Browsing by Subject "Law"

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'Bad' news travels fast: the telegraph, syndicated libel, and conceptualizing freedom of the Press, 1890-1910
(2013-08) File, Patrick C.
This dissertation explores the historical implications of an unprecedented series of libel cases that arose out of false news reports spread by news wire services at the turn of the twentieth century. The industrialized speed and scale of the news industry, along with growing concern about sensationalism and the value of reputation had created tension in the press' relationship with society at the time the cases arose. The scale of the cases, in which single plaintiffs sued hundreds of newspapers for publishing the same libelous story, raised new challenges for the press and for libel law doctrine. This study argues that through the serial libel cases the press articulated a new legal conception of press freedom that called on courts to tip the analytical balance to be more protective of its social role in using the telegraph to deliver timely news to the public. Moreover, because the cases involved plaintiffs of varying social prominence, from virtually anonymous to world-famous, the cases also offer new insights into how libel plaintiffs' status and identity could influence the legal analysis of protecting reputational rights at a time before libel law prompted constitutional consideration. The study uses an interdisciplinary conceptual framework of the cultural history of journalism and critical legal history to illuminate the role of law and legal consciousness in the social process of regulating the role of journalism in a democratic society. The study examines legal discourse surrounding the cases both inside and outside of courtrooms and newsrooms, drawing on appellate opinions and legal treatises as well as newspaper and trade press coverage of the cases.
The Battle Between Human Rights and Development in Post-Conflict Situations: Assessed Through the Lens of the Rwandan Model
(2020-05-01) Olubayo, Paul
The principles of human rights and development share both a common vision and a common purpose; the desire “to secure, for every human being, freedom, well-being and dignity”. These basic, underlying principles have been promoted and advocated in various differing forms throughout human history, with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) noting that concern for these two principles can be dated as far back as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789. Further, throughout history we have seen endeavors to link these two agendas in a mutually beneficial relationship. It has been stated that one of the central achievements of the first World Conference on Human Rights in 1968, was its assertion that ‘the achievement of lasting progress in the implementation of human rights is dependent upon sound and effective national and international policies of economic and social development.’ The international community would take this a step further in 1977 when the United Nations Commission on Human Rights proclaimed the existence of a human right to development, which would later be adopted formally by the UN General Assembly in 1986.
Between Empires And Frontiers: Alaska Native Sovereignty And U.S. Settler Imperialism
(2018-03) Arnett, Jessica
“Between Empires and Frontiers: Alaska Native Sovereignty and U.S. Settler Imperialism,” examines territorial Alaska as a critical borderland: a settler colonial space alternately framed as the “Last Frontier” of the American West or as the first experiment in U.S. overseas imperialism. Drawing on indigenous, territorial, federal, state, Congressional, and corporate records, I argue that these competing understandings generated tensions in the legal relationship of Alaska Natives to the federal government and informed Alaska Native political strategies as they made claims on land, sovereignty, and U.S. citizenship. Unlike in the contiguous states, the federal government never signed treaties with Alaska Natives and the Bureau of Indian Affairs refused jurisdiction to what it considered to be “races of a questionable, ethnical type” and therefore categorically different than American Indians. Beginning in 1867, when the federal government purchased the territory from Russia, to 1959 when Alaska was admitted to the Union as the 49th state, my dissertation traces the processes by which these racial distinctions engendered a new legal framework that I call settler imperialism. I argue that the tensions inherent in this legal framework were fundamental to the broader structure of U.S. empire in which “incorporated” territories were instrumental. In this way, Alaska had far-reaching implications for United States international policy and global hegemony in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I argue further that Alaska Natives strategically leveraged these tensions in shaping their relationship to the federal government as indigenous nations and as U.S. citizens. Alaska Natives organized their political strategies around what territorial and federal officials referred to as “uncertainty” as to their legal status, alternately drawing similarities between themselves and American Indians or maintaining distinctions. In doing so, they enacted sovereignty, made claims to citizenship rights, and tailored elements of federal Indian policy to suit their political, economic, and social organization and networks of relations in ways that territorial and federal officials did not expect. The outcomes of their efforts are crucial to understanding U.S.-indigenous relations in the contiguous states and globally.
Charles the Bald's 'Edict of Pîtres' (864): a translation and commentary
(2013-04) Hill, Brian E.
This thesis consists of an analysis of Charles the Bald's use of royal decrees, known as capitularies, as well as a critical English translation of the Edict of Pîtres (864), the most significant capitulary issued in Charles' reign. Charles the Bald (r. 840-877), king of West Francia, inherited the complex administrative system instituted by his Carolingian predecessors. The capitulary had been central to Carolingian administration and legislation since the time of his grandfather, Charlemagne, and it represents the most direct evidence of royal intentions in written form from Charles the Bald's reign. The capitulary was formulated by the king and his nobles, and then promulgated by a network of royal and ecclesiastical officials throughout the kingdom. The Edict of Pîtres is an important example of this capitulary tradition. It touches on a wide range of issues that fell under royal power, and it provides a snapshot of the political situation facing the king at the moment of its promulgation.
Chattel Land: Legal and Labor Histories of Reclamation in Singapore
(2020-07) Fok, Beverly
After fifty years of aggressive augmentation, reclaimed land now makes up a quarter of Singapore’s total landmass. Cut out of sea, this artificial land aspires to cut the chain of causality: to self-found and so give law to itself (auto-nomos). How to analytically capture that gesture of self-authoring? From what vantage point does one study an object like reclamation whose structure is that of recursion? This is the challenge—at once methodological and theoretical—to which my dissertation responds. I proceed first by asking: what exactly is being reclaimed in reclamation? Why should the creation of “new” land need to be enacted in the idiom of a “re,” that is, as a re-taking, a retrieval, or a return? Though reclamation purports to create land “from sea,” key to this land-making is not saltwater but sand and labor, both of which Singapore imports in vast quantities from its South, East, and Southeast Asian neighbors. Harnessing those flows, reclamation would appear to put the very ground itself in motion. Foreign coastlines are dismantled, ferried piecemeal, then reassembled into new land in Singapore by migrant workers on barges. In the process, land paradoxically becomes chattel. What then becomes of chattel—including certain forms of labor? A tentative answer might be obtained, I argue, by looking to the legal and labor histories that inform this present-day fabrication of mobile land. Thus the dissertation rehabilitates a link between today’s migrant labor and its earlier prefiguration, colonial convict labor, which was first tasked with creating new land in the island’s interior. Just as today’s reclaimed land needs labor’s upkeep to fend off the tides, interior land needed constant servicing to prevent its return to the jungle. Where convict labor’s lot was “imprisonment in transportation, beyond sea, for life,” reclamation workers, confined in vessels, trace an unending circuit between dredge sites at sea and fill sites near land. By situating reclamation within those longer-standing political economies of extraction, I show that mobile land—made here to be eternally remade against rising seas—is not “new” and cannot be claimed, but rather must always be re-claimed, even in the very first instance.
Chinese Exclusion and U.S. Empire in Hawai’i and Cuba, 1874-1943
(2020-08) Weber, Kent
“Chinese Exclusion and U.S. Empire in Hawai’i and Cuba, 1874-1943,” interrogates the confluences between United States’ immigration control and overseas territorial expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Chinese exclusion laws, some of the earliest federal U.S. immigration laws and the first to name and discriminate against a particular migrant group based on their race, informed and moved with U.S. empire to recreate physical, political, and social borders in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The dissertation traces how efforts to control the transnational migrations of Chinese to and between Cuba, Hawai’i, and the United States became a tool for the geographic movement of U.S. state power as American borders expanded for empire and further attempted to control and limit the movements of Chinese migrants. By examining Cuba and Hawai’i together, the dissertation argues that the exclusion laws offered an adaptable system of corporeal control that aided U.S. colonial projects in each place. The spread of the Chinese exclusion laws outside the continental United States by the end of the nineteenth century did not only occur in the context of expanding U.S. empire, but also helped to define and constitute the boundaries of America’s new imperial domain.
Geography and the rule of law in the making of two American Indian Reservations: a geographic study of law as a social system
(2008-08) Shockey, Frank Clinton
This study explores the use of Niklas Luhmann's theory of social systems in the geographic study of law. Describing law as the communication of congruently generalized normative expectations allows access to the spatiality contained within the operations of the legal system. This exploration takes place in the context of a legal system whose self-description, the so-called "rule of law," orients it toward the observation and coding of every possibility of experience. Topically the focus of this study is on the legal system's expansion into the lands and lives of indigenous people and on the making of two American Indian Reservations, the Red Lake Reservation and the White Earth Reservation, in nineteenth-century Minnesota. The conception of unorganized territory as "Indian Country," the cession of Indian lands and creation of tribes and reservations as legal entities, and the allotment of reservation lands to individual Indians in severalty provide comparative material. In addition to reformulating the geographic study of law as a study of law as a social system, the methodology allows the history of federal American Indian law to be described with emphasis on the use of space. Like time, space has been an integral medium for the legal system's infiltration of indigenous peoples' societies, as this study shows.
Government
(1902) Carroll, Walter N.
The impact of charity and tax law/regulation on not-for-profit news organizations
(The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford and the Information Society Project, Yale Law School, 2016) Picard, Robert; Belair-Gagnon, Valerie; Ranchordás, Sofia
The impact of human rights law in time
(2013-07) Dancy, Geoffrey T.
International human rights law is often disparaged either for having no positive impact on government repression or for having negative unintended consequences that lead to even worse repressive violence. Most empirical scholarship on human rights indicates that the root causes of widespread repression--authoritarianism, democratic instability, and civil war--are beyond the reach of legal rules. The contribution of this project is to demonstrate that human rights law in fact has an important role to play in addressing these root causes. I argue that the human rights legal action, under certain conditions, promotes democracy and prevents conflict recurrence. This takes time. By slowly changing state-society interactions, the pursuit of human rights legalization is causally related to lessened repressive violence. Importantly, though, these contributions are not guaranteed, and they are dependent on the creation of domestic human rights constituencies. In support of my argument, I uncover relationships between human rights legal actions and regime change, broadly defined, that have so far remained unobserved. These relationships have been obscured within the existing literature for two reasons. First, detailed data on various legal mechanisms has until recently been lacking. Using new data collected over a 3-year period in coordination with the Oxford-Minnesota Transitional Justice Collaborative (OMTJC), in addition to other longitudinal data from a variety of sources, I address this data deficit in my research. Second, to see the positive impact of human rights legal action on democracy and peace, one must zoom out and observe change over the long term. This dissertation is the first to give serious consideration to issues of time and process in the study of human rights law. In its wide sweep, the dissertation also provides new evidence of robust links between social movements and pursuit of rights-based legalization; between `transitional justice' and the long-term decline of repression; and between enforcement of human rights law and the non-recurrence of civil war. Overall, I find reason to be skeptical of human rights critics, who base their arguments about consequences on short-term events, rather than analyzing larger processes of social transformation.
Negotiating justice: defendant perspectives of plea bargaining in American criminal courts
(2013-05) Hussemann, Jeanette M.
This dissertation research focuses on adult, indigent defendant perceptions of plea bargaining and justice in American criminal courts. Data for this research was collected over a two year period of time in Hennepin County, Minneapolis, MN. This research relies on over 600 hours of court observations during which period of time I followed over 250 cases and interviewed forty indigent, criminal defendants. This research specifically addresses how defendants interpret their court experiences as fair--including defendant's ability to be involved in the decisions of their case, treatment by public defenders, and attitudes towards the practice of plea bargaining and the court system as a whole. Despite claims that procedural fairness matters to defendant perceptions of court, and to the extent that perceptions of outcome fairness rely in part on experiences with procedural fairness, this research shows that defendants are not overly concerned about the procedures of their case. Defendants do not expect to be involved in plea procedures and case processing, and they do not anticipate receiving outstanding representation by a public defender. Defendant perceptions of court experiences are based largely on perceptions of distributive justice and case outcomes. Perhaps most importantly, defendant decision-making rests on a limited understanding of the procedures and decisions that are involved in the criminal courts. Broadly speaking, defendants support court procedures such as plea bargaining because they feel that the procedure allows them to quickly exit an uncontrollable and confusing situation while receiving the benefit of a more lenient sentence.
The Petition of Right
(1917-12) Relf, Frances Helen
Pressing the Police and Policing the Press: The History and Law of the Relationship Between the News Media and Law Enforcement in the United States
(2020-07) Memmel, Scott
Amidst urbanization, immigration, industrialization, and rising crime in the United States in the 1830s-1840s, the modern conceptions of both the press and police were born. From early historical antecedents in the American colonies through the present, the news media and law enforcement have been, and continue to be, fundamental institutions in the United States. However, both parties face significant political, economic, social, and technological tension, pressure, and scrutiny, signifying the need for further research. Although past literature has covered some aspects of the press-police relationship, its history and law remain understudied. Through a new and original theoretical framework, in-depth literature review, three-part content analysis, and two-part legal analysis, this dissertation provides the most complete and comprehensive study of the history and law of the press-police relationship to date. It also aims to understand, analyze, and address how the history and law of the interactions between both parties inform the present and future of their relationship, including key implications on the press, police, and American public, as well as how the press-police relationship can be improved. This study therefore provides a series of important, tangible recommendations for the press and police to improve their relationship and better serve the public moving forward.
Priest as Criminal: Community Regulation of Priests in the Archdeaconry of Paris, 1483-1505
(2013-11) Vann Sprecher, Tiffany
This dissertation examines accusations of criminal behavior levied against priests in the archdeaconry of Paris from 1483 - 1505. It is a study of both justice and religion based on an analysis of ecclesiastical court registers. Within these registers are thousands of cases against laypeople and clergy. Focusing on priests, this dissertation scrutinizes the four most common charges brought against them: engaging in illegal business practices; participating in inappropriate leisure activities; committing violence; and having illicit contact with women. It reveals that parishioners had wide latitude and many tools to compel their priests to act in a certain manner. Community members were able to avail themselves of the ecclesiastical court to enforce church law. The ecclesiastical court also tacitly sanctioned the use of certain extralegal means, such as violence, that allowed community members to coerce priests into conforming to local expectations. Finally, community members could ignore ecclesiastical laws altogether, enabling though inaction their priests to contravene church laws against, for example, gambling or living with women. This dissertation challenges a persistent historiography which portrays parishioners as languishing under the leadership of an incompetent and unscrupulous clergy at the turn of the sixteenth century. Historians have argued that this alleged misbehavior prompted parishioners to look elsewhere for religious leadership - namely to Protestant or reformed Catholic churches. However, allegations of crimes committed by Parisian priests have not been systematically examined until now. This study argues that historians have exaggerated the prevalence of, and parishioner disillusionment with, sacerdotal misbehavior. Moreover, this work shows that parishioners had significant agency in the regulation of priests in their parishes. Parishioners were not necessarily looking outside the traditional church to fulfill their religious needs. Rather, they utilized the enforcement tools they possessed to shape the character of their local parish. This study therefore contributes to a growing body of scholarship that sees the church at the turn of the sixteenth century as a dynamic organization directed largely at the parish level by residents of the parish themselves.
The quality of women's employment around the globe
(2012-10) Kim, Min Zee
Considering women's increased levels of employment globally, this project addresses a crucial question: When, if ever, is women's increased employment linked to women getting good jobs? Extensive research shows that women-friendly policies at the national level and national integration into the global economy increase women's employment. However, it is unclear if either or both of these factors are linked to the quality of women's employment. This dissertation research argues that the way women are incorporated into the labor force is critical in determining if increased female labor force participation is linked to women's representation in higher status positions. This dissertation research integrates global and national policy theories to examine their implications on the quality of women's employment, utilizing quantitative pooled time-series analyses on women's relative chances to be employed in two higher-status occupational groups--managerial/administrative and professional/technical occupations. As key independent variables, original indicators of anti-discrimination and maternity leave policies that are comparable across developed and developing countries are created. This study not only provides a crucial test of those theories that suggest women's increased labor force participation leads to women's employment in high quality jobs and those that suggest the opposite, but also explains the factors that make one or the other outcome more likely. This research also advances sociological theories about the links between globalization, state policies, and actual employment outcomes on the ground by integrating state-centered and global theories of women's employment and testing the scope of theories in both developed and developing countries.This research finds that women's employment policies are important to the quality of women's employment, particularly in developing countries, as well as the levels of gender prejudice. Then, I discuss academic and policy implications of the main findings. The cross-national, historical research design makes findings from this project particularly applicable to diverse national contexts.
Rights and Duties of Public School Teachers with Special Reference to Minnesota Statutes, Rulings, and Decisions
(1919) Pearson, Albert Erick
Seeking justice during war: accountability in conflicted democracies.
(2012-08) Lynch, Moira Katherine
In the past several years, the transitional justice literature has generated theories concerning varying human rights accountability outcomes in states transitioning from authoritarianism and violent conflict. Most of these theories are based on transition and post-conflict dynamics. However, a subset of these cases, democracies that have experienced internal conflict, cannot accurately be explained by these theories. Human rights trials and truth-seeking measures are overwhelmingly conducted during the violence in conflicted democracies, thus it is not appropriate to theorize accountability outcomes in these cases based on transition or post-conflict dynamics. Yet, these cases continue to be included in large N datasets and research that formulates explanations on why some countries implement accountability mechanisms while others do not. I assert that it is necessary to consider these cases in a different light. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland and Spain, I argue that the causal mechanisms that shaped prosecutions and truth-seeking measures in these cases were rooted in the pre-conflict milieu. Vertical, horizontal and external relations of accountability, including political competition, civil society pressure, judicial independence and pressure from international institutions, prompted accountability mechanisms in all three countries. The variation across the cases in terms of the prosecution record and the use of truth-seeking measures is explained by the extent to which these relations of accountability were available and operating efficiently prior to the conflict. The efficiency of these relations, in turn, was shaped by the presence/absence of entrenched emergency laws.
The Spectre Of Institutionalization: Disability, Law, Performance, And Policy At The Pennhurst State School & Hospital And Pennhurst Asylum
(2023-08) Stenberg, Nathan
This dissertation combines archival and ethnographic research to investigate the Pennhurst State School & Hospital (PSSH), a custodial institution for dis/abled people turned haunted attraction, primarily staffed by dis/abled performers. I ask how Pennhurst became a performance venue which commodifies violence for entertainment, while paradoxically fostering community for the very people the former institution sought to eliminate. In doing so, this dissertation uncovers how institutionalization constructs and enforces legal, medical, political, and social notions of disability, producing identities which simultaneously dehumanize and sustain dis/abled people. I theorize institutionalization as an ongoing social process and show how one dis/abled community uses performance to reinterpret and reclaim it. Chapters examine the commitment process to the PSSH through the lens of disability, law, and performance (Act I), and compare official “accounts” of care at the PSSH with the experiences of those forced to exist at the institution (Act II). The first half of the dissertation ends by examining the lawsuits that closed the PSSH, and Pennhurst’s influence on current disability policies (Intermezzo). The second half of the dissertation offers an ethnographic analysis of the contemporary Pennhurst Asylum haunted attraction (PA). The PA’s immersive performances of horror elide fact with fantasy and conceal ongoing violence against dis/abled people (Act III). The dissertation ends by showing how (in Act IV) the community of dis/abled and nondisabled people who work for PA perform vernacular dis/ability heritage work through their collective inhabitation of and care for this former institution. In doing so, they reclaim the space once intended for their segregation from society to create a space for dis/abled people made by dis/abled people.
Wrangling Software: computing professionals and the interpretation of software ownership in the University computing environment.
(2011-02) Cleveland, Lara L.
This project explores the way information about law is transformed into organizational policies and practices. Existing literature emphasizes the state and organized professional groups as primary interpreters of the law and as creators of legal implementation strategies in the organizational setting. This case study of university responses to software-related intellectual property protections focuses on the role of computing professionals in the creation and implementation of university policies and practices related to software ownership. This case challenges and extends existing research about professional construction of the law by examining a loosely organized profession, computing, and a law for which the state provides little or no regulatory enforcement. This research finds that professional boundary maintenance among computing professionals is difficult in a labor force environment where demand for professionals outpaces the availability of persons to do the work. Professional boundaries remain undefined or fluid, and credentialing efforts fail, in markets for which labor supply cannot meet the demand. However, control over physical machinery serves as an alternative boundary maintenance mechanism within the organization. Managing usage rights, and consequently software ownership permissions, through the digital protections already provided in the software and hardware systems is often justified to `protect users from themselves,' but with consequences for information exchange. Organizational emphasis on data privacy, file sharing, and security compete against pressures toward information openness in the university setting. The closed-machine system of dealing with privacy, security, and consequently ownership, align with the professional boundary maintenance efforts of computing professionals and is reinforced by bureaucratic organizational concerns of the university in desired outcome, if not fully in terms of philosophy or justification. Academic and technological scripts of openness and autonomy present opportunities for computing professionals to broadly interpret the increasingly restrictive policies on who can have full access to computing machinery. Rather than resist closed systems through rule breaking, copying, "stealing," or "piracy," computer professionals resist closed systems through active support of open source technologies, through extra efforts at ensuring interoperability among different computing platforms and programs, and primarily for those computer users who can also be defined as computer experts.

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