Areas of Law, Misc

This article addresses a few moments in the evolution of human security law in Iraq, focusing in particular on the Coalition Provisional Authority, the new Iraqi Constitution, Iraqi High Tribunal (successor to the Iraqi Special Tribunal), and the International Criminal Court. It synthesizes the results of some existing research on ongoing impunity for certain crimes against political candidates, journalists, anti-corruption activists, and ethnic and religious minorities, a situation which may have tainted Iraq’s transition to a more democratic republic, while aggravating (...) other conflicts, such as those in Syria. In theory, the institutions of human and national security can help reconcile peoples whose tenuous unity had been shattered in wartime. The sometimes competing priorities and policies of Iraqi politicians, civil society groups, and judges resulted in swift justice for Iraqi officials responsible for mass killings involving Shi’a Arab, Kurdish, and other victims, but a lack of justice for other segments of the population. The emphasis of some claims of injury over others may have "reenchanted" some sectors of Iraqi society with the state and its institutions, while alienating others and contributing to ruptures in the social fabric. The Coalition Provisional Authority, Iraqi leaders, and international community ensured that the high-profile proceedings against former regime officials would not be accompanied or followed by others that some Iraqis might perceive as being as pressing as those of the Iraqi High Tribunal, relating to the impact of sanctions and aerial bombardment, the legality of Iraq's occupation, torture, etc. (shrink)

El objetivo principal de esta contribución es identificar los retos y perspectivas que presenta la investigación biomédica con datos en España, realizando una breve aproximación al marco jurídico actual, atendiendo en particular los biobancos; y con un enfoque jurídico multinivel, es decir, teniendo en cuenta la regulación no solo interna sino también europea, para poder identificar algunas de las carencias que presenta el actual marco normativo. -/- El avance de los biobancos y la tecnología de investigación en la actualidad está (...) mejorando la efectividad de la investigación científica biomédica, gracias al uso masivo de datos. Sin embargo, al mismo tiempo, esta investigación enfrenta dilemas éticos y legales en la búsqueda de un equilibro con otros derechos, en especial aquellos vinculados a la esfera de la privacidad de la persona, lo que hace esencial conocer el marco jurídico aplicable. (shrink)

Over recent decades, several global tech giants have gained enormous power while at the same time generating various disputes with their end-users, local governments, and regulators. We propose that the Jewish concept of covenant can help the above parties, legal scholars, and wider society, in addressing this complex legal reality. We present the challenge of disequilibrium between the above four parties against the main points of conflict: the requirement of customer consent; clear contractual provisions upon entry; options for reasonable customer (...) exit; limitations on the platform’s ability to exercise unilateral termination; profile-based discrimination; and liability for mere intermediation. We introduce the biblical concept of covenant, and we review its unfolding in Jewish tradition. Further, we conceptualize three main covenantal principles: (1) responsibility—God and humans are both conceived as moral agents; (2) reciprocity—God as a caring law giver, open to human appeals; and (3) reasonability—divine instruction as initially intelligible. We demonstrate how the latter principle of explainability is exercised in the biblical law narratives and how the story of Balaam stresses the significance of moral agency that cannot hide behind “mere intermediary” claims. In light of this analysis, we revisit the relationship between tech giants and tech users to demonstrate how covenantality offers novel ways to conceptualize the noted conflicts between the parties. (shrink)

The article reviews on the technical attributes on current technologies deployed in outer space and those that are being developed and mass produced. The article refutes the Chinese state-controlled Xinhua News’ propaganda several years ago on objecting America’s deployment of nuclear technologies in outer space with rigorous scientific evidence. Furthermore, the article warns on the dangers of physical signals applied in outer space technologies that can threaten the solar system, especially the Mozi quantum satellite with photon beams. The article concludes (...) with the illicit practices by the Chinese state party with militant ambitions in the supposedly scientific institutions. It violates the spirit on the peaceful use of outer space, and goes against the 2222 (XXI) resolution adopted by the general assembly, including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty banning the stationing of weapons of mass destruction in outer space. (shrink)

In order for a religious conviction to receive protection under the First Amendment or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), it must be a sincere religious conviction. Some critics of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby have suggested that the plaintiffs in that case and in related cases were motivated more by political ideology than by sincere religious conviction. The remedy, they argue, is for courts to be quicker to scrutinize claims of religious sincerity. In this article, (...) I consider another possibility—namely, that current sociopolitical partisanship in the United States has eroded a clear distinction between political ideology and religious conviction for plaintiffs in cases like Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. If this theory is correct, it is far less obvious what the proper remedy is. I consider and reject the view that newly formed religious convictions with political origins should be treated as less than sincere on those grounds. However, I do argue that whether a religious conviction seems to have been newly generated by political circumstances should be taken into account when deciding religious free exercise cases. I suggest that this could best be accounted for if the courts adopted a balanced interests approach instead of the winner-takes-all “checklist” approaches that have developed under Employment Division v. Smith and RFRA. (shrink)

Is privacy the key ethical issue of the internet age? This coauthored essay argues that even if all of a user’s privacy concerns were met through secure communication and computation, there are still ethical problems with personalized information systems. Our objective is to show how computer-mediated life generates what Ernesto Laclou and Chantal Mouffe call an “atypical form of social struggle”. Laclau and Mouffe develop a politics of contingent identity and transient articulation (or social integration) by means of the notions (...) of absent, symbolic, hegemonic power and antagonistic transitions or relations. In this essay, we introduce a critical approach to one twenty-first-century atypical social struggle that, we claim, has a disproportionate effect on those who experience themselves as powerless. Our aim is to render explicit the forms of social mediation and distortion that result from large-scale machine learning as applied to personal preference information. We thus bracket privacy in order to defend some aspects of the EU GDPR that will give individuals more control over their experience of the internet if they want to use it and, thereby, decrease the unwanted epistemic effects of the internet. Our study is thus a micropolitics in in the Deleuzian micropolitical sense and a preliminary analysis of an atypical social struggle. [Added note: the contract law specialist cited twice in this article (Jonathan R. Bruno) is a graduate of Harvard Law and is presently located at University of Michigan Law School (Ann Arbor) (not identical to the 'data scientist' of the same name that populates the first page of links brought up by a Google-search on this proper name.]. (shrink)

What follows is an attempt to do some conceptual housekeeping around the notion of secret law as provided by Christopher Kutz (2013). First I consider low-salience (or merely obscure) law, suggesting that it fails to capture the legal and moral facts that are at stake in the case which Kutz used to motivate it. Then I outline a theoretical contrast between mere obscurity and secrecy, in contrast to the 'neutral' account of secrecy provided by Sissela Bok (1989). The upshot of (...) the two sections is that low-salience law is neither secret law nor necessarily problematic, though it closely resembles a kind of law that is both secret and problematic: namely, those legal obscurities that subvert manifest interests related to the informational needs of citizens. The ensuing argument undermines the fiction of constructive presence found in Austin and Blackstone. (shrink)

In this article, I defend the view that conscience exemption clauses for medical practitioners (doctors, nurses, technicians, pharmacists) should be limited by patient protection clauses. This view was also defended by Mark Wicclair, in his book on conscience exemptions in medicine (Cambridge UP, 2011). In this article, I defend Wicclair’s view by supplementing it with Hegelian ethical theory and feminist critical theory. Conscience exemptions are important to support as a matter of human rights. They support an individual’s right to protect (...) their deepest value-commitments. A true understanding of conscience is dialectical, however, and it requires patient protection clauses because they, too, protect individuals in their deepest value-commitments. In this article, I show that the defense of patient protection clauses is historically supported by the theory of “conscience [Gewissen]” developed by G.W.F. Hegel in the nineteenth century (mostly in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)). (shrink)

Democracy has been hailed as a global phenomenon and the most popular feature of modern political thought. Several notable efforts have been made by the global community to promote and extend democracy to cover billions of people, with their varying histories, cultures, and disparate levels of affluence. In 2007, the United Nations General Assembly resolved to support the efforts of governments to promote and consolidate new or restored democracies. The GA in this regard stated that “democracy is a universal value (...) based on the freely expressed will of people to determine their own political, economic, social and cultural systems and their full participation in all aspects of their lives. Also, while democracies share common features, there is no single model of democracy, and that democracy does not belong to any country or region, reaffirming further the necessity of due respect for sovereignty, the right to self-determination, and territorial integrity. In 2005, the United Nations Democracy Fund was created to implement projects aimed at enhancing democratic practice, promoting human rights, and encouraging participation of all groups in democratic processes. In contrast to its growing popularity, democracy has also been closely looked at with suspicion by experts- academic, political, and otherwise. Skeptics assert that “ the meaning of democracy is contested with no universal definition that is applicable.”. (shrink)

This book begins with an overview of the current legal status of children under U.S. federal and state law, It includes an analysis of relevant Supreme Court decisions and an extended critique of the philosophical arguments for treating children differently from adults under the law. Sections in the book include discussions of the need for a theory of juvenile rights, the moral arguments that prop up such theories, Professor Houlgate's proposal for a theory, and a final discussion of the applications (...) of his theory to the debates about status offenses, child neglect, and rehabilitation of juvenile offenders. (shrink)