Building a Better Truth Commission

Lisa Laplante has a new article in print: Transitional Justice and Peace Builduing: Diagnosing and Addressing the Socioeconomic Roots of Violence Through a Human Rights Framework, 2 Int’l J. Transitional Justice 331 (2008).  (Subscribers can download a copy from the journal’s website.)  In recent years, many nations have used “truth commissions” to ease the transition from oppressive to more democratic regimes: the commissions investigate and report about human rights abuses in the old regime, with the idea that an honest accounting of the past may facilitate reconciliation and reform.  However, as Lisa observes, there are distressing signs of renewed civil unrest and violence in a number of nations that have employed truth commissions, including Chile, South Africa, and Guatemala.  In her article, Lisa argues that the mission of truth commissions ought to be reconceived such that the commissions would address a broader range of human rights violations, including violations of economic, social, and cultural rights.  Social conflict and violence are often connected to deep-seated socieconomic inequalities.  If truth commissions do not recognize a human rights dimension to these inequalities, Lisa suggests, then they will fail to get at the root cause of the more traditional types of human rights violations on which they have focused their attention.  And failing to address root causes means that social conflict may continue unabated, despite all of the effort otherwise put into achieving reconciliation.

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3L Charles Stone to Speak at U. of Chicago on Chinese Views of Intellectual Property

I try to make note here of significant scholarly accomplishments by my faculty colleagues, but our students often do great work as scholars, too.  Drawing on his expertise in the field of Chinese culture — he has a Ph.D. in Chinese Language and Literature — 3L Charles Stone has written a fascinating law review comment on classical Chinese attitudes towards intellectual property. I see now that he is presenting on Chinese views regarding intellectual property and the rule of law at the University of Chicago School of Business on Thursday.  Information on the event is here.

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In the Supreme Court, ACCA Is Back-a

Recently, the Supreme Court has been taking a lot of interest in the Armed Career Criminal Act, which requires that a minimum fifteen-year prison term be imposed on certain defendants with three or more prior convictions for serious drug offenses or crimes of violence.  As I discussed here, the ACCA has proven to be an interpretive nightmare, with courts struggling for more than two decades now to decide exactly which prior convictions count as triggers for the mandatory minimum.  With several recent opinions and cert grants, the Supreme Court now seems intent on addressing some of the many circuit splits in the ACCA case law.

Of particular note last year was the Court’s decision in Begay v. United States, in which the Court held that DUI is not a “crime of violence.”  Now, following in Begay’s footsteps, the Court held today in Chambers v. United States (No. 06-11206) that failure to report to prison is not a crime of violence. 

Chambers does not purport to revise the analytical framework used in Begay, but I am struck by how much closer the Chambers opinion seems to be to Justice Scalia’s concurrence in Begay than to the majority opinion in the earlier case.  Has Scalia convinced a few of his colleagues to switch sides?

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