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.

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.

From the BESTSELLING Law Express revision series. Law Express Question and Answer: Human Rights is designed to ensure you get the most marks for every answer you write by improving your understanding of what examiners are looking for, helping you to focus in on the question being asked and showing you how to make even a strong answer stand out.

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.

In Lord Sumption and the Limits of the Law, leading public law scholars reflect on the nature and limits of the judicial role and its implications for human rights protection and democracy. The starting point for this reflection is Lord Sumption's lecture, 'The Limits of the Law', which grounds a wide-ranging discussion of questions including the scope and legitimacy of judicial law-making, the interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights, and the continuing significance and legitimacy, or otherwise, of the European Court of Human Rights. Lord Sumption ends the volume with a substantial commentary on the responses to his lecture.

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 Spanish transition from the Franco regime to democracy has not been a very popular subject amongst researchers examining transitional justice at the international level. However, Spain presents certain peculiarities that make it an interesting case in which to explore comparative law and sociology. It has sometimes been seen as a model of peaceful transition, but has also been labelled as an example of an "amnesic" transition to a democratic system in which victims' rights, justice and truth were forgotten. In contrast to other transitions, demands of justice were not expressed during what was the purely transitional period, but they have been on the increase since then. That is why, in this case, we can speak of "post-transitional justice" or, more properly, of "late transitional justice". This book analyses, above all, the laws, policies and judicial decisions adopted in Spain that were related to the construction of the past and could therefore be understood as measures of transitional justice. By comparing this experience with transitional decisions adopted in other countries, the book highlights the main features of the Spanish case and the lessons that can be learned from it. Measures adopted during the transitional period, such as the amnesty and subsequent decisions aimed at giving some kind of partial reparation to the victims of the repression, are here studied. Demands for reviewing the past, the 2007 Act of Historical Memory, and the controversial use of criminal justice are also considered. Criminal Law is hardly applicable to the facts of the past, but the purely amnesic option can no longer be defended. Therefore, the author proposes a plan of action including different measures, such as the creation of a commission of memory, which would be in charge of investigating not only violent crimes or torture, but also other related crimes, including child abduction and politically motivated unlawful adoptions and those perpetrated in a systematic way during the Dictatorship. A victim-centred approach requires ensuring that each victim has the right to be considered on the basis of his or her own suffering, needs and rights and not as a member of a large group.

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.

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.

The "superb" (The Guardian) biography of an American who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to fight for civil rights and economic freedom: Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan. They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court. Almost a century after his death, John Marshall Harlan's words helped end segregation and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom. But his legacy would not have been possible without the courage of Robert Harlan, a slave who John's father raised like a son in the same household. After the Civil War, Robert emerges as a political leader. With Black people holding power in the Republican Party, it is Robert who helps John land his appointment to the Supreme Court. At first, John is awed by his fellow justices, but the country is changing. Northern whites are prepared to take away black rights to appease the South. Giant trusts are monopolizing entire industries. Against this onslaught, the Supreme Court seemed all too willing to strip away civil rights and invalidate labor protections. So as case after case comes before the court, challenging his core values, John makes a fateful decision: He breaks with his colleagues in fundamental ways, becoming the nation's prime defender of the rights of Black people, immigrant laborers, and people in distant lands occupied by the US. Harlan's dissents, particularly in Plessy v. Ferguson, were widely read and a source of hope for decades. Thurgood Marshall called Harlan's Plessy dissent his "Bible"--and his legal roadmap to overturning segregation. In the end, Harlan's words built the foundations for the legal revolutions of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras. Spanning from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond, The Great Dissenter is a "magnificent" (Douglas Brinkley) and "thoroughly researched" (The New York Times) rendering of the American legal system's most significant failures and most inspiring successes.

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

The research monograph Equal Citizenship and Its Limits in EU Law: We the Burden? is a critical study of the scope of EU citizenship as an 'equal status' of all Member State nationals. The book re-conceptualises the relationship between the status of EU citizenship and EU citizens' fundamental right to equal treatment by asking what indicates the presence of agency in EU law. A thorough analysis of the case-law is used to support the argument that the present view of active citizenship in EU law fails to explain how EU citizens should be treated in relation to one another and what counts as 'related' for the purposes of equal treatment in a transnational context. In addressing these questions, the book responds to the increasing need to find a more substantive theory of justice for the European Union. The book suggests that a more balanced view of agency in the case of EU citizens can be based on the inherent connection between citizens' agency and their subjectivity. This analysis provides an integrated philosophical account of transnational equality by showing that a new source of 'meaningful relationships' for the purposes of equal treatment arises from recognizing and treating EU citizens as full subjects of EU law and European integration. The book makes a significant contribution to the existing scholarship on EU law, first, by demonstrating that the undefined nature of EU citizenship is fundamentally a question about transnational justice and not just about individual rights and, secondly, by introducing a framework within which the current normative indeterminacy of EU citizenship can be overcome.

This book provides a detailed analysis, within an EU setting, of what we may mean by the phrase 'consumer citizen'. It examines the characterizations of the consumer in EU law and policy and argues the case for a limited conflation of the hitherto distinct concepts of the consumer and the citizen. As a basis for the model of consumer citizenship practice introduced in this book, ideas of the politicized consumer are discussed in parallel with legal and theoretical concepts of citizenship. The author's discussion then moves on to examine ideas of territorial and membership dimensions of European consumer citizenship and the policy initiatives that help define and encourage the consumer citizenship role. As the detail becomes clear a set of four related and interdependent normative influences on consumer citizenship practice are set into a framework that will provide a functional reference tool for policy makers and academic researchers.

Rights and rights talk have a long and storied history and have occupied a crucial place in the ideology of liberal legalism. With the development of Critical Legal Studies in the 1970s and 80s, rights were subject to extensive critique. Yet not long after that critique rights were rehabilitated by feminists and Critical Race Theorists. Today, scholars are investigating the role of rights in social movements, in legal consciousness, in organizations, in the international arena, etc. This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" contains a Special Issue on rights. It brings together the work of leading scholars to think about the nature, utility and limits of rights. This work takes stock of the field, charts its progress and points the way for its future development.

The European Commission has claimed that 'Solidarity is part of how European society works...'. But how are we to understand solidarity, and what are its implications to Government policy? Promoting Solidarity in the European Union addresses the question of what solidarity might mean today and its relevance to the purposes of the European Union and the way it functions. Is solidarity just a slogan or can it have meaningful legal and policy content? This book brings together contributions from leading scholars in law, politics and sociology to discuss an idea that is coming under fresh scrutiny at a time when the EU's direction following the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty is hotly debated. The authors engage with both the content and limitations of solidarity as a concept in political and legal debate, and its application to specific fields such as migration, education and pensions policies.
Promoting Solidarity in the European Union provides a thoughtful and provocative analysis of the power and potential of solidarity, applying a sceptical and rigorous assessment of the conditions necessary for it to make a difference to the European political and legal space at a time when traditional manifestations of national solidarity (e.g. in health care) are perceived to be under threat from EU market liberalization policies. A number of contributions consider whether an EU concept of solidarity is possible and how that might affect the balance between market and social priorities for the Union's future.
If the EU is to be more than just a market, promoting solidarity as a value and a principle has a key role. This rich collection of essays explores how solidarity might fulfil its status as a core value for the Union.

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.

This textbook comprehensively examines and analyses the interpretation and application of the United Kingdom's Human Rights Act 1998. The third edition has been fully updated to include the last seven years of case law. Part I covers key procedural issues including: the background to the Act; the relationship between UK courts and the European Court of Human Rights; the definition of victim and public authority; determining incompatibility including deference and proportionality; the impact of the Act on primary legislation; and damages and other remedies for the violation of Convention rights. In Part II of the book, the Convention rights, as interpreted and applied by United Kingdom courts, are examined in detail. All of the key Convention rights are discussed including: the right to life; freedom from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; the right to liberty; fair trial; the rights to private life, family life and home; freedom of religion and belief; freedom of expression; the right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions; and the right to freedom from discrimination in the enjoyment of Convention rights. The third edition of Human Rights Law will be invaluable for those teaching, studying and practising in the areas of United Kingdom human rights law, constitutional law and administrative law.

Human rights tend to focus on the relationship between the individual and the state the individual is the rights-holder, the state is the duty-holder. Children's rights bring a third player much more into the picture, namely the parents. Although, legally speaking, they are not duty-holders under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, parents do have a number of responsibilities under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other human rights instruments. Child rearing may still be considered by many to be within the private domain, i.e. a matter of concern only within the relationship between children and their parents, with the exception of instances of child abuse or neglect. However, States may be obligated to turn parental responsibilities into national legal duties if this is needed to improve the legal and social position of children. In this volume, child-rearing responsibilities are examined in the light of children's rights and other human rights. All the contributions focus in particular on the proposal to introduce an upbringing (or parenting) pledge. The upbringing pledge contains not only a statement of lasting commitment towards the child, but also an explicit declaration of commitment to respect and promote the rights of the child both as a person and as a human being who is utterly dependent upon parents for wellbeing and the development of his or her personality. By means of the upbringing pledge as a child rights-based social institution, the responsibilities of society and the state towards both parents and children are re-affirmed as well.

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.

Transforming Citizenships engages the performativity of citizenship as it relates to transgender individuals and advocacy groups. Instead of reading the law as a set of self-executing discourses, Isaac West takes up transgender rights claims as performative productions of complex legal subjectivities capable of queering accepted understandings of genders, sexualities, and the normative forces of the law. Drawing on an expansive archive, from the correspondence of a transwoman arrested for using a public bathroom in Los Angeles in 1954 to contemporary lobbying efforts of national transgender advocacy organizations, West advances a rethinking of law as capacious rhetorics of citizenship, justice, equality, and freedom. When approached from this perspective, citizenship can be recuperated from its status as the bad object of queer politics to better understand how legal discourses open up sites for identification across identity categories and enable political activities that escape the analytics of heteronormativity and homonationalism. Isaac West is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Communication Studies and Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa.

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.

The term "gender" was first distinguished from "sex" in the 1950s when psychologists began to discuss the idea of "gender roles," behaviors and responsibilities given to people by a society rather than flowing from their biology. Since then, leaders across disciplines have sought to better understand the roles of biology, psychology, and culture on gender. New language has emerged alongside rich scientific inquiry and research. Increased visibility of transgender and nonbinary communities has brought awareness to a range of gender diverse experiences, while legal battles, wage disparities, and health inequities continue to prove gender's relevancy in today's world. In this book, Laura Erickson-Schroth and Benjamin Davis guide readers through the knowns and unknowns of gender, asking questions such as: What is the difference between sex, gender identity, and gender expression? Were ancient societies matriarchal? How different are male and female brains, really? What role does language play in the ways we think about gender? What do we know about sex and gender in non-human species? What are the current frontiers in gender equality? Gender: What Everyone Needs to Know (R) is an easy-to-read guide that takes readers on a much-needed tour of perspectives on gender and identity in the 21st century.The book is written in a question-and-answer format, and Erickson-Schroth and Davis cover topics such as current definitions; the history of gender as concept; therole of biology, psychology, and culture on gender; and gender norms over time and across the globe.