should recommend an amendment to Rule 6(e) that would allow for disclosure of grand jury documents of historical significance under certain circumstances. This Article concludes by providing proposed language that could serve as a framework through which the Advisory Commit- tee on the Criminal Rules could prevent district courts from creating exceptions outside Rule 6(e) while simultaneously allowing the disclosure of grand jury materials in historically significant cases and respecting the role grand jury secrecy has played in American jurisprudence
“What is a city but its people”*: commentary on “Migration and peripheral urbanization: the case of the metropolitan zone of the valley of Mexico” by Raúl Delgado Wise, Francisco Caballero Anguiano and Selene Gaspar Olvera
Get PDFThis commentary centres on themes of conquest, globalization, and inequality and argues that the article Migration and Peripheral Urbanization: The Case of the Metropolitan Zone of the Valley of Mexico can be understood as suggesting prescriptions for forward-looking socio-economic and migration policy. The article’s authors focus on the effects of neoliberalism on the Metropolitan Zone, explaining how globalization has dismantled domestic markets in the global South and triggered both internal and cross-border migration. In the phenomenon the authors dub “peripheral urbanization”, poor people now live in the periphery of the city, having been priced out of the city centre. Assuming a shared commitment to reversing the effects of conquest and equalizing wealth, the authors’ analysis supports the removal of morality and membership theory from discourse regarding border crossings and immigration. In addition, the authors can be understood as demonstrating that neoliberal, trickle-down economics have been a failure
