Rights For Purposes Research Articles

Dating the State: The Moral Hazards of Winning Gay Rights

The article offers a critical analysis of the complexities of having the state recognize and then take up gay rights as a cause of its own. I examine three principal contexts – the role of gay rights in the state of Israel’s re-branding campaign, the response to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 2007 speech at Columbia University in which he claimed that there were no homosexuals in Iran, and the role of gay rights in Romania’s effort to join the European Community – as examples of the moral hazards that a minority faces when the state takes up their interests and uses their rights for purposes that well-exceed the obvious interests of the new rights-bearing community. I conclude that critical awareness of the state’s role as fundamental partner in the recognition and protection of a form of sexual rights should push us to regard these “victories” as necessarily ethically compromised.

One Size Fits All: The Supreme Court's Interpretation of Ne Exeat Rights for Purposes of the Hague Convention

With wrongful child abductions occurring worldwide, the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction was drafted for the purpose of protecting children from its harmful effects. The United States implemented provisions of the Hague Convention in 1988 into the International Child Abduction Remedies Act, for the same purpose. Under the two, the drafters draw a distinction between of and of access, the determination of which would ultimately establish a parent’s right to the return remedy under the Convention. Specifically, if a parent has of a wrongfully abducted child would be ordered back by the abducting parent where as a parent with of has no such remedy.In Spring 2010, Abbott v. Abbott which entailed the interpretation of of and of under the Hague Convention was heard and decided by the United States Supreme Court. In Abbott, a Chiliean custody ordered granted a father access rights coupled with a ne exeat clause preventing the custodial parent from leaving the country without permission. The issue was whether these rights coupled together amounted to of which would entitle the father to the return remedy. Thus, the mother would have to return the child to Chile. With the facts and circumstances unique to Abbott, the United States Supreme Court held that ne exeat rights do confer rights of custody for purposes of the Convention. This paper will examine the danger in the Court’s ruling and long lasting negative effects that it is likely to have on the nation and international communities.

Applying a Fixed Water Year to Administer Water Storage Rights

The Colorado Supreme Court recently ruled that when water storage rights decrees are silent, the state and division engineers (SDEs) have authority to impose a fixed water year on water storage rights for purposes of administering the state's one‐annual‐fill limitation. In N. Sterling Irrigation Dist. v. Simpson, 202 P.3d 1207 (Colo. 2009), a declaratory judgment issued by the water court in Division 1, which has jurisdiction over water matters in Colorado's South Platte River Basin, was appealed. The plaintiff, North Sterling Irrigation District (NSID), challenged the SDEs’ administration of NSID's water storage rights, contending that the imposition of a fixed water year was an unlawful interference with its decreed storage rights.