Author Archive for jaya-ramji-nogales

A Reminder of Our Comment Policy

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

You can always find our comment policy on the menu at the top of the page, but at times it bears repeating:

We welcome thoughtful and respectful comments to our posts, but we don’t welcome all comments. We view comment threads as a forum for civil intelligent discussion. We therefore reserve the right to edit or delete comments or ban commenters. Although we welcome strong disagreement, we don’t welcome name calling, rudeness, insults, privacy invasions, defamation, or crude remarks. Since our aim is for a discussion that is civil and intelligent, we may delete comments that strike us as stupid, that don’t contribute to the debate, or that are shrill and not in the spirit of reasoned discourse. We will also delete irrelevant comments, and we will ban sock puppets. We may give warnings to problem commenters or in problematic threads. Our judgment on whether to delete a comment or ban a commenter is final. Please feel free to disagree with us, and to disagree strongly, but be respectful of us and others. If you don’t like the tone and tenor of the discussions we want to foster here, then there are plenty of other places in the blogosphere for you to go.

  November 9, 2011 at 9:55 am   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   3 Comments

The Turner Symposium: Coming Soon!

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

No one knows what the Supreme Court will do in Turner v. Rogers, but its decision will likely shape our understanding of access to justice going forward.  The issue before the Court is whether an indigent person has a constitutional right to counsel in a civil contempt proceeding that could lead to incarceration for willful failure to pay child support.  The Court has many options.  It could establish a categorical civil right to counsel, require judges to consider the need for counsel in every case, or determine that states providing counsel in these situations need not do so as a matter of federal law.  It could decide that trial judges have specific responsibilities to assist persons without counsel, with implications possibly extending to many classes of cases.  Perhaps it could even alter in some way our understanding of the right to counsel recognized in Gideon v. Wainwright.  In light of the possibilities and their implications, Concurring Opinions will sponsor The Turner Symposium, an on-line analysis by experts in the field interpreting the decision in real time — as soon as the opinion comes down.  Two experts in residence will moderate:  Richard Zorza, expert in self-represented litigation and blogger at Access to Justice, and David Udell, Director of the National Center for Access to Justice.  The list of participants is after the leap:

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  May 23, 2011 at 6:57 pm   Posted in: Symposium (Turner v. Rogers)   Print This Post   2 Comments

Randomization, Intake Systems, and Triage

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

Thanks to Jim and Cassandra for their carefully constructed study of the impact of an offer from the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau for representation before the Massachusetts Division of Unemployment Assistance, and to all of the participants in the symposium for their thoughtful contributions.  What Difference Representation? continues to provoke much thought, and as others have noted, will have a great impact on the access to justice debate.  I’d like to focus on the last question posed in the paper — where do we go from here? — and tie this in with questions about triage raised by Richard Zorza and questions about intake processes raised by Margaret Monsell.   The discussion below is informed by my experience as a legal service provider in the asylum system, a legal arena that the authors note is  strikingly different from the unemployment benefits appeals process described in the article.

My first point is that intake processes vary significantly between different service providers offering representation in similar and different areas of the law.  In my experience selecting cases for the asylum clinics at Georgetown and Yale, for example, we declined only cases that were frivolous, and at least some intake folks (yours truly included) preferred to select the more difficult cases, believing that high-quality student representation could make the most difference in these cases.  Surely other legal services providers select for the cases that are most likely to win, under different theories about the most effective use of resources.  WDR does not discuss which approach HLAB takes in normal practice (that is, outside the randomization study).  On page twenty, the study states that information on financial eligibility and “certain additional facts regarding the caller and the case”  are put to the vote of HLAB’s intake committee.  On what grounds does this committee vote to accept or reject a case?  In other words, does HLAB normally seek the hard cases, the more straightforward cases, some combination, or does it not take the merits into account at all?

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  March 28, 2011 at 9:14 pm   Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Civil Rights, Empirical Analysis of Law, Immigration, Law Practice, Law Rev (Yale), Symposium (What Difference Representation), Uncategorized   Print This Post   One Comment

Rejecting Refugees

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

The New York Times today reports on my most recent co-authored empirical study of the U.S. asylum system, Rejecting Refugees: Homeland Security’s Administration of the One-Year Bar to Asylum, forthcoming in the William and Mary Law Review. As the title suggests, this article focuses on asylum law’s one-year filing deadline, which was created by the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). Scholars and practitioners have long expressed concern that refugees have been denied asylum due solely for failure to apply within a year of entry, and fear that the bar has had a significant impact on the U.S. asylum system. Our article is the first systematic empirical study of the effects of the deadline on asylum seekers and the asylum system.
We focus on decision-making by the Department of Homeland Security, which adjudicates most applications for asylum in the first instance. The findings are troubling. Most notably, it is likely that since the one-year bar came into effect, in April 1998, through June 2009, DHS rejected on the deadline more than 15,000 asylum applications (affecting more than 21,000 refugees) that would otherwise have been granted.
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  September 30, 2010 at 6:45 am   Posted in: Administrative Law, Immigration   Print This Post   6 Comments

Where, Oh Where Shall They Sue?

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

When I was a young law firm associate, we had tobacco, diet drugs, and Jeep rollovers.  These big money-making mass tort cases were known for sucking the life out of young attorneys, who could spend years of their lives in windowless rooms conducting document review tasks that could be performed by highly paid monkeys.  Next year’s class of monkeys will have a whole new nemesis: the Gulf oil spill litigation.

With over 200 federal civil lawsuits already filed, today’s Wall Street Journal outlines the battle shaping up among lawyers over where these cases will be heard, and most importantly, who will hear them.  Arguments on potential consolidation will be heard in one hour next week before a panel of seven judges in Boise, Idaho.  Pay attention, young associates!!  These decisions could determine your future residence, even if you thought you were signing onto a law firm so that you could live in New York.

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  July 23, 2010 at 3:06 pm   Posted in: Civil Procedure   Print This Post   No Comments

A Well-Founded Fear of School?

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

Tuesday’s Washington Post discusses an intriguing asylum case: an immigration judge in Memphis granted asylum to a German couple who fled their homeland to avoid its mandatory schooling policy.  Uwe Romeike, along with his wife and five chilren, are evangelical Christians who had decided to homeschool their children both because they believed the public school curriculum to be “against Christian values” and because their children faced violence, bullying, and peer pressure in public schools.  The Romeikes took their children out of school in their home state of Baden-Wuerttemberg in 2006, and paid fines of approximately $10,000 over 2 years for doing so.  That state constitution requires that children attend public or private schools; parents who refuse to comply can face fines or even jail time, or in severe cases, Germany’s highest appellate court ruled that social service officials could remove children from their parents.

There are so many interesting angles to the decision that it’s hard to know where to start.  Some might question whether the ability to choose how to school one’s child is a fundamental human right that should be protected by asylum law.  The German consul for the Southeast U.S. noted that “German parents have a wide range of educational options for their children.”  Should the Romeikes be sent back to Germany on the assumption that they could find a religious school that provided instruction acceptable to their value system?  Under U.S. asylum law, if internal relocation is an option to avoid persecution, applicants must move within their own country to find safety before coming to the United States.  The Romeikes had the option not only of relocating within Germany but also, as citizens of the European Union, of living and working in any member state (some of which allow home schooling and others of which surely offer affordable education that accords with evangelical religious values).

The involvement of the German consul also raises questions about the appropriateness of immigration court as a messenger in foreign affairs.  Romeike’s lawyer said that he took on the case in part because he hoped to influence public opinion in Germany, while the consul defended the law as a policy decision that “ensures a high standard of learning for all children.”  Should our immigration courts be questioning the policy judgments of solidly democratic nations with robust and procedurally fair legal systems?  Asylum has for many years been used as a political tool, for better or for worse, but this seems one step too far.  In any case, I’m interested in readers’ thoughts — are the Romeikes modern-day pilgrims, or is this just another misguided decision by our dysfunctional immigration courts?

  January 29, 2010 at 2:43 pm   Posted in: Immigration   Print This Post   6 Comments

Introducing Guest Blogger Adam Steinman

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

It’s a pleasure to introduce my law school classmate Adam Steinman as a guest blogger for the month of December.  Adam is a Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati, where he teaches Civil Procedure, International Business Transactions, and International Trade.  Like yours truly, Adam is a proud procedure nerd, and his guest post on Iqbal last August generated much interest and thoughtful discussion from Co-Op readers.

Adam received his J.D. from the Yale Law School and his LLM from Georgetown University Law Center.  Prior to joining the legal academy, he clerked for Judge Buchmeyer of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas and Judge Garza of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, held a clinical teaching fellowship at Georgetown Law, and litigated with Perkins Coie LLP in Seattle.

Adam’s scholarship focuses on civil procedure and federal courts.  His most recent article, The Pleading Problem, is forthcoming in Volume 62 of the Stanford Law Review (2010).  Recent publications include:

What Is the Erie Doctrine? (And What Does It Mean for the Contemporary Politics of Judicial Federalism?), 84 Notre Dame L. Rev. 245 (2008)

Reinventing Appellate Jurisdiction, 48 Boston College L. Rev. 1237 (2007)

The Irrepressible Myth of Celotex: Reconsidering Summary Judgment Burdens Twenty Years after the Trilogy, 63 Washington & Lee L. Rev. 81 (2006)

Adam also co-edits the Civil Procedure and Federal Courts blog.

Welcome, Adam!

  December 1, 2009 at 8:07 am   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   2 Comments

Integration through contract?

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

Though European states have received increasing numbers of immigrants over the past few decades, they have failed to integrate these immigrants as successfully as traditional immigrant-receiving nations such as the United States and Canada.  There are undoubtedly many factors that contribute to this differential in integration success rates, but access to education and employment may be the most important.  Examining these measures, a recent OECD report found that the children of migrants living in Europe have significantly worse education and labor market outcomes than the children of migrants in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

So what then should we make of German Immigration Commissioner Maria Boehmer’s proposal to address Germany’s integration problem through contracts?   Expected to be introduced during the current legislative period, these contracts will explain the services and assistance available to immigrants while requiring immigrants to learn German and avow their support for liberal values such as freedom of expression and equality of women.  Dr.  Boehmer acknowledges that the key to integrating immigrants is access to schooling and employment markets (the latter through recognition of qualifications from abroad). Read the rest of this post »

  November 24, 2009 at 8:22 pm   Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Immigration, International & Comparative Law   Print This Post   One Comment

An Anecdotal Survey on the Mommyprof Track

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

A couple of weeks ago, I invited readers to participate in a survey on maternity leave policies at various law schools.  This effort was aimed at provoking open dialogue on the topic rather than providing a scientifically defensible sample or survey of law school practices (a worthy endeavor but not one that this mommyprof can fit into her schedule!).  I received 22 responses to the survey, which could include some overlap from the same law school, so the results are not even close to representative of the 193 ABA-accredited law schools in the U.S.  Nonetheless, I think the findings are interesting.

It was striking that all but one of the respondents said that their law school did not expect women to wait until tenure to have children.  The other respondent was not sure how her school would view pre-tenure childbearing, but worried that a leave might attract stigma from male colleagues.  On the brighter side, one commenter noted that at her school, all of the junior women in relationships had children before tenure in recent years.  While I know from conversations with friends at other law schools that this norm is not universal, it’s nice to see that it may be more widespread than I had expected.

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  October 14, 2009 at 3:03 pm   Posted in: Feminism and Gender, Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   No Comments

The Mommyprof Track

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

In many ways, law teaching is an ideal job for ambitious women who value a balance between work and family.  Many (though by no means all) law schools have generous maternity leaves — a semester paid, and if you can time your baby at the beginning of the calendar year or the end of the academic year, you can tack on a summer and win nine months at home with your newborn.  Once you’re back to teaching full time, the flexible schedule makes it possible to spend quality time with children during the hours they are available and to get your work done after the little ones have gone to bed.   And, at least in an ideal world, your colleagues view you as a lifetime investment rather than a disposable worker, so they will be flexible and supportive at this particularly challenging stage of your life.

That has been my experience and that of several of my friends, but I have heard significantly more negative stories from other women, ranging from law schools that refuse to provide more than six weeks paid leave to schools that expect female professors to wait until they have tenure to bear children.  I’ve heard of other schools that require women to “make up” the classes they miss while on leave; I can only imagine what a 2-2 or 2-3 teaching load while juggling a toddler (or nursing!) does to one’s research agenda.  And of course, for all of us, there’s no “part-time” option as a law professor; while working moms in many other fields can opt to work only two or three days a week for less pay, there’s no “mommy track” to tenure.  So while law prof moms often have the flexibility to work from home two or three days a week, those days must be productive and can’t be spent playing with little ones.  (To be sure, that’s just fine with many of us, including yours truly, but may not be ideal for all law prof moms.) Read the rest of this post »

  September 30, 2009 at 4:03 pm  Tags: gender  Posted in: Feminism and Gender, Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   No Comments

Teaching Sexual Violence

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

I’m into week two of Evidence, which is one of my favorite classes to teach — full of vivid examples and fun hypotheticals, which make it relatively easy to keep students engaged.  Each year, however, I hit the tricky problem of how to deal with the sections of the course that cover crimes of sexual violence while maintaining the pedagogical goals of maximizing participation in class discussion and encouraging thorough and comprehensive study habits.  There are two main parts to this question — how to approach cold-call questioning in this area of the course and how to test these issues.  I’m sure others who teach evidence, criminal law, international criminal law, and similar courses have faced these problems, and I’m eager to hear how you’ve addressed them. Read the rest of this post »

  September 4, 2009 at 12:06 pm   Posted in: Criminal Law, Evidence Law, Feminism and Gender   Print This Post   4 Comments

Re-reading Iqbal (a new take on the 12(b)(6) wars)

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

My friend and law school classmate Adam Steinman tempted the civ pro geek in me with his thoughtful and thorough discussion of the recent Iqbal decision, which has caused more excitement in proceduralist circles than I’ve seen in quite some time!  His thoughts should prove most helpful to those of you figuring out how to teach the case in your Civil Procedure class this fall . . .

Thanks to the folks at Concurring Opinions for giving me the opportunity to share some thoughts on last Term’s decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which dismissed a civil-rights complaint filed against John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller by Arab Muslim men detained in the weeks following 9/11. I realize my comments are glacially slow-in-coming by blogosphere standards (Iqbal came down over two whole months ago). But it’s been back in the news lately, including Adam Liptak’s NYT article and Senator Specter’s introduction of the Notice Pleading Restoration Act (which would legislatively overrule Iqbal, although even Iqbal’s critics concede that the bill may have little chance of becoming law).
Iqbal has been of immense interest to litigators and civil-procedure scholars, because it embraces the 2007 decision in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly as reflecting the generally applicable pleading standard in federal court. Twombly had dismissed an antitrust conspiracy claim for lacking sufficient “factual enhancement” to make it “plausible.”  Twombly was quite controversial in its own right, but some had speculated it might be narrowly confined to complex antitrust cases.

The response to Iqbal reveals a sharp divide between those who “are lovin’ Iqbal” (in the words of a recent WSJ headline) and those who are, well, not lovin’ Iqbal. But there has been very little disagreement about how to read Iqbal—everyone seems to agree that Iqbal imposes significant new obstacles on plaintiffs at the pleadings phase and, thereby, discards the liberal, notice-pleading paradigm that most lawyers, judges, and law professors alive today learned in law school. The focus of the debate has been whether this result is proper or desirable. I want to challenge the premise that this is the correct reading of Iqbal. In fact, if read carefully, Iqbal can be fully reconciled with the pre-Twombly view of pleading. (If readers are interested, this argument is explored in more detail in my article “The Pleading Problem“, which is available on SSRN.)
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  August 4, 2009 at 8:28 am   Posted in: Civil Procedure   Print This Post   11 Comments

Measuring Gender Discrimination

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

I’m normally a fan of the statistical reports produced by the OECD, so was surprised to find myself in disagreement with the methodology of their recently-created Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI). The idea behind SIGI is a good one — to get at the root of gender discrimination by examining traditions and social norms that impede women’s empowerment. To this end, SIGI assesses twelve variables in 102 non-OECD countries and then ranks these countries based on their “performance in social institutions.” The selection and evaluation problems with their study highlight the difficulty of empirically measuring and ranking intangible phenomena such as social norms.

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  May 22, 2009 at 7:38 am   Posted in: Empirical Analysis of Law, Feminism and Gender   Print This Post   One Comment

Judging Motherhood

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

Sarah Waldeck’s recent post on the consequentialist rationale for publicizing breast-feeding’s benefits for mothers was right on the mark; breast-feeding can be challenging in the best of circumstances, so those who believe that “breast is best” should appeal to women’s self-interest rather than or as well as their noble sense of self-sacrifice.  In addition to the argument she lays out, there’s also expressivist value in changing the way we speak about, and thus perceive, breast-feeding. 

The discourse of breast-feeding has long been about everything but the mother; women who wanted to breast-feed were once told that they shouldn’t do so because formula was better for their child, now mothers are told that they must breast-feed because of all of the benefits for their child — higher IQ, less risk of obesity, diabetes, ear infections — you name it.  Inundated by these questionable claims during my pre-natal classes, I wondered how studies could possibly control for factors such as the socio-economic background of the mother.  It turns out they can’t, as Hanna Rosin explained in The Atlantic last month (in an article Sarah posted on here).  As Toto pulls open the curtain on its lack of empirical grounding, the breastfeeding orthodoxy is revealed as a stunningly paternalistic judgment on motherhood and women’s agency.

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  May 8, 2009 at 1:03 pm   Posted in: Feminism and Gender   Print This Post   5 Comments

What’s Wrong with Teen Sexting?

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

The teen pastime of “sexting” has taken a serious tangle with the law of late in our fair state of Pennsylvania. For those who haven’t heard of the phenomenon, “sexting” is the practice of sending nude or semi-nude pictures of oneself (or of one’s closest friends or enemies) via cell phone to a love interest, a friend, or as many classmates as possible. A recent study by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found that 20% of teens surveyed had electronically sent or posted online nude or semi-nude photos or videos of themselves — so this appears to be a sizeable and quite serious problem. Even worse is the jaw-dropping response from local law enforcement.

In one example, last fall, school officials from the Tunkhannock School District in Wyoming County, Pennsylvania, seized several cell phones from high school students. The officials searched the phones and discovered that male students had been using them to trade photos of semi-nude and nude female students. The local district attorney threatened to charge three girls — two photographed in white bras and one with a towel covering her from the waist down — with child pornography or open lewdness unless they agreed to participate in probation in the form of a five-week re-education program. He did not threaten to bring charges against any of the boys trading photographs on their cell phones. The concerns raised by this approach abound: privacy, free speech, proportional punishment (if found guilty of child pornography, the teens would be subject to Megan’s Laws disclosure requirements and other sex offender laws), and, of most interest to yours truly, the gendered nature of this particular bit of legal discourse.

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  March 30, 2009 at 9:45 pm   Posted in: Feminism and Gender   Print This Post   13 Comments

Bring on the Deans!

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

With Yale Law Dean Harold Koh’s nomination as State Department Legal Adviser, the Obama administration has tapped the deans of the country’s top two law schools, and is populated by numerous law professors, including, of course, the president himself. There’s nothing new in that observation, but it was still of interest to a European law professor who was visiting Temple Law School yesterday. In his country, there’s no such intermingling between academia and government — the executive bureaucracy remains in place regardless of electoral outcomes; a new political party in power leads to change at the very top but otherwise few shifts occur. Though there may be some efficiency benefits to a permanent bureaucracy, I can’t say that I see much more to recommend it, and nor could our guest. While permanent executive officers would develop significant expertise in the subject area relevant to their post, I can’t imagine that luminaries such as Koh and Kagan, with not only deep knowledge but also serious candle-power, would migrate in large numbers to such positions. A permanent bureaucracy might result in increased ideological stability, without the migration between the left and the right that we see in the U.S., but I query whether this outcome is possible (can permanency eliminate political inclinations or does it simply entrench them?) or even desirable. At least in our system of government, the executive branch should be responsive to the will of the people, and the cyclical shifts in ideological inclinations help to moderate extreme influences on both sides of the political spectrum. As long as excellence and experience, rather than ideology, are the central rationales for selection of political appointees, these swings should improve governance in the long run, by bringing in fresh ideas and new perspectives every four to eight years. So bring on the deans, I say — our government will be a richer place for it.

  March 25, 2009 at 3:06 pm   Posted in: International & Comparative Law   Print This Post   2 Comments

The Supremes Speak

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

This week, the Supreme Court took the rare step of deciding an asylum case, Negusie v. Holder, which examines the availability of a duress exception to the persecutor bar. The Court has decided very few asylum cases in its history, and when it does so, the result is often messy. The Negusie decision is no exception– while Justice Kennedy commands a majority of six, the proliferation of concurrences and dissents doesn’t inspire confidence in the unity of the court. It does, however, make for a fun read for immigration law junkies as well as for aficionados of administrative law and moral philosophers.

First, for the admin law types, this case continues and amplifies recent tussles in the immigration field over who has the authority to interpret the Immigration and Nationality Act — the federal courts or the Board of Immigration Appeals (the administrative entity charged with reviewing immigration court decisions and establishing national uniformity in immigration law). Kennedy’s majority opinion gives some deference to the administrative agency (deference that, in my opinion, is misplaced, given the dysfunctional nature of the Board, which I’ve discussed in more detail here), finding that while the Board misapplied precedent in interpreting the statute to preclude a duress exception to the persecutor bar, it should be allowed to reinterpret the statute free from this error. But as Scalia notes in his concurrence, the tone of the opinion indicates that Kennedy thinks the Board should come down in favor of a duress exception. Scalia disagrees with this approach, arguing that the Board “deserve[s] to be told clearly whether we are serious about allowing them to exercise . . . discretion, or are rather firing a warning shot across the bow.”

Stevens and Breyer, on the other hand, think the warning shot isn’t clear enough, finding that the question of whether the duress exception exists is one for the courts, and that the role of the administrative agency should be to determine how to apply the standard to be used in deciding whether participation in persecution was voluntary or coerced. Thomas doesn’t explicitly address whether the authority to interpret this provision of the statute should lie with the courts or the administrative agency; he thinks that the Board’s underlying decision was correct because the language of the statute doesn’t contain a duress exception.

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  March 5, 2009 at 9:30 pm   Posted in: Immigration   Print This Post   3 Comments

Layoffs, Layoffs Everywhere

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

Though news of law firm layoffs, not to mention offer rescission and complete dissolution, has been brewing for some time now, government and non-profit jobs, though harder to come by, have seemed relatively more secure. Not so, as I learned from a former colleague at the ACLU last month, where Madoff-related investments forced layoffs of ten percent of the workforce, including several staff attorneys. As a former staff attorney at the ACLU, those positions appeared to be some of the most secure in the legal profession — yours to keep for as many years as you wanted, until poof! they disappeared. And just last week, a former student of mine reported that the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office rescinded the thirteen offers it made this year (in contrast to the 25 it extends in a normal year) to third-year law students. As another student on the public interest job hunt noted today, “I thought that was why I became a professional!” Indeed — that was the deal we all signed up for; we’d put our noses to the books for three long years, incurring piles of debt, but we’d still have jobs in an economic downturn. Wouldn’t we? While job losses may be more severe outside the legal profession, a law degree is certainly no panacea, and some may begin to wonder exactly what is the value added from three years of expensive education. At the moment, I’m not sure I have an answer for my talented and hardworking students struggling to find permanent employment after graduation.

  February 23, 2009 at 9:31 pm   Posted in: Law Talk   Print This Post   No Comments

Empiricizing Transitional Justice

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

The Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley released this month “a population-based survey on attitudes about social reconciliation and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia” entitled So We Will Never Forget. Of the several surveys of the Cambodian public on accountability for the Khmer Rouge that have been completed in the past decade (including one by yours truly), this is the most scientifically planned and executed, with rigorous methodology and a wide sampling of the Cambodian population.

There’s much of interest in this report for those participating in accountability efforts. First, the report underscores the need for a serious public education effort around the tribunal. Of the respondents who did not live under the Khmer Rouge regime, 81% described their knowledge of that period as poor or very poor. Given that 68% of Cambodia’s population has been born since the Khmer Rouge left power, that’s a very concerning statistic. Moreover, 39% of those surveyed had no knowledge of the Extraordinary Chambers and 46% had only limited knowledge. The court and non-governmental organizations have a great deal of headway to make in educating the Cambodian public about the ECCC and the Khmer Rouge era.

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  January 30, 2009 at 8:30 am   Posted in: International & Comparative Law   Print This Post   One Comment

Courting Genocide?

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

This week, Peter Spiro and I hosted Jide Nzelibe at Temple’s International Law Colloquium. Jide presented his work-in-progress, Courting Genocide: The Unintended Effects of Humanitarian Intervention, on which Kristen Boon provided commentary. While I had several smaller quibbles and a few larger criticisms of the paper, it moves the scholarship on humanitarian intervention a step forward, as Kristen noted, by examining the motivations of all of the actors involved and suggesting that the effects of humanitarian intervention may not always be benign. Jide’s basic thesis is as follows:

because humanitarian interventions tend to increase the chance that rebel or victim group leaders are going to achieve their preferred political objectives, such leaders might have an incentive to engage in the kinds of provocative actions that make atrocities against their followers more likely in the first place

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  January 23, 2009 at 7:00 am   Posted in: International & Comparative Law   Print This Post   One Comment

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