Legislation

About: Legislation is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 62664 publications have been published within this topic receiving 585188 citations. The topic is also known as: law & act.

Making Sense out of Nonsense: The Deconstruction of State-Level Sex Offender Residence Restrictions

Abstract: Releasing a sex offender from prison or placing the offender on community-based sanctions, only to have the offender commit a new sex crime, is a policy-maker’s worst nightmare. Fueled by misperceptions and public fear, sex offender laws have developed piecemeal and without rigorous empirical insight and testing. While policies and practices are well-intended, they are unlikely to resolve the very real social problem of sexual violence and may inadvertently increase victimization. Such is the possibility with residence restrictions. This type of law is among the newest in an ever-growing barrage of legislation designed specifically for sexual criminals yet what little research that exists suggests there is no correlation between residence and sexual recidivism. This article identifies 30 states with state-level residence restrictions and conducts a content analysis of each state’s legislation. Geographical and other assessments are also conducted.

Evidence of Persistent and Pervasive Workplace Discrimination Against LGBT People: The Need for Federal Legislation Prohibiting Discrimination and Providing for Equal Employment Benefits

Abstract: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people have experienced a long and pervasive history of employment discrimination. Today, more than eight million people in the American workforce identify as LGBT, but there still is no federal law that explicitly prohibits sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination against them.This Article begins by surveying the social science research and other evidence illustrating the nature and scope of the discrimination against LGBT workers and the harmful effects of this discrimination on both employees and employers. It then analyzes the existing legal protections against this discrimination, which include constitutional protections for public sector workers, court interpretations of Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination, state and local antidiscrimination laws, and corporate policies. This Article determines that, while these laws and policies provide important protection, the current system is incomplete, confusing, and inadequate. This Article next considers empirical research showing that employers do not offer employees with a same-sex spouse or partner the same access to family benefits that they offer to employees with a different-sex spouse, and it examines court decisions finding that a denial of equal benefits is unlawful employment discrimination.Based on this research and legal analysis, the Article concludes that a federal law like the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill pending in Congress that would prohibit sexual orientation and gender identity employment discrimination, is needed. To serve its purpose consistently, however, the bill’s current exemption of employee benefits should be removed. To be sure, ending all forms of unequal treatment based on sexual orientation or gender identity is warranted and feasible, and doing so will have positive effects for both employees and employers.

Breaking the Convention: Researching the “Illegal” Migration of Refugees to Europe

Abstract: The study of refugees by geographers and other social scientists is, almost by definition, framed around a series of legal categories, which provide us with more or less neat categories of types of involuntary migrants. Yet the process of migration emerges in relation to legal categories and is not simply dictated by them. Thus, as legislation on migration in general and the interpretation of the 1951 Geneva Convention in particular have become more restrictive, patterns of migration have increasingly emerged that manipulate, circumvent or simply break existing legislation.

Unilateral Powers: A Brief Overview

Abstract: To advance their policy agenda, presidents have two options. They can submit proposals to Congress and hope that its members faithfully shepherd bills into laws; or they can exercise their unilateral powers--issuing such directives as executive orders, executive agreements, proclamations, national security directives, or memoranda--and thereby create policies that assume the weight of law without the formal endorsement of a sitting Congress. To pursue a unilateral strategy, of course, presidents must be able to justify their actions on some blend of statutory, treaty, or constitutional powers; and when they cannot, their only recourse is legislation. But given the ambiguity of Article II powers and the massive corpus of law that presidents can draw upon, as well as the well-documented travails of the legislative process, the appeal of unilateral powers is readily apparent. Not surprisingly, almost all the trend lines point upward. During the first 150 years of the nation's history, treaties (which require Senate ratification) regularly outnumbered executive agreements (which do not); but during the last 50 years, presidents have signed roughly ten executive agreements for every treaty that was submitted to Congress (Margolis 1986; Moe and Howell 1999b). With rising frequency, presidents are issuing national security directives (policies that are not even released for public review) to institute aspects of their policy agenda (Cooper 1997, 2002). Since Truman fatefully called the Korean War a "police action," modern presidents have launched literally hundreds of military actions without first securing a formal congressional authorization (Blechman and Kaplan 1978; Fisher 2004b). Though the total number of executive orders has declined, presidents issued almost four times as many "significant" orders in the second half of the twentieth century as they did in the first (Howell 2003, 83). Using executive orders, department orders, and reorganizations plans, presidents have unilaterally created a majority of the administrative agencies listed in the United States Government Manual (Howell and Lewis 2002; Lewis 2003). These policy mechanisms, what is more, hardly exhaust the options available to presidents, who regularly invent new ones or redefine old ones in order to suit their own strategic interests. For years, political scientists paid precious little attention to these trends. Until recently, only one book had been written on the president's unilateral powers (Morgan 1970), and most journal articles on the topic were published in law reviews (see, e.g., Cash 1963; Fleishman and Aufses 1976; Hebe 1972). There are signs, though, that change is afoot. In the past several years, three books have focused exclusively on the president's unilateral powers (Cooper 2002; Howell 2005; Mayer 2001), and others are in the works. A number of articles on executive orders have been published in mainstream political science journals (Cooper 2001; Deering and Maltzman 1999; Howell and Lewis 2002; Krause and Cohen 1997, 2000; Mayer 1999; Mayer and Price 2002; Moe and Howell 1999a, 1999b). And for the first time, edited volumes on the general topic of the presidency are devoting full chapters to unilateral powers (Edwards 2005; Rockman and Waterman, forthcoming). The nation's recent experience under the last two presidential administrations makes the subject all the more timely. From the creation of military tribunals to try suspected "enemy combatants" to tactical decisions made in ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq to the freezing of financial assets in U.S. banks with links to bin Laden and other terrorist networks to the reorganization of intelligence gathering domestically and abroad, Bush has relied upon his unilateral powers in virtually all facets of his "war on terror." And to the considerable consternation of congressional Democrats, Bush has issued numerous rules that relax environmental and industry regulations concerning such issues as the amount of allowable diesel engine exhaust, the number of hours that truck drivers can remain on the road without resting, and the logging of federal forests. …