Martin Luther King Jr exercised a tremendous degree of influence in a movement that between 1955 and 1965 successfully dismantled a system of legalised racial segregation and disfranchisement entrenched for over sixty years in the United States. How did King, who came from a subordinated group within American society, help effect this change? What background, characteristics, abilities and ideas enabled him to do this? Why was King so important in shaping the civil rights movement?

John A. Kirk looks at the sources of King's power in the black community and its relationship to wider American society, focusing particularly on the role of the black church, the philosophy of nonviolence and issues of leadership, whilst paying due attention to the voices of King's critics and detractors and to the limitations of his power. He locates King firmly within the context of other leaders and organisations, voices and opinions, and tactics and ideologies, which made up the movement as a whole.

Fifty years after the Montgomery bus boycott, which launched King's movement leadership, this book moves beyond the all-too-often oversimplified story of King's life and times to provide an innovative analytical framework for understanding the role played by one of the United States' most important historical figures.

John A. Kirk is senior lecturer in US History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has written extensively on the history of the civil rights movement, including "Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940 1970" (2002) which won the 2003 J. G. Ragsdale Book Award.""

"With Forewords by Geoffrey Robertson QC, Doughty Street Chambers, London, UK and Professor Mihail E. Ionescu, Bucharest, Romania"

Simona u uianu describes a new model of sovereignty which is fast replacing the traditional Westphalian model embodied in Article 2 of the UN Charter and rigorously followed throughout the Cold War. The scholarly basis for this new model draws upon developments in international criminal law which first emerged from the Nuremberg trials and upon more recent interstate economic cooperation which has turned sovereign independence into interdependence across a range of state functions. Does this mean that traditional Westphalian concepts of sovereignty should be abandoned in constructing a new theory of world governance for the twenty-first century? Not at all. A new model, which can be called the pattern of interdependence-based sovereignty, serves to explain contemporary events that puzzle traditional theorists, such as the war over Kosovo, the invasions of Iraq and Libya, the emergence of a "Responsibility to protect" doctrine and its recent validation in Security Council Resolutions 1970 and 1973. We are witnessing the emergence of a new philosophy of action, which is in the process of producing a 21st century system of international relations.

The Book will appeal to academics, students and postgraduates studying international affairs, politics, international law, diplomatic history, or war and/or peace studies. It is particularly of interest for NATO establishments and national military schools, while experts and scholars will value its theory of what sovereignty means today.

The Book offers a multidisciplinary approach which underpins a new theory of how human rights can be better protected in a better world. There is a unique case study of cooperative security in the Greater Black Sea Area, by one of the few experts on the politics of this region." "It will be read and appreciated by those who need to understand how modern international law and diplomacy really work. Journalists, media commentators, human rights NGOs, aid agencies, diplomats and government officials need the information in this Book.

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This study examines the relationship between state and society in early 20th-century Japan through a case study of public policies directed towards the media. It raises basic issues about the Japanese state and compares Japan with other countries during the same era.

This book analyzes the role of strategic human rights litigation in the dissemination and migration of transnational constitutional norms and provides a detailed analysis of how transnational human rights advocates and their local partners have used international and foreign law to promote abolition of the death penalty and decriminalization of homosexuality. The "sharing" of human rights jurisprudence among judges across legal systems is currently spreading emerging norms among domestic courts and contributing to the evolution of international law. While prior studies have focused on international and foreign citations in judicial decisions, this global migration of constitutional norms is driven not by judges but by legal advocates themselves, who cite and apply international and foreign law in their pleadings in pursuit of a specific human rights agenda. Local and transnational legal advocates form partnerships and networks that transmit legal strategy and comparative doctrine, taking advantage of similarities in postcolonial legal and constitutional frameworks. Using examples such as the abolition of the death penalty and decriminalization of same-sex relations, this book traces the transnational networks of human rights lawyers and advocacy groups who engage in constitutional litigation before domestic and supranational tribunals in order to embed international human rights norms in local contexts. In turn, domestic human rights litigation influences the evolution of international law to reflect state practice in a mutually reinforcing process. Accordingly, international and foreign legal citations offer transnational human rights advocates powerful tools for legal reform.

This book examines selected legal complexities of the notion of torture and the issue of the proper foundation for legally characterizing certain acts as torture, especially when children are the targeted victims of torture. ICC case law is used to highlight the International Criminal Court's reluctance in practice to prosecute as a separable offence the crime of torture as set out in one or more of the relevant provisions of the Rome Statute where children are the particularized targets as part of a common plan during armed conflict. Also addressed is the failure of the ICC to consider that the young age of the victims of torture (i.e. children) should be an aggravating factor taken into account in determining the ICC sentence for those convicted of the torture of civilians, including children, in the context of armed conflict as part of a common plan. The six UN-designated grave crimes against children (including child soldiering for State or non-State forces perpetrating mass atrocities, and sexual violence perpetrated on a systematic and widespread basis against children including child soldiers), it is argued, are also instances of the torture of children as part of a common plan such that separate charges of torture are legally supportable (along with the other charges relating to additional Rome Statute offences involved in such circumstances). Useful legal perspectives on the issue of the torture of children in its various manifestations gleaned from the case law of other international judicial forums such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the ICTY are also examined.

This book explores some of the conceptual questions that underpin the legal disputes which arise in relation to equality and discrimination. Among these questions are: the meaning of 'equality' as a legal concept and its relationship to the principle of non-discrimination * symmetrical and asymmetrical approaches to equality/non-discrimination * the role of comparators in discrimination/equality analysis * the selection of protected characteristics and the proper sphere of statutory and constitutional protections * the scope for and regulation of potential conflicts between protected grounds. The book engages with domestic, European Union, and European Convention on Human Rights case law, as well as with wider international approaches. It also addresses a number of contemporary issues for discrimination/equality law, including the problem of racial profiling and the regulation of multiple discrimination. This is an interesting study for all those working in the fields of discrimination and human rights. (Series: Human Rights Law in Perspective)

Winner of the 2013 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize presented by the American Society of Church History Mississippi Praying examines the faith communities at ground-zero of the racial revolution that rocked America. This religious history of white Mississippians in the civil rights era shows how Mississippians' intense religious commitments played critical, rather than incidental, roles in their response to the movement for black equality. During the civil rights movement and since, it has perplexed many Americans that unabashedly Christian Mississippi could also unapologetically oppress its black population. Yet, as Carolyn Renee Dupont richly details, white southerners' evangelical religion gave them no conceptual tools for understanding segregation as a moral evil, and many believed that God had ordained the racial hierarchy. Challenging previous scholarship that depicts southern religious support for segregation as weak, Dupont shows how people of faith in Mississippi rejected the religious argument for black equality and actively supported the effort to thwart the civil rights movement. At the same time, faith motivated a small number of white Mississippians to challenge the methods and tactics of do-or-die segregationists. Racial turmoil profoundly destabilized Mississippi's religious communities and turned them into battlegrounds over the issue of black equality. Though Mississippi's evangelicals lost the battle to preserve segregation, they won important struggles to preserve the theology that had sustained the racial hierarchy. Ultimately, this history sheds light on the eventual rise of the religious right by elaborating the connections between the pre- and post-civil rights South.

Launched in 1993, The Common Core of European Private law is the oldest ongoing collective comparative law efort in Europe. Putting cases at their heart, each book in this series analyses a selected legal topic on the basis of real and fctional facts across diferent European and other jurisdictions. The likely outcome of the decision and its underlying legal rules are clearly set out case by case and jurisdiction by jurisdiction. In addition, the national reporters put the respective legal rules into the relevant cultural context. In this way, the collaborative efort brings not only the inner structures of national laws in Europe to the fore, but also the diferent cultural sensitivities forging their development in the frst place. It allows a reliable map of what is diferent and what is common in the various private laws across Europe to be drawn, without any specifc agenda for or against the further harmonisation of private law in Europe. The series comprises more than 20 volumes of work of more than 300 academics and is an invaluable tool to understand private law across Europe. In this book, which is part of the Common Core of European Private Law series, reporters consider legal institutions - such as the well-known acquisitive prescription and adverse possession - that allow squatters and other persons who have occupied the private or public land of others to acquire that land through mere long-term use. Rules permitting such acquisition have existed since Roman times and are said to promote legal certainty as regards ownership of land. The reporters investigate how these rules work in their legal systems today and whether this justifcation still holds water, especially given that land is now registered in most countries. Registration seems to obviate the necessity for rules permitting acquisition of land through mere long-term use, as land registration systems create clarity as to who owns the land. The continued existence of these rules also comprises a human-rights dimension. Landowners enjoy constitutional property protection under many constitutions and other legal instruments. The loss of protected ownership draws the constitutional validity of rules on long-term use into question. Yet, the rights to housing and human dignity are also relevant, especially where such users have lived on the land for extended periods and regard it as their home or where they are vulnerable to landlessness. As such, these rights must be balanced against each other. The reporters represent 19 jurisdictions from all over the world, including civil law, common law and mixed legal systems, and are from both the global north and the global south. A comparison between these legal systems and their experience with their rules on long-term use reveals a common core and guidelines against which these rules may be measured in other countries. As such, this book will be valuable to practitioners dealing with both private and public law, academic lawyers and government ofcials tasked with land use planning. With contributions by Miriam Anderson (University of Barcelona), Michel Boudot (Universite de Poitiers), Dmitry Dozhdev (Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences), Magdalena Habdas (University of Silesia in Katowice), Karoline Rakneberg Haug (Norwegian Parliamentary Ombud for Scrutiny of the Public Administration), Bjoern Hoops (University of Groningen), Eran S. Kaplinsky (University of Alberta), John A. Lovett (Loyola University New Orleans College of Law), Ernst J. Marais (University of Johannesburg), Francesco Mezzanotte (University of Roma Tre), Matti Ilmari Niemi (University of Eastern Finland), Alasdair Peterson (University of Glasgow), Hector Simon (University Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona), Jozef Stefanko (University of Trnava), Johan Van de Voorde (University of Antwerp), Filippo Valguarnera (Stockholm University), Leon Verstappen (University of Groningen), Emma J.L. Waring (University of York) and Una Woods (University of Limerick).

Immigration and refugee policies have traditionally been based on two assumptions: first, that national sovereignty implies absolute control of a country's borders and, second, that outsiders are to be admitted only when it serves the national interest. Moral or ethical concerns have not played a central role in policy formation anywhere in the world. This collection of essays challenges the traditional politically oriented position, analyzes the moral issues involved, and develops models for morally responsible immigration and refugee policies in a contemporary political setting. The editor's introduction reviews the history of U.S. immigration policy and provides a framework for considering immigration control issues. Written by leading authorities on immigration and refugee policy, this provocative volume offers an honest, sensitive exploration of some of the most difficult questions facing contemporary society. It will be of interest for studies in ethics, human rights, public policy, and political economy, as well as to general readers concerned with immigration and refugee issues.

"This is the first book to offer a systematic analysis of human rights in the 21st century. The chapters, written from diverse methodological perspectives, provide rich and varied insights on vital questions concerning the resiliency, weaknesses, and prospects of human rights today"--Provided by publisher.

"A thoughtful book that offers significant insights on the potential perils of imposing restraints in the traditional First Amendment rights."
--A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr.

"A powerful collection of essays challenging the advocates of curbing speech in order to promote equality. Most impressively, these writers make their case not through name-calling, but by taking them seriously, and dissecting, opposing arguments and acknowledging complexities, and by invoking informed common sense in bracing prose."
--Gerald Gunther, author of "The Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge,"

At the University of Pennsylvania, a student is reprimanded for calling a group of African-American students water buffalo. Several prominent American law schools now request that professors abstain from discussing the legal aspects of rape for fear of offending students. As debates over multiculturalism and political correctness crisscross the land, no single issue has been more of a flash point in the ongoing culture wars than hate speech codes, which seek to restrict bigoted or offensive speech and punish those who engage in it. In this provocative anthology, a range of prominent voices argue that hate speech restrictions are not only dangerous, but counterproductive. The lessons of history indicate that speech regulation designed to protect minorities is destined to be used against them. Acknowledging the legitimacy of the concerns that prompt speech codes and combining support for civil liberties with an acute concern for civil tights issues, "Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex" demonstrates that it is difficult, if not impossible, to draw the line between unprotected insults and protected ideas.Decrying such speech regulation as overly concerned with the symbols of racism rather than its realities, Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex offers a balanced and well-reasoned perspective on one of the most controversial issues of our time.

African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights examines the emerging trend of requests for expert opinions in asylum hearings or refugee status determinations. This is the first book to explore the role of court-based expertise in relation to African asylum cases and the first to establish a rigorous analytical framework for interpreting the effects of this new reliance on expert testimony. Over the past two decades, courts in Western countries and beyond have begun demanding expert reports tailored to the experience of the individual claimant. As courts increasingly draw upon such testimony in their deliberations, expertise in matters of asylum and refugee status is emerging as an academic area with its own standards, protocols, and guidelines. This deeply thoughtful book explores these developments and their effects on both asylum seekers and the experts whose influence may determine their fate. Contributors: Iris Berger, Carol Bohmer, John Campbell, Katherine Luongo, E. Ann McDougall, Karen Musalo, Tricia Redeker Hepner, Amy Shuman, Joanna T. Tague, Meredith Terretta, and Charlotte Walker-Said.

Does an offender have the "right" to be punished? "The right to be punished" may sound like an oxymoron, but it is not necessarily so. With the emergence of modern criminal law, the offender gained the "right" to be punished by rational criminal law rather than being lynched by an angry mob. The present-day offender may have the "right" to be punished by doctrinal sentencing rather than being subjected to verdicts based on vague, unclear, and uncertain principles. In modern criminal law, the imposition of criminal liability follows accurate and strict rules, whereas there are no similar rules for the imposition of punishment. The process of sentencing is vague and obscure, as are the considerations used for the imposition of punishments. The objective of the present book is to propose a comprehensive, general, and legally sophisticated theory of modern doctrinal sentencing. The challenges of such a legal theory are plenty and complex. In addition to increasing clarity and certainty, modern doctrinal sentencing must deal with modern types of delinquency (e.g. organized crime, recidivism, corporate offenders, high-tech offenses, etc.) and modern principles of criminal law. Modern doctrinal sentencing must serve to ensure optimal sentencing.

This title uses oral history methodology to record stories of people who experienced the brunt of racist forced removals in the city of Cape Town, South Africa. Through life stories and community case studies, it traces the human impact of this disruptive, often violent feature of apartheid's social engineering.

Former slaves, with no prior experience in electoral politics and with few economic resources or little significant social standing, created a sweeping political movement that transformed the South after the Civil War. Within a few short years after emancipation, not only were black men voting but they had elected thousands of ex-slaves to political offices. Historians have long noted the role of African American slaves in the fight for their emancipation and their many efforts to secure their freedom and citizenship, yet they have given surprisingly little attention to the system of governance that freedpeople helped to fashion. Justin Behrend argues that freed-people created a new democracy in the Reconstruction era, replacing the oligarchic rule of slaveholders and Confederates with a grassroots democracy.
"Reconstructing Democracy" tells this story through the experiences of ordinary people who lived in the Natchez District, a region of the Deep South where black political mobilization was very successful. Behrend shows how freedpeople set up a political system rooted in egalitarian values wherein local communities rather than powerful individuals held power and ordinary people exercised unprecedented influence in governance. In so doing, he invites us to reconsider not only our understanding of Reconstruction but also the nature and origins of democracy more broadly.

This invaluable one-stop reference source supplies students and general readers with historical and current information on the victims' rights revolution in the United States, providing analysis on everything from human rights reports to Supreme Court cases that allows the reader to fully understand these documents. Victims' rights represent the greatest change in the criminal justice system within the last 30 years. Victims' Rights: A Documentary and Reference Guide traces the origins, evolution, and results of the victims' rights movement. It puts victims' rights in a legal, historical, and contemporary context, and comprehensively collects important victims' rights documents in a single volume-perfect for students as well as general readers. Bringing together dozens of varied documents such as presidential task force reports and recommendations, Supreme Court cases, state constitutions, human rights reports, critical articles, and political documents, this book is an indispensable resource for those seeking to understand the origins and modern consequences of American victims' rights policy. The author's accompanying commentary and analysis helps the reader to gain a complete comprehension of the significance of these documents, while numerous bibliographic sources provide additional resources for interested readers. Many primary source documents, such as the President's Task Force on Victims of Crime A focused bibliography follows each chapter An index offers easy access to documents and analysis

The human right to survive and develop, a fundamental premise of the "U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child," can be attained only if adequate living conditions are secured for the child. This book reviews the significance of the physical, mental, spiritual, moral, and social aspects of holistic child development called for by Article 27 of the "Convention." The editors share a vision of childhood wherein the child is accorded dignity, and opportunities exist to promote advancement of human potential. Contributors from several nations and a variety of disciplines, including psychology, law, social work, medicine, economics, and international studies, address the challenge of identifying adequate living conditions across cultures and discuss issues affecting communities and governments as they attempt to fulfill their responsibilities to children and their families. Key themes throughout the book are the significance of the child's perspective, the primacy of the family environment, the need to balance the interests of diverse cultures while reducing historical inequities, and the ecological interdependence of children, families, communities, and nations. The editors and contributors call for organized social and political action to realize the child's right to develop, including ways to measure and monitor children's well-being beyond survival.

During the Standing Rock Sioux protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline, an activist observed, "Forced removal isn't just in the history books." Sabine N. Meyer concurs, noting the prominence of Indian Removal, the nineteenth-century policy of expelling Native peoples from their land, in Native American aesthetic and political praxis across the centuries. Removal has functioned both as a specific set of historical events and a synecdoche for settler colonial dispossession of Indigenous communities across hemispheres and generations. It has generated a plethora of Native American writings that negotiate forms of belonging-the identities of Native collectives, their proprietary relationships, and their most intimate relations among one another. By analyzing these writings in connection with domestic settler colonial, international, and tribal law, Meyer reveals their coherence as a distinct genre of Native literature that has played a significant role in negotiating Indigenous identity. Critically engaging with Native Removal writings across the centuries, Meyer's work shows how these texts need to be viewed as articulations of Native identity that respond to immediate political concerns and that take up the question of how Native peoples can define and assert their own social, cultural, and legal-political forms of living, being, and belonging within the settler colonial order. Placing novels in conversation with nonfiction writings, Native Removal Writing ranges from texts produced in response to the legal and political struggle over Cherokee Removal in the late 1820s and 1830s, to works written by African-Native writers dealing with the freedmen disenrollment crisis, to contemporary speculative fiction that links the appropriation of Native intangible property (culture) with the earlier dispossession of their real property (land). In close, contextualized readings of John Rollin Ridge, John Milton Oskison, Robert Conley, Diane Glancy, Sharon Ewell Foster, Zelda Lockhart, and Gerald Vizenor, as well as politicians and scholars such as John Ross, Elias Boudinot, and Rachel Caroline Eaton, Meyer identifies the links these writers create between historical past, narrative present, and political future. Native Removal Writing thus testifies to both the ongoing power of Native Removal writing and its significance as resistance.

Violence against women is a major problem in all countries, affecting women in every socio-economic group and at every life stage. Nowhere in the world do women share equal social and economic rights with men or the same access as men to productive resources. Economic globalization and development are creating new challenges for women's rights as well as some new opportunities for advancing women's economic independence and gender equality. Yet, when women have access to productive resources and they enjoy social and economic rights they are less vulnerable to violence across all societies. The Political Economy of Violence against Women develops a feminist political economy approach to identify the linkages between different forms of violence against women and macro structural processes in strategic local and global sites - from the household to the transnational level. In doing so, it seeks to account for the globally increasing scale and brutality of violence against women. These sites include economic restructuring and men's reaction to the loss of secure employment, the abusive exploitation associated with the transnational migration of women workers, the growth of a sex trade around the creation of free trade zones, the spike in violence against women in financial liberalization and crises, the scourge of sexual violence in armed conflict and post-crisis peacebuilding or reconstruction efforts and the deleterious gendered impacts of natural disasters. Examples are drawn from South Africa, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, China, Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, the Pacific Islands, Argentina, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Haiti, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States and Iceland.

This book explores the alleged uniqueness of the European experience, and investigates its ties to a long history of LGBT and queer movements in the region. These movements, the book argues, were inspired by specific ideas about Europe, which they sought to realize on the ground through activism.

Mississippi is a unique case study as a result of its long-standing defiance of federal civil rights legislation and the fact that nearly half its population was black and relegated to second-class citizenship. According to the vast majority of Mississippi daily press editorials examined between 1948 and 1968, the notion that blacks and whites were equal as races of people was a concept that remained unacceptable and inconceivable. While the daily press certainly did not advocate desegregation, in contrast to what many media critics have reported about the Southern press promoting violence to suppress civil rights activity, Mississippi daily newspapers never encouraged or condoned violence during the time periods under evaluation. Weill places coverage of these important events within a historical context, shedding new light on media opinion in the state most resistant to the precepts of the civil rights movement. This is the first comprehensive examination of civil rights coverage and white supremacist rhetoric in the Mississippi daily press during five key events: the 1948 Dixiecrat protest of the national Democratic platform; the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision to desegregate public schools in 1954; the court-ordered desegregation of Ole Miss in 1962; Freedom Summer in 1964; and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. From nearly 5,000 issues of Mississippi daily newspapers, more than 1,000 editorials and 7,000 news articles are documented in this volume.

View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction.

The second amendment is the most hotly debated and controversial right in the Constitution. In light of the recent surge of school shootings and other gun-related crimes, gun policy has become one of our leading national concerns, affecting politicians, gun manufacturers, sport shooters, and ordinary citizens alike.

Showcasing viewpoints from all sides of the gun control debate, Gun Control and Gun Rights, presents the first balanced gun policy textbook for use by undergraduates, graduate students, law students and the general public.

This comprehensive anthology includes selections from legal cases, hunting stories, public policy briefs and journalistic accounts. Anyone looking for a fair, even-handed account of the gun issue will find it in this book.

Since its founding, the U.S. has struggled with issues of federalism and states' rights. In almost every area of law, from abortion to zoning, conflicts arise between the states and the federal government over which entity is best suited to create and enforce laws. In the last decade, immigration has been on the front lines of this debate, with states such as Arizona taking an extremely assertive role in policing immigrants within their borders. While Arizona and its notorious SB 1070 is the most visible example of states claiming expanded responsibility to make and enforce immigration law, it is far from alone. An ordinance in Hazelton, Pennsylvania prohibited landlords from renting to the undocumented. Several states have introduced legislation to deny citizenship to babies who are born to parents who are in the United States without authorization. Other states have also enacted legislation aimed at driving out unauthorized migrants. Strange Neighbors explores the complicated and complicating role of the states in immigration policy and enforcement, including voices from both sides of the debate. While many contributors point to the dangers inherent in state regulation of immigration policy, at least two support it, while others offer empirically-based examinations of state efforts to regulate immigration within their borders, pointing to wide, state-by-state disparities in locally-administered immigration policies and laws. Ultimately, the book offers an extremely timely, thorough, and spirited discussion on an issue that will continue to dominate state and federal legislatures for years to come.