Can Legislatures Redress Racial Discrimination in Capital Punishment? Evaluating Racial Justice Acts in Response to McCleskey

2018 ◽  
Vol 82 (5) ◽  
pp. 388-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen A Donnelly
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
The Public ◽  
The North ◽  
Death Sentences ◽  
The Us ◽  
Death Sentencing

Three decades ago, the US Supreme Court declared in McCleskey v Kemp that legislatures, rather than courts, should redress statistically identified disparities in death sentencing. Racial justice efforts failed in Congress, but two states adopted measures that challenge inequalities in capital punishment. This article critically examines the development and impacts of the North Carolina and Kentucky Racial Justice Acts. Findings reveal two policy implications. The acts first actualised judicial wishes for elected officials and the public to address sentencing disparities. Secondly, the policies became distinct ‘super due process’ remedies that require defendants to show racial disparity as an error under specific procedures. Variation in the acts’ approaches to proof and causes of discrimination contributed to differential impact: the questioning of all death sentences within four years in North Carolina and minimal relief in Kentucky for two decades. Lessons are drawn for designing disparity reforms in criminal processing following judicial non-intervention.

scholarly journals Black Lives Matter and Catholic Whiteness: A Tale of Two Performances

Horizons ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 306-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Jaycox
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Collective Agency ◽  
Theological Ethics ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
The Us ◽  
Moral Critique ◽  
Catholic Theological

The Black Lives Matter movement has received little scholarly attention from Catholic theologians and ethicists, despite the fact that it is the most conspicuous and publicly influential racial justice movement to be found in the US context in decades. The author argues on the basis of recent field research that this movement is most adequately understood from a theological ethics standpoint through a performativity lens, as a form of quasi-liturgical participation that constructs collective identity and sustains collective agency. The author draws upon ethnographic methods in order to demonstrate that the public moral critique of the movement is embedded in four interlocking narratives, and to interrogate the Catholic theological discipline itself as an object of this moral critique in light of its own performative habituation to whiteness.

scholarly journals Mycobacterium avium ssp. paratuberculosis in the Food Supply: A Public Health Issue

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Kuenstner ◽  
John Todd Kuenstner
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Mycobacterium Avium ◽  
Control Program ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Public Health Issue ◽  
Pasteurized Milk ◽  
The Public ◽  
Federal Authority ◽  
The Us ◽  
Standards And Regulations

This article examines the policy implications of Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP) as a zoonotic pathogen and the public health risks posed by the presence of MAP in food, particularly milk products. Viable MAP has been cultured from commercially pasteurized milk in the US. Dairy pasteurization standards and regulations are examined in light of this finding. On the basis of the precautionary principle, the authors suggest options to reduce exposure to MAP, including (1) increased federal authority to regulate pasteurization of all dairy products, (2) modification of pasteurization standards in order to more effectively kill MAP, (3) removal of the Pasteurized Milk Ordinance (PMO) provision that allows states to override federal policy in intrastate dairy sales, and (4) creation of a mandatory Johne's Disease Control Program. These measures would reduce human exposure to MAP and may reduce the risk of diseases associated with MAP.

scholarly journals Ungodly Genders: Deconstructing Ex-Gay Movement Discourses of “Transgenderism” in the US

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 191
Author(s):  
Christine M. Robinson ◽  
Sue E. Spivey
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Gender Variance ◽  
Transgender Studies ◽  
Transgender People ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
The Us ◽  
Gay Movement ◽  
The Individual

This research investigates a neglected topic within both transgender studies and religious studies by analyzing ex-gay movement discourses of “transgenderism” from the 1970s to the present, focusing primarily on the US-American context. The oppression of transgender people in the US and globally is fed and fueled by the religious, scientific, and political discourses of the transnational “ex-gay” movement, which provides the ideological and material foundation of Christian Right politics. Using critical discourse analysis of ex-gay texts, we analyze the implications of these discourses in the individual, interactional, and institutional dimensions of society’s gender structure. This movement is one of the most insidious—and overlooked—sources of cisgenderism and transmisogyny today, constructing gender variance as sin, mental illness, and danger—with catastrophic consequences for transgender people, and those along the transfemale/feminine spectrum in particular. Finally, we discuss the public policy implications of these discourses.

Asia in 2019

Asian Survey ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Uk Heo
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
The North ◽  
China Trade ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Issue ◽  
Trade War ◽  
Economic Partnership ◽  
Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership

Among the major events that occurred in Asia in 2019 were four that received global attention: the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the US-China trade war, the North Korean nuclear issue, and protests in Hong Kong. These events have significant policy implications for the world as well as for Asia.

scholarly journals Victims and the sentencing process: developing participatory rights?

Legal Studies ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 651-677 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Doak ◽  
Ralph Henham ◽  
Barry Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Structural Parameters ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
The Public ◽  
Adversarial System ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
Procedural Rights

Recent years have seen a number of developments pertaining to the notion that victims should be afforded a ‘voice’ in the criminal justice system. The theoretical and structural parameters of the adversarial system are not, however, conducive to exercising such a role. For many, conferring procedural rights on victims jeopardises the due process rights of the accused, as well as the public nature of the criminal justice system. In light of the recent decision to roll out the ‘Victims' Focus Scheme’ across England and Wales, this paper explores a number of issues of principle that arise – not least the deeper policy implications of an apparent re-alignment of the normative parameters of the criminal justice system to incorporate the private interests of third parties.

2. Arthur Dobbs, Adam Smith and Walpole’s Excise Scheme

1961 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-207
Author(s):  
C. R. Fay
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
North West ◽  
The Public ◽  
University Library ◽  
The North ◽  
Public Record ◽  
Rough Draft

The writer is Arthur Dobbs (1689–1765), M.P. for Carrickfergus, later Governor of North Carolina, and a lifelong believer in the North-West Passage. The letter is in the Walpole Papers. (Cambridge University Library by courtesy of the Marquis of Cholmondeley), but the Memorandum to which it relates is absent. However, the rough draft of the Memorandum, from which I quote at length, is in the Dobbs Papers from Castle Dobbs, Carrickfergus, now on deposit with the Public Record Office, Belfast, and there marked ‘82, undated’.

scholarly journals A Plea for Legal Peace

2021 ◽  
pp. 93-117
Author(s):  
Riccardo Pavoni
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Successful Outcome ◽  
Constitutional Court ◽  
International Court Of Justice ◽  
The Public ◽  
State Immunity ◽  
The North ◽  
International Court ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Law

AbstractThis chapter advocates legal peace between Germany and Italy as the most sensible and appropriate way to deal with the aftermath of Sentenza 238/2014 of the Italian Constitutional Court and its declaration of the unconstitutionality of the 2012 International Court of Justice (ICJ) Judgment in Jurisdictional Immunities. This plea does not only arise from frustration with the current impasse but also from the suspicion that the public good of legal peace has never seriously been canvassed by the Italian and German governments. Section II takes stock of the legal developments relating to the dispute between Germany and Italy since Sentenza 238/2014 was delivered. It especially focuses on the attitudes of the governments concerned, both in the context of the ongoing proceedings before Italian courts and elsewhere. It finds such attitudes opaque and unduly dismissive of the necessity to devise legal peace in the interest of the victims and of the integrity of international law. Section III highlights how the behaviour of the governments so far was at odds with the successful outcome of other intergovernmental negotiations concerning reparations for crimes committed during World War II (WWII), a process which has not been entirely finalized, as evidenced by the 2014 Agreement between the US and France on compensation for the French railroad deportees who were excluded from prior French reparation programmes. The Agreement between the US and France and all previous similar arrangements were concluded under mounting pressure of litigation before domestic courts against those states (and/or their companies) that were responsible for unredressed WWII crimes, thus a situation resembling the current state of the dispute between Germany and Italy. It is telling that litigation ended when the courts took cognizance of the stipulation of intergovernmental agreements establishing fair mechanisms for compensating the plaintiffs and victims of the relevant crimes. Such practice, therefore, is essentially in line with the proposition that state immunity (for human rights violations) is essentially conditional on effective alternative remedies for the victims. This and other controversial aspects related to the law of state immunity—such as the nature of state immunity, the North American remedies against immunity for state sponsors of terrorism, and the persistent dynamism of pertinent practice—are revisited in section IV. The purpose is to suggest that certainty about the law of international immunities, as allegedly flowing from the 2012 ICJ Judgment, is more apparent than real and that this consideration should a fortiori urge the realization of legal peace in the German–Italian affair.

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