Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Although the discipline of international relations has traditionally described international politics and economics as the outcome of the actions of self-interested, rational, actors, concerned with expediency and not with the imperatives of justice, in practice many times we see the opposite: the concerns of politicians, academics, and the general public with morality and justice. My claim is that this is so because justice, and debates about how to go about promoting it in our political communities and in the international system, are crucial to social life. Social institutions and norms have deep effects on the distribution of social goods, and the choices we make about their interpretations need to be morally justified. Assuming the existence of a plurality of lifestyles and of perspectives on what justice is, particularly outside of political communities, in this paper I claim that conceptions of justice are crucial to norm interpretation and justification. Using a norm-based constructivist perspective and insights from Michael Walzer’s communitarian approach to distributive justice, I also propose a framework for the study and comparison of those different conceptions of justice, and as a preliminary study of its possibilities, I apply it to the international capital market (ICM) and the analysis of a what a liberal, market-oriented, conception of justice would define as a just distribution of capital through the ICM.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper looks at the values inscribed in the language of transitional justice documents. I argue that there is a gap in values between those of these documents and those of contemporary human rights discourse.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The researcher was interested in the impact of gender on the imposition of sanctions for misdemeanor offenses in Tippecanoe County, Indiana. After establishing specific criteria, he collected 95 cases from the public file court records. Several statistical analyses were performed with the data which yielded insight on the perceptions of gender in the criminal justice system of a conservative rural county in the US. The data provided interesting theoretical allusions as to the attitudes relevant actors in the criminal justice system have towards the genders. Findings and limitations are discussed at the end of the project.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines the shifting landscape of the intersection of global justice activism and the U.S. criminal justice system since the Seattle n30 WTO protests (30 November 1999). The National Lawyers Guild, drawing on 35 years of observation of First Amendment activity, concludes that post-Seattle protest policing manifests “a noticeable shift from reactive law enforcement to preemptive law enforcement.” Global justice activism is operationalized here to include: opposition to the international institutions such as the World Bank and WTO, anti-corporate campaigns associated with the anti-globalization movement, and movements which predate this movement but have become involved with it. The criminal justice system is operationalized here to include relevant laws, policing, investigation, prosecution, defense of activists, and lawsuits fighting back on all these aspects of the law (political litigation). Obviously this is a lot of territory to cover, and this article aims to simply describe the landscape, laying the groundwork for future analyses of each area in the above list.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: I explore the doctrine, first announced by Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. in University of California Regents v. Bakke in 1978, that the attainment of student body diversity is a constitutionally permissible goal. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor accepted the rule as doctrine in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003. I argue that although Justices Powell and O'Connor used doctrinal arguments in their opinions, they could have used originalism to arrive at the same result. I further argue that originalism in Constitutional interpretation is required under American republicanism.