Washington and Lee University School of Law

About: Washington and Lee University School of Law is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Supreme court & Corporate law. The organization has 79 authors who have published 357 publications receiving 2411 citations. The organization is also known as: Lexington Law School.

Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy

Abstract: 1. Coming of Age in Atrocity 2. Children Who Soldier: Practices, Politics, and Perceptions 3. Not So Simple 4. Child Soldiers and Accountability 5. Unlawful Recruitment and Use of Children: From Proscription to Prevention 6. Rights, Wrongs, and Transitional Reconstruction 7. Reinvigorating the International Legal Imagination

Punishment Postgenocide: From Guilt to Shame to 'Civis' in Rwanda

Abstract: Following the 1994 Rwandan genocide, national and international trials set out to encourage national reconciliation, promote peace, punish perpetrators, foster a culture of human rights, and effect justice. In this Article, Professor Mark Drumbl questions the ability of these trials to achieve these goals and suggests they may in fact aggravate ethnic identity politics, thereby threatening Rwanda's long-term stability. He argues that the highly interdependent yet dualist nature of Rwandan society, together with the widespread level of participation in and victimization by the genocide, create a situation where accountability for the violence and the deterrence of future violence can be pursued more effectively through the restorative cultivation of shame, rather than through the retributive imposition of guilt. Although criminal sanction usually attaches to deviant conduct, participation in genocide in Rwanda was not particularly deviant, nor was it an individualized, pathological transgression. Professor Drumbl asks whether there might be times and places where collective wrongdoing needs to be exposed and not hidden by the law's preference for individual fault. Despite the concerns that ought to be emerging from the Rwandan experience, international lawyers continue to push - with significant degrees of success - for selective criminal prosecution as a preferred, and potentially exclusive, response to mass atrocity. In contrast, he suggests that creating presumptions in favor of criminal trials may preempt the supervening inquiry about the suitability of those trials to the afflicted society. Professor Drumbl concludes that policy responses to mass atrocity should be founded upon contextual inquiries, not driven by globalitarian or legalistic agendas, and should recognize the uniqueness of each incident of mass atrocity and the uniqueness of the reconstruction process that should follow, instead of flattening that uniqueness. This may lead to a preference for flexible, polycentric responses within and outside of what may be customarily identified by the West as the "law."

International Intersectionality: A Theoretical and Pragmatic Exploration of Women's International Human Rights Violations

Abstract: Ardent identity politics dominate the world stage. As Afghanistan struggles to overcome Taliban rule, the international community attempts to help rebuild a nation torn apart by violent ethnic clashes. Recent eruptions of violence between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority in the Indian state of Gujarat have focused international attention on communal conflicts in the region. In both cases, and many more like them, women's bodies become one of the primary sites for contested national identity. In Afganistan, the struggle for nationalist identity violated women's international human rights through extreme forms of seclusion, isolation, and violence. In Gujarat, the religious conflict led to large-scale rape and murder. In addition to the violence visited on women as a result of extreme nationalism around the world, women in such situations are also often forced to choose between nationalist struggles and struggles to achieve gender equality. Identity politics, as popularly conceived, leave no room for women to situate themselves at the crossroads of both struggles and lead to oversimplified notions of women's identity. Although feminists in the global South have criticized this understanding of women's human rights around the world. The international human rights community has, in fact, relied on its own permutation of a unified, monolithic identity for women, which has led to a myopic approach to women's human rights that fails to address complex forms of human rights violations. The international human rights community has, in recent years, expanded its definition of human rights violations to include many of the human rights abuses commonly perpetrated against women. Although this expansion represents significant progress for the world's women, the movement has consistently relied on a rigid, unitary category of "women." With the exception of some voices from the global South, the international women's human rights community's focus on "women" to the exclusion of other ididentity categories, such as ethnicity, race, class, religion, and sexual orientation, has resulted in a limited understanding of women's human rights. One explanation for this is that, like the domestic women's rights movement in the United States, the international women's human rights movement began by focusing on perceived "shared experience" in an effort to maximize support for the movement. Only in the last few years have activists begun to critically examine whether the international women's human rights movement, as currently understood, can accommodate a complex, nuanced understanding of human rights violations. The predominant narrow, relatively static notion of women's human rights does not adequately reflect the eperience of women within minority racial or ethnic communities, lesbians, disabled women, or other women who may experience discrimination or human rights violations as a result of both gender and another ground. In 1998, for example, members of the Indonesian ethnic majority raped a number of ethnically Chinese women who constitute an ethnic minority in Indonesia. These women suffered human rights violations, including death threats and rape, based simultanelusly on their gender and ethnicity. The international community, however, largely failed to recognize abuses such as these as products of both racism and sexism. The international human rights community historically has not responded to such human rights violations as both violation of rights related to race or ethnicity and gender. "Neither the gender aspects of racial discrimination nor the racial aspects of gender discrimination are fully comprehended within human rights discourses." This is due to both the theoretical framework of human rights and the fragmented structure of human rights organizations and institution, which divide responsibility for addressing human rights along rigid substantive lines separating, for example, race and gender. Indeed, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights observed, "The United Nations, governments, inter-governmental and non-governmentatal organizations have often addressed racial and gender discrimination as two separate problems, leaving women faced by multiple forms of dicrimination unsure of where to turn for redress." The current theoretical foundations, organizational structure, and practice of the United Nations and many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) does not permit a nuanced human rights analysis that would account for multiple forms of human rights abuses occurring simultaneously.

Nanotechnology: the challenge of regulating known unknowns.

Abstract: Media reports of the health hazards posed by nano-sized particles (NSPs) have turned a white hot spotlight on the risks of nanotechnology. Worried about the risks posed to workers producing nano-materials, the Washington Post has labeled nanotechnology a "seat-of-the-pants occupational health experiment." This article examines our emerging knowledge base about the hazards of two types of exposure: inhalation of NSPs and topical application of products containing NSPs. It argues that a clear-eyed evaluation of the benefits and risks of nanotechnology is made extremely difficult by the marriage of a complex science with a venture capitalist-like hype. It then suggests that, absent additional statutory authority, governmental regulators cannot readily address the risks posed by these products. This regulatory inaction leaves a significant role for the private insurance market, a role that regulators should support in tangible ways outlined in the article.

Enhanced Damages, Litigation Cost Recovery, and Interest

Abstract: This chapter discusses the law and policy of monetary awards—including exemplary damages and litigation cost recoveries—that go beyond the compensatory damages to which prevailing parties in patent litigation are normally entitled. Up to treble damages are authorized in the United States for knowing infringement, but attorney fees are awarded only in exceptional cases. The rest of the world tends towards the opposite: attorney fees are awarded as a matter of course, but punitive damages are generally prohibited as against public policy. In this chapter we discuss the theory, law, and policy of enhanced damages and attorney fee awards in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. While the availability of enhanced damages and fees can bring accused infringers that might otherwise “holdout” to the table, care must also be taken to ensure that it does not discourage productive learning from patents or challenges to overbroad and vague patents. Rather than endorsing any single set of doctrinal rules, we recommend further research into a number of unanswered questions about current and potential future configurations, in order to inform future policy-making.