Contributions to Books

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 Construction of the African Human Rights System: Prospects and Pitfalls

Makau wa Mutua

Published as Chapter 7 in Realizing Human Rights: Moving From Inspiration to Impact, Samantha Power & Graham Allison, eds.

The regional African human rights system is based on the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (The African or Banjul Charter), which entered into force on October 21, 1986, upon ratification by a simple majority of member states of the organization of African Unity (OAU). In 1998, the OAU adopted a protocol for the establishment of an African Court on Human and Peoples’ rights. The Protocol suggests that the African Human Rights Court will make the promotion and the protection of human rights within the regional system more effective. But the mere addition of a court, although a significant development, is unlikely by itself to address sufficiently the normative and structural weaknesses that have plagued the African human rights system since its inception. This chapter critically evaluates the African human rights system and assesses its potential impact on human rights conditions on the continent. It examines the normative aspects and institutional arrangements created under the African Charter and the Protocol for the African Human Rights Court. It asks whether a clear and mutually reinforcing division of labor between the African Commission and the African Human Rights Court could be developed to promote and protect human rights on the continent more effectively.
The Law-as-Literature Trope

Guyora Binder

Published in Law and Literature, Michael Freeman & Andrew Lewis, eds.
Teenage Violence

Charles Patrick Ewing

Published in Violence in America: An Encyclopedia, Ronald Gottesman, ed.
Violence, Custody and Visitation

Charles Patrick Ewing

Published in Violence in our Lives: Impact on Workplace, Home and Community, Elizabeth K. Carll, ed.
Federalism and the Problem of Political Subcommunities

James A. Gardner

Published as Chapter 9 in To Promote the General Welfare: A Communitarian Legal Reader, David E. Carney, ed.
Property

Elizabeth B. Mensch and Alan David Freeman

Published in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, Jack P. Greene & J.R. Pole, eds.
A Common Standard--50 Years of Defending Human Rights For All

Makau wa Mutua

Published in The 1999 World Book Year Book
A Discussion on the Legitimacy of Human Rights NGOs in Africa

Makau wa Mutua

Published in The Legal Profession and the Protection of Human Rights in Africa, Evelyn A. Ankumah & Edward K. Kwakwa, eds.
Returning to My Roots: African "Religions" and the State

Makau wa Mutua

Published as Chapter 7 in Proselytization and Communal Self-Determination in Africa, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, ed.

Four decades after physical decolonization, the African state is today mired in crises of identity. Multidimensional and complexly dynamic, these crises primarily feed from the traditional troughs of culture and religion, ethnicity and race, history and mythology, and politics and economics. The realm of religion, together with its essential linkage to philosophy and culture, has been one of the pivotal variables in the construction of the identity of the modern African state. Religion has been one of the critical seams of social and political rupture in several African states. Due to the centrality of religion in the construction of social reality, this critical examination of the treatment of African religions within the African state will necessarily probe the intersection of Islam, African religion, and Christianity - the three dominant religious traditions in Africa. This chapter primarily argues that the modern African state, right from its inception, has relentlessly engaged in a campaign of the marginalization, at best, or eradication, at worst, of African religion. Further, it argues that the destruction and delegitimation of African religion have been actively effected at the urging, or with the collusion and for the benefit of, either or both Islam and Christianity, the two dominant messianic traditions.
The Ideology of Human Rights: Toward Post-Liberal Democracy?

Makau wa Mutua

Published as Chapter 5 in Legitimate Governance in Africa: International and Domestic Legal Perspectives, Edward Kofi Quashigah & Obiora Chinedu Okafor, eds.
Acte de Contrôle et Réforme de l’Immigration de 1986: Contexte et Analyse

Judy Scales-Trent

Published in l’Immigration: La Face Changeante de l'Amérique, American Cultural Center (Dakar), ed.
The American Celebration of Whiteness

Judy Scales-Trent

Published as Chapter 6 in Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reflections, Chris J. Cuomo & Kim Q. Hall, eds.
Words from a Largely Forgotten Man

John Henry Schlegel

Published as Chapter 17 in The Fundamental Interrelationships between Government and Property, Nicholas Mercuro & Warren J. Samuels, eds.

After I had agreed to contribute to this volume, I reflected on the not so subtle irony of my doing so. My hero, if I have any hero, is the American Legal Realist, Underhill Moore. His first significant publication was a savage criticism of a book much like this one, a book called The Rational Basis of Legal Institutions, that offered a series of essays on several legal institutions-liberty, property, succession, the family and punishment. Moore observed that legal institutions were only patterns of habitual human behavior, the rationality of which depended on the ends to which the behavior was a means and so rephrased the editor’s question as, “What are the means to legal institutions and to what proximate ends are legal institutions means? Concretely, of what facts are group habits consequences and what are the consequences of group habits?” (Moore 1923).
Changing Legal Conceptions of Free Labor

Robert J. Steinfeld

Published in Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor, Stanley L. Engerman, ed.
How Does Law Matter in the Constitution of Legal Consciousness?

David M. Engel

Published in How Does Law Matter?, Bryant G. Garth & Austin Sarat, eds.
"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, James R. Acker, Robert M. Bohm & Charles S. Lanier, eds.
The Crossings of Benpa Topgyal: The Changing Legal Identity of a Tibetan Refugee

Rebecca Redwood French

Published in Crossing Boundaries: Traditions and Transformations in Law and Society Research, Austin Sarat, Marianne Constable, David Engel, Valerie Hans & Susan Lawrence, eds.
Laws and Institutions in Cross-Boundary Stewardship

Errol E. Meidinger

Published as Chapter 4 in Stewardship Across Boundaries, Richard L. Knight & Peter Landres, eds.

Jurisdictional fragmentation makes cross-boundary stewardship ("CBS") essential to intelligent and efficient environmental policy. CBS depends heavily on the legal and institutional context in which it is practiced, and this paper provides an overview of laws and institutions affecting CBS in the United States. The first section discusses the basic nature of boundaries and stewardship, arguing among other things that boundaries have positive as well as negative functions. The next two sections describe the basic types of resource owners in American law and the laws governing how they interact with each other and society. Because the laws both reflect and support larger institutional structures, the fourth section outlines the broad institutional patterns which seem to describe our current legal structure. It traces a broad and halting change from bureaucratic toward networked decision structures. The fifth section highlights key areas of stress and change in the present system, focusing on four trends: (a) growing privatization of policy-making, (b) movement from rule toward discretion, (c) decentralization, (d) politicization of information. The concluding section discusses the implications of the preceding analysis and offers some suggestions for changes in laws governing information and economic cooperation.
The History of Mainstream Legal Thought

Elizabeth B. Mensch

Published as Chapter 1 in The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique, third edition, David Kairys, ed.
Legal Developments in the Electronic Securities Markets: Online Trading Systems and the Use of Websites for Offshore Internet Offers

David A. Westbrook, Brandon Becker, and Lyle Roberts

Published as Chapter 22 in Securities Law & The Internet 1998: Doing Business In a Rapidly Changing Marketplace, Stephen J. Schulte, Michelle C. Wallach & Brandon Becker, eds.
Online Trading: Issuers, Broker-Dealers and SROs

Brandon Becker, David A. Westbrook, and Soo J. Yim

Published in Securities in the Electronic Age: A Practical Guide to the Law and Regulation, John F. Olson, Harvey L. Pitt & Glasser LegalWorks, eds.
Some Preliminary Remarks on the Nature of the Tibetan Legal System from the Perspective of Comparative Law

Rebecca Redwood French

Published in Tibetan Studies, Volume 1: Proceedings of the 7th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Graz, 1995, Helmut Krasser, Michael Torsten Much, Ernst Steinkellner & Helmut Tauscher, eds.
Fear of Feminism: The Media Debate about Victims and Violence on College Campuses

Martha T. McCluskey

Published as Chapter 6 in Feminism, Media and the Law, Martha A. Fineman & Martha T. McCluskey, eds.
Organizational and Legal Challenges for Ecosystem Management

Errol E. Meidinger

Published in Creating a Forestry for the 21st Century: The Science of Ecosystem Management, Kathryn A. Kohm & Jerry F. Franklin, eds.

This article attempts to clarify the central organizational and legal challenges confronting efforts to establish ecosystem-based management of natural resources in the U.S. It first summarizes the general organizational requirements of ecosystem management, including coordinated information gathering and analysis, coordinated management, and social learning and adaptation. Next it describes the overall structure of land ownership in the US and the primary kinds of legal mandates under which land managers operate. It argues that the ideal of ecosystem management is too general and discretionary to be translated directly into a legal mandate, and that therefore ecosystem management must be understood as dependent on the interactions of many legal and institutional factors. It then describes alternative models of organizational management available to land holders, including various forms of bureaucratic, matrix, project oriented, and loosely coupled organization. Finally it reviews several specific kinds of laws, including public land management statutes, administrative laws, antitrust laws, and takings law, that are likely to have significant effects on efforts to undertake ecosystem management. The article concludes that while existing laws need not prevent the emergence of ecosystem management, they are likely to make it difficult. Creative strategies and a certain amount of risk taking will be necessary in the near term. It will probably take a long time for the laws to adapt to the changed organizational relationships required by ecosystem management.
Kindred and Kin: One Story from a Seminar on Literature and Law

Judy Scales-Trent

Published in Beyond Portia: Women, Law and Literature in the United States, Jacqueline St. Joan & Annette Bennington McElhiney, eds.