JournalTOCs

Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights
Number of Followers: 5

This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Print) 1549-828X
Published by Northwestern University

[6 journals]

Workers, Dignity, and Equitable Tolling
- Authors: Duane Rudolph
  Abstract: When workers allege that mental illness prevented the timely filing of a federal employment discrimination lawsuit, courts subject them to extreme standards at the equitable tolling stage, which ends workers’ lawsuits against their employers. Such an approach to workers suffering from mental illness is indicative both of judicial misunderstanding of equitable remedies and judicial ignorance of equity’s historical engagement with those afflicted with mental illness. More importantly, subjection of workers to high threshold requirements at equity is an affront to workers’ dignity. Dignity, like equity, has a powerful moral basis that focuses on the individual. Dignity requires that workers alleging that mental illness foreclosed a timely filing of a federal employment discrimination lawsuit be heard and that they not be humiliated.My contribution to the scholarly literature is three-fold. First, I introduce dignity to the scholarly literature on equity and reject arguments by prominent readers of American equity as unresponsive to the kinds of dignitary treatment that vulnerable plaintiffs should expect from courts sitting at equity. Second, I extend judicial discussion of dignity and equity to encompass federal remedies law and federal employment discrimination law. Third, I contribute to the literature on disabilities by looking at the treatment of afflicted workers at a particular point in the federal adjudicatory process. My policy prescriptions explore possible legal and equitable responses to the humiliating experience awaiting workers who allege that mental illness prevented the timely filing of a federal employment discrimination lawsuit.
  PubDate: Tue, 25 Apr 2017 10:44:16 PDT
The Normalization of Immigration Law
- Authors: Mac LeBuhn
  Abstract: In “The Normalization of Foreign Relations Law,” Professors Ganesh Sitaraman and Ingrid Wuerth argue that the Supreme Court increasingly treats foreign relations law like other bodies of law—it has “normalized” this body of once-exceptional law. However, a subset of foreign relations law, immigration law, receives little attention in their account, which obscures the fact that immigration law, unlike the rest of foreign relations law, has not normalized in nearly the same fashion.To understand the normalization of immigration law, this paper proposes a theory of rights normalization: the Court has been reluctant to normalize immigration law except where immigrants’ rights are most at issue. Unlike foreign relation law normalization, immigration normalization has been halting and uneven in the contexts of justiciability, federalism and executive dominance. Yet, in questions affecting immigrants’ constitutional or international human rights, the Supreme Court has been more willing to normalize immigration law. Naturally, all immigration cases affect the rights of immigrants in some manner, but the Supreme Court shows an increased willingness to identify and employ rights claims as the basis for rejecting exceptionalist arguments. In this way, the Supreme Court implements rights normalization.
  PubDate: Tue, 25 Apr 2017 10:44:09 PDT
Keynes, Sen, and Hayek: Competing Approaches to International Labor Law in
the ILO and the WTO, 1994–2008
- Authors: Pascal McDougall
  Abstract: In discussions of recent human rights-driven developments in the International Labour Organization (ILO), as well as in other international legal debates, many scholars have suggested that human rights and “neoliberalism” intrinsically tend to converge. Such purported convergence is at once deplored by critics of “globalization” and applauded by its defenders. This article offers an empirical refutation of this convergence thesis by documenting the potential for systematic divergences between human rights, neoliberalism and a third omnipresent discourse, social legal thought (i.e. tropes associated with the welfare state and Keynesianism). I support this claim by taking as a case study three interrelated and historically fateful debates about international labor standards in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the ILO. The debates are those pertaining to (1) the failed 1990s project of conditioning WTO trade status with respect for labor standards (“trade/labor linkage”), (2) the prioritization of human rights-based labor standards in the ILO’s 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (1998 Declaration) and (3) the shape of the ILO corpus under the Decent Work Agenda (DWA), a social policy programmatic initiative on labor standards fiercely debated in the 2000s. I argue that human rights, neoliberalism and social legal thought diverge a great deal because they have different degrees of normative malleability. I propose a methodology, structuralist argumentative analysis, to address the question of discursive convergence and divergence, an issue of crucial importance for those interested in the political stakes of debates on international labor standards and the future trajectories of neoliberalism and human rights.
  PubDate: Tue, 25 Apr 2017 10:44:01 PDT
Transferring Away Human Rights: Using Human Rights to Address Corporate
Transfer Mispricing
- Authors: Monica Iyer
  Abstract: An estimated sixty percent of international trade happens within multinational enterprises. Transfer pricing occurs when one part of a firm sets a price in order to sell to another division in another country. When these prices are deliberately set at something other than market rate in order to minimize the firm’s tax liability, this is known as transfer mispricing, or abusive transfer pricing. These practices account for an enormous portion of global illicit financial flows. This paper will consider transfer mispricing as a violation of human rights, and will look at the ways in which various human rights instruments and mechanisms might be employed in order to address this global problem. In doing so, this paper seeks to add to a growing body of literature that considers the human rights implications and the importance of incorporating a human rights approach to issues like tax policy, trade, and corruption, with the aim of addressing the underlying structural drivers of human rights violations. It also seeks to address a gap in law and policy discussions that is generally characterized by an uneven power relationship between stakeholders and lack of voice for those most affected.
  PubDate: Tue, 25 Apr 2017 10:43:53 PDT
The Legal Status of Employees of Private Military/Security Companies
Participating in U.N. Peacekeeping Operations
- Authors: Mohamad Ghazi Janaby
  PubDate: Wed, 15 Apr 2015 13:22:53 PDT
Kiobel, Bauman, and the Presumption Against the Extraterritorial
Application of the Alien Tort Statute
- Authors: Ross J. Corbett
  PubDate: Wed, 15 Apr 2015 13:22:52 PDT
Speech-Conditioned Funding and the First Amendment: New Standard, Old
Doctrine, Little Impact
- Authors: Heather Blakeman
  PubDate: Wed, 15 Apr 2015 13:22:51 PDT
A Call for the EU to Assume Jurisdiction over Extraterritorial Corporate
Human Rights Abuses
- Authors: Jodie A. Kirshner
  PubDate: Wed, 15 Apr 2015 13:22:50 PDT
Proposal for an International Criminal Court Arrest Procedures Protocol
- Authors: David Scheffer
  PubDate: Wed, 28 May 2014 22:02:56 PDT
A Call for Aggressive Media Campaign Regarding DPRK Prison Camps
- Authors: Hannah Lee
  PubDate: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 11:33:41 PDT
Denying Genocide or Denying Free Speech' A Case Study of the
Application of Rwanda’s Genocide Denial Laws
- Authors: Yakaré-Oulé (Nani Jansen
  PubDate: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 11:33:40 PDT
“Gate of the Sun”: Applying Human Rights Law in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories in Light of Non-Violent Resistance and
Normalization
- Authors: Keren Greenblatt
  PubDate: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 11:33:39 PDT
A Constitution at a Crossroads: A Conversation with the Chief Justice of
the Constitutional Court of South Africa
- Authors: Drew F. Cohen
  PubDate: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 11:33:35 PDT
Comparing American Disability Laws to the Convention on the Rights of
Persons with Disabilities with Respect to Postsecondary Education for
Persons with Intellectual Disabilities
- Authors: Kevin Walker
  PubDate: Tue, 07 Jan 2014 18:33:29 PST
Statelessness and Mass Expulsion in Sudan: A Reassessment of the
International Law
- Authors: Mike Sanderson
  PubDate: Tue, 07 Jan 2014 18:33:28 PST
Prevention of Human Trafficking for Labor Exploitation: The Role of
Corporations
- Authors: Nicola Jägers et al.
  PubDate: Tue, 07 Jan 2014 18:33:27 PST
Linguistic Isolation: A New Human Rights Violation Constituting Torture,
and Cruel, Inhuman And Degrading Treatment
- Authors: Peter Jan Honigsberg
  PubDate: Tue, 07 Jan 2014 18:33:26 PST
Mental Retardation and the Death Penalty: The Need for an International
Standard Defining Mental Retardation
- Authors: Allison Freedman
  PubDate: Tue, 07 Jan 2014 18:33:25 PST