Human Rights of American Minorities provides students with a holistic view of universal human rights as they apply to American social problems and the lives of minority populations in the United States. The anthology encourages readers to think critically about the identity, behavior, and reactions to modern events by minority and majority social groups. Within the collection, students read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as written by the United Nations and selections that explore the role of identity in diversity, economic inequality, the impact of micro-aggressions on Latino/a communities, and the structural racism Native Americans and Alaskan natives endure. Additional readings address the roles sex, gender, sexuality, and age play in determining minority or majority status. The collection concludes with readings that examine stunted opportunity in America, the fundamentals of social policy, and whether claims of religious discrimination can be successful. Moving beyond stratification theory to spotlight the everyday struggles of minorities in the United States, Human Rights of American Minorities is an excellent resource for courses in the social sciences, especially those that explore inequality and minority populations.

This book analyses and compares how the USA's liberal allies responded to the use of torture against their citizens after 9/11. Did they resist, tolerate or support the Bush Administration's policies concerning the mistreatment of detainees when their own citizens were implicated and what were the reasons for their actions? Australia, the UK and Canada are liberal democracies sharing similar political cultures, values and alliances with America; yet they behaved differently when their citizens, caught up in the War on Terror, were tortured. How states responded to citizens' human rights claims and predicaments was shaped, in part, by demands for accountability placed on the executive government by domestic actors. This book argues that civil society actors, in particular, were influenced by nuanced differences in their national political and legal contexts that enabled or constrained human rights activism. It maps the conditions under which individuals and groups were more or less likely to become engaged when fellow citizens were tortured, focusing on national rights culture, the domestic legal and political human rights framework, and political opportunities.

This book considers the phenomenon of soft law employed by domestic public authorities. Lawyers have long understood that public authorities are able to issue certain communications in a way that causes them to be treated like law, even though these are neither legislation nor subordinate legislation. Importantly for soft law as a regulatory tool, people tend to treat soft law as binding even though public authorities know that it is not. It follows that soft law's 'binding' effects do not apply equally between the public authority and those to whom it is directed. Consequently, soft law is both highly effective as a means of regulation, and inherently risky for those who are regulated by it. Rather than considering soft law as a form of regulation, this book examines the possible remedies when a public authority breaches its own soft law upon which people have relied, thereby suffering loss. It considers judicial review remedies, modes of compensation which are not based upon a finding of invalidity, namely tort and equity, and 'soft' challenges outside the scope of the courts, such as through the Ombudsman or by seeking an ex gratia payment.

A series of laws passed in the 1970s promised the nation unprecedented transparency in government, a veritable "sunshine era." Though citizens enjoyed a new arsenal of secrecy-busting tools, officials developed a handy set of workarounds, from over classification to concealment, shredding, and burning. It is this dark side of the sunshine era that Jason Ross Arnold explores in the first comprehensive, comparative history of presidential resistance to the new legal regime, from Reagan-Bush to the first term of Obama-Biden.

After examining what makes a necessary and unnecessary secret, Arnold considers the causes of excessive secrecy, and why we observe variation across administrations. While some administrations deserve the scorn of critics for exceptional secrecy, the book shows excessive secrecy was a persistent problem well before 9/11, during Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Regardless of party, administrations have consistently worked to weaken the system's legal foundations.

The book reveals episode after episode of evasive maneuvers, rule bending, clever rhetorical gambits, and downright defiance; an army of secrecy workers in a dizzying array of institutions labels all manner of documents "top secret," while other government workers and agencies manage to suppress information with a "sensitive but unclassified" designation. For example, the health effects of Agent Orange, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria leaking out of Midwestern hog farms are considered too "sensitive" for public consumption. These examples and many more document how vast the secrecy system has grown during the sunshine era.

Rife with stories of vital scientific evidence withheld, justice eluded, legalities circumvented, and the public interest flouted, "Secrecy in the Sunshine Era" reveals how our information society has been kept in the dark in too many ways and for too long.

The stark reality is that throughout the world, women disproportionately live in poverty. This indicates that gender can both cause and perpetuate poverty, but this is a complex and cross-cutting relationship.The full enjoyment of human rights is routinely denied to women who live in poverty. How can human rights respond and alleviate gender-based poverty? This monograph closely examines the potential of equality and non-discrimination at international law to redress gender-based poverty. It offers a sophisticated assessment of how the international human rights treaties, specifically the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which contains no obligations on poverty, can be interpreted and used to address gender-based poverty. An interpretation of CEDAW that incorporates the harms of gender-based poverty can spark a global dialogue. The book makes an important contribution to that dialogue, arguing that the CEDAW should serve as an authoritative international standard setting exercise that can activate international accountability mechanisms and inform the domestic interpretation of human rights.

International migration for temporary employment is a critical component of South Asia's development path, from both the jobs and remittance flows perspectives. South Asian economies are at a stage of demographic transition where people of working-age are generally still increasing shares of populations, with millions of people entering the working-age cohort every year for another generation. This report focuses on Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan - three countries in the region sharing similar characteristics, opportunities, and challenges when it comes to international migration. All three are lower-middle income countries where sizeable shares of the working age population migrate overseas. Migration has large positive effects on South Asian economies overall, often noted by the fact that remittances tend to be very high in relative and absolute terms. Several of the policy actions that can be taken in the pre-migration phase of the migration life-cycle to reduce the vulnerability of migrants will directly reduce costs and improve access for poorer households. Reducing volatility and improving sustainability will require sending countries to ultimately diversify the markets where they send their workers.

"In short, we have a first-rate study of an important constitutional symbol of disunion." --Donald Roper, American Journal of Legal History 26 (1982) 255. Finkelman describes the judicial turmoil that ensued when slaves were taken into free states and the resultant issues of comity, conflict of laws, interstate cooperation, Constitutional obligations, and the nationalization of slavery. "Other scholars have defined the antebellum constitutional crisis largely in terms of the extension of slavery to the territories and the return of fugitive slaves. Finkelman's study demonstrates that the comity problem was also an important dimension of intersectional tension. It is a worthy addition to the growing literature of slavery." -- James W. Ely, Jr., California Law Review 69 (1981) 1755. Paul Finkelman is the President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy and Senior Fellow, Government Law Center, Albany Law School. He is the author of more than 200 scholarly articles and more than 35 books including A March of Liberty: A Constitutional History of the United States, with Melvin I. Urofsky (2011), Slavery, Race and the American Legal System, 1700-1872 (editor) (1988) and Slavery in the Courtroom (1985).