Cuban Law and Legal Research: A Snapshot During the Deshielo (Congelado?) – Monday, July 17, 2017, 9:45 a.m., Austin Convention Center, Room 18AB

By Julienne Grant

“The history of the United States and Cuba encompass[es] revolution and conflict, struggle and sacrifice, retribution and now reconciliation. It is time now for us to leave the past behind. It is time for us to look forward to the future together.”

-President Barack Obama, March 22, 2016, Havana, Cuba

 

“Therefore, effective immediately, I am canceling the last administration’s completely one-sided deal with Cuba.” 

-President Donald J. Trump, June 16, 2017, Miami, Florida

 

“Again, the United States Government resorts to coercive methods of the past, adopting measures to intensify the blockade, in force since February 1962, which not only causes damage and deprivation to the Cuban people and constitutes an undeniable obstacle to the development of our economy, but also affects the sovereignty and interests of other countries, inciting international rejection.” (Julienne E. Grant, translation)

-Declaration of the Revolutionary Government, June 16, 2017, Havana, Cuba

 

When I drafted a proposal last fall for an AALL program on Cuba, I envisioned a continuation of the dramatic deshielo (thaw) of relations between the U.S. and Cuba. Specifically, I assumed there would be a progression of the rapprochement that former President Obama alluded to in his speech in Havana on March 22, 2016.  What I didn’t foresee while crafting the program were the most recent proclamations by President Trump and the Cuban government.  Trump’s June 16^th announcement in Miami that backtracks some of the previous administration’s initiatives has halted the thaw a bit. As such, this program is perhaps more appropriately a snapshot during the deshielo congelado (frozen thaw). However U.S.-Cuba relations can now be characterized, though, Cuba is on the cusp of dramatic changes, and it’s a hot topic.

Please join Dr. Marisol Florén-Romero (Florida International University), Teresa Miguel-Stearns (Yale), and me (Loyola University Chicago) as we first explore this enigmatic jurisdiction from a law librarian’s perspective. Our program will include a brief overview of the somewhat unwieldly nomenclature of Cuban law, as well as a short assessment of English-language sources that can provide insight into Cuba’s legal landscape. In addition, Teresa will offer a quick summary of her experience purchasing legal materials in Havana last year.  Accompanying the program is a useful 26-page handout that will be available for download.

Our featured speaker, however, is Professor Jorge R. Piñon, whose talk is titled “Cuba Business Scenarios:  Challenges and Opportunities,” certainly a timely topic in what is an extremely fluid political and economic environment.   Professor Piñon is the Interim Director of The University of Texas at Austin, Center for International Energy & Environmental Policy, and the Director of its Latin America & Caribbean Energy Program.

Professor Piñon is also recognized as an expert on Cuba’s energy sector, as well as on the island’s future economic transitional challenges and opportunities.  He is an advisor and a member of the Cuba Task Force at The Brookings Institution and co-author of “Cuba’s Energy Future: Strategic Approaches to Cooperation,” Brookings Institution Press, 2010.

Hope to see you on Monday for what is sure to be a lively, engaging, and enlightening hour!

 

Antiquarian/Rare Books Vendors and Dealers: Foreign and International Law

By Lyonette Louis-Jacques

For those building special collections of rare law books, here is a list I compiled recently after a call for suggestions to the AALL FCIL-SIS (Foreign, Comparative, and International Law) and LHRB-SIS (Legal History & Rare Books) e-Communities, and the INT-LAW (International Law Librarians) listserv. Thanks especially to Mike Widener, Andreas Knobelsdorf, and Jonathan Pratter for suggesting names of antiquarian vendors/dealers/publishers, etc. of foreign, comparative, and international law rare books. Please send any other suggestions or updates to me at llou@uchicago.edu).

Here is the list:

• Apuleio Studio Bibliografico di Roberto Sbiroli – Trento, Italy
• Antiquariat + Verlag Klaus Breinlich
• Azo Antiquariat Peter Kiefer
• Bernard Quaritch Ltd. – London
• Bibliopathos – Verona
• Bonhams Auctions
• Il Cigno Galileo Galilei Edizioni
• Gerits & Son – Amsterdam
• Kloof Booksellers & Scientia Veralg – Amsterdam
• Lawbook Exchange – Clark, NJ
• Leo Cadogan Rare Books Ltd. – London
• Lex Antiqua Studio bibliografico di Massimo Caputi – Italy
• Libreria Giuridica Antiquaria Bonfanti Giuliano – Milan (Italian, Roman, and canon law)
• Libreria Giuridica Ardy Bernardino (Genova)
• Libreria Gozzini – Florence
• Librería Jiménez (Spain)
• Mediolanum Libreria Antiquaria di Luca Pozzi – Milan
• Mémoire du Droit – Paris
• Meyer Boswell Books, Inc. (Joe Luttrell)
• Philadelphia Rare Books & Manuscripts Co.
• SISMEL edizioni del Galluzzo (Firenze – Middles Ages)
• Sokol Books – London
• Susanne Schulz-Falster Rare Books – London
• Vico – Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Sometimes FCIL rare books are sold through auctions via Bonhams or Doyle.

Mega-catalogs or rare book search pages for identifying rare FCIL titles include AbeBooks.com, viaLibri, ZVAB (Zentrales Verzeichnis Antiquarischer Bücher), WorldCat, and KVK – Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog (you can limit your search to the Buchhandel = Book Trade section). You can use these sources to check if a law title is unique or owned by few law libraries.  You can check these sources or digital libraries or commercial databases directly to see if a rare law book you own has already been digitized (if you’re thinking of special digitization projects).

For tracking the literature related to FCIL history, it’s useful to regularly review the Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law which includes an annual bibliography of essays and books) and “Orientamenti Bibliografici”, a bibliography coordinated by Rosalba Sorice with contributions from Manlio Bellomo, etc. published  in the Rivista Internazionale di Diritto Comune.

You can enroll in Mike Widener’s course for training in law rare book collecting. It’s a Rare Book School class called Law Books: History & Connoisseurship. He teaches it every two years or so. A reading list is available. Mike’s most recent law rare books class was in June 2016 and covered Roman, canon & civil law in addition to Anglo-American law. Bill Schwesig reported on this year’s class in the summer 2016 issue of the CALL Bulletin. Susan Gualtier, Teresa Miguel-Stearns, Sarah Ryan, and Fang Wang reported on the summer 2014 class in the March 2015 issue of AALL Spectrum.

It might be also useful for FCIL rare book collection development to check the catalogs and new acquisitions lists of research center libraries such as the Library of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History (which, BTW, has a great digital library!).

Some of the libraries that have strong collection of rare FCIL book include Yale (including the Library of the Stephan Kuttner Institute of Medieval Canon Law), Berkeley (Robbins Collection on Religious and Civil Law), Law Library of Congress (The Rare Book Collection), and the Peace Palace Library (Grotius Collection). Sharing knowledge with them, generalist rare book librarians, or EXLIBRIS-L subscribers, on FCIL rare book collecting would be important for others new to selecting materials in this area. What are some strong FCIL rare book collections or specialized vendors?

07/17/2016 Summary and a Word about DuSable

By Julienne Grant

I was walking home from the Hyatt after the conference ended and an AALL member stopped me on Michigan Ave. to tell me how much she loved Chicago. That made my day.  I sent colleagues all over the city during the conference—to the Chicago History Museum, Wicker Park, Old Town, the CAF boat tour dock, the West Loop, and to Eataly (they owe me a huge cut). Throughout all of this, I was supposed to be writing up reports of various programs/meetings, and I got a little behind.  The following are short summaries of several events from Sunday, July 17:

Latino Caucus:  My DePaul law school classmate, Matt Katz, gave a compelling and provocative presentation that focused on the precarious and truly abominable state of immigration law in this country, providing specific case examples from his firm (Katz Law).  Mateo also berated the increasing trend of prison privatization in the U.S., mentioning a 2013 article in The Guardian, “America’s Private Prison System is a National Disgrace.” To drive his points home, Matt drew upon a wide range of authors, including French philosopher Michel Foucault.  Matt distributed copies of a piece he recently penned, “Como Indocumentado, Que Debo Saber y Hacer en la Era del Trump y la Negación de DAPA por La Corte Suprema?” (As an undocumented immigrant, what should I know and do in the era of Trump and the Supreme Court’s rejection of DAPA?).

After Mateo’s talk, the Latino Caucus began its business meeting, led by Chair Marisol Florén-Romero (Florida International U). The Caucus discussed a number of proposed projects, including one called “Latino Voices.” The goal of this initiative would be to compile information on selected members of the Hispanic legal community, including law librarians.  These personal profiles would be featured on the Caucus’ web page.

Matt Katz

Asian Legal Information in English: Availability, Accessibility, and Quality Control:   This was a very interesting and useful program; kudos to all the presenters who covered China (Alex Zhang, U of Michigan), Hong Kong/Macao (Anne Mostad-Jensen, U of North Dakota), South Korea (Juice Lee, Northeastern), and Japan (Mike McArthur, U of Michigan). The presenters did an excellent job of explaining the complexities involved in translating the law from these jurisdictions and the inherent pitfalls of English-language translations. Free websites and commercial databases were presented, and in some instances demoed live.  Juice Lee’s PowerPoint slides are posted on AALL’s website.

Foreign Law Selectors Interest Group:  The meeting drew about 30 attendees, and was led by Marci Hoffman (UC Berkeley).  Schaffer Grant recipient Rheny Pulungan of the University of Melbourne’s Law School Library offered a brief overview of her library’s print and electronic resources, which she described in more detail during her presentation on Monday, July 18 (summary forthcoming). Representatives from the Law Library of Congress, Yale, Harvard, NEFLLCG, and LLMC Digital provided updates. The LA Law Library was not represented, as Neel Agrawal has left his position there. Marci also brought the group up to date on recent developments related to the Foreign Law Guide (FLG) and Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (IFLP). Regarding the former, there are newly-updated entries for Azerbaijan, China, France, Japan, and Mexico.  Updates for Germany, South Korea, and Switzerland have been completed and will be loaded soon; revisions for Argentina, Chile, Italy, and Spain are in the works. She also indicated that the IFLP will soon have a multilingual subject thesaurus and that the database will be adding 10 new Japanese journals.  Marci will post the full minutes of the meeting on the Foreign Law Selectors Interest Group web page.

 

Rheny Pulangan

 

Before closing, I want to say just a bit about the convention center’s DuSable room, which apparently piqued the interest of a few FCIL-SIS members. I’m quite sure the room is named for Jean Baptiste Point DuSable who is known as the founder of Chicago. DuSable was purportedly a Haitian of African and French descent who established the first permanent settlement here in the 1780s. Next time you’re in town, check out the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.

 

 

 

FCIL-SIS Jurisdictions Interest Groups To Meet On Sunday

FCIL-SIS invites all AALL conference attendees to join us for our Jurisdictions Interest Groups Joint Meeting this Sunday, from 12:30pm to 2:00pm, in the Hyatt-Water Tower Room.  The program will include substantive presentations from several of our interest groups, as well as 15 minutes at the end of the meeting for each group to discuss their plans for the coming year.

The agenda for the meeting is as follows:

SUNDAY July 17, 2016

12:30 PM – 2:00 PM

FCIL-SIS Jurisdictions IG Joint Meeting (Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, Indigenous Peoples, Customary & Religious Law, Roman Law) (Hyatt-Water Tower)

Meeting Topics:

• Welcome and Intro (Susan Gualtier, Louisiana State University School of Law Library) – 5 minutes
• European Law: Recent Developments in German Law Related to Asylum and Refugees: A Brief Overview for Law Librarians (Jennifer Alison, Harvard Law School Library) – 20 minutes
• Latin America: Cuban Legal Research Guide (Julienne Grant, Loyola University Chicago Law Library, et al.) – 10 minutes
• Africa: Updates of the Digitization Case Law Project from South Western Nigeria (Yemisi Dina, Osgood Hall Law School Library) – 20 minutes
• Indigenous Peoples: Indigenous Peoples and DNA Testing: Friend or Foe? (Steven Perkins, Greenberg Traurig, LLP) – 20 minutes
• Individual Interest Groups business meetings – 15 minutes

Everyone is welcome to attend the presentations and to check out our interest groups, so please spread the word to anyone interested in these areas of foreign law.  FCIL-SIS looks forward to seeing you there!

Book Review: Criminality and Criminal Justice in Contemporary Poland

By: Christopher Galeczka

Konrad Buczkowski, et. al. Criminality and Criminal Justice in Contemporary Poland: Sociopolitical Perspectives (Ashgate Publishing, 2015). 208 p. Hardcover $112.46.

Criminality and Criminal Justice in Contemporary Poland is a collection of articles by professors, as well as one alumna, of the Institute for Law Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences. The series of ten articles designated as chapters describe the philosophical views on crime and criminality of some of the authors, as well as other Polish authorities on the subject, and describe the historical and contemporary aspects of crime, the criminal justice system, and public perceptions of both in the country.

Poland is a country of significance to international and comparative legal scholars in being one of the largest countries in Central Europe, a region of nations characterized by long legacies of foreign rule, the more recent experience of a half-century of existence under Soviet-imposed Communism, and a still unfolding path of economic and political integration into pan-European institutions. As such, this work is of relevance not only to those interested in comparative criminal law, but also those interested in criminality across time and cultures, as well as the economic, social, political and cultural issues that arise in societies in transition from command to market economies and from authoritarian to liberal-democratic political systems.

Chapter 1, “Criminality Today and Tomorrow,” discusses historical and philosophical definitions of the concept of crime, as well as the ways in which crime is defined in the current Polish criminal code, with reference to defenses and mitigating circumstances (e.g., when certain acts are committed by juveniles or in self-defense), contained in the code.

Chapter 2, “The Status of Criminality in Poland since 1918”, narrates the history of Polish criminal legislation from independence through the communist era, to the present day, as well as describing rises and falls, and changed in criminal activity in the country with reference to available statistics, chiefly, the total number reported crimes and finalized convictions in a given period.

Chapter 3, “Social Change and Criminality: Mutual Relationships, Determinants, and Implications” treats the issue of social change and its effect on the level and nature of criminality. Kossowska describes the findings and conclusions of a number of criminologists concerning changes in criminal activity during several key periods of transition in 20^th century Polish history, concluding with a discussion of the precipitous drop in ordinary criminal activity in many nations including in Poland, albeit delayed in comparison to elsewhere, and also with the advent of cybercrime and the unusual, un-marginalized nature of those who engage in it.

Chapter 4 examines the association between crime on one hand and socially excluded and economically marginalized groups on the other. Beginning with a discussion of the criminalization of the itinerant and unemployed in medieval Europe, the author examines how poverty and factors often accompanying poverty, such as feelings of alienation from society, alcoholism, family breakdown, living in marginalized areas often combine with opportunities to commit crime, leaving underprivileged people to be disproportionate perpetrators and victims of crime.  Chapter 5 continues by examining the difficulties faced by and failures of the Polish social welfare and public educational system in being able to effectively reduce social exclusion, and, by extension, criminal activity.

Chapter 6, “Justice and its Many Faces,” describes the views of many contemporary Polish writers on society’s proper response to those guilty of committing crimes.

Chapter 7 “Controlling Criminality” focuses on the Polish criminal justice system’s historical approaches to combating crime, with statistical data on numbers of crimes, convictions, and frequency with which various sanctions were imposed. Chapter 8 “Supervised Liberty,” focuses on one of the most frequently imposed of these sanctions, the suspended sentence, and comparing the philosophical justifications and practical success of this sanction with that of probation in the United States, United Kingdom, and similar systems elsewhere in Europe.

Chapters 9 “The Social Perception of Criminality,” and Chapter 10 “Criminality and the Media” combine to tell the story of public perception of crime and the role of the media in forming that perception, beginning with the late Communist era, typified by press censorship, and a relatively low level of certain criminal activity, and continuing on through the transition to democracy, characterized by a rise in criminal activity as well as the development of sensationalist media and a great rise in popular fear of crime. The story of a tabloid press fanning public fear of crime, as well as the sentiment of a criminal justice system that is ‘soft on crime’ despite its many punitive aspects would likely ring familiar to the ears of many American readers.

Many of the chapters of the book are written in a somewhat dense scholarly style. Citations are in APA format. The reader should note that citations to many of the graphical figures provided in the work are not provided with the figure, but rather are indicated within the text, where the particular figure is first mentioned. Sometimes chapters focus on providing numerous summaries of the opinions and findings of various other authors rather than rigorously promoting and supporting the authors own thesis.  The strength of these chapters, however, lie in providing a reader a good outline of Polish scholarship on crime and penology, and for this reason the book would fit well in an academic law library’s criminal law or comparative law collection.

Book Review: Emerging Challenges in Privacy Law, Comparative Perspectives

By Christina Glon

Emerging Challenges in Privacy Law, Comparative Perspectives (Norman Witzleb, et al., eds, Cambridge University Press 2014). 477p. incl. index.  Hardcover $165.00

Emerging Challenges in Privacy Law, Comparative Perspectives is a collection of essays adapted from programs presented at the “Emerging Challenges to Privacy Law: Australasian and EU Perspectives” conference held in February 2012 at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.  To accommodate for the fast-moving development of privacy issues, a few essays have also been specifically commissioned for inclusion in this collection to provide broader coverage of the big issues developing since early 2012.  While there is a decidedly heavier focus on European fundamentals, Australian history and/or advances in privacy protections are also discussed in several of the essays.

The collection is organized in six parts and provides a little bit of something for anyone interested in privacy and data protection around the globe.  Some topics covered are quite broad (Privacy and the Internet), while others are very narrow in focus (protecting the anonymity of young people in Anti-Social Behaviour Orders).  Additionally, the collection offers a nice balance of discussions on theory and the abstract (“[Convention 108] is the only global data protection treaty we are ever likely to see”) as well as detailed discussions about the nuances contained in some privacy arenas (the five categories of “intrusion on seclusion” violations).  Finally, several of the essays provide much-needed historical context for the development of privacy frameworks in many different areas of privacy law because it is truly impossible to understand where we are and where we should go with privacy law without first exploring where we have been and how we got to where we are today.

Part I of the collection provides an overview of both the Australian and European Union data protection frameworks from three different perspectives – that of Australian Privacy Commissioner (Timothy Pilgram), of the European Data Protection Supervisor (Peter Hustinx), and finally of an Australian privacy advocate (Nigel Waters, Principal, Pacific Privacy Consulting).  All three “agree on the challenges facing data privacy law reform” and the importance of enforcement of data protection laws, however, there is significant disagreement on successful expansion of those laws and enforcements over territorial / jurisdictional boundaries and consistently defining and protecting these rights on a global scale.

Part II provides the much needed fundamentals of the primary documents that have shaped privacy protections in the European Union.  Specifically, Chapter 5 examines the architecture of privacy protection in EU through the exploration of current privacy rights and the documents that granted and guarantee those rights (pre-2012 reform proposals).  Documents discussed include the well-known European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) as well as the formal adoption of the more recent Charter of Fundamental Rights (2009).  Discussions also touch on “data protection” in conjunction with Convention 108 (1981), Directive 95/46/EC (1995), and continue up to the proposed reforms offered in January 2012.

Chapter 6 focuses on one particular document (Convention 108) and provides food-for-thought about how far privacy protections can really evolve globally.  Renowned author and scholar, Professor Graham Greenleaf proffers, “[Convention 108] is the only global data protection treaty we are ever likely to see” because no other organization (save the UN) has the capability nor the desire to draft such a global document and current efforts to update and globalize Convention 108 could eliminate the need for an additional global document.

Part III of this collection gets into the real nitty-gritty of some very specific privacy violations.  First, Chapter 7 addresses privacy beyond the unwanted dissemination of private information to that of “physical privacy.”  Professor Moreham explores the patchwork of legislative, criminal, and common law measures in England to prevent this “intrusion on seclusion” (including several “slippery slope” examples of each of the five categories of intrusion – unwanted listening and audio recordings; unwanted watching, following, photographing and/or filming; unwanted access to personal documents or files (hardcopy or electronic); unwanted access to home and personal belongings; and harassment).  In Chapter 8, Professor Michael Tilbury explores several alternative modes of protection from intrusion based in tort law and weighs the pros and cons of creating new causes of action in tort law and/or implementation of a “privacy rights-based model” to specifically enumerate privacy “wrongs.”

Part IV continues this in-depth analysis by examining surveillance frameworks in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States (Chapter 10) and the creation of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (UK) and Prohibited Behaviour Orders (Australia) (Chapter 11) to prohibit “publication of anything that could identify that a young person has been involved in criminal proceedings” (page 229) in order to uphold the longstanding tradition of protecting the anonymity of young people.

Part V deals extensively with privacy issues and the Internet.  Chapter 12 dives deep into development of the Internet, “privacy-invasive and privacy-enhancing features” of the Internet, and the effects (if any) the proposed Data Protection Regulation may have on the future of the Internet.  Chapter 13 deals explicitly with the “right to be forgotten” in the EU data protection framework.  Chapter 14 compares and contrasts privacy models in the European Union, Australia, the United States, Malaysia, Singapore, and finally, Chapter 15 explores cloud computing in the European Union generally and in Germany, specifically.

Part VI circles back to the media and how the courts in the United Kingdom and Australia should balance the rights of the media and free speech with the rights of the public and witnesses to privacy.  It is unfortunate that these two chapters were moved to the end of the collection as they provide the perfect complement to Parts III and IV.  Chapter 16 explores the use of anonymity orders to protect (from media disclosure) those involved in judicial proceedings, while Chapter 17 deals explicitly with interlocutory orders in defamation actions.

This collection of essays offers a robust dialog of past, present and future successes and challenges of privacy protections around the globe.  It is an excellent collection for gaining a well-rounded understanding of the trailblazing European Union privacy frameworks and offers a mix of hope and cautionary tales to help us move forward in our united and global quest to find balance in privacy rights frameworks.

Schedule of FCIL Events in Philadelphia

Hello FCIL-SIS!  Are you ready for Philly?  We at the publicity committee certainly are!  We have swag for the exhibit hall ready to go, and we’re looking forward to seeing all of our SIS friends again next week!

As we approach the 2015 AALL Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, we encourage you to keep an eye on the blog and to follow us on Twitter for coverage of FCIL-SIS programming both during and after the conference.  If you are interested in covering any of the events listed below, please contact blog administrators Susan Gualtier (susan.gualtier@law.lsu.edu) or Loren Turner (lturner@law.ufl.edu).  Finally, remember to send us your original photos from the Philadelphia conference so that we can share them with our readers who were unable to attend!

FCIL-SIS EVENTS

2015 AALL ANNUAL MEETING, PHILADELPHIA

Saturday, July 18

9:30am – 4:45 pm

Researching the European Union (University of Pennsylvania Law School)

5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

Exhibit Hall Ribbon-Cutting/Opening Reception. Stop by the FCIL-SIS table!

Sunday, July 19

11:30 am – 12:45 pm

AALL/LexisNexis Call for Papers: Researching International Agreements other than Article II

Treaties (PCC-Room 104A)

FCIL-SIS Jurisdictions Interest Groups Joint Meeting (Marriott-Grand Ballroom Salon C)

1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

Cross-Border Disputes: Dissecting the International Investment Arbitration (PCC-Room

201BC)

4:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Designers’ Workshop: Subject Guides that Create the Effect You Want (PCC-Room 103BC)

5:15 pm – 6:00 pm

FCIL-SIS Foreign Selectors Interest Group (Marriott-Room 306)

6:00 pm – 7:00 pm

FCIL-SIS Internships and International Exchanges Committee (Marriott-Room 310)

FCIL-SIS Publicity Committee (Marriott-Room 308)

Monday, July 20

7:15 am – 8:30 am

FCIL-SIS Business Meeting and Breakfast (PCC-Room 110AB)

3:15 pm – 4:25 pm

FCIL-SIS Teaching Foreign and International Legal Research Interest Group (PCC-Room

112A)

4:00 pm – 4:30 pm

FCIL-SIS Schaffer Grant for Foreign Law Librarians Fundraising Committee (Marriott-

Conference Suite 2)

4:30 pm – 5:30 pm

FCIL-SIS Schaffer Grant for Foreign Law Librarians Recipient Presentation (Marriott-Grand

Ballroom Salon D)

5:45 pm – 6:45 pm

International Attendees Joint Reception (AALL/FCIL/IALL) (Marriott-Grand Ballroom Salon

IJ)

Tuesday, July 21

8:30 am – 9:30 am

Mighty MT: Enhancing the Value of Machine Translation Tools for FCIL Reference and

Collection Services (PCC-Room 103BC)

12:30 pm – 2:00 pm

LHRB/FCIL-SIS Roman Law Interest Group: Researching the Corpus Juris Civilis (PCC-Room

105A)

1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

FCIL-SIS Education Committee (Marriott-Grand Ballroom Salon B)

FCIL-SIS Electronic Research Interest Group (PCC-Room 104B)

Book Review: Indigenous Peoples, Customary Law and Human Rights – Why Living Law Matters

By: Xiaomeng (“Alex”) Zhang

Brendan Tobin. Indigenous Peoples, Customary Law and Human Rights – Why Living Law Matters (Routledge, 2014). 302 p. Hardcover $145.00.

Brendan Tobin, a research fellow at Griffith University Law School with significant experience in the areas of environmental law, customary law, and global human rights law, makes a highly valuable contribution to the area of customary law and the rights of Indigenous Peoples through this well-written and thoroughly researched monograph.  The book not only provides insights to theoretical research but also offers practical guidance to both legal and non-legal professionals working in the area of human rights, environmental justice, and indigenous peoples’ rights.

Tobin’s principal purpose, through this book, is to “demonstrate the importance, legitimacy and durability of Indigenous Peoples’ legal regimes, their rights to regulate their internal affairs in accordance with their own laws, customs, and traditions, and the central role that customary law has to play in securing the realization of their human rights.”  Tobin starts with the premise that Indigenous Peoples’ rights of self-determination and autonomy are important and that customary legal regimes exist to protect those rights.  He also draws a large amount of empirical evidence showing the dire consequences of not recognizing “customary law and indigenous jurisdiction.”

Despite being recognized by many binding international legal instruments and some domestic legal tools, Indigenous Peoples’ rights are not effectively protected.  Tobin argues that neither the States nor legal professionals (such as Judges) fully appreciate the importance of customary law, a core component of most (if not all) Indigenous legal systems. As a result, many of customary legal principles are not given equal consideration as positive law during the dispute settlement and/or litigation process.

The problem that Tobin tries to resolve is a long-standing issue. There are many discussions on the (in)effectiveness of Indigenous Peoples’ rights protection.[1] There are many barriers that prevent effective protection of rights politically, economically, culturally, psychologically and judicially. Effective protection not only depends on recognizing the rights protected by legal instruments such as ratified international agreements, constitutions, statutes and case law, but also relies on implementation and enforcement of these legal instruments. Two major barriers to effective enforcement of customary law are due to the nature of custom and the nature of indigenous rights. The author is able to focus on both areas and make a thorough examination on both issues.

To sum up, there are three major contributions of this book. First, Tobin provides thorough analyses of the issues of ineffective protection of Indigenous Peoples’ rights and of ineffective implementation of customary law in indigenous legal regimes, drawing on a large amount of empirical data and major well-established theories in the area. Second, Tobin, in the second half of the book, closely examines the current (in)effective implementation of customary law in many practical areas, such as rights to land, right to culture, natural resources and traditional knowledge. Finally, Tobin also provides extensive footnotes and a comprehensive bibliography that would benefit other researchers in this area. Therefore, I would highly recommend this book to academic researchers and practitioners interested or working in the relevant fields. I also recommend this book to libraries of academic institutions, organizations and government agencies working closely with indigenous peoples.

[1] For example, see Jeremie Gilbert, Indigenous Peoples’ Land Rights under International Law: From Victims to Actors (Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, 2006).

Book Review: Statelessness: The Enigma of an International Community

By: Taryn Marks

William E. Conklin. Statelessness: The Enigma of an International Community (Hart Publishing, 2014). 366 p. Hardcover $120.00.

Statelessness is an enigma, William Conklin writes, due to an assumption and a claim. The international community assumes that all persons are members of that community through the state of which they are a national. The international community claims that it provides protection for all members. The enigma arises because millions of persons are stateless, are not nationals of any state and thus are excluded from the international community, leaving them unprotected.

For those interested in the history of statelessness and in a thorough explanation of how and why the international community has created (or simply allowed to exist) such a large, unprotected population, Conklin’s book will be well received. Conklin’s passion for the subject is clear and his points are well-supported. However, for those hoping Conklin will present a definitive (or even a pie-in-the-sky) answer to the question of how to solve this enigma, the book may leave you frustrated.

Statelessness begins by explaining that the international community has two discourses. In the first discourse, the international community exists as the aggregate will of the states, the traditional definition of the international community. Under this view, the state is the primary actor and member of the international community; most importantly, the states always maintain independent power over domestic affairs, what Conklin call the “boundary of the reserved domain”—the boundary of power that the international community cannot touch. In the second discourse, Conklin’s implicitly preferred view, there is the international community as a whole. In the international community as a whole, the individual person is the actor and can access that community without state intervention. According to Conklin, statelessness is inevitable when the world is viewed as the aggregate will of the states because the ultimate decision as to whether to recognize the nationality of a person will always reside with the executive branch of a state. Under the international community as a whole, however, the person’s social and cultural bonds determine nationality.

Statelessness focuses on the status of those persons who, for whatever reason, no longer have a state in which they may legally live. Conklin focuses the first part of the book on the concept of statelessness, explaining how statelessness developed under the aggregate will of the states before discussing the consequences of statelessness and the reasons why statelessness has not been protected as a human right. Conklin provides numerous, often moving examples of those who are stateless: refugees from ISIS living in camps in Turkey, those who live in Palestine, nationals of the former USSR. The sources he uses are wide and varied, including international treaties, General Assembly documents, and fundamental sources of international law (such as jus cogens) to document and explain this enigma. He also pulls in sovereign and international court decisions from a variety of sources. But the strength of his analysis is significantly diminished by the repetitiveness of the first half of the book.

One almost forgets the repetitiveness of the first half of the book, however, when you reach the end of the book. In the last chapters, Conklin’s clear passion for those who have been rendered stateless stands out, and the book becomes much less repetitive. Conklin focuses on defining the social and cultural bonds that should exist between a person and her “state,” before shifting to his main question, whether the traditional sources of international law can be used to obligate states to protect a stateless person, regardless of the will of the state. Drawing a parallel to international criminal law, particularly to the ad hoc tribunals that were set up after Rwanda and Yugoslavia, Conklin argues that, like international criminal law, protecting stateless persons is implicit in international treaties. When an executive arbitrarily expels or refuses to grant a person nationality and when statelessness is recognized as a basic human right that is self-executing, the boundary of the reserved domain can be pierced. Being able to penetrate a state executive’s decisions means that the shift from an aggregate will of the states to the international community as a whole has started. That, it seems, is one of Conklin’s points: that statelessness arose because of the aggregate will of the states discourse, and that it is a good thing that the shift to the international community as a whole has begun.

Book Review: An Eye for an Eye: A Global History of Crime and Punishment

By: Amy Lewontin

Mitchel P. Roth.  An Eye for an Eye:  A Global History of Crime and Punishment (Reaktion Books, 2014). 304 p. Hardcover $30.00.

Mitchel P. Roth’s new sweeping history of crime and punishment is a fascinating look at the way many societies, Eastern and Western, have developed methods over time to deal with behavior that is considered criminal.  Roth very early on in his introduction explains that there is no “definitive answer to the question, ‘What is crime?’” and then goes on to say that for the purposes of his book, “crime will be regarded as a legal concept, that is, what is or is not against the law”.

An Eye for An Eye traces the history of crime and punishment from Mesopotamia and the Code of Hammurabi to the modern era.  What is worth noting about the book is Roth’s thoroughness in trying to survey as many parts of the world as he can to show that the laws, practices, and motives of one society influence those of others.  Roth examines the types of crimes committed in places like China, India and many of the European nations and explains how one nation’s imprisonment and capital punishment practices influence the others.

For example, in a chapter titled, “The Transformation of Punishment”, Roth talks about the British penal reformer, John Howard visiting Russia, to learn about its system, and to understand how Russia abolished capital punishment for all crimes except first-degree murder.  Before that, Roth talks about the large penitentiary built near Philadelphia that brought Charles Dickens to the United States to visit the prison and then to denounce it for the use of solitary confinement.   Additionally, the influence of nations on their colonies and the way in which criminal laws developed due to political and social influences by many nations is what makes the book extremely interesting to read.

This is a book that can both be read cover to cover, but can also be used as a source text for students of history and criminal studies who may be interested in a particular society or a particular method of punishment for a crime.  The book is extremely well documented and the footnotes contain a wealth of information and good source material, should you need to follow up on a particular topic. Something else worth noting here is that Roth is acutely aware of the way many nations throughout history approached punishment.  Oftentimes, the class and wealth of the victim as well as the perpetrator had a large effect on the outcome.   There is much discussion of Sharia law, as well as the origins of civil and common law, as it affects the types of crimes and punishments meted out in many nations.  Roth generally maintains an objective stance in his descriptions of punishments for minor and serious crimes.  He does take certain societies to task, for their punishments, including the United States, for its very high incarceration rate.  The book covers so many types of crimes, including rape, murder, and from the modern era, financial crimes.

When I say this is a fascinating book, I should also say that it is a difficult book to read without flinching, mainly because the author examines many dark periods throughout history to seek out the types of crimes and the varied punishments that man has inflicted on man (and woman).  An Eye for an Eye is extremely well written and, for someone who enjoys reading various types of history, it is noteworthy in the breadth and the depth of the source material, including novels, newspaper accounts, as well as religious texts.  Roth also explains early on that information on every society is not necessarily readily available, and therefore he does the best he can with available source material.

I would highly recommend this book, to all types of libraries, but then caution that it is truly not for the faint of heart, as it delves into very rough subject matter in its descriptions of serious punishments throughout the world and throughout history.  It is the descriptions of the various punishments where I as a reader found myself both riveted and shaken by the cruelties of many societies.

Mitchel P. Roth has previously published several other books on prisons and crime and punishment and currently teaches Criminal Justice and Criminology at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.