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Dowry Deaths: Proposing a Standard for Implementation of Domestic Legislation in Accordance with Human Rights Obligations
This article discusses the due diligence standard of governmental responsibility, and measures the adequacy of India's implementation of its national dowry death legislation in accordance with its international human rights obligations. India has enacted legislation designed to combat dowry violence. Although India's laws seem to follow the letter of its international human rights obligations, the country violates the spirit of human rights by lacking an actual commitment to implement this legislation. This Article demonstrates and examines India's breach of its duty of due diligence. Such a breach constitutes government complicity in condoning and perpetuating dowry deaths, which violate women's human rights in India. Through this complicity, India dishonors its obligations under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention of Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.Minors as Medical Decision Makers: The Pretextual Reasoning of the Court in the Abortion Cases
By examining the Court's failure to consider the allocation of authority between parents and children in the critical realm of medical decision making, this article exposes the irrationality of the Court's acceptance of limitations on the abortion rights of minors and reveals the pronatalist thrust of the parental involvement decisions. The article begins by looking at how the Roe Court characterized abortion as a medical decision, followed by a discussion about the medical decision-making rights of minors. Rooted in this medical paradigm, the article then turns to the parental involvement cases to examine the Court's failure to consider the medical decision-making of minors when evaluating the constitutionality of parental involvement laws as well as its emerging concern for the rights of the unborn.Regulating Sexual Relationships Between Faculty and Students
Universities must create an effective learning environment for students; university policy should be directed at creating an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust. Whenever a faculty-student sexual relationship causes a student to drop a class, or a thesis, or school, that student has suffered a serious harm. Universities cannot simply answer that the student consented to the relationship and should handle the consequences. A university without a well-established and promulgated policy, one that at least acknowledges the risks involved in faculty-student sexual relationships and gives students a list of faculty and staff members to contact for support, seriously fails the students. Professors should not be sexually involved with students who are in their classes or working closely with them on research or a thesis; students should have access to support. The difficulty should not be in deciding whether to have an established and easily accessible consensual relationships policy. The difficulty comes instead in deciding whether to ban or simply discourage sexual relationships, and in developing effective mechanisms to promulgate and enforce the policy. Part I of this article will evaluate university consensual relationships policies that ban or discourage sexual relationships. Part II focuses on consent and the potential harms that policy makers should consider in developing or reevaluating their policies. Part III critiques the liberal view that regulation of faculty-student sex overburdens individuals’ right to privacy. Part IV focuses on the writings of Jane Gallop and bell hooks, who offer stories about faculty-student relationships from the two professors' points of view.Foundations for 15(1): Equality Rights in Canada
The paper discusses a selection of important cases under section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It traces the development of equality jurisprudence from the introduction of section 15 to early approaches in Andrews, Hess, Weatherall, Symes, and McKinney. This review illustrates the persistence of formal equality analysis and the threats of biology, morality, and tradition to the realization of substantive equality. The May 25, 1995, trilogy of Egan, Miron, and Thibaudeau is critiqued in detail. Finally, we turn to more recent jurisprudence and offer a brief discussion of M. v. H.Be Careful What You Wish For: An Examination of Arrest and Prosecution Patterns of Domestic Violence Cases in Two Cities in Michigan
This Article will examine six months of data on arrests for domestic violence in the cities of Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. In order to be able to interpret what the data means Lyon did some other research. The results were surprising- for example, although women tend to be injured most severely by domestic violence, they use violence in intimate relationships a little more often than men. Part I of this Article traces a brief history of domestic violence and discusses the issue of who commits domestic violence, Part II discusses the "must arrest" and "should arrest" policies and their history, Part III lays out what the data received from Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti revealed, and Part IV addresses the policy implications of this information and proposes some changes.The Freedom to Marry for Same-Sex Couples: The Opening Appellate Brief of Plaintiffs Stan Baker Et Al. In Baker Et Al. V. State of Vermont
As the first state to prohibit slavery by constitution, and one of the few states which, from its inception, extended the vote to male citizens who did not own land, the State of Vermont has long been at the forefront of this nation's march toward full equality for all of its citizens. In July 1997, three same-sex couples challenged Vermont to act as a leader yet again, this time in affording full civil rights to the State's gay and lesbian citizens. Stan Baker and Peter Harrigan, Nina Beck and Stacy Jolles, and Holly Puterbaugh and Lois Farnham were denied marriage licenses by their respective town clerks in the summer of 1997. They sued the State of Vermont and the towns, arguing that the marriage statutes allowed them to marry, and that if the law did purport to limit marriage to different sex unions it would be unconstitutional. The trial court dismissed their claims in December 1997, and the couples appealed to the Vermont Supreme Court. The court heard oral arguments on the case on November 18, 1998.Gender, Risk Taking, and Negotiation Performance
This Article will evaluate the impact of the confluence of two factors- gender and the availability of a credit/no-credit grading option- on student performance in Professor Craver's Legal Negotiating course at George Washington University. Our empirical assessment will analyze the results achieved on negotiation exercises and on course papers by the 612 male and female law students who took Professor Craver's course over the past eleven years. Do a greater percentage of female students take the Legal Negotiating course on a credit/no-credit basis, when that option is available, than do their male cohorts? Are the woman students who take the course on a credit/no-credit basis motivated more by a desire to avoid the discomfort associated with overt competition than by a desire to earn an easy two-credit hours in a skills course? If so, the credit/no-credit female students might work as diligently as their graded classmates causing the negotiation exercise and course paper performances of credit/no-credit females to exceed those of credit/no-credit males who may elect the credit/no-credit alternative not to avoid competition, but to guarantee themselves a "credit" with a minimal amount of effort.Traffic Jam: Recommendations for Civil Penalties to Curb the Recent Trafficking of Women from Post-Cold War Russia
This Article will examine the recent criminal trend of trafficking women from post-Cold War Russia into the United States. First, it will examine the Russian mafia and its development. It will also discuss the system of economic corruption that currently exists in Russia, which facilitates government involvement with this criminal activity. It will further investigate the issues surrounding trafficked women and the international anti-trafficking conventions that have been created by the United Nations. Next, it will go into a deeper discussion of the current status of relevant international law and the issues involving the International Criminal Court. Finally, this Article will propose six civil and criminal recommendations that can be utilized through the current application of United States law with an emphasis on the need for international enforcement of the laws that affect this problem. This article is restricted to the trafficking of women from Russia; thus, it discusses one example of a worldwide problem. Many of this article's recommendations, however, may also apply to the trafficking of women from other countries.Bisexual Jurisprudence: A Tripolar Approach to Law and Society
Part I of this Review will briefly assess the principal arguments in Colker's book. In Part II, Colker's book will be situated within the larger currents of the discussion concerning bisexuality and the arguments for a bisexual jurisprudence. Part III critiques Colker's concept of a bisexual jurisprudence as applied to sexual hybrids from the standpoint of an identity, as well as a legal, skeptic. Part IV will sketch out some important implications for the advancement of a bisexual jurisprudence as well as question the need for a bisexual jurisprudence. This review concludes that the addition of a bisexual jurisprudence, like the one Colker has fashioned in her book, is neither transformative nor liberating for individuals with varied identities. Instead, the idea of a pansensual jurisprudence that seeks to deconstruct existing identity categories, as opposed to adding new categories, is a more radical and potentially transformative vision of our current legal and social system.Judge
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