Suchergebnisse

During a post-election TV interview that aired mid-November 2016, then President-Elect Donald Trump claimed that there are millions of so-called "criminal aliens" living in the United States: "What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate." This claim is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts. A recent report by the Migration Policy Institute suggests that just over 800,000 (or 7 percent) of the 11 million undocumented individuals in the United States have criminal records.1 Of this population, 300,000 individuals are felony offenders and 390,000 are serious misdemeanor offenders — tallies which exclude more than 93 percent of the resident undocumented population (Rosenblum 2015, 22–24). Moreover, the Congressional Research Service found that 140,000 undocumented migrants — or slightly more than 1 percent of the undocumented population — are currently serving time in prison in the United States (Kandel 2016). The facts, therefore, are closer to what Doris Meissner, former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Commissioner, argues: that the number of "criminal aliens" arrested as a percentage of all fugitive immigration cases is "modest" (Meissner et al. 2013, 102–03). The facts notwithstanding, President Trump's fictional tally is important to consider because it conveys an intent to produce at least this many people who — through discourse and policy — can be criminalized and incarcerated or deported as "criminal aliens." In this article, we critically review the literature on immigrant criminalization and trace the specific laws that first linked and then solidified the association between undocumented immigrants and criminality. To move beyond a legal, abstract context, we also draw on our quantitative and qualitative research to underscore ways immigrants experience criminalization in their family, school, and work lives. The first half of our analysis is focused on immigrant criminalization from the late 1980s through the Obama administration, with an emphasis on immigration enforcement practices first engineered in the 1990s. Most significant, we argue, are the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). The second section of our analysis explores the social impacts of immigrant criminalization, as people's experiences bring the consequences of immigrant criminalization most clearly into focus. We approach our analysis of the production of criminality of immigrants through the lens of legal violence (Menjívar and Abrego 2012), a concept designed to understand the immediate and long-term harmful effects that the immigration regime makes possible. Instead of narrowly focusing only on the physical injury of intentional acts to cause harm, this concept broadens the lens to include less visible sources of violence that reside in institutions and structures and without identifiable perpetrators or incidents to be tabulated. This violence comes from structures, laws, institutions, and practices that, similar to acts of physical violence, leave indelible marks on individuals and produce social suffering. In examining the effects of today's ramped up immigration enforcement, we turn to this concept to capture the violence that this regime produces in the lives of immigrants. Immigrant criminalization has underpinned US immigration policy over the last several decades. The year 1996, in particular, was a signal year in the process of criminalizing immigrants. Having 20 years to trace the connections, it becomes evident that the policies of 1996 used the term "criminal alien" as a strategic sleight of hand. These laws established the concept of "criminal alienhood" that has slowly but purposefully redefined what it means to be unauthorized in the United States such that criminality and unauthorized status are too often considered synonymous (Ewing, Martínez, and Rumbaut 2015). Policies that followed in the 2000s, moreover, cast an increasingly wider net which continually re-determined who could be classified as a "criminal alien," such that the term is now a mostly incoherent grab bag. Simultaneously and in contrast, the practices that produce "criminal aliens" are coherent insofar as they condition immigrant life in the United States in now predictable ways. This solidity allows us to turn in our conclusion to some thoughts about the likely future of US immigration policy and practice under President Trump.

This article examines the principle of legal certainty in the context of low-carbon investment in the electricity sector. It analyses the interpretation and functions of legal certainty as a constitutional principle of EU law and explores how they operate in the low-carbon transition. The analysis is conducted in the context of conflicting roles of law in the energy transition. On the one hand, the low-carbon transition requires new investment, which demands stable and predictable legal frameworks. On the other hand, the energy transition calls for the continuous development of legal frameworks to respond to the evolving energy sector. This continuous change is detrimental to the investment needed to finance the transition. This article argues that the principle of legal certainty can function as a means of anchoring these evolving and sometimes turbulent legal developments and reconcile the conflicting roles of law required by the energy transition, on the one hand, and investment certainty, on the other.

Male-dominated law and legal knowledge essentially characterized the whole of pre-modern history in that the patriarchy represented the axis of social relations in both the private and public spheres. Indeed, modern and even contemporary law still have embedded elements of patriarchal heritage, even in the secular modern legal systems of Western developed countries, either within the content of legislation or in terms of its implementation and interpretation. This is true to a greater or lesser extent across legal systems, although the secular modern legal systems of the Western developed countries have made great advances in terms of gender equality. The traditional understanding of law has always been self-evidently dominated by men, but modern law and its understanding have also been more or less "malestreamed." Therefore, it has become necessary to overcome the given "maskulinity" of legal thought. In contemporary legal and political orders, gender mainstreaming of law has been of the utmost importance for overcoming deeply and persistently embedded power relations and gender-based, unequal social relations. At the same time and equally importantly, the gender mainstreaming of legal education – to which this book aims to contribute – can help to gradually eliminate this male dominance and accompanying power relations from legal education and higher education as a whole. This open access textbook provides an overview of gender issues in all areas of law, including sociological, historical and methodological issues. Written for students and teachers around the globe, it is intended to provide both a general overview and in-depth knowledge in the individual areas of law. Relevant court decisions and case studies are supplied throughout the book.

Introduction: Law, palliative care and dying : legal and ethical challenges -- The development and practice of palliative care -- Specialist palliative care and euthanasia : a legitimate distinction? -- The human rights framework for palliative care -- The legal framework for palliative care in the United Kingdom and Ireland -- The legal framework for palliative care in the Netherlands -- The legal framework for palliative care in France -- Conclusion: Law, palliative care and dying

International courts have proliferated in the international system, with over one hundred judicial or quasi-judicial bodies in existence today. This book develops a rational legal design theory of international adjudication in order to explain the variation in state support for international courts. Initial negotiators of new courts, 'originators', design international courts in ways that are politically and legally optimal. States joining existing international courts, 'joiners', look to the legal rules and procedures to assess the courts' ability to be capable, fair and unbiased. The authors demonstrate that the characteristics of civil law, common law and Islamic law influence states' acceptance of the jurisdiction of international courts, the durability of states' commitments to international courts, and the design of states' commitments to the courts. Furthermore, states strike cooperative agreements most effectively in the shadow of an international court that operates according to familiar legal principles and rules.