Including Civil Rights Research Articles

From Civil Society Organisations to Pirate Parties to Digital Democracy

Reshaping our political and social systems for a sustainable future requires a multifaceted approach that addresses several key areas, such as: political reform, social change, economic development, environmental preservation, or technological innovation. In order to achieve a sustainable future, we need to implement its ideals in every societal sector. When dealing with the political system, we cannot ignore the antidemocratic tendencies arising or taking over our everyday life even in the Western World. Under these circumstances, political reform is a must and we have to admit that one of its most important tasks is strengthening democracy. The actual political discourse is full of ideas like proportional representation, direct democracy, sustainability-focused governance, transparency, accountability, and equity. Among the many actors that try to solve these problems there is a group that proposes some new solutions, based on the means of Information Society, Pirate Parties. Emerging from the digital world, they are a fresh wave of political movements with deep roots in online activism. These parties, some born from anti-establishment protests, have rapidly spread across the globe in just two decades. Their journey is one of transformation, from grassroots movements to established political players. Pirate Parties have a clear digital agenda, focusing on issues like copyright reform, open access to information, and online privacy. They champion net neutrality and the free flow of knowledge. However, most of them have recognized the importance of broader democratic values for political success. Beyond their digital focus, Pirate Parties also advocate for traditional democratic ideals, including civil rights, transparency, and combating corruption. They promote free speech, direct democracy, and exploring alternative forms of citizen participation in government, often leveraging technology (e-democracy). The future impact of Pirate Parties remains uncertain, but their influence is undeniable. They’ve challenged traditional political norms and brought issues of the digital age to the forefront. Pirate Parties have reshaped the European political landscape and inspired similar movements around the world. My paper aims to briefly present these political formations, with special regard to their origins in and their relations with civil society. After outlining the broad framework, I present some of the most notorious of these formations.

Feminism Explored in Joan Barfoot's Abra: An Analysis

This paper analyses the feminist elements present in the novel Abra authored by Joan Barfoot, a Canadian feminist writer of the second wave feminism era in the 1960s and 1970s. The period impacted many social changes including civil rights for women, and secured power in the hands of women. The novel Abra captures the significance of the period through an empowered female protagonist who renounced her family and society to gain autonomy. Moreover, the novel offers insights into the struggles of women as well as their established power in a world dominated by men. Hence, this article aims to examine the feminist themes in the novel and analyses how the novel depicts the treatment of women in the Canadian patriarchal society. Further, the paper focuses on the protagonist's psychological transformation from an ordinary woman to an empowered individual who defies patriarchal domination, while exploring the period’s spirit of quest for freedom.

Perlindungan Hak Konstitusional Di Indonesia

The basis for the establishment of the Constitutional Court is an effort to uphold the principles of a rule of law and to provide maximum protection for democracy and basic rights of citizens. As the main objective of the rule of law is to protect the freedom of individual citizens from the State's power. The purpose of this research is to answer the question of what constitutional rights are citizens and how they are protected in Indonesia. This research uses a normative juridical approach by examining theories, concepts, legal principles and laws and regulations obtained from legal material sources such as books, articles / writings and other documents, then the data is analyzed so that it will provide conclusions. The results show that constitutional rights are rights that include civil rights, political rights, economic rights, and socio-cultural rights guaranteed by the 1945 Constitution, for their protection efforts through the process of forming laws that reflect the protection and respect for human rights and dignity. and dignity and if there is a law that is detrimental to their rights, they can file a constitutionality review in the Constitutional Court

Review: Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, by Martha S. Jones

Review: <i>Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All</i>, by Martha S. Jones

Facebook an Anti-Stereotyping Tool: A Case Study

Facebook, the most popular social media (SM) platform has penetrated every nook and corner of the world. SM is now treated as the ‘fifth Estate’, other than legislative, executive, judiciary, and mainstream media. The power of SM as a critique is widely acknowledged. Establishments are finding it difficult to deal with it at times. Due to its ease of usage and relative anonymity, the general public finds it very convenient to put across their viewpoints, even if it’s against the establishment. Some establishments at times are at loggerheads with champions of freedom of speech including civil rights activists. SM has been used for propaganda, marketing, and awareness campaigns. In this paper, we are proposing to use this powerful tool towards social change. Through a case study, a detailed process is being proposed for using social media, particularly Facebook as an anti-stereotyping tool. The response to an online survey, the outcome of opinion mining, and the enthusiastic response to our case study by the targeted audience validate our hypothesis that Facebook can be effectively utilized as an anti-stereotyping tool.

How to Apply the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act to Promote Health Equity in the US.

Health equity in the United States requires elimination of differentials in access to health services according to race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, comorbidity, or ability. To achieve health equity, governments can use a variety of tools, including civil rights legislation and constitutional jurisprudence. In the United States, 2 such examples are the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution's Equal Protection clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. While both have the capacity to reduce health disparities, in practice, neither has achieved its full potential because of how the judicial branch has interpreted and allowed these 2 laws to be enforced. How courts adjudicate health-related cases, especially those in which civil rights or other human rights legislation are at stake, is key to the successful promotion of legislative and jurisprudential approaches to motivating health equity and realizing justice for all.

The Decision of the General Meeting of Members in a Non-Public Business Company: Concept and Types

Introduction. The article examines the features of holding general meetings of members in non-public business companies, in particular questions about the place of decisions of general meeting in the system of legal facts, their relationship with the deal and the contract. The ability to use digital technology in decision making. Theoretical Basis. Methods. The article is based on an analysis of the norms of positive law, primarily the Civil Code and the Laws on Company Business. Results. The authors conclude that the starting point in the activities of a non-public business company is the acquisition and exercise of their civil rights and the fulfilment of duties, and not a legal relationship that includes civil rights and civil duties as a necessary element. In addition, the decision of a general meeting, despite having many features in common, is not a deal. The decision of a general meeting, acting as an act of individual regulation, is in fact an act of a legal entity, and not a decision of the business community. The authors proposed a classification of decisions of meetings of business entities, depending on the method of their adoption, the possibilities being: the unanimously adoption by all participants of the company; decisions of the meeting of members of a company being adopted by a majority, or a qualified majority, of votes; decisions of the meeting of members of a company to change its charter, reorganization and liquidation of the company, requiring state registration in the unified state register of legal entities. The decision of a general meeting can be made either in person or in absentia, or a combination of the two. The decision of the meeting adopted in absentia will be valid, despite the absence of any special document establishing the procedure for its adoption. Discussion and Conclusion. Decisions of general meetings are actions of participants in a business company concerning legal consequences, including civil rights and obligations, in cases specified by law, and binding on all persons entitled to participate in the meeting, as well as other persons, whether required by law or having some other involvement.

Before Reagan: The Development of Abortion’s Partisan Divide

What explains the alignment of antiabortion positions within the Republican party? I explore this development among voters, activists, and elites before 1980. By 1970, antiabortion attitudes among ordinary voters correlated with conservative views on a range of noneconomic issues including civil rights, Vietnam, feminism and, by 1972, with Republican presidential vote choice. These attitudes predated the parties taking divergent abortion positions. I argue that because racial conservatives and military hawks entered the Republican coalition before abortion became politically activated, issue overlap among ordinary voters incentivized Republicans to oppose abortion rights once the issue gained salience. Likewise, because proabortion voters generally supported civil rights, once the GOP adopted a Southern strategy, this predisposed pro-choice groups to align with the Democratic party. A core argument is that preexisting public opinion enabled activist leaders to embed the anti (pro) abortion movement in a web of conservative (liberal) causes. A key finding is that the white evangelical laity’s support for conservative abortion policies preceded the political mobilization of evangelical leaders into the pro-life movement. I contend the pro-life movement’s alignment with conservatism and the Republican party was less contingent on elite bargaining, and more rooted in the mass public, than existing scholarship suggests.

Human Rights Are Eternal In Indian Values

The history of human rights in Indian culture and values are eternal to its civilization as it has evolved. The “Rigveda”, which is regarded as the oldest epic in the world, proclaims that all human beings are equal and they are all brothers. According to “Atherveda”, all human beings have equal right over food and natural resources. The “Vedas” including “Upnishads”(Shruti) are the basic source of “Dharma”, (an umbrella like term for all human rights and duties), the observance of which was regarded as essential for securing peace and happiness to individuals as well as to the society. The "Smritis” and “Puranas” are the collection of the rules of “Dharma” (which includes civil rights and liability towards society i.eVyavhara Dharma) and “Raja Dharma’ (Constitutional Law) which were developed on the basis of fundamental ideals incorporated in the ‘Vedas”. There were also several other authoritative works on “Raja Dharma”, the most important of them were the Kamandaks and Kautilya's Arthashastra, all of them have vouched for ensuring happiness to the society and the subjects.

The Casualties Left Behind in Tobacco's Cinders of Combustion.

This paper 1) defines the scope of tobacco-related health disparities; 2) reviews population-based approaches aimed to eliminate disparities- Medicaid, the U.S. Preventive Health Service Task Force, and the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act; and 3) discusses their potential role in reducing tobacco use and lung cancer disparities. The implementation of population-based approaches aimed to reduce tobacco use and chronic diseases has been inequitable. The poor are predominately affected by limited access to comprehensive tobacco cessation coverage. Moreover, lung cancer screenings reveal that those disproportionately excluded are African Americans who have the highest lung cancer incidence and mortality in the United States. The potential impact of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act is unclear, but the proposed rule to ban menthol combustible and not non-combustible tobacco products could potentially contribute to a cycle of addiction in disadvantaged communities. Alternative solutions, including civil rights litigation, should be investigated. Eliminating tobacco-related health disparities is a health, social justice, civil rights, and ethical issue that deserves immediate attention and equitable policy solutions.

The Rise and Fall of Triumph: The History of a Radical Roman Catholic Magazine, 1966–1976 by Mark D. Popowski (review)

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Triumph: The History of a Radical Roman Catholic Magazine, 1966–1976 by Mark D. Popowski James M. O’Toole The Rise and Fall of Triumph: The History of a Radical Roman Catholic Magazine, 1966–1976. By Mark D. Popowski. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2012. Pp. xxvi, 254. $90.00. ISBN 978-0-7391-6981-0.) In recent years, historians have been usefully employing the concept of “print culture.” That makes sense. Printed and other literate sources have long been the foundation for studying the past, and it is only a short step from mining these for specific information to wondering what their very form, existence, and extent might tell us. By the middle of the twentieth century, print was everywhere, and the systems for producing it and making it accessible were highly developed. The need to appeal to a range of tastes—high-brow, low-brow, middle-brow—meant that publications proliferated, and the trend was especially noticeable among religions, which had both specific motives for spreading their message and well-defined audiences for consuming it. Mark Popowski contributes to this interest in the culture of print among American Catholics by looking at Triumph magazine, a very curious publication indeed. It had a short but intense life. Established in 1966, it lasted barely a decade, transformed first into a simple newsletter before going out of business altogether; its peak circulation was only 28,000. It was, however, as Popowski insists, a “radical” publication, although not in the sense that that word was usually applied in the 1960s. It emerged from postwar political conservatism—one of its principals was Brent Bozell, brother-in-law of William F. Buckley Jr. and cofounder with him of the National Review—but it quickly broke with those forebears by staking out a rigorously sectarian position. The problems of the United States would not be solved by secular libertarianism or unrestrained capitalism. Nothing less than transforming the nation into a Catholic confessional state would do. All citizens had to convert; the Church’s moral law had to become the civil law; and Christ (rather than the people) had to be recognized as politically sovereign, acting through his vicar on earth, the pope. In practical terms, Triumph’s editors and writers may as well have been demanding that the sun come up in the west, but that neither deterred them nor moderated their forceful, punch-in-the-nose style. The list of wrongs to be righted in church and state was familiar, including civil rights legislation, the Second Vatican Council (which had “Protestantized” the Church), and the emerging counter-culture. Popowski catalogs all this from the pages of the magazine itself, and other researchers will thus find a useful guide in pursuing their own particular interests. (The editors even advised President Richard Nixon not to turn over the Watergate tapes, for instance, although how that related to the establishment of Christ’s kingdom on earth is a little hard to follow.) It would be difficult to argue that Triumph had any lasting impact, though it did help confirm the opinions of some conservative Catholics in the era. Popowski avowedly sympathizes with much of the magazine’s outlook, and this can lead to trouble. He anachronistically applies the term pro-life to a time well before it entered the public vocabulary, and he refers to efforts to liberalize abortion law as coming from the “anti-life movement” [End Page 396] (p. 210). This kind of editorializing, entirely expected from the magazine itself, is inappropriate for a historian. Still, those looking for 1960s radicalism different from the usual kind will find here an example to be incorporated into the larger story of the times. James M. O’Toole Boston College Copyright © 2015 The Catholic University of America Press

Knowledge about patients’ rights among professionals in public health care in Finland

The legal rights of patients include civil rights for patients and the duties of healthcare professionals. Knowledge of legislation and the ability to put juridical norms into practice are among the main aspects of professionals. The aim of the study was to describe the level of healthcare professionals' knowledge about patients' legal rights and to describe background variables associated with the knowledge. The legal rights are based on the Finnish Act on the Status and Rights of Patients. The data were collected from healthcare professionals (nurses and physicians) in public health care in Finland (recruited N = 290, responded n = 191) with a questionnaire designed for the study. The response rate was 66%. The data were analysed statistically. Healthcare professionals were partially familiar with patients' legal rights. The right to good health care, treatment and access to care and right to self-determination were the best-known areas. The respondents lacked knowledge on the right to information and the right to use the services of patient ombudsman. Based on self-evaluation, half of the respondents thought that they had weak knowledge of the legislation on patients' rights. However, they perceived knowledge about patients' rights as being important. There was no correlation between respondents' self-evaluated knowledge and actual scoring on the knowledge test. These results implicate a need for further education aimed at healthcare professionals and development of professional training about patients' legal rights.

Constructing Threats and Opportunities After 9/11

President Bush war on terror emphasized domestic surveillance, enhanced police powers, and military adventures abroad, and virtually all political debates focused on the administration’s initiatives. This was not inevitable. An alternative response to the threat of terrorism could include, for example, expanded funding for language instruction and comparative religion in American schools, improved training for first responders in medical emergencies, and an overhaul of the health care system to provide rapid responses to crises. Critics of the Administration's war on terror, however, were reluctant or unable to frame 9/11 to support alternative preferred policies. In contrast, during the Cold War, advocates used fear of Communism and the Soviet Union to build support for alternative domestic policies, including civil rights and social investment. By rejecting completely the premises of the war on terror, critics may have missed an opportunity to advance broader political agendas.

Public Interest Media Advocacy and Activism as a Social Movement

This chapter reviews the literature on public interest media advocacy and activism. In so doing, it organizes the literature according to the three primary theoretical perspectives on social movements—framing processes, political opportunities, and mobilizing structures, to reflect the increased tendency in recent years for scholars to conceptualize public interest media advocacy and activism as a social movement. As this review indicates, public interest media advocacy and activism encompasses a movement that has employed a number of distinct, though overlapping, frames. It comprises a movement with political opportunities that are strongly tied to technological developments and to the conceptualization of policy problems within the policy-making sector. It constitutes a movement that, from a structural standpoint, has both emerged from—and can potentially serve the interests of—a wide range of other social movements, including civil rights and democratization movements, the consumer movement, and the anti-globalization movement. This review considers the implications of these and other characteristics of public interest media advocacy and activism as a social movement in an effort to develop strategic recommendations for the movement as well as recommendations for future research.

National Policing, Lynching, and Constitutional Change

IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE TO LEARN THAT THROUGH THE 1920S AND 1930s, national government insisted it had no jurisdiction to investigate lynching and instead waged a campaign against black militancy. greater surprise to historians comes from period between 1940 and 1952, when Department of Justice (DOJ) abruptly reversed itself and sent agents of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into South to investigate reported lynchings. (1) For good reason, history has not been kind to FBI. While some Americans had cast a wary eye at FBI since its inception 1908, most serious blow to FBI's image came 1960s when civil rights workers complained bitterly agents would not protect activists from racist vigilantes but preferred to investigate civil rights advocates' communist connections instead. Congressional investigation subsequently confirmed FBI misconduct and did so at a time when state generally became unloved, to use Martin J. Wiener's term. Many observers concluded FBI, suffused with a political conservatism controlled its performance, had always been disinclined to investigate lynchings. Such concerns led one writer to roughly dismiss FBI as that crook-, commie-, and coon-fighting bureaucracy and to say when Franklin D. Roosevelt expanded FBI's jurisdiction to include civil rights violations, change came in theory if rarely practice. No doubt federal government compiled a shameful record during 1960s, but scholars have too often allowed formulations derived from decade and later to color their understanding of FBI's entire history. (2) It is not purpose of this article merely to argue 1940s national government fought lynching more than theoretically and investigated reported incidents invariably rather than rarely. Instead, this article looks at one feature rise of administrative state, an incident at beginning of dramatic enlargement of national government's power to police crime. In particular, this article examines distinct theme proposed by Robert Post: the growth of belief nation, and not states, was a natural unit of democratic self-determination. Prohibition represented a false start at making nation into unit, a failed attempt by U.S. government to articulate a supposed agreement by most Americans, across state lines and regional divisions, liquor had to be banned. Seven years after effort collapsed, U.S. government tried again, this time promoting opposition to mob violence based on constitutional rights came to be more real than evangelical moralism supposedly underlay Prohibition and thereby contributed to a more enduring nationalization of crime control. To explain how this happened requires looking at why Department of Justice first found it constitutionally impossible to investigate lynching, how department then discovered its constitutional authority to combat lynching, and how promoting national rights expanded administrative state. (3) Americans' ideas about law enforcement have stemmed from three sources evolved as nation broadened its conception of popular sovereignty. In nineteenth century authority to control crime lay neighborhoods and communities. In this highly localized world where local jurisdictions struggled to maintain order with little outside help, Americans sometimes rationalized lynching as so-called lynch law, a constitutionally legitimate expression of popular sovereignty outside statutory law. Owen Wister explained concept his novel Virginian, a dialogue between characters named Molly Wood and Judge Henry. Wood begins by defining lynching as when [o]rdinary citizens take law their own hands. judge responds, Out of whose hands do they take law? Wood answers, The court's. In response to further questioning, she says Constitution made courts and then concedes people made Constitution. …

Caution, Your Civil Liberties May Have Shifted During the Flight: Judicial Interpretations of the Warsaw Convention

Courts have interpreted and applied Article 17 of the Warsaw Convention inappropriately by limiting its scope to only physical injuries. Courts have erred by expanding the exclusivity clause of Article 24, thereby preventing domestic laws from providing relief for incidents not fitting the definition of “injury” or for incidents that do not take place on board but take place within the broad range of “embarking” and “disembarking.” Currently, the United States Supreme Court allows air carrier agents to police international flights with unlimited authority free from suit, because courts have narrowly construed accidents and injuries to protect air carriers from liability and deny relief to citizens for legitimate non-physical injuries. The Convention should be amended to allow air carrier liability for damages resulting from willful employee misconduct, including civil rights violations, mental injuries, and emotional distress. The United States should maintain the Convention, but also call for a new protocol at an international conference, as done in the past, to modify liability definitions to appropriately provide comprehensive coverage for international air travel. Alternatively, Congress should legislate greater protection for its citizens by providing multiple means of recovery against air carriers.

Participatory Democracy: Movements, Campaigns, and Democratic Living

These are paradoxical times for the ideal of participatory democracy in America, the land that gave the world Jefferson as its intellectual midwife, Whitman as its poetic spur, and Dewey as the visionary seer of its future global scope and culture-transforming depth. In the months and weeks just before September 11, 2001, the majority of the American people, whom Alexis de Tocqueville had described a century and a half earlier as always meeting and organizing for democratic social betterment in all its myriad forms, had slumped into apathy, [End Page 60] perhaps even mild despair about civic participation's efficacy, combined with a too-busy preoccupation with their own narrow interests. Half of America's citizens did not even exercise their right and duty to vote in the 2000 presidential elections, finding neither presidential candidate inspiring and believing that their individual votes made little difference, until the dramatic events of the Florida electoral recount put Miami and Tallahassee on the worldwide list of place names. Many citizens' sudden spurt of interest in the power of the vote during those days was quashed again, however, when the Supreme Court of the United States decided the outcome of Bush v. Gore by a single-vote majority and the Electoral College subsequently declared Bush the winner, in spite of the fact that Gore had won a majority of the popular vote. The American economy slowed during this same period, and most American citizens slumped back into their previous apathy and preoccupation, now tinged with anxiety about their own economic survival, so that there was very little outcry against the new Bush administration's immediate attacks on the greatest achievements of America's participatory democratic movements in the previous century, including civil rights and liberties, environmental protection legislation, occupational health and safety regulations, and affirmative programs to equalize opportunities for women and members of racial and ethnic groups who have been burdened with legal limitations and social exclusions of various kinds throughout our nation's history.

Advising Ike: the memoirs of Attorney General Herbert Brownell

In this volume, Herbert Brownell, the man Dwight D. Eisenhower said would make an outstanding president, recounts his achievements and trials as one of the GOP's presidential operative in the 1940s and 1950s and as Attorney General at a crucial time in American history. Instrumental in getting Eisenhower to run for office and wielding considerable influence over many of the president's decisions, Brownell had to make many tough and controversial recommendations. In his memoirs he recalls his relationship with the president and the difficult issues confronting them, including civil rights, McCarthyism, illegal aliens, anti-trust laws and national security vs. individual rights. I am often amused when people pine about going back to the 'quiet days' of Eisenhower, writes Brownell, who served during an administration that faced not only the wrath of segregationists and Communist witch hunters but also the resolution of an increasingly unpopular war in Korea and a new definition of American-Soviet relations following Joseph Stalin's death. Particularly difficult,but among the high points of the Eisenhower administration for Brownell, were the painstaking gains made in the area of civil rights. Despite personal attacks by the opposition on his integrity, he tenaciously supported and enforced the Supreme Court's decision in Brown vs. Board of Education and Little Rock desegregation. Going beyond the years he spent on Eisenhower's cabinet, Brownell describes the events and people that have influenced his colourful life, including those from his early years in Nebraska, his apprentice years in New York as he joined the opposition to Tammany Hall, his stints as chairman of the Republican party and manager of Thomas Dewey's two unsuccessful presidential campaigns, and his 62-year private law career. Brownell's memoirs, filled with history, anecdotes, personal observations and subtle humour, reveal a highly intelligent and modest man who achieved great accomplishments - developing the first civil rights act since Reconstruction, preserving national security while protecting individual rights - by doing what he thought was right, not by being politically correct.

FORMULATING CORPORATE SOCIAL POLICY: CONSIDERATION OF THE EFFECT OF MANAGERIAL ATTITUDES.

The article reports on the social responsibility of business enterprises. The author focuses on the ethical and moral components being integrated into corporate culture after the social uprising which took place during the 1960s. Issues including civil rights, women's liberation, ecology, and consumerism made it necessary for businessmen to develop costly corporate social policies. According to the author, there are three methods that can be used to persuade executives to implement the aforementioned policies, including moral suasion, compulsion, and conformance. Financing issues related to policy implementation are also discussed. Social policies implemented by the Whirlpool Corporation are mentioned.