Responsibility For Rights Research Articles

Pushing Back and Stretching: Frame Adjustments Among Reproductive Rights Advocates in Peru

The article examines how two reproductive rights coalitions in Peru adjust their framing by way of regular interactions with other collective actors. Qualitative data were gathered from the coalitions in the regions of Arequipa and Cusco. The findings demonstrate how the coalitions engage in framing practices not only among their members as they select and refine advocacy goals and strategies, but also by means of interaction, communication, and negotiation with a range of organized social and political actors. Through these interactions, coalition members adjust their framing of reproductive rights in response to what they perceive from other actors, taking frames from them and directing frames back to them. These interactions occur within broader political and cultural contexts consisting of stable and variable opportunity structures. Thus, the coalitions' framing practices entail stretching favorable interpretations among allies and neutral actors, while pushing back the boundaries in which the Catholic Church leadership attempts to transmit its own interpretations.

ENFORCEMENT RIGHTS AGAINST NON‐CULPABLE NON‐JUST INTRUSION

AbstractI articulate and defend a principle governing enforcement rights in response to a non‐culpable non‐just rights‐intrusion (e.g., wrongful bodily attack by someone who falsely, but with full epistemic justification, believes that he is acting permissibly). The account requires that the use of force reduce the harm from such intrusions and is sensitive to the extent to which the intruder is agent‐responsible for imposing intrusion‐harm

Property Rights and Parliament in Industrializing Britain

During Britain’s industrialization, Parliament operated a forum where rights to land and resources could be reorganized. This venue enabled landholders and communities to exploit economic opportunities that could not be accommodated by the inflexible rights regime inherited from the past. In this essay, historical evidence, archival data, and statistical analysis demonstrate that Parliament increased the number of acts reorganizing property rights in response to increases in the demand for such acts. Tests with placebo groups confirm the robustness of this result. This evidence indicates that Parliament responded elastically to changes in the public’s demand for reorganizing property rights. Parliament’s efforts to adapt property rights to modern economic conditions may have accelerated Britain’s economic ascent.

"Ain't I a Person?": Reimagining Human Rights in Response to Children

"Ain't I a Person?": Reimagining Human Rights in Response to Children

Cross-border feminism: shifting the terms of debate for US and European feminists

Recent decades of women's rights advocacy have produced numerous regional and international agreements for protecting women's security, including a UN convention that affirms the state's responsibility to protect key gender-specific rights, with no exceptions on the basis of culture or religion. At the same time, however, the focus on universal women's rights has enabled influential feminists in the United States to view women's rights in opposition to culture, and most often in opposition to other people's cultures. Not surprisingly, then, feminists across the global South have criticized the universal-women's-rights agenda. This article reviews representative critical responses to universal-women's-rights advocacy. The author argues that, taken collectively, these critical responses do not reject the possibility of cross-cultural feminist advocacy but they do suggest the need for feminists in the United States and Europe to focus less on transferring rights across the obstacles of culture and more on how they can revise and expand their own understanding of women's rights in response to the struggles of other women, many of whom view women's rights as organic to their own cultures and as connected to broader social struggles.

Reconceiving Rights and Constitutionalism

Human rights invoked in the international context are often treated as having self-evident content. The focus is on implementation and enforcement. The urge to enforcement is especially strong when...

Epilogue: Property rights between tools and social values

The approach taken by the authors of all the papers in this special issue has been deliberately and unashamedly instrumental. The question asked in all cases was - could new rules for stimulating private initiatives with property rights be used as an instrument for better achieving (some of the) existing goals of land use planning? Would that as an instrument be more effective and/or more efficient that the 'customary' way of pursuing land use planning? In this epilogue we want to broaden the discussion about property rights, private initiatives and land use planning. We want to broaden it by placing it within the wider topic of ordering and structuring markets. Most land use change takes place 'through the market' even when there is strong and active land use planning. Customary land use planning can, therefore, be seen as an Ordering' of that market. However, scholars of planning very rarely do that, although there is a wealth of practical experience and academic literature about ordering markets in other sectors. Admittedly, the market within which decisions about land use are taken has some special properties which make it different from those other markets. In particular, decisions about land use refer to a particular location and all locations are special if not unique because of the immobility of land. Also, there are sometimes aesthetic and emotional consequences to land use decisions which can be regarded as unquantifiable and locationally specific external effects. Nevertheless, discussion about land use planning could benefit from discussion about market ordering in other sectors, as the paper by Segeren et al. in this issue shows. Another direction in which we want to broaden the discussion about deliberately changing property rights by relating it to the topic of institutional change. Property rights are rules and therefore according to the usual definition, institutions. Changing property rights deliberately so as to achieve certain effects is, therefore, purposeful institutional change. There is a growing literature on this related to land (Needham and Louw, 2006; Buitelaar et al., 2007). Property rights change slowly, especially when they concern fundamental and sensitive rights such as the ownership of land. Nevertheless, there are many cases where the state has deliberately modified property rights in response to social and political pressure. See, for example, The Trusts of Land and Appointment of Trustees Act 1996 introduced for England and Wales in order to regulate co-ownership better. The other point we wish to emphasise is that institutional change, especially in property rights, is usually path dependent - changes are fairly marginal. It can be no accident that North (1990, 97-99) when discussing the concept of path dependency, illustrated this with the land laws adopted for many states in North America, which were based on the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. It must be noted that the political and the social context are essential for whether or not, and in which direction, institutions change. For instance, Houston (Texas) is the only big city in the USA that still has not adopted a zoning ordinance, since the majority of the people (or at least the majority of the ones that turned up at the ballot box in 1948, 1962 and 1993) is against it. The connotation and symbolic value attached to zoning and property rights have prevented zoning from being installed (Buitelaar, forthcoming). In more general terms, institutions embody certain values instead of just serving them instrumentally. Closely related to the previous topic (institutional change) is the necessity of institutional fit. By this we mean that any change in the rules governing the use of property rights has to fit in with existing formal rules and informal practices related to property rights. Some of the institutions have been determined at the level of the European Union (EU), for example, the European Convention on Human Rights. …

Principles for Resolving Conflicts Between Trade Secrets and the First Amendment

Preliminary and permanent injunctions are routinely granted in trade secret cases without offending the First Amendment, and this is as it should be. In ordinary trade secret cases, injunctions merely require parties to abide by express or implicit agreements they have made, respect the confidences under which they acquired secrets, and refrain from wrongful conduct vis-a-vis the secrets. Occasionally, those who want to disclose trade secrets invoke the First Amendment as a defense to claims of trade secrecy misappropriation. Courts and commentators have taken varying positions on issues pertinent to these defenses, including whether trade secrecy law are categorically immune (or nearly so) from First Amendment scrutiny and whether preliminary injunctions forbidding disclosure of informational secrets should be considered prior restraints on speech. This article offers a set of principles for mediating the tensions that occasionally arise between trade secrets and the First Amendment. Part I seeks to explain why conflicts between trade secrecy law and the First Amendment have thus far been relatively rare. It discusses limiting principles of trade secrecy law that mediate most free-speech-related tensions likely to arise when someone wants to disclose information that another claims as a trade secret. Part II suggests that more conflicts between trade secret and First Amendment interests may occur, in part because of the increased use of mass-market licenses to keep information secret that would otherwise be lawful to acquire and disclose. It considers proposals to strengthen trade secret rights in response to threats to trade secrets posed by the global communications medium of the Internet. The stronger trade secret rights become, the more likely they are to come into conflict with First Amendment interests. Part III criticizes the California Supreme Court's decision in DVD CCA v. Bunner for, among other things, its implicit adoption of the categorical immunity theory and its reliance on DVD CCA's assertion of property rights in its secrets in rejecting Bunner's First Amendment defense. Part IV concludes that even though preliminary injunctions in informational trade secret cases are prior restraints, they are generally justified in ordinary cases. Yet the heavy presumption against prior restraints should apply to cases in which third parties who obtained the secret without wrongdoing seeks to disclose it publicly. Part IV considers a number of other First Amendment due process issues, such as whether the burden of proof in third-party disclosure cases should be higher than in the normal trade secret cases and whether appellate review of constitutionally relevant facts should be de novo when First Amendment defenses have been raised. Part IV proposes several principles to assist courts in grappling with First Amendment defenses in trade secrecy cases.

Responsibility for Rights: The Act Human Rights Act

Australia is unique among Western countries in not having either a constitutional or statutory Bill of Rights at Commonwealth or State level. This year, however, the Australian Capital Territory passed the Human Rights Act 2004 and, in so doing, became the first Australian jurisdiction to attempt a comprehensive protection of rights. The Act is very weak, particularly in terms of the power given to the judiciary, which is obliged to interpret legislation in light of human rights, but has no power to strike down either primary or delegated legislation. One interesting aspect of the Act is the way in which it attempts to give each arm of government a serious role in the protection of rights. This article explores the responsibility for rights under the Human Rights Act of the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. Despite some problems with the Act, particularly in the area of executive obligations, it represents an important step in a country which has traditionally been cautious about the concept of Bills of Rights.

Responsibility for Rights: The Act Human Rights Act

Australia has its first Bill of Rights with the passing of the Human Rights Act (2004), which demonstrates the growing influence in the common law world of human rights protection models that seek to distribute responsibility for protecting rights. The Act aims to balance the responsibilities of rights between the three branches of government, although it is criticised for being insufficiently comprehensive and unduly weak when it comes to enforcement.

Terrorism and Intellectual Property Rights

A bioethicist argues that the government has the right to restrict or override intellectual property rights in response to a national emergency only when specific criteria are met. Virtual Mentor is a monthly bioethics journal published by the American Medical Association.

Balancing Private Rights and Public Policies: Reconceptualizing Property in Databases

This Article presents a new paradigm for thinking about intangible property rights in response to recent criticism that information products such as databases should not be over-propertized. Analyzing the inherent problems with existing approaches, the Article concludes that creating private property rights in these intangible assets will not inevitably lead to commercial and social problems. On the contrary, legislatures can create private property rights that when accompanied by appropriate oversight and monitoring will preserve commercial markets and the public domain of information. Indeed, a new database law can use the concept of property as an organizing tool to properly balance private rights and public policies. In developing this new approach to database protection, this Article examines the international debate on the creation of private property rights in databases. Furthermore, unlike previous models for sui generis database protection law based on copyright or trade secret law, the model in this Article draws on the principles underlying trademark and patent law in reaching a new solution.

The Balance Between Student Drug Testing and Fourth Amendment Rights in Response to Board of Education v. Earls

In 1995, the United States Supreme Court rendered its decision in Vernonia School District 47J v. Acton , holding that a school district's random suspicionless drug testing of student athletes for participation in interscholastic athletics did not violate the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures. In light of the Acton decision and in response to statistics indicating that drug use among students is rising, a number of school districts nationwide implemented mandatory drug testing for students. A 2001 study of the student drug-testing policies of Texas school districts confirmed this trend. The Supreme Court recently revisited the issue of random suspicionless drug testing of students in Board of Education v. Earls , where it upheld the district's policy requiring drug testing of students in any extra-curricular activities. This article examines the effects of the Supreme Court's decision in Board of Education v. Earls on Texas school districts' student drug-testing pol...

Section 6 of the Bill of Rights Act 1990: A Case for a Parliamentary Responsibility for Human Rights and Freedoms

The author addresses the role of the Courts in considering whether delegated legislation is ultra vires by reason of breaching the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. He suggests that such review should not consider whether the limitation in any such regulation is justifiable in a free and democratic society, but ought to only consider if it infringes rights and freedoms contained in the Bill of Rights Act. In his view, not only would such an approach result in much delegated legislation being held to be ultra vires, but that it would force Parliament to take responsibility for the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights Act by closely considering them when enacting provisions which permit delegated legislation.

The Allocation of the Commons: Parking on Public Roads

The allocation of parking spaces on public roads presents an ideal test of the formation and transformation of property rights in response to changes in technology and cost. This study looks at bottom‐up regimes for parking, which are based on possession of particular spaces for limited periods of time, and top‐down systems of allocation, such as metered parking and parking permits, which are based on such factors as place of residence or disability. In general, the bottom‐up systems do better in an economic sense because they tend to reduce the dead time associated with these spaces. The system of incremental modification of parking places, however, is undermined by a political process that tends on balance to be more responsive to the interests of particular groups than to the overall carrying capacity of the commons.

Thomson on the Moral Specification of Rights

In this paper we offer a limited defense of the view of rights in response to criticisms of Judith Jarvis Thomson. The defense is limited in that we do not attempt to demonstrate the overall superiority of this view to others, including the view currently advocated by Thomson. We only attempt to show that the advocate of moral specification (MS)' has a plausible response to two objections she raises. According to MS, moral rights embody principles of justice. Their meaning is specified by such principles. For example, the right to life is not the right not to be killed, but the right not to be killed unjustly. Thomson herself took this line on the right to life in A Defense of Abortion. She writes:

Indigenous Land Rights Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Constraint on Productivity?

This article uses cross-sectional evidence from Ghana, Kenya, and Rwanda in 1987-88 to examine the question, Are indigenous land rights systems in sub-Saharan Africa a constraint on productivity? The evidence supports the hypothesis suggested by historical studies, that African indigenous land rights systems have spontaneously evolved from systems of communal control toward individual sized rights in response to increases in commercialization and population pressure. Cross-sectional data on the incidence of land improvements and on land yields provide little support for the view that limitations under indigenous law on the right to transfer land are a constraint on productivity. Copyright 1991 by Oxford University Press.