The DC@UB Law Faculty Contributions to Books collection includes information on books, book chapters, encyclopedia entries and other contributions published in books by all current and emeritus University at Buffalo School of Law faculty members. Links to purchase books are included where the books are still in print. Full text chapters are included where publisher policies permit their inclusion.
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The Complexity of Universalism in Human Rights
Makau wa Mutua
Published as Chapter 2 in Human Rights With Modesty: The Problem of Universalism, András Sajó, ed.
This piece suggests that all claims of universalism must be approached with caution and trepidation. Visions of universality and predestination have been intertwined throughout modern history, and have been deployed as the linchpin for advancing narrow, secretarian, and exclusionary ideas and practices. Universality is not a natural phenomenon, but is always constructed by an interest for a specific purpose with a definite interest. How are local truths legitimately transformed into universal creeds? What value judgments are made, who makes those judgments, how they are made, and for what purposes? Ultimately, we must ask ourselves what good is intended by universal creeds - and whether they redound to the benefits of peoples everywhere. This piece presents a view of human rights that questions the assumptions of the major actors in the human rights movement. It attempts to make an explicit link between human rights norms and the fundamental characteristics of liberal democracy as practiced in the West, and to question the mythical elevation of the human rights corpus beyond politics and political ideology.
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The Hope for Sustainable Development: Visions of History and the Pragmatism of Environmentalists
David A. Westbrook
Published as Chapter X in The Jurisdynamics of Environmental Protection: Change and the Pragmatic Voice in Environmental Law, Jim Chen, ed.
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The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974
James A. Wooten
Published in Major Acts of Congress, Brian K. Landsberg, ed.
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"Above All, Do No Harm": The Role of Health and Mental Health Professionals in the Capital Punishment Process
Charles Patrick Ewing
Published in America's Experiment with Capital Punishment: Reflections on the Past, Present, and Future of the Ultimate Penal Sanction, Second Edition, James R. Acker, Robert M. Bohm & Charles S. Lanier, eds.
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Expert Testimony: Law and Practice
Charles Patrick Ewing
Published in Handbook of Psychology. Volume 11, Forensic Psychology, A.M. Goldstein, ed.
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Beverly Blair Cook: The Value of Eclecticism
Lynn M. Mather
Published in The Pioneers of Judicial Behavior, Nancy Maveety, ed.
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Gender in Context: Women in Family Law
Lynn M. Mather
Published as Chapter 3 in Women in the World's Legal Professions, Ulrike Schultz & Gisela Shaw, eds.
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Forest Certification as a Global Civil Society Regulatory Institution
Errol E. Meidinger
Published in Social and Political Dimensions of Forest Certification, Errol Meidinger, Christopher Elliott & Gerhard Oesten, eds.
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Forest Certification as Environmental Law Making by Global Civil Society
Errol E. Meidinger
Published in Social and Political Dimensions of Forest Certification, Errol Meidinger, Christopher Elliott & Gerhard Oesten, eds.
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The Fundamentals of Forest Certification
Errol E. Meidinger, Christopher Elliott, and Gerhard Oesten
Published in Social and Political Dimensions of Forest Certification, Errol Meidinger, Christopher Elliott & Gerhard Oesten, eds.
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The Voyage of the Neptune Jade: Transnational Labour Solidarity and the Obstacles of Domestic Law
James B. Atleson
Published as Chapter 19 in Labour Law in an Era of Globalization: Transformative Practices and Possibilities, Joanne Conaghan, Richard Michael Fischl & Karl Klare, eds.
This chapter recounts the troubled voyage of the Neptune Jade, a cargo ship caught in the midst of a dockworkers' dispute that began in Britain but attracted expressions of solidarity from dockworkers all over the world. It deploys the image of the endlessly voyaging Neptune Jade as a metaphor for the relentless search for solidarity in the midst of changing and highly unpredictable economic and political seas. Why should strikes aimed at supporting workers elsewhere not be deemed to involve basic rights? If a nation privileges political speech, why are expressions of views, voiced by withholding labour, not considered worthy of protection? The poignant absurdity to which this issue gives rise is illustrated by US laws protection of the right of unions to handbill consumers even though action is secondary, on the ground that it is protected by the First Amendment.
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Twentieth-Century Legal Metaphors for Self and Society
Guyora Binder
Published in Looking Back at Law's Century, Austin Sarat, Bryant Garth & Robert A. Kagan, eds.
Contract was a powerful trope at the nineteenth century’s end, representing society as a dynamic field of competing and transacting wills. This paper traces the emergence of other legal metaphors for society in twentieth century American legal thought, social thought, and popular culture. The newer legal metaphors included interests, claims, process, institutions, and transactions. Taken together, these metaphors testified to a new experience of the self as a contingent performance enabled by an institutional medium or network.
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Criminal Defenses
Charles Patrick Ewing
Published in Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment, David Levinson, ed.
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Criminal Trial
Charles Patrick Ewing
Published in Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment, David Levinson, ed.
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Tibetan Law
Rebecca Redwood French
Published in Legal Systems of the World: A Political, Social and Historical Encyclopedia, Herbert M. Kritzer, ed.
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History of Jurisprudence: American, 1945-1970
Elizabeth B. Mensch
Published in Oxford Companion to American Law, Kermit L. Hall, ed.
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The Impact of Mass Incarceration on Immigration Policy
Teresa A. Miller
Published as Chapter X in Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Incarceration, Marc Mauer & Meda Chesney-Lind, eds.
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The Banjul Charter: The Case for an African Cultural Fingerprint
Makau wa Mutua
Published as Chapter 3 in Cultural Transformation and Human Rights in Africa, Abdullahi An-Na'im, ed.
This article questions the universality of the human rights corpus and argues that a human rights doctrine that is legitimate across cultures and traditions is not possible without the participation of the wider globe. Its purpose is to imagine and reconfigure a rights regime that could achieve legitimacy in Africa. It argues that African cultures and conceptions of man have a lot to contribute to the exercise of the reconstruction of the human rights corpus. The piece focuses attention on particular African ideas and conceptions of society, morality, and human ethos that would enrich the human rights regime and make it more legitimate in Africa.
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Critical Legal Studies
John Henry Schlegel
Published in The Oxford Companion to American Law, Kermit L. Hall, ed.
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Legal Realism
John Henry Schlegel
Published in The Oxford Companion to American Law, Kermit L. Hall, ed.
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Freedom of Contract and Freedom of Person: A Brief History of “Involuntary Servitude” in American Fundamental Law
Robert J. Steinfeld
Published as Chapter 14 in Republicanism and Liberalism in America and the German States, 1750–1850, Jürgen Heideking, James A. Henretta & Peter Becker, eds.
Liberal ideas are normally taken to have played an important role in the development of free markets, and of free labor based on contract in those markets. A closer look at labor regimes in the nineteenth century, however, reveals that liberal commitments to freedom did not straightforwardly produce what we today would think of as free labor. Just as often they produced a form of coerced contractual labor. And this was quite simply because liberal commitments to freedom embraced a basic conflict between freedom of contract and freedom of person.
To the extent that one possessed absolute freedom of contract, one would have been free to contract away one's personal liberty. One would have been free to contract into slavery or bind one's labor irrevocably for long periods of time. To the extent that the state found it desirable to prevent this result, it could only do so by imposing limitations on the freedom of contract in the interest of preserving the freedom of persons.
Modern free labor is the result of just such a choice to restrict freedom of contract. Before this basic issue within liberalism was finally resolved in favor of freedom of person and against freedom of contract, many of the first market regimes based on free contract produced coerced contractual labor rather than free labor. In the first flourishing of free contract in the nineteenth century, lawmakers in many different countries seem to have believed that labor markets based on promises could only function properly if contracts could be rigorously enforced against workers. As a result they often gave employers harsh remedies for contract breach so that they could compel workers to perform their agreements
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Injury and Identity: The Damaged Self in Three Cultures
David M. Engel
Published in Between Law and Culture: Relocating Legal Studies, David Theo Goldberg, Michael Musheno & Lisa C. Bower, eds.
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Protecting Human Rights in a Global Economy: Challenges for the World Trade Organization
Robert Howse and Makau wa Mutua
Published in Human Rights in Development Volume 6: Yearbook 1999/2000, Hugo Stokke & Arne Tostensen, eds.
Since the late 1980s, the ascendancy of market economics coupled with a revolution in information technology has accelerated the process of globalization while institutions of international governance have been unable or unwilling to catch up. Privatization and the related phenomena of deregulation, structural adjustment, and a myriad of new bilateral, regional and multilateral trade and investment agreements have proceeded without credible efforts to conceptually and practically address their impacts on legally protected human rights. This paper addresses the tensions and potential synergies between the two legal regimes governing trade and investment and human rights. Trade and investment agreements, as well as the practices of international business, must be held accountable to existing human rights law. The spirit of human rights law must frame the development of trade law if either is to achieve its goals. While human rights violations existed long before this period of rapid economic integration, the growing number of sectors covered by multilateral trade and investment agreements has set the stage for a new variety of human rights abuses which have not yet been suitably addressed. There is a need to evolve new laws and policies in a manner that overcomes the post-war legacy of isolation between human rights institutions and economic institutions. This is something that the World Trade Organization, other multinational organizations, and all of mankind should address.
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Social Construction and Transformation of Disputes
Lynn M. Mather
Published in International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Neil J. Smelser & Paul B. Baltes, eds.
The social construction of disputes refers to the process by which injuries are perceived and asserted as claims before a third party. Disputes are not objective events, but are social constructs. Transformation of disputes refers to change in their form or content as they are rephrased into legal language and as other participants become involved in the disputing process. Key contributions of the dispute transformation perspective include psychological insight into the perception and assertion of grievances; sociological analysis of the distribution of grievances, claims, and court cases for different types of injuries or problems; empirical work on the role of lawyers in transforming disputes; anthropological study of language and conflict; and political science research on how courts and other institutions shape the construction of disputes. Understanding how disputes emerge and are transformed links a microanalysis of dispute resolution with a macroview of Law, political order and change.