This paper goes beyond commonly invoked macro-political explanations for conflict-related migration, offering a micro-analysis of the causes and processes of flight from Mogadishu in the last two years. It explores how particular interactions between people, their resources, and their structural contexts produce migration, and shape the process of migration. Based on qualitative research with people from Mogadishu seeking refuge in self-declared Somaliland, the paper illuminates some of the micro-level, human consequences of the ‘war on terror’ in the Somali regions.
On 2 and 3 May 2008, Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar, devastating large portions of the Irawaddy Delta and creating the potential for a massive humanitarian crisis. Yet, the government of Myanmar rejected aid from some countries, limited the amount of aid entering the country to a fraction of what was needed and strictly controlled how that aid was distributed. The United Nations and many governments criticized Myanmar’s response to the cyclone as inadequate and inhumane, and senior politicians from a number of countries discussed whether the situation justified invoking the “responsibility to protect.” This paper explores several questions, including: 1) can an inadequate response to a natural disaster constitute an ongoing crime against humanity and thus act as the trigger for the responsibility to protect?; 2) should the responsibility to protect have been invoked by the international community in response to Cyclone Nargis?; and 3) what would countries have been obligated to do if it was invoked? In particular, assuming that the invocation of the responsibility to protect would have been based on a finding that crimes against humanity were being committed by the government of Myanmar, would the international community be obligated to investigate and potentially prosecute the underlying violations of international criminal law? If so, what venues exist for the investigation and prosecution of these potential crimes? Finally, the paper attempts to assess the successes and failures of the responsibility to protect since its acceptance by the member states of the UN at the 2005 World Summit.
From the founding of the United States, Americans have understood loyalty to their country as a religious and not just a civic commitment. The idea of a 'civil religion' that defines the collective identity of a nation originates with Rousseau, and was adapted to the United States Robert Bellah, who suggested that a peculiarly American civil religion has underwritten government and civil society in the United States. Leaving aside the question whether civil religion has ever truly unified all or virtually all Americans, I argue that it excludes too many Americans to function as such a unifying force in the present. I discuss the general content of American civil religion, and then briefly examine how it has been deployed to sacralize four historical 'moments' in American history, the Founding, the Civil War, the Cold War, and the contemporary Culture Wars. I argue that religious pluralism and sectarian activism in the United States make a unifying civil religion improbable from a practical standpoint, and that the tendency of civil religion to devolve into idolatry, i.e., the sanctification of the government and its goals, makes it normatively unattractive, particularly for religious minorities. I close by suggesting that American civil religion can genuinely include and unify all Americans only if it drops its religious component, and that American society has sufficient cultural resources to inform a 'secular' civil religion.This paper was delivered at a symposium entitled 'Civil Religion in the United States and Europe: Four Comparative Perspectives,' held at Brigham Young University Law School on March 12-14, 2009.
Since 1998, 5.4 million citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have been killed in what many refer to as "Africa's First World War" -- the deadliest armed conflict since World War II. Despite a 2003 peace deal and the country's first elections in 2006, a staggering 45,000 people continue to die each month and as many as 4,000 women per year are being raped. As Western Europe needed a massive infusion of American assistance to lift itself from misery after World War II, this article contends that the DRC needs such an infusion now. It posits that ending DRC atrocities will require launching an "African Marshall Plan" -- a gargantuan influx of aid and expertise that will stabilize the country and promote the rule of law. This will entail a series of suggested procedural and substantive changes to U.S. policy. The procedural changes involve greater agency inclusion and coordination, use of human rights benchmarks and an ombudsman, and establishment of a team of law and negotiation experts on the ground. The substantive changes focus on large-scale humanitarian assistance efforts supporting judicial and security sector reform that will eliminate the culture of impunity. Such reform would include: (1) setting up programs to curb and punish sexual violence and corruption; (2) preventing illegal resource exploitation through, inter alia, corporate sanctions; (3) backing the International Criminal Court and DRC domestic war crimes prosecution efforts; (4) possible establishment of a hybrid tribunal for crimes outside DRC and ICC jurisdiction; and (5) creating a "National Human Rights Office" with branches in Kinshasa and outlying provinces (especially in the troubled eastern DRC).
This paper examines the Reconstruction-era case of United States v. Klein, which imposed some uncertain limitations on congressional control over judicial jurisdiction and judicial decisionmaking. Klein remains one of the mysteries of the constitutional-law canon, a subject of a sort of 'cult' among some lawyers and commentators, although no one seems to know how or why. Two connected myths surround Klein. First, the case is said to be meaninglessly indeterminate because, given the confusing and disjointed language of the opinion, its precise doctrinal contours are not clear; second, the case is believed (and hoped) to function as vigorous precedent, likely to be used by a court to invalidate likely federal legislation. Both of these ideas are false. In fact, close analysis of Klein, its progeny, and past scholarship reveals three core, somewhat-related principles of separation of powers and limits on congressional control over the courts: 1) Congress cannot dictate case outcomes; 2) Congress cannot tell the courts how to understand, interpret, or apply the Constitution; and 3) Congress cannot enact unconstitutional rules. But close analysis also reveals that Klein lacks doctrinal vigor and that the belief in Klein's power is purely a myth. Those three core principles are neither groundbreaking nor exceptional and all are common ideas, reflected in and associated with other precedents and constitutional doctrines; we do not need Klein to advance these separation-of-power ideals. Consider that no federal law has been judicially invalidated on Klein grounds since the law challenged in Klein itself. Klein's principles fail to limit in any meaningful way Congress' power to enact two recent, controversial pieces of War-on-Terror legislation: the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which imposed limits on Habeas Corpus on federal judicial decisionmaking in cases brought by WOT detainees, and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which granted telecommunications companies retroactive immunity for their assistance to the Bush Administration in conducting warrantless surveillance of people in the United States. Although both laws limit and control the authority, operation, and decisionmaking of federal courts over highly contested legal and constitutional issues - the concerns at the case's heart - the case imposes no meaningful constitutional barriers to either enactment and both survive constitutional scrutiny. The continued belief that Klein imposes significant constitutional limits is a continued belief in a legal myth.
The veterans disability compensation (VDC) program, which provides a monthly stipend to disabled veterans, is the third largest American disability insurance program. Since the late 1990s, VDC growth has been driven primarily by an increase in claims from Vietnam veterans, raising concerns about costs as well as health. We use the draft lottery to study the long-term effects of Vietnam-era military service on health and work in the 2000 Census. These estimates show no significant overall effects on employment or work-related disability status, with a small effect on non-work-related disability for whites. On the other hand, estimates for white men with low earnings potential show a large negative impact on employment and a marked increase in non-work-related disability rates. The differential impact of Vietnam-era service on low-skill men cannot be explained by more combat or war-theatre exposure for the least educated, leaving the relative attractiveness of VDC for less skilled men and the work disincentives embedded in the VDC system as a likely explanation.
Equitable Balancing in the Age of Statutes examines the application of the doctrine of equitable balancing in determining whether to issue injunctions for violations of federal statutes. For the past several decades, the Supreme Court has held that the decision whether to enjoin violations of federal laws ordinarily should be determined by “balancing the equities,” in which courts weigh the hardship that the plaintiffs would face if an injunction were denied against the hardship the defendants would face if an injunction were granted. The Court has justified the doctrine by declaring that it is a longstanding equitable practice dating back centuries, perhaps since time immemorial. The Court most recently applied the doctrine in Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, 129 S.Ct. 365 (2008), in which environmentalists sought to enjoin the Navy from conducting antisubmarine training exercises using a type of sonar system alleged to be harmful to whales. The Court held that, even if the Navy was acting in violation of federal law, no injunction should be issued because, as the Court saw the balance of equities, national security trumps environmental protection. The Article argues that the Supreme Court’s experiment in applying equitable balancing in statutory contexts should be abandoned because it conflicts with separation-of-powers principles. The Article seeks to debunk the Court’s premise for applying equitable balancing in statutory cases - that the doctrine has been part of equitable practice for many centuries. In fact, equitable balancing is a relatively modern phenomenon, which first appeared in state common law cases during the period of rapid industrialization following the Civil War, and it only gained general acceptance in the 1930s. It was adopted for the express purpose of expanding judicial discretion to protect industries against injunctions in nuisance actions to stop air and water pollution. History is repeating itself because the Supreme Court adopted equitable balancing in federal statutory cases, beginning in 1982, to expand judicial discretion to excuse violations of federal statutes when, in the courts’ judgment, countervailing policy interests outweigh the interests served by federal statutes. Once equitable balancing is recognized as a recent phenomenon adopted to enlarge judicial policymaking authority, it becomes apparent that applying the doctrine in federal statutory cases raises substantial unresolved separation-of-powers problems. Among other things, the doctrine allows, if not requires, that courts make ad -hoc assessments of the relative importance of apparently conflicting statutory policies.
This paper extends the current literature which questions the stability of the monetary transmission mechanism, by proposing a factor-augmented vector autoregressive (VAR) model with time-varying coefficients and stochastic volatility. The VAR coefficients and error covariances may change gradually in every period or be subject to abrupt breaks. The model is applied to 143 post-World War II quarterly variables fully describing the US economy. I show that both endogenous and exogenous shocks to the US economy resulted in the high inflation volatility during the 1970s and early 1980s. The time-varying factor augmented VAR produces impulse responses of inflation which significantly reduce the price puzzle. Impulse responses of other indicators of the economy show that the most notable changes in the transmission of unanticipated monetary policy shocks occurred for GDP, investment, exchange rates and money.
This article contributes new time series for studying the U.K. economy during World War I and the interwar period. The time series are per capita hours worked and average tax rates of capital income, labor income, and consumption. Uninterrupted time series of these variables are provided for an annual sample that runs from 1913 to 1938. We highlight the usefulness of these time series with several empirical applications. We use per capita hours worked in a growth accounting exercise to measure the contributions of capital, labor, and productivity to output growth. The average tax rates are employed in a Bayesian model averaging experiment to reevaluate the Benjamin and Kochin (1979) regression.