Professor Lisa Mazzie Is a Ms. JD Writer-In-Residence

I am happy to report the news that our Associate Professor of Legal Writing, Lisa A. Mazzie, will be one of Ms. JD‘s writers-in-residence for 2011.  Ms. JD describes itself as follows:

Ms. JD is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to the success of women in law school and the legal profession. Ms. JD is governed by a volunteer Board of Directors comprised of law students and recent graduates and an Executive Director. Founded at Stanford Law School in 2006 by a group of female law students from Boalt Hall (UC Berkeley), Cornell, Georgetown, Harvard, NYU, Stanford, UCLA, UT Austin, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, and Yale, Ms. JD is a 501(c)(3) incorporated in California.

Serving as a unique nexus between the profession and the pipeline of diverse attorneys, Ms. JD’s online community provides a forum for dialogue and networking among women lawyers and law students. With campus chapters throughout the nation, Ms. JD is also home to the National Women Law Students’ Organization. Ms. JD celebrates women’s achievements, addresses remaining challenges, and facilitates continued progress by bringing legal practitioners and law students together to share in an ongoing conversation about gender issues in law school and the profession.

As a writer-in-residence, Professor Mazzie will post to the blog every month throughout the year.  You can read past writer-in-residence posts here.

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Human Rights Day 2010

Today is Human Rights Day, a United Nations celebration that marks the date, December 10, 1948, when the General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  The current High Commissioner for Human Rights in the United Nations, Navi Pillay, gave a speech at a special event in Geneva to mark the day.  One of her themes was that “criticism is not a crime,” and she advocated for governments “to release all those people who have been detained for peacefully exercising their fundamental freedoms to defend democratic principles and human rights.”  She also called for recognition of human rights defenders, not only those whose names have become famous everywhere but also the  “hundreds of thousands of largely unsung heroes, known collectively as human rights defenders.”

One useful human rights resource is the website of the Human Rights Education Association, an international initiative that serves governmental, inter-governmental, and non-governmental organizations, as well as individuals, who are interested in learning more about human rights.  There are distance learning materials for adults as well as various curriculum resources for educators who want to develop educational materials for children.

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Most Important United States Supreme Court Case in Refugee Law: I.N.S. v. Elias-Zacarias

[Editor’s note:  This is a sixth installment in the “what is the most important Supreme Court case in your subject area” series.]

One of my subject areas is refugee law. There are only a handful of Supreme Court decisions in the area, but instead of making the selection easier, the paucity of case law only made it harder to choose one case as the “most” important.  Because the Court has interpreted the Refugee Act relatively rarely, each of its decisions in the area has taken on even more significance than it might otherwise have had.  For instance, it is difficult to overstate the impact of the decision in Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, Inc., the repercussions of which still plague the international refugee law system, because the Court said that the United States could stop and return Haitians at sea, without verifying whether they were refugees, seemingly in direct conflict with the highest principle of international refugee law, “non-refoulement,” or, “non-returning,” of refugees. And what about the pair of cases, INS v. Stevic and INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, which, prior to Sale, held that the Refugee Act  created two distinct categories of refugees, those whom the U.S. had promised not to return to their persecutors and those whom the U.S. could, in its discretion, allow to stay in the U.S. (a distinction generally not recognized by any of the other nations who signed the refugee treaties)?

In the end, of course, it’s impossible to identify a single case as most important. But I decided to write about INS v. Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. 478 (1992), because its holding, that an asylum applicant must provide direct or circumstantial evidence establishing the alleged persecutor’s motivations, has had such dramatic, and (I hope) unintentional impacts on refugee law and practice in the United States.  One could even argue that the extreme disparities in judges’ decisions in similar asylum cases stem, at least in part, from the near-impossibility of reliably applying Elias-Zacarias‘s demand for evidence of the persecutor’s motive, in the context of the record that can reasonably be developed in the vast majority of asylum cases.

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