An attorney and certified information privacy professional offers a resource book for citizens seeking to understand, use, and defend their right to know under freedom of information laws in the United States. The Right to Know: Your Guide to Using and Defending Freedom of Information Law in the United States sets out in plain language freedom-of-information best practices for ordinary citizens, activist organizations, journalists, bloggers, and lawyers. Jacqueline Klosek, an expert in U.S. information law, educes practical lessons from dozens of case studies to show how readers can use freedom of information laws to protect themselves, but also to protect the environment, and public health and safety, as well as to expose governmental and corporate crime, waste, and corruption. Finally, the book shows American readers how, in contrast to what is going on in most democracies, their right to know is being progressively curtailed, why this is so dangerous to democracy, and what they can do to help reverse the alarming trend. 15 illustrations

The present volume focuses on the jurisprudence of national, supranational and international jurisdictions (and quasi-juridictions) as regards the legal "status" of same-sex couples. Its aim is to explore the content, rationale, functioning and potential of the different jurisdictions' reasonings and their contribution to the strengthening of LGBTI rights (and duties). As a consequence, the book tries to convey the complexities and controversies that derive from the judicial recognition of same-sex couples across the world, taking always into account the relationship of the judiciary with the executive and the legislature and the related problems of legitimacy and democracy. The volume deals with this issue and considers it as a crucial test for modern democracies and contemporary societies.

Within the Middle East there are a wide range of minority groups outside the mainstream religious and ethnic culture. This book provides a detailed examination of their rights as minorities within this region, and their changing status throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The rights of minorities in the Middle East are subject to a range of legal frameworks, having developed in part from Islamic law, and in recent years subject to international human rights law and institutional frameworks. The book examines the context in which minority rights operate within this conflicted region, investigating how minorities engage with (or are excluded from) various sites of power and how state practice in dealing with minorities (often ostensibly based on Islamic authority) intersects with and informs modern constitutionalism and international law. The book identifies who exactly can be classed as a minority group, analysing in detail the different religious and ethnic minorities across the region. The book also pays special attention to the plight of minorities who are spread between various states, often as the result of conflict. It assesses the applicable domestic legislative instruments within the three countries investigated as case studies: Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, and highlights key domestic remedies that could serve as models for ensuring greater social cohesion and greater inclusion of minorities in the political life of these countries.

Stereotypes are beliefs about groups of people. Some examples, taken from human rights case law, are the notions that 'Roma are thieves', 'women are responsible for childcare', and 'people with a mental disability are incapable of forming political opinions'. Increasingly, human rights monitoring bodies including the European and inter-American human rights courts, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination voice concerns about stereotyping and warn States not to enforce harmful stereotypes. Human rights bodies thus appear to be starting to realise what social psychologists discovered a long time ago: that stereotypes underlie inequality and discrimination. Despite their relevance and their legal momentum, however, stereotypes have so far received little attention from human rights law scholars. This volume is the first one to broadly analyse stereotypes as a human rights issue. The scope of the book includes different stereotyping grounds such as race, gender, and disability. Moreover, this book examines stereotyping approaches across a broad range of supranational human rights monitoring bodies, including the United Nations human rights treaty system as well as the regional systems that are most developed when it comes to addressing stereotypes: the Council of Europe and the inter-American system.

Open government initiatives have become a defining goal for public administrators around the world. However, progress is still necessary outside of the executive and legislative sectors. Achieving Open Justice through Citizen Participation and Transparency is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly research on the implementation of open government within the judiciary field, emphasizing the effectiveness and accountability achieved through these actions. Highlighting the application of open government concepts in a global context, this book is ideally designed for public officials, researchers, professionals, and practitioners interested in the improvement of governance and democracy.

Providing comparative analysis that examines both Western and non-Western legal systems, this wide-ranging Handbook expands and enriches the existing privacy and defamation law literature and addresses the fundamental issues facing today's scholars and practitioners. Comparative Privacy and Defamation provides insightful commentary on issues of theory and doctrine, including the challenges of General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and the impact of new technologies on the law. Chapters explore the origins and development of the right to privacy, privacy rights of photographic subjects and defamation by photo-manipulation, and the right to be forgotten. Containing contributions from expert international scholars, this comprehensive Handbook investigates the liability of internet intermediaries in cases of defamation and the emerging problem of global injunctions before concluding with eight country focussed studies. Engaging and accessible, this Handbook will be a key resource for students and scholars researching in the fields of privacy and defamation law, internet and technological law and information and media law. Contributors include: T.D.C. Bennett, S. Bretthauer, J. Campbell, P. Coe, M. Cornils, S.C. Ekaratne, A. Gajda, G. Gil, A. Koltay, R. Krotoszynski, J. Kulesza, D. Mangan, D. Milo, R. Moosavian, J. Oster, K.S. Park, M. Pearson, J. Reichel, D. Rolph, J. Shimizu, D.N. Staiger, R.L. Weaver, R.H. Weber, P. Wragg, M.N. Yan, V. Zeno-Zencovich

A valuable survey of a cutting-edge issue, this book outlines the history of same-sex marriage, explaining how politics and religion have intersected to decide and control who can legally marry. Marriage equality became law in the United States in 2015 with the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges. Marriage is, strictly speaking, a secular ceremony, requiring only civil sanction. However, many couples also seek the blessing of a religious body upon their union, and not all religious bodies support marriage equality. Some oppose it outright and some support it outright, while others are divided. This work examines the issue of same-sex marriage in the U.S. and internationally. It surveys the attitudes of major religions towards same-sex marriage and also looks at leading and sometimes polarizing personalities, like politician Pete Buttigieg and Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, who exemplify both the religious and political sides of the issue. The book's A-Z organization makes it easy for readers to locate important court cases, individuals, religious bodies, and social movements at the center of the same-sex marriage debate. Provides a comprehensive background of same sex-marriage in the United States by looking at its history, which shows how the topic has developed over the past half-century Surveys the current treatment of same-sex marriage by major religions, illustrating the diversity of views towards same-sex marriage among religions today Looks at modern court cases up to and through Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, providing a outline of what the law currently says about same-sex marriage and religion Includes a comprehensive, annotated bibliography of resources

This book offers a unique insight into the global trend towards the commodification of citizenship. In Cyprus, as well as many other countries, foreign investors can become naturalised citizens for a price. Exploring the fact that there is now a price tag to the national (and therefore EU) passport, the book examines the nature of citizenship alongside the unequal interactions between global political economy and national political communities. The analysis stresses how golden passports rearrange common sensibilities about the principle of political equality through citizenship. The book is a rare ethnography of the transactional relations between Russian investors who wish to acquire the Cypriot passport and their Cypriot 'facilitators', the local professionals who ease the process. The book argues that golden passports are the continuation of offshoring by other means, as now not only capital but capitalists too, 'have no country'. -- .

What is the legacy of Brown vs. Board of Education? While it is well known for establishing racial equality as a central commitment of American schools, the case also inspired social movements for equality in education across all lines of difference, including language, gender, disability, immigration status, socio-economic status, religion, and sexual orientation. Yet more than a half century after Brown, American schools are more racially separated than before, and educators, parents and policy makers still debate whether the ruling requires all-inclusive classrooms in terms of race, gender, disability, and other differences.
In Brown's Wake examines the reverberations of Brown in American schools, including efforts to promote equal opportunities for all kinds of students. School choice, once a strategy for avoiding Brown, has emerged as a tool to promote integration and opportunities, even as charter schools and private school voucher programs enable new forms of self-separation by language, gender, disability, and ethnicity.
Martha Minow, Dean of Harvard Law School, argues that the criteria placed on such initiatives carry serious consequences for both the character of American education and civil society itself. Although the original promise of Brown remains more symbolic than effective, Minow demonstrates the power of its vision in the struggles for equal education regardless of students' social identity, not only in the United States but also in many countries around the world. Further, she urges renewed commitment to the project of social integration even while acknowledging the complex obstacles that must be overcome. An elegant and concise overview of Brown and its aftermath, In Brown's Wake explores the broad-ranging and often surprising impact of one of the century's most important Supreme Court decisions.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize Winner of the David J. Langum Prize Winner of the OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "This extraordinary book is a powerful addition to the history of travel segregation...Mia Bay shows that Black mobility has always been a struggle." -Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist "In Mia Bay's superb history of mobility and resistance, the question of literal movement becomes a way to understand the civil rights movement writ large." -Jennifer Szalai, New York Times "Traveling Black is well worth the fare. Indeed, it is certain to become the new standard on this important, and too often forgotten, history." -Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of Stony the Road From Plessy v. Ferguson to #DrivingWhileBlack, African Americans have fought to move freely around the United States. But why this focus on Black mobility? From stagecoaches and trains to buses, cars, and planes, Traveling Black explores when, how, and why racial restrictions took shape in America and brilliantly portrays what it was like to live with them. Mia Bay rescues forgotten stories of passengers who made it home despite being insulted, stranded, re-routed, or ignored. She shows that Black travelers never stopped challenging these humiliations, documenting a sustained fight for redress that falls outside the traditional boundaries of the civil rights movement. A riveting, character-rich account of the rise and fall of racial segregation, it reveals just how central travel restrictions were to the creation of Jim Crow laws-and why free movement has been at the heart of the quest for racial justice ever since.

This book presents a wholly new perspective on the Child Support Agency. The authors were granted privileged access to the CSA's own staff and were thus able to monitor case conduct from both the Agency and the client perspective. In a gripping analysis they compare the accounts of former husbands and wives with those of their respective legal advisers,and, critically, they incorporate the experience and views of the beleaguered CSA staff who attempted to calculate and enforce child maintenance obligations in those same cases. The media picture of the misery visited upon 'absent fathers' is borne out in part, but even more striking is the authors' account of a catastrophic administrative failure which led to the abandonment of many of the basic tenets of administrative justice. The reasons do not lie in the perceived unfairness of the formula but rather in the failure of those drafting the Child Support legislation to appreciate the impact of such change upon the rest of our hugely complex benefit structure. Their failure to grasp that the problems of inadequate disclosure and ineffective enforcement - with which courts had grappled for decades - could not be tackled effectively by a distant bureaucracy.

It is a familiar and irrefutable fact that the world we live in today is marked with divisions. Border posts, frontier patrols, and elaborate fencing establish the dividing lines between the territory of one country and the next. Meanwhile, partitions have also been created between people, even though individuals do not exist as isolated beings. They are connected to one country or another through the legal bond of membership known as nationality. However, these divisions are not watertight. There are also individuals who remain unclaimed by any country. These are the world's stateless persons. Some fifty years ago, the international community adopted a pair of instruments to tackle the anomaly that is statelessness: the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. The former was designed to offer a minimum standard of protection to those individuals who found themselves without a nationality, while the latter was crafted in order to prevent new cases of statelessness from arising. However, these documents were quickly forgotten and failed to have any real impact. Then, at the turn of the millennium, a deepening understanding of the severity and potential implications of statelessness as well as the emergence of several large, new caseloads of stateless persons spurred the international community to renew its attempts to tackle the issue. It is the current growing preoccupation with the plight of the stateless that offered an opportune moment to reflect upon the question as to whether the international community now has the necessary tools at its disposal to respond effectively to the issue of statelessness. Nationality Matters is devoted to answering that question by investigating in detail both the enduring value of the two tailor-made statelessness conventions, as well as ascertaining what other areas of international law in particular human rights law have to offer in answer to the phenomenon of statelessness. Laura van Waas has been selected as a recipient of the Max van der Stoel Human Rights Award 2009 for this book.

With a Foreword by Prof. Asbjorn Eide, a former Chairman of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Chairman of the UN Working Group on Minorities, President of the Advisory Committee on National Minorities of the Council of Europe Following the internationalization of the indigenous rights movement, a growing number of African hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and other communities have channelled their claims for special legal protection through the global indigenous rights movement. Their claims as the indigenous peoples of Africa are backed by many (international) actors such as indigenous rights activists, donors and some academia. However, indigenous identification is contested by many African governments, some members of non-claimant communities and a number of anthropologists who have extensively interacted with claimant indigenous groups. This book explores the sources as well as the legal and political implications of indigenous identification in Africa. By highlighting the quasi-inexistence of systematic and discursive - rather than activist - studies on the subject-matter, the analysis questions the appropriateness of this framework in efforts aimed at empowering claimant communities in inherently multiethnic African countries. The book navigates between various disciplines in trying to better capture the phenomenon of indigenous rights advocacy in Africa. The book is valuable reading for academics in law and all (other) social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, history, political science, as well as for economists. It is also a useful tool for policy-makers, legal practitioners, indigenous rights activists, and a wide range of NGOs. Dr. Felix Mukwiza Ndahinda is Associate Professor at the International Victimology Institute Tilburg (INTERVICT), Tilburg University, The Netherlands.

Legal statements are, according to the authors, the most basic elements of the law. Nevertheless they must be considered not only as the pieces of a puzzle, but also as the components of a dynamic and highly complex reality: the law of contemporary society. The book presents an analysis of the different types of legal statements (mandatory rules, principles, power-conferring rules, definitions, permissions, values and the rule of recognition) from a threeefold perspective, that is, considering their logical structure, their function in legal reasoning as reasons for action, and their connections with the interests and power relationships among the individuals and the social groups. The result is conceived as a first step in the building of a general theory of law designed not as an isolated discourse but as a decisive element for the dynamization of the legal culture.

Focusing on contemporary debates in philosophy and legal theory, this ground-breaking book provides a compelling enquiry into the nature of human dignity. The author not only illustrates that dignity is a concept that can extend our understanding of our environmental impacts and duties, but also highlights how our reliance on and relatedness to the environment further extends and enhances our understanding of dignity itself. Against the background of current global threats to the realisation of rights, including severe environmental degradation and depleted reserves of essential natural resources, this innovative book considers whether dignity has any role to play in addressing these new problems, as well as in securing environmental rights and greater environmental care. The author provides an astute examination of important developments in human and environmental rights across a range of jurisdictions and levels, and considers whether human dignity should play a more central role in judicial considerations regarding environmental rights and environmental threats to human rights. Eminently engaging, this forward-thinking book will prove a critical read for legal academics and scholars with an interest in human dignity and environmental rights, as well as judicial reasoning and legal philosophy more widely. Its practical presentation of recent developments will also be of great importance to practitioners and policy-makers working in human rights and environmental law.

This highly acclaimed textbook provides law students with a thorough introduction to the Human Rights Act 1998, its background, how it came to be passed and the mass of case law that has followed it. The authors discuss the particular rights the Act embodies, including the law's response to terrorism. Combining broad topic coverage with an engaging writing style, Hoffman and Rowe provide an outstanding platform for students wishing to gain an in-depth and critical understanding of this contemporary, contentious and constantly evolving area of law.

The question of to what extent, manifestations of religious beliefs should be permitted in the European public sphere has become a salient and controversial topic in recent years. Despite the increasing interest however, debates have rarely questioned the conventional wisdom that an increase in the range of security measures employed by a government inevitably leads to a decrease in the human rights enjoyed by individuals.

This book analyses the relationship between state security regime changes and the right to religious freedom in the EU. It presents a comparative analysis of the impact these regime changes have had on the politics, policies and protections of religious freedom across the EU member states in the post-2001 environment. The book provides a timely investigation into the role of national legislation, the European Court of Human Rights, and societal trends in the protection of religious freedom, and in so doing demonstrates why the relationship between state security and religious freedom is one of the most socially significant challenges facing policymakers and jurists in Europe at the present time.

This is the first book to provide an in-depth study of the juvenile transfer process. Criminal justice's get tough policy has led to greater use of this process which, on the surface, transfers persistent juvenile offenders to criminal court jurisdiction in order to impose more serious penalties. The implications of this growing phenomenon are increasingly important for both the juvenile and criminal court systems. Champion and Mays' analysis includes descriptions of juvenile courts, types of offenders processed by these courts, and characteristic outcomes of transfers. Examining the transfer process in detail, they explore social and legal definitions of delinquency; goals and functions of transfers; legal rights of juveniles; and the implications of possible penalties, such as the death penalty. Questions such as whether transfers necessarily result in harsher punishment are discussed at length. Transferring Juveniles to Criminal Courts is designed for students majoring in criminal justice, public administration, political science, sociology, and psychology.

Examining the transfer process, Chapter One provides a thorough discussion of the social and legal definitions of delinquency. Chapter Two is an overview of juvenile options, juvenile punishments, public policy, and the theme of deterring juvenile offenders. A description of transfers in different jurisdictions, including their goals and functions, is provided in Chapter Three. Chapter Four then explores the various implications of these transfers. Public policy is examined as it relates to the prevalent get tough policy. Chapter Five describes the criminal court and some of the varied functions served by these courts. Finally, Chapter Six summarizes several important trends relating to juvenile transfers. It includes male/female juvenile comparisons, the issue of selective certification, implications of prison overcrowding, and the emergence of a unified court system. An up-to-date bibliography is provided for further research.

The European Court of Human Rights has been a vital part of European democratic consolidation and integration for over half a century, setting meaningful standards and offering legal remedies to the individually repressed, the politically vulnerable, and the socially excluded. After their emancipation from Soviet influence in the 1990s, and with membership of the European Union in mind for many, the new democracies of central and eastern Europe flocked to the Convention system. However, now the gold rush' is over, the Court's position in the New Europe' is under threat. Its ability to decide cases promptly is almost fatally compromised, and the reform of its institutional architecture is effectively blocked by Russia. The time is right to take stock, to benefit from hindsight, and to consider how the Court can respond to the situation. This book examines the case law of the European Court of Human Rights with particular reference to democratic transitions in Europe and the consequent enlargement of the European Convention system. Focusing firmly on the substantive jurisprudence of the Court, the book analyses how it has responded to the difficult and distinct circumstances presented by the new Contracting Parties. Faced with different stages of, and commitments to, democratic transition, how has the Court reacted to such diversity whilst maintaining the universality of human rights -- and how is this reflected in its judgments? The book tackles this question by matching rigorous doctrinal analysis of the case law with new developments in critical thinking. The cases are viewed through the prism of jurisprudence and political philosophy, with links made to European political integration and other international human rights systems. The book offers an original explanation of the Court's predicament by drawing upon thick' and thin' notions of morality and tying this to notions of essential contestability.

Focusing on the lived experience of immigration policy and processes, this volume provides fascinating insights into the deportation process as it is felt and understood by those subjected to it. The author presents a rich and innovative ethnography of deportation and deportability experienced by migrants convicted of criminal offenses in England and Wales. The unique perspectives developed here - on due process in immigration appeals, migrant surveillance and control, social relations and sense of self, and compliance and resistance - are important for broader understandings of border control policy and human rights.

Privacy-invading technologies (PITs) such as Body scanners; Public space CCTV microphones; Public space CCTV loudspeakers and Human-implantable microchips (RFID implants/GPS implants) are dealt with in this book. The book shows how and why laws that regulate the design and development of privacy-invading technologies (PITs) may more effectively ensure the protection of privacy than laws that only regulate data controllers and the use of such technologies. The premise is supported and demonstrated through a discussion on these four specific PITs as case studies. In doing so, the book overall attempts to explain how laws/regulations that mandate the implementation of Privacy by Design (PBD) could potentially serve as a viable approach for collectively safeguarding privacy, liberty and security in the 21st Century. This book will be of interest to academic researchers, law practitioners, policy makers and technology researchers.

This book presents a new constitutional argument for the legitimacy of evolutive interpretation of the ECHR. It constructs a model, in which evolutive and static constitutional principles are balanced with each other. The author argues that there are three possible interpretive approaches in time-sensitive interpretations of the ECHR, but that only one of them is justifiable by reference to the constitutional principles of the ECHR in every single case. The ECHR's constitutional principles either require an evolutive or static interpretation or they do not establish a preference relation at all, which leads to a margin of appreciation of the member states in the interpretation of the Convention. The balancing model requires the determination of the weights of the competing evolutive and static constitutional principles. For this purpose, the author defines weighting factors for determining the importance of evolutive or static interpretation in a concrete case.