This Article analyzes the public health issues of Noise-Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL) and Noise-Induced Hidden Hearing Loss (NIHHL) due to Chronic Repeated Ambient Acoustic Pollution (CRAAP). This Article examines the clinical and empirical medical data about NIHL and NIHHL and its normative implications. This Article applies behavioral law and economics and information economics to advocate legal policies to reduce CRAAP. Finally, this Article advocates changing individual and social attitudes about deafness and hearing loss to raise political awareness and social consciousness about NIHL and NIHHL. One way to change our attitudes is by practicing empathy and kindness, including loving kindness mindfulness (LKM) meditation.
Human rights advocates are exposed to significant stressors and harms of myriad forms, and suffer elevated levels of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and burnout. Yet research into mental health and human rights is nascent. This global study, the first of its kind, and based on interviews with advocates at 70 organizations from 35 countries and dozens of experts, mapped how human rights organizations are responding to the mental health and well-being needs of advocates. The study found that, generally, organizations have responded poorly and much more needs to be done at all levels—individual, organizational, and field-wide. The study addressed: (1) sources of stress and the harms advocates see as resulting from poor mental health and stress exposure; (2) the challenges to improving well-being; and (3) positive organizational practices for supporting well-being and building more resilient advocates and organizations. The study concludes with recommended next steps, including further research, knowledge-sharing, and tailored education and trainings.
It is common knowledge in American society that persons who have criminal records will have a more difficult path to obtaining legitimate employment. Similarly, conventional wisdom acknowledges the unfortunate fact that young people, on average, are more prone to engage in risky, impulsive, and other ill-advised behavior that might result in brushes with law enforcement authorities. This article addresses the difficult situation faced by people whose now disabling criminal records were attained while they were under the age of 21. Not only do such individuals face stigma and possible discrimination from potential employers, the efforts of today’s young people to “go straight” are hampered by nearly unlimited online access to records of even the briefest of encounters with law enforcement, even if those encounters did not result in conviction. This article examines the broad scope and troubling effects of the intersection between policies attempting to “reform” youthful offenders, and policies giving any curious citizen access to records about a person’s youthful indiscretions, no matter how minor. The article concludes that current practices are inconsistent with what we know about the development of young people, are inconsistent with developing U.S. Supreme Court jurisdiction, and are undermining the social goal of rehabilitating youthful offenders, and suggests that we need to restrict access to and use of information about contacts that offenders under the age of 21 have had with the criminal justice system.
Ricci v. DeStefano is the most important Supreme Court pronouncement in recent years on one of the landmark enactments of the 1960s, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The decision, authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, held that the white firefighters who topped the civil service list by virtue of their multiple-choice test scores were entitled to promotion, notwithstanding the disparate impact the test had on African-American candidates. The case has the potential to significantly curtail litigation under the statute, and certainly will discourage employers from monitoring their selection devices to remove “artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary barriers to employment when the barriers operate invidiously to discriminate on the basis of racial or other impermissible classification,” as required by Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971). This article documents the decision’s dramatic break with past precedent and assesses its perplexing substantive and procedural oddities. Professor Brodin, who has written extensively about Title VII over the years, places Ricci in the context of the debate today, in both legal and political circles, about race, affirmative action, and “reverse discrimination.” The author traces the egregious history of discrimination in firefighting, and the adverse effect the decision will have on progress towards equal opportunity in the Nation’s firehouses. Finally, he explores our society’s obsession with testing and its stubborn equation of merit with exam success, regardless of whether the exam actually predicts job performance. The piece ends with a discussion of alternative means of personnel selection designed to produce a more productive workforce, without the adverse racial or gender impact of traditional written tests.
This article explores contemporary developments in American race relations that encourage law students to "decline to state" their race in law school applications. The discussion also explores broader developments that have encouraged students to withdraw from law school discussions about diversity. The article analyzes arguments offered by students regarding their disengagement from discussions about race, offers pedagogical suggestions, and considers the potential repercussions if large numbers of law students become inarticulate and reluctant to discuss racial dynamics in the United States.
The sentencing revolution, occasioned by the Supreme Court's re-invigoration of the Sixth Amendment right to jury-found facts in Apprendi v. New Jersey and Blakely v. Washington, caused the Court to overturn mandatory Federal Sentencing Guidelines and to reconfigure the Guidelines as an advisory-only system in United States v. States v. Booker. For the past two years, post-Booker cases have revealed deep contradictions between three important, but directly competing, constitutional-policy imperatives, i.e. (a) defining the limits of Congress' power to establish uniform sentencing policy and procedures, to eliminate or reduce apparent disparities in sentencing between judges; (b) re-establishing the system of individuated, case-specific sentences by permitting broader judicial discretion in sentencing; and (c) protecting the Sixth Amendment right to jury-found facts as a bulwark against governmental over-reaching, in the context of judicial decision-making. Within the last several months, the Court decided Rita v. United States and Gall v. United States, which go a long way in sorting out the proper relationship between the first two policy imperatives above. However, the proper relationship between judicial discretion in sentencing and the Sixth Amendment right to jury-determined facts in sentencing, established in Apprendi and Blakely, is yet to be definitively addressed by the Court, post-Booker. Given the importance of Sixth Amendment jury fact-finding as a bulwark against judicial excess animating all members of the Court in Apprendi, Blakely and Booker, together with recent indications by members of the Court that the Sixth Amendment issues underlying Booker have yet to be resolved, indicate that further resolution of this issue will soon be on the Court's agenda, of necessity. This article examines the unresolved, post-Booker contradiction between judicial discretion in sentencing and the Sixth Amendment right to jury-found facts, by considering the circumstance in which the contradiction is most plain, the judicial use of acquitted conduct to impose a sentence based on facts the jury has considered, and rejected, in an acquittal. The article advances the position that the minority view expressed in lower court cases, that acquitted conduct may never be used by a sentencing court in light of Apprendi and Blakely (at least with respect to facts related to proof of the elements of the acquitted offense), is essentially correct as a matter of principle, and simple logic. However, the broad discretion entrusted to the sentencing court by the remedial measures described in Booker, Rita and Gall, requires principled line-drawing, if the jury is not to be supplanted by judicial fact-finding in sentencing, in apparent contravention of the Apprendi/Blakely/Booker Sixth Amendment rationale.
The purpose of this report is to assess whether discrimination against minority voters and minority voting strength exists in California. In assessing whether such discrimination exists, this report will chronicle the efforts of minority communities in California to secure access to the political process utilizing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) from 1982, the year the VRA was reauthorized and amended, to the present. This chronicle indicates that two important provisions of the VRA have played a pivotal role in assisting racial and ethnic minority communities, as well as language minority groups, to secure greater access to the political process
The traditionally forbidding visage of law mimics the constructed face of the “God of our Fathers.” The punitive ‘Father God’ and the harsh letter of the law are connected in both their errors and their promises for transformation. Both the ‘Father’ and ‘His Law’ primarily impose their wills through “authority” and “force.” Jewish feminist theologian Judith Plaskow questions whether the law is a female form. Plaskow contrasts the law’s constrictions and abstraction with traditional femeie characteristics of openness and fluidity. Plaskow hopes to redeem her tradition through a God of relationship and love, affirming both law and a new feminine authority. Perhaps only such a law, with masculine and feminine in correct relation, can save law from falling victim to economic interest that seem more viable than a decrepit legal system. Such a supple law may let women practice law without giving up an essential thread of themselves. It may also free men to acknowledge their feminine sides, and to integrate this other aspect of themselves into their lives as lawyers. The daughter or female imagines that law is available to all, especially those oppressed by masters. The daughter envisions law beyond the system of domination, law once again sacred, inviting rather than forbidding through spirit — blessed, belonging to us all, holy, whole. It calls for a lawfulness so intense that it dances outside the “law.”
