Prof. Rosenblum on CEDAW

Pace Law Professor Darren Rosenblum's latest article Unsex Cedaw: What's Wrong with Women's Rights, recently posted on SSRN, is featured in a March 8 blog post on the Reproductive Rights Prof Blog. The abstract of Prof. Rosenblum's article follows:

This Article argues that the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (“CEDAW” or the “Convention”) has failed to create equality for women or gender equality because its scope remains limited to women. CEDAW’s focus on women enshrines an understanding of sex as a binary of men/women and a consequent presumption of their relationship as perpetrator/victim. The Convention is also the preeminent treaty on gender inequality, and cannot succeed in creating gender equality if it continues to focus so narrowly and exclusively on women.Instead of focusing on “women” as part of a binary, CEDAW should seek the elimination of the categories themselves. CEDAW’s very title is its mistaken diagnosis. CEDAW’s focus on the category “women” reifies rather than undermines gender disparities. This Article argues that CEDAW should reframe its target to focus on sex or gender discrimination rather than women as its sole particular victims. CEDAW represents men as the comparator for women’s equality and the implicit perpetrator of their inequality. Rather than be in CEDAW’s periphery, men should be central, along with women, to any rectification of gender inequality. Beyond men, CEDAW should protect people of all genders. Gender or sex must replace the identitarian category of “women” in international law. This reinterpretation must occur for the future of this crucial international Convention.

Prof. Rosenblum's article will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law.

Prof. Humbach on Free Will

Pace University School of Law Professor, John A. Humbach, has posted an article titled Free Will Ideology: Experiments, Evolution and Virtue Ethics on SSRN. Prof. Humbach's article has been featured on Legal Theory Blog under a title Humbach on Free Will.

Free will could never have evolved in a world of ordinary biological forces. There is, moreover, substantial experimental evidence against it. This evidentiary situation is a serious moral concern because free will ideology plays a key role in justifying punishment in criminal law. People draw a sharp distinction between the suffering of innocents and suffering that is deserved. As a basis for criminal punishment, the very concept of just deserts usually presupposes that wrongdoers have a choice in what they do. The essay proceeds from the assumption that hurting people is presumptively wrong and therefore requires justification. If this assumption is true, then the factual dubiousness of free will presents a serious problem for current penal practices. Because the evidence makes free will unlikely and the logic of evolution makes it impossible, an important underpinning of the criminal law appears to fail. A variant of free will, so-called compatibilism, does not solve or avoid the problem of justification. It seems on the contrary to be merely a repackaging of an ancient form of virtue-ethics under which people are deemed to deserve to suffer because they are what they are.

Griffin On the Wrong Person Defense

Pace University School of Law Professor, Lissa Griffin, has posted an article titled Avoiding Wrongful Convictions: Re-Examining the 'Wrong-Person' Defense (Seton Hall Law Review, Vol. 39, 2009) on SSRN. Prof. Griffin's article has been featured on Legal Theory Blog under a title Griffin On the Wrong Person Defense.

This article reviews the history of the right to present a defense and closely examines the United State Supreme Court's modern analysis of that right. Part III. analyzes the emergence of the right to present a defense that a third party committed the crime and concludes with a discussion of the Supreme Court's recent decision in South Carolina v. Holmes. Part IV. then describes the current restrictive implementation of the wrong-person defense by the lower courts. Part V argues that the constitutional right to present a wrong-person defense is being insufficiently protected under the current, arbitrary standards, and prescribes a constitutional analysis of the defense that is consistent with the Supreme Court's jurisprudence, more reflective of what the lower courts actually are doing, and that it likely to produce more reliable results.

Cite To The Internet or Not?!

Via Slaw.ca, in a post titled Link Rot In Court Decision the bellow mentioned article is featured. With the growth of the Internet and the use of information available on the Internet, the citation to the Internet has also increased. That is true for the legal world and legal citation as well. The question of citing or not citing to the Internet in legal documents is being heavily debated. There is an article available through SSRN that discusses link rot in court decisions by Tina Ching (Reference Librarian, Seattle Univ. Law Library) in The Next Generation of Legal Citations: A Survey of Internet Citations in the Opinions of the Washington Supreme Court and Washington Appellate Courts, 1999-2005 , 9 J. App. Prac. & Process 387 (2007), available at SSRN.

The article abstract reads as follows:

As more legal research is conducted online, it is reasonable to conclude that there will be a corresponding increase in citations to the Internet by judges in their opinions. With the widespread public use of the Internet to access information along with the constant changes and impermanence of websites, citing to the Internet should be an issue of increasing concern to the legal community across the country. This paper surveys the types of Internet sources the Washington state Supreme Court and Appellate Court justices are citing. It discusses the interrelated issues of link rot and the impermanence of web pages, citation format, authentication and preservation of online electronic legal information.