Abstract Following Wittgenstein's call to imagine law as a way of life (1958), we can envisage environmental law and environmentalism as a way of living beautifully. Employing George Santayana's aesthetic theory (1896, 1905, 1910), this article explores environmentally engaged citizenship as more than a mere ideological manifestation of subjectivity. A multifaceted relationship between individuals and their environment, it manifests itself through their ideology, political subjectivity, but also through aesthetic subjectivity. Using Juliana v. USA as a case study, this article examines civic engagement taking into consideration its deeply ideological and aesthetic nature. Keywords Environmentally engaged citizenship · Aesthetic ideology · Environmentalism · Sustainable capitalism
While law review articles are preserved in fee-based databases such as Westlaw and Lexis and thus are reliably accessible for the future, the footnotes, the source of authority and the body of most law review articles which themselves represent the main part of legal scholarship, usually refer to documents which far too often become inaccessible within a few months after their publication. Both government documents and documents privately published on the Internet have an unreliable life-span. This contradictory approach to digitization raises a large array of questions. Among them, is the following: How does this double digitization (that is, digitizing articles which refer to already-digitized, but unreliably retrieved, prior sources) affect the retrieval of legal information? Whose job is it to preserve legal information? As this is a more complex answer here I will only attempt to show that digitization has created a different environment of legal information (which includes legal scholarship) and this new environment proves to be more elusive that we would like to think about it.
When, in January 2006, seven-year-old Nixzmary Brown was tortured and beaten to death, allegedly by her stepfather as her mother ignored her cries for help, every New Yorker looked at the city's Administration for Children's Services for answers. Conversely, I do not recall any discussion about the failure of charities to adequately provide for the city's abused children. Charities, like non-governmental organizations (NGOs), are not expected to be responsible for systemic problems. They are a moral and social bonus, which fill the gap in discrete areas where taxpayers' money is not sufficient. So I may be accused of having a one-track mind, but I cannot seem to escape the following questions: Why do we even talk about providing social services in the twenty-first century? Couldn't we have had this issue resolved by now? Why don't we have a "sophisticated national system of government departments" charged with this task? Most other Western countries have one. Even corporate America would like the government to be in charge of providing social services for its employees. Instead we find ourselves on the cutting-edge of a newly fashionable neo-liberal government that looks as emaciated as a Hollywood diva and as masculine as a New York City cop. This decade-long transformation comes hand-in-hand with a trend of privatization and an increased reliance on the nonprofit sector, both domestically and internationally
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States came to Eastern Europe spreading the gospel of democracy and the American Rule of Law. In addition to encouraging Western ideology, the United States was there to forge new economic relationships and, following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to accelerate the creation of military alliances through membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the newly-formed "coalition of the willing." Romania and Bulgaria, among other former Soviet satellites, welcomed the invitation. Romania and Bulgaria are small countries which share similar economic pressures as they attempt to emerge from troubled political histories. When the United States, with its military budget of $ 399 billion, approached Romania and Bulgaria seeking support for its global war against terror, both countries experienced a major transformation on a local and international level. In what seems like a perfect example of Andy Warhol's notoriety allotment, for fifteen minutes the West gazed at them in disbelief.
This article focuses on the content of elite law schools' curricula. Like all such debates, this one also reflects the author's political and social concerns, which at this time are questioning the impact such curricula have on the graduates' abilities to deliberate "upon the full range of issues which might appear directly or indirectly on a less impoverished [contemporary] political agenda." Elite law schools, which are usually associated with elite universities, are expected to offer liberal legal education. Elite law schools are the fountain of legal scholarship. They are also the place where many of this nation's leaders acquire both legal knowledge about truth and ideologies -- lenses through which they see the world, form their beliefs and then act accordingly. This author understands the goals of liberal education to translate John Stuart Mill's principle of "market of ideas" into a content-rich curriculum. As Mill wrote, "the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it." To the contrary, this article argues, currently elite law schools have abandoned Mill's principle. They favor a more limited version, one that excludes uncomfortable theories, such as Marxism. Omitting Marx's writings, this article argues, is not an innocuous curricular reduction. If theories are subjective constructs -- "academic elites make theories in their own image," then a curriculum stripped of a theory that emphasizes a different perspective about legal phenomena risks being perceived as a mere exercise in cultural hegemony. Our society is still based on classes that are identified economically, and our law still has to govern the behavior of people with different economic constraints. For example, Marx's writings, as argued here, make it easier to articulate why a rational choice for those who rely on public services is to favor progressive taxation, and for those who rely on private services, tax cuts.
Michael F. Brown, the Lambert Professor of Anthropology and Latin American Studies at Williams College, has spent many decades researching indigenous cultures in Australia and the Americas. With "Who Owns Native Culture" -- as the title suggests -- he embarks on solving proprietary issues related to indigenous knowledge and its artistic, religious or holistic value.
This article is about sex; but not about sex meaning gender, an adjective, or "that thing we are." It is about sexual behavior. It is, in Professor Franke's words, about sex as verb--"that thing we do"--or, to quote Judge Posner, it is about that "quintessential private activity [of] our culture." However, it does not focus on sex as "the ultimate animal necessity." That would be the realm of today's talk shows headed by Jerry Springer and his ilk. Instead, it focuses on the pervasiveness of sexual discourse in the legal realm and tries to explain the reason behind it. This article suggests that sex has become a human behavior that is often legally sanctioned because it offers itself to endless and various permissive and restrictive regulations. Furthermore, policing sex requires little infrastructure, unlike, say, a war in Iraq or improving the public school system. Allowing permissive sex legislation is also less expensive. Moreover, like thirst and hunger and irrespective of any regulation, sex will continue its old ways, whether heterosexual or homosexual, reproductive or amative.
Written laws, records and legal materials form the very foundation of a democratic society. Lawmakers, legal scholars and everyday citizens alike need, and are entitled, to access the current and historic materials that comprise, explain, define, critique and contextualize their laws and legal institutions. The preservation of legal information in all formats is imperative. Thus far, the twenty-first century has witnessed unprecedented mass-scale acceptance and adoption of digital culture, which has resulted in an explosion in digital information. However, digitally born materials, especially those that are published directly and independently to the Web, are presently at an extremely high risk of permanent loss. Our legal heritage is no exception to this phenomenon, and efforts must be put forth to ensure that our current body of digital legal information is not lost. The authors explored the role of the United States law library community in the preservation of digital legal information. Through an online survey of state and academic law library directors, it was determined that those represented in the sample recognize that digitally born legal materials are at high risk for loss, yet their own digital preservation projects have primarily focused upon the preservation of digitized print materials, rather than digitally born materials. Digital preservation activities among surveyed libraries have been largely limited by a lack of funding, staffing and expertise; however, these barriers could be overcome by collaboration with other institutions, as well as participation in a large-scale regional or national digital preservation movement, which would allow for resource-sharing among participants. One such collaborative digital preservation program, the Chesapeake Project, is profiled in the article and explored as a collaborative effort that may be expanded upon or replicated by other institutions and libraries tackling the challenges of digital preservation.
In this article, we observe the legalized character of the phenomenon popularly called "globalization." We first examine what it means to be a legalized phenomenon and observe that an important part of legalization is legitimation. In domestic legal regimes, legitimation is accomplished through the Rule of Law, which makes certain claims about the nature of the society of which the legal regime is a part. Simply stated, the Rule of Law claims that a legal system is legitimate if its rules are definite and predictable and are applied in a general, impartial, and non-retroactive manner. In the international trading system of which globalization is the legalized regime, the legitimizing role is played by the so-called law of comparative advantage, developed originally by David Ricardo. Simply stated, the law of comparative advantage claims that all nations, not just the richest or most powerful, can profit from unhindered international trade, since each country can exploit and thus profit from its own particular advantages, even while it pays others for goods produced elsewhere. This globalized legitimation, similar to domestic legitimation, makes certain claims about the nature of the system of which the globalized regime is a part. We then examine what particular features of globalization are supported by the law of comparative advantage, and we note how the legitimating role of that law conceals the true nature of those features. Finally, we observe that globalization and those features we have examined produce, contrary to their express claims, disastrous global disparities in income and welfare. We conclude that it is the legitimizing functions of the law of comparative advantage that allows globalization to proceed in the manner it does while claiming to do quite the opposite. The legitimizing function of the global regime thus prevents a true understanding of globalization's nature.
During the year 2000, there were significant developments in immigration law and policy with respect to employment-based immigration, family visas, asylum regulations and jurisprudence, refugee admissions, Temporary Protection Status (TPS) designations, and the implementation of the United Nations Torture Convention. The net effect of changes in employment-based immigration was a gain to both the business community and to immigrants under most categories. There was a virtual unanimous consent among lawmakers to increase the number of temporary H-1B specialty workers in the United States and to ameliorate some of the unintended consequences of previous legislation such as the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA).1 To accomplish these objectives, Congress enacted two significant pieces of immigration legislation late in the year: the American Competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century Act2 (AC21) and the Legal Immigration and Family Equity Act of 2000 (LIFE Act),3 as well as subsequent LIFE Act Amendments. Together, the new laws provide for a three-year increase in the H-1B visa cap, new rules allowing for "portability" and extensions of H-1B visa status, temporary restoration of the special adjustment of status provisions of former Immigration and Nationality Act4 (INA) § 245(i), and temporary nonimmigrant status for certain alien spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents during the pendency of their green card processing. In addition to these legislative developments, the executive branch and courts focused on an array of issues including permanent and temporary worker labor certifications, asylum claims, and implementation of the United Nations Torture Convention.
