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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Ruan on the Accommodation of Religious Speech in the Workplace

In the fall issue of the Marquette Law Review, Professor Nantiya Ruan of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law has written an interesting article entitled “Accommodating Respectful Religious Expression in the Workplace.”  It is always hard to summarize a serious piece of scholarship in the few sentences that a blog post will permit and I am, of course, likely to emphasize those aspects of the piece that I found intriguing. It is also true, since I have decided to post a response and not a blurb, that I will emphasize those things that I see differently. So, with advance apologies to Professor Ruan, here is how I read the article.

Ruan posits an inconsistency between the emerging willingness of the Supreme Court to protect religious expression in public spaces (as illustrated by the Ten Commandments cases of 2005) and its rather narrow reading of the requirements to accommodate religious expression in the workplace under Title VII, where employers need incur no more than a de minimis burden to accommodate religious expression and practice.

I am sympathetic to Ruan’s arguments for greater accommodation of religious expression in the workplace. She does a nice job of advancing the notion that religion is fundamental to individual identity, although I would have added, as I have in recent papers, the notion that mandated secular spaces harm religion.

But I want to comment on her claim of an inconsistency between the recent trend toward toleration of religion in the public square and the treatment of religion in the workplace.

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