Bonnichsen v. United States: Time, Place, and the Search for Identity

2005 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Harding

On its surface, Bonnichsen v. United States is an administrative law case, reviewing a decision by the Secretary of the Interior regarding the appropriate reach of a specific set of legislative and regulatory rules. As such, Judge Gould, writing for a panel of the Ninth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals (Ninth Circuit) decided that the secretary's office had overstepped its bounds; in short, its interpretation of the rules in question was not reasonable. But underneath the legal categories, Bonnichsen is a much more complicated and politically charged case. It is about competing conceptions of history and spirituality. It is about sovereignty (although that word is not uttered once in the decision, aside from reciting a definition of Native Hawaiians) and the clash of cultures. It is less about the standards for decision making and more about who the appropriate decision makers are. It is a case about a man who lived 9,000 years ago and about how today we should understand his cultural identity.

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 180-182

On August 8, 2019, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued an opinion in Bakalian v. Central Bank of Republic of Turkey, Case No. 13-55664. In this case, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court's dismissal of plaintiffs’ claims seeking compensation from the Republic of Turkey and two Turkish national banks for lands that they claim were unlawfully confiscated from their ancestors during what the Court refers to as the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1923. In 2006, California adopted a statute extending the statute of limitations for claims arising out of the Armenian Genocide to December 31, 2016. Thus, the claims filed by the plaintiffs in 2010 were not time-barred under the statute; however, the panel found that since the Court had previously found the statute to be unconstitutional, no statute existed to extend the statute of limitations and therefore the claims were time-barred. The panel held that since the claims were plainly time-barred, the Court need not address legal questions posed regarding Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act jurisdiction.


2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 196-198
Author(s):  
Donald Abelson

The Government Taketh Away: The Politics of Pain in the United States and Canada., Leslie A. Pal and R. Kent Weaver, eds., Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003, pp. xii, 340.Compiling edited collections is notoriously difficult because editors and contributors frequently work from a different script. The result is that instead of producing a coherent volume which addresses a particular theme, readers are often left with a collection of scholarly papers that share little in common. What may have started as a project with a single goal and focus can quickly disintegrate into a patchwork quilt. This major problem has been avoided in Leslie Pal and Kent Weaver's edited book, The Government Taketh Away: The Politics of Pain in the United States and Canada, a sophisticated and richly detailed analysis of how decision-makers in the two countries attempt to introduce policies that may adversely affect the economic, social and political interests of various groups while trying to minimize political fallout. As the title of this book suggests, the editors are not concerned about why policy makers reward certain sectors and groups in society. After all, common sense dictates that politicians need votes and attempt to acquire them by appealing to the broadest segment of the population. In this book, the focus is on how policy makers, when faced with potential opposition from different groups, make strategic decisions that result in the imposition of losses. Although the editors do not offer a concrete definition of loss, examples include policy decisions that result in the de-indexation of old age pensions, the closure of military bases and the retraction of tax benefits. This book is not an indictment of government—the editors acknowledge that in democracies politicians must often make difficult choices that will help some and hurt others. Rather, it is a thorough exploration of how decision makers make these decisions and how various groups and sectors react.


2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-125
Author(s):  
Andrew Adler

AbstractIn 2002, the California state legislature enacted a law temporarily suspending the statute of limitations in certain Holocaust art cases. In doing so, it removed a major procedural obstacle facing plaintiffs and effectively revived claims once considered time-barred. Seven years later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held in von Saher v. Norton Simon Museum of Art at Pasadena that this California law was unconstitutional under the foreign affairs doctrine, because it impermissibly intruded on the federal government's exclusive power to make and resolve war. In so holding, the Ninth Circuit became the first court in the United States to restrict the authority of the states to inject themselves into the realm of Holocaust art litigation.


2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-69
Author(s):  
Marlene Kim

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) in the United States face problems of discrimination, the glass ceiling, and very high long-term unemployment rates. As a diverse population, although some Asian Americans are more successful than average, others, like those from Southeast Asia and Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (NHPIs), work in low-paying jobs and suffer from high poverty rates, high unemployment rates, and low earnings. Collecting more detailed and additional data from employers, oversampling AAPIs in current data sets, making administrative data available to researchers, providing more resources for research on AAPIs, and enforcing nondiscrimination laws and affirmative action mandates would assist this population.


Author(s):  
Takis S. Pappas

Based on an original definition of modern populism as “democratic illiberalism” and many years of meticulous research, Takis Pappas marshals extraordinary empirical evidence from Argentina, Greece, Peru, Italy, Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, the United States, Spain, and Brazil to develop a comprehensive theory about populism. He addresses all key issues in the debate about populism and answers significant questions of great relevance for today’s liberal democracy, including: • What is modern populism and how can it be differentiated from comparable phenomena like nativism and autocracy? • Where in Latin America has populism become most successful? Where in Europe did it emerge first? Why did its rise to power in the United States come so late? • Is Trump a populist and, if so, could he be compared best with Venezuela’s Chávez, France’s Le Pens, or Turkey’s Erdoğan? • Why has populism thrived in post-authoritarian Greece but not in Spain? And why in Argentina and not in Brazil? • Can populism ever succeed without a charismatic leader? If not, what does leadership tell us about how to challenge populism? • Who are “the people” who vote for populist parties, how are these “made” into a group, and what is in their minds? • Is there a “populist blueprint” that all populists use when in power? And what are the long-term consequences of populist rule? • What does the expansion, and possibly solidification, of populism mean for the very nature and future of contemporary democracy? Populism and Liberal Democracy will change the ways the reader understands populism and imagines the prospects of liberal democracy.


1974 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce E. Lindsay ◽  
Cleve E. Willis

The spread of suburbs into previously rural areas has become commonplace in the United States. A rather striking aspect of this phenomenon has been the discontinuity which results. This aspect is often manifest in a haphazard mixture of unused and densely settled areas which has been described as “sprawl”. A more useful definition of suburban sprawl, its causes, and its consequences, is provided below in order to introduce the econometric objectives of this paper.


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