Legal Battle Research Articles

Maria Griffin, et al. Slavery's Intimate World

When her enslaver, the father of her children, died, a Virginian woman named Maria Griffin was set to inherit, along with her children, a significant fortune. Framed around the story of the legal battle that ensued between Griffin and the deceased's white family, who sought to prevent Griffin and her children from inheriting the estate, this article probes slavery's intimate world. Situated within a robust and growing literature on intimacy and slavery, the article deploys the concept of intimacy to grasp the complexity of Maria Griffin's myriad affective ties within the world of slavery. Ultimately, this work asks both what is gained and what violence is done in an accounting of the intimate.

Secrets, lies and a costly legal battle

Secrets, lies and a costly legal battle

The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable, by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus

<i>The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable</i>, by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus

Property Rights Protection and Land Markets in the Context of Juridical Gaps between Municipal and SADC Systems

The protection of property rights is a sensitive issue in the SADC, leading to protracted legal battles and contestations. This article explores the factors engendering the present configurations of property relations in three selected states in the region. The intention of this article is to identify the factors necessary for the development of land markets and to analyse secondary sources on themes, arguments and factors shaping market development. Interrogating the major themes in the prevailing debates, this article identifies African customary rights as an important factor in the development of markets, by acknowledging the significance of the harmonisation of property laws in the region. Since there are cross-juridical gaps between the regulatory goals of states and those of regional communities, the article identifies limitations and opportunities associated with efforts to harmonise the law. Furthermore, proposing measures to narrow the juridical gaps between the municipal and SADC systems, and presenting the idea of a regional protocol as a prospective device to ensure legal convergence.

School Administrators and School Counselors’ Legal and Ethical Alliance

The importance of a cooperative school administrator–school counselor alliance is explored against the backdrop of legal proceedings involving professionals in both disciplines who at different points could have prevented or averted lengthy, energy-draining legal action. Most legal battles involving school administrators and school counselors revolve around child abuse reporting, confidentiality, and advocacy for equitable educational opportunities. An examination of case law, statutes, office of civil rights investigations, and other legal proceedings underscores the implications and consequences of school administrators (e.g., principals and assistant principals) and school counselors neglecting to understand disparate, and often mutual, legal and ethical imperatives. An alliance can afford greater comfort for both educational fields in ambiguous and situational dilemmas that are part of the daily work of school administrators and school counselors. Positive collaboration also can lead to increasing opportunities to develop social capital and better support outcomes for students.

Fighting for Farmers

Fighting for Farmers

When Chemicals Go to the Dark Side

When Chemicals Go to the Dark Side

From Love to Justice: Families’ Interrogation of Racial State Violence

This paper explores how love, grief and kinship operate in families’ struggles for truth and justice following a death in custody of a racialised person in England and Wales. Racialised people are disproportionately vulnerable to dying in police custody. Family experiences following a custodial death are characterised by difficulty in obtaining information, delays in processes, a lack of responsiveness from authorities and an absence of resolution. Love, grief and kinship form the initial springboard for families’ legal battles for justice, with women often taking leading roles in demanding state accountability through legal action and community-based campaigns. While kinship ties have traditionally been understood in mainstream scholarship as closing off family units and mitigating against principles of egalitarianism and solidarity, families’ justice campaigns challenge this narrative. Families can become politicised in the course of struggle, forming alliances with groups proclaiming broader antiracist goals. This paper reveals the subversive potential of love, grief and kinship in struggles for justice in racialised death in custody cases.

Illegally Sold: The Josefa Segunda and Its Captives in New Orleans, 1818–1832

ABSTRACT In April 1818, U.S. officers seized the Spanish brig Josefa Segunda, which they found ‘hovering’ in the Mississippi, and brought her to New Orleans. On board were 152 enslaved Africans. Barely a year later, the enslaved people were sold by the local sheriff, as permitted by the court under Louisiana legislation. What followed the sale of the captives was a series of legal battles in which the multiple parties involved tried to secure a financial advantage for themselves, including the Josefa Segunda cases heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1820 and again in 1825. However, in 1830, the Supreme Court decided that the sale of the captives had been illegal under the 1819 ‘Act in addition to the Acts prohibiting the slave trade’, which had not been applied in the previous appeals. The 1819 legislation decreed that any such captives should be turned over to the federal government and sent to Africa. This article illustrates some of the tensions and contradictions in the early U.S. effort to curtail the trade in African captives and offers clues for a future effort to trace the lives of people who were, as recognized by the Supreme Court, illegally enslaved.

Knowledge Conflicts: The Strategic Use and Effects of Expertise in Social Movements

Based on a unique data set of research reports that appear in media coverage of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline conflict in the United States, the study brings together perspectives in social movement theory and the sociology of science and technology by (1) developing an understanding of the epistemic dimension of framing through the analysis of the strategic use of different types of research produced by experts in the context of social movement conflicts and (2) examining the extent to which research is relevant for regulatory and judicial decision making. The project identifies over 50 research reports that proponents and opponents discuss in the media. Proponents favor reports with economic framing, and opponents respond to those reports but also produce or fund reports that document environmental and other risks and political influence. Regulatory agencies at both the federal and state level tend to be aligned with proponents, but the federal courts provided independent decisions that contributed to the decision by developers to withdraw from the project. The analysis draws attention to an under‐studied area of environmental and social movement conflict that brings together the framing and political sociology of science literatures. It also develops generalizable implications for future research as well as actionable, problem‐oriented knowledge for activists and advocates. For example, the study suggests that activists may want to focus limited research resources on developing studies that can be used in regulatory and legal battles. If regulatory agencies are somewhat or highly captured, resources would best be spent on litigation in the courts.

A War of Words Over Abortion: The Legal-Framing Contest Over the Undue Burden Standard

Movement lawyering often results in litigation battles. Litigant lawyers in Supreme Court abortion cases, who are typically affiliated with, if not members of the reproductive-rights and antiabortion movements, for many years have engaged in a war of words as they dispute abortion laws and what constitutes an undue burden on abortion access. I use and build on social movement framing theory to examine the legal-framing contest unfolding across the undue-burden abortion cases, toward discerning the anatomy and causal sequence of this discursive legal battle. Using both qualitative and quantitative-computerized text analysis, I show that a broad discursive-opportunity structure shapes the legal-framing contest, and the contest itself is structured by framing innovations and persistence and by dialogic and monologic framing. This theoretical framework can aid our understanding of the sometimes fierce discursive battles in movement litigation, shedding light on how social movements influence legal policy development.

Jam Session for Seasoned Freelancers—Part 2

Last month in the AMWA Journal, you may have read the first installment of the review of the popular annual conference session, the Jam Session for Seasoned Freelancers. Here we summarize and discuss the experiences, ideas, concerns, and challenges faced by seasoned freelancers that there wasn’t space for in last month’s issue. If you missed last month’s article, we reviewed managing stress; email, travel, and security issues; and sculpting your business. Here, we discuss doing business with friends, referring clients, legal battles, and one of the costs of doing business. Contributors include: Cathryn D. Evans Phyllis Minick Sherri Bowen

How will the Legal Battle End in the Public Job : Sight of Jordan Issue

&lt;p&gt;Conflict of interests, as an act of corruption, is considered a loose concept. Legal jurisprudence differed in defining its concept, but the salient feature in it is that it constitutes an act of a public job that calls for both disciplinary and criminal responsibility, as it constitutes a two-faced act, a criminal and a disciplinary aspect. This study came to examine a important issue within the framework of the public job. From here it was necessary to stand on the definition of conflict of interest and the types of this conflict within the framework of the public job, and the elements of the crime of conflict of interest according to the criminal framework in the punitive legislation in the countries under study. The main findings show that the most prominent of which is that the most common and dangerous form of conflict is the conflict between the public interest and the private interest. This is when the employee has a direct or indirect interest that affects the administrative decision-making process or any other administrative act. The two researchers recommended that more details be given to the images of Conflict of interests in order to avoid any legal lapse or loophole, which would result in the establishment of the largest possible criminal and disciplinary confrontation for this act.&lt;/p&gt;

Black Ecological Vibrations

Black Ecological Vibrations

The violence of disavowing Indigenous governance: exposing the colonial politics of "development" and FPIC in the Caribbean

After decades of community mobilizing and a protracted legal battle, Maya villages in southern Belize won a watershed Indigenous land rights victory in the Caribbean Court of Justice in 2015. Since then, the state has criminalized environmental defenders, violated communal land rights, and is argued by Maya activists and alcaldes (village leaders) to be operating in discriminatory bad faith. Accordingly, this Grassroots article casts critical light on a recent flashpoint conflict between the Government of Belize and Maya of Toledo District related to Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC). The article is directly informed by both the grounded knowledge of an autonomous movement engaged in frontline resistance, and participatory research that is rooted in a politics and spirit of "accompliceship." The structural analysis we offer from an explicitly anticolonial standpoint is instructive about the historical-imperial processes, social forces, and economic logics that underpin conventional approaches to both "development" and the state's duty to consult local communities. Ultimately, the article reveals the forms of political conflict and environmental degradation that continue to emerge globally at the conjuncture of capitalist development, (postcolonial) state power, and struggles for Indigenous self-determination.er, and struggles for Indigenous self-determination.

Neither Employee nor Contractor: A Case Study of Employment Relations between Riders and Platform-Based Food-Delivery Firms in Taiwan

There have been numerous legal battles in Western countries concerning employment relations between platform-based food delivery firms and their riders; however, no such legal battles have occurred in Taiwan. This qualitative case study applies the theory of institutional logics to examine the reason such legal action is absent in Taiwan, focusing on how different stakeholders apply different logics to employment relations in Taiwan’s platform-based food-delivery sector. Through this investigation, this article shows that most stakeholders in this sector quickly came to a consensus that the ‘quasi-employee’ hybrid logic should be applied to riders, and that this was due to a convergence of worker and capitalist theories of profit, motivation to maintain the profitability of these platform firms (who are regulatory entrepreneurs performing symbolic compliance) and the techno-developmentalism of the Taiwanese government.

Contemporary Native American and Indigenous Religions: State of the field

AbstractNative American and Indigenous religions are incredibly diverse in practice, belief, material culture, and organization, which shape distinct individual religious experiences and communal identities. The study of Native American and Indigenous religions is not the study of a singular religion or people nor does it refer to a singular methodology. Instead, the study of contemporary Native American religions is the study of diverse communities that were and continue to be shaped by settler colonialism, Christian missionization, US federal Indian policy, and legal battles over religious freedom and ancestral lands. Three interrelated themes emerge in recent scholarship: the study of protest/protector movements and the assertion of legal rights for sovereignty, self‐determination, and religious freedom; the confluence of environmental issues and Indigenous religions; and an attention to global Indigeneity. A number of gaps remain, however: engagement with non‐federally recognized tribes; Indigenous communities outside of the American West; and religion and violence.

Where Lies the State? Sāmoa's 2021 Election and the Defeat of the Human Rights Protection Party

ABSTRACT In 2021, Sāmoa witnessed its first change of government since the 1980s. The April election result entailed a narrow defeat for the governing Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP). This triggered a major constitutional crisis and a succession of legal battles over the 10 per cent quota for women in parliament and over the powers of the head of state, who had attempted to cancel the election. This paper examines the election outcome, how this was influenced by changing electoral laws, and why the newly formed Fa‘atuatua I Le Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST) party was able to mount such a strong challenge to the HRPP. The paper argues that the central issue during the campaign – the HRPP's reforms to reconfigure the Land and Titles Court – was not (as widely depicted) a dispute over ‘communal' versus ‘individual rights’ but rather one over two conflicting visions of centralized control.

I Felt a Little Homosexual Today, So I Called in Sick: The Formation of “Reverse Discourse” by Swedish Gay Activists in the 1970s

ABSTRACT This article revolves around the legal and epistemic battles around “homosexuality” in Sweden in 1979, which led to the abolition of homosexuality being classified as a “disease”. Among other things, gay activists “called in sick” to the Social Insurance Agency (SIA) and claimed that they were unable to work because they were homosexuals (read as mentally disordered). The phone calls can be understood as a formation of “reverse” discourse; that is, gay people starting to speak on their own behalf, while using the same categories by which they were labelled. By analysing this resistance and a sit-in that was organised at the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW), we conclude that reverse discourse, as a productive yet rupturing practice, is not a single- handed and unaccompanied resistance strategy but materialises as one practice among many in a complex web of resistance and power.

Migrant Workers and Wage Theft: Is Legal Action an Effective Form of Collective Action?

Abstract Vulnerable migrant workers are generally very reluctant to take legal action to challenge exploitation given the many obstacles they face, and instances of such action are important to examine for their exceptionality. This article presents a case study of non-unionised Portuguese construction workers who engaged in a lengthy legal battle against their Portuguese employers for various forms of wage theft while they worked in Ireland. The aim of the article is to assess the extent to which their legal action was an effective form of collective action. To do so, we draw on industrial relations and law literature to explore the purposes of collective action and litigation and apply this understanding to assess the outcomes of the migrant workers’ legal cases. We find that the workers’ legal action was a partially effective form of collective action that sought to address the source of their discontent. The case study highlights the regulatory dilemmas that arise in an institutional environment where workers ability to engage in voluntarist forms of collective action is constrained and they seek to use the legal system as collective subjects.