THE ENDURING GENOCIDE AGAINST THE YAZIDIS: How Iraq\u27s Law on Religious Identity Violates the Human Rights of Yazidi Survivors of ISIS Captivity and Their Children Born of Sexual Violence

2024 marked the ten-year anniversary of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) genocide against the Yazidis—an ethnoreligious minority community indigenous to northwest Iraq. Beginning in August 2014, ISIS executed between 3,000 and 5,000 Yazidi men and elderly Yazidi women and buried them in mass graves, kidnapped and converted young Yazidi boys to a radical form of Sunni Islam and pressed them into military service, and captured or trafficked over 6,800 Yazidi women and children, subjecting many of them to sexual violence. ISIS carried out its intent to eradicate the Yazidis through systematic murder, forced conversion, and sexual violence with brutal intensity and on a shocking scale. The horrific acts perpetrated by the terrorist group against the Yazidis have been recognized as genocide by the United Nations, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and many other countries around the world. While ISIS was defeated in Iraq in 2017, and the Iraqi government and non-governmental organization (NGO) groups have made progress in rebuilding the Yazidi homeland in Sinjar, several hundred Yazidi survivors of conflict-related sexual violence—many with children born from their time in captivity—are unable or unwilling to return, forcing them to languish in displaced persons camps in northern Iraq and Syria to this day. And while the Yazidi Supreme Spiritual Council has publicly welcomed back female survivors of sexual violence, some members of the community have been less accepting of the children born in captivity to ISIS fathers—in large part because of a 2016 law designating these children as Muslim. This article examines the harsh impacts of the National Card Law on Yazidi mothers, who gave birth in ISIS captivity, and on their children through the lens of international human rights law. In hindering these women from returning to their homeland of Sinjar with their children and in preventing this new generation from carrying on the Yazidi religion, the National Card Law violates their fundamental human rights under international treaties and the Iraqi Constitution and perpetuates the devastating effects of ISIS’s genocide against the Yazidis

Towards a Federalism(s) Framework of Punishment

Federalism and its impact on criminal punishment is foundational to understanding the failures of mass incarceration. Scholars studying the negotiation of power between the federal and state governments have highlighted the increase of cooperative agreements that allow these levels of government to accomplish mutually beneficial outcomes for their overlapping constituencies. In the context of criminal punishment, however, such cooperation has devolved into a race to the bottom in a bipartisan push to punish. Consequently, the modern cooperative era of federalism has facilitated mass incarceration in many respects as a policy vehicle to accomplish a national tough-on-crime agenda. This Article argues for a new conception of punishment that forms important synergies within a redesigned federalism system. The core principle that connects punishment and federalism theory is their impact on the liberty interests of the individual. This Article builds on this unifying principle of liberty to constrain cooperative criminal federalism from abusing its power and oversubscribing to carceral punishments. These unique tools that merge federalism and punishment theories form the federalism(s) framework of punishment. This framework leads to a set of policy outcomes in which the federal and state governments conflict, cooperate, and coordinate in different contexts with the goal of fully appreciating the liberty interests of offenders while increasing public safety

Dream a Little Dream of Licensing: Jazz and the § 115 Compulsory Music Reproduction License

The compulsory music reproduction license codified at 17 U.S.C. § 115 allows anyone to obtain the right to record another version of, or “cover,” a previously published musical work. Invoking the compulsory license, however, comes at a dramatic cost. Under § 115(a)(2), the licensee cannot copyright any original musical material they compose for the cover without express permission from the underlying copyright owner, even if that material would otherwise be copyrightable. This limitation gravely harms jazz music, as jazz relies on dynamic recompositions of preexisting music. Jazz musicians depend on compulsory licenses to record the reinterpretative covers essential to the genre, but are barred from copyrighting the original, expressive solos and arrangements that they record as part of their covers. This prohibition on copyrightability means jazz musicians do not receive royalty compensation for composing their solos and arrangements when their recordings are performed, reproduced, distributed, or licensed. This also allows third parties—often major music publishing companies—to transcribe and sell jazz arrangements and solos without compensating their performers or composers. This Note addresses fundamental flaws in the compulsory licensing regime and proposes a novel statutory amendment allowing jazz musicians to “dream a little dream” of licensing

Challenging Race-Based Health Care Discrimination: A New Private Right of Action

The Hippocratic Oath calls on doctors to “do no harm.” Yet we know from extensive public health research that clinicians repeatedly cause harm to Black patients by dismissing their medical concerns, misdiagnosing them, and undertreating their pain. These practices of differential treatment for Black patients have led to steadily increasing racial disparities in health care outcomes throughout the United States. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits this type of disparate impact, but modern Supreme Court jurisprudence forecloses opportunities for affected parties to seek legal relief—despite the clearly established legislative intent of Title VI. However, another legal mechanism remains. Section 1557 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability in health programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance. In applying this provision, this Note offers a path forward for civil rights plaintiffs who have been affected by inadequate medical treatment on the basis of race

The War on Trade: Applying the WTO Security Exceptions to Economic Security Measures

This article examines the efficacy of the WTO treaties’ security exception provisions in curbing abusive appeals to national security to justify otherwise impermissible trade measures. It specifically explores whether GATT Article XXI and its sister provisions establish objectively discernible prerequisite conditions for their invocation, how far Member discretion extends in defining “essential security interests,” and whether the WTO dispute system offers sufficiently objective legal standards to prevent abuse of the security exceptions. Building on existing scholarship, this article employs a comprehensive interpretive analysis of all available means under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) and integrates not just the landmark Russia – Traffic in Transit report, but also the recent United States – Steel and Aluminum and United States – Origin Marking cases of December 2022. This interpretive exercise identifies a uniform analytical framework running through each WTO Panel report reviewing invocations of the security exceptions and applies that framework to critique the U.S. position on the issue. Under this interpretive framework, this article ultimately determines whether and to what extent the WTO security exceptions including GATT Article XXI(b)(iii) justify discriminatory and anti-competitive trade measures purportedly imposed in the name of “economic security.

The State[s] of Confession Law in a Post-Miranda World

Police interrogators often use lies, threats, subterfuge, and psychological pressure to coerce vulnerable suspects to speak. These tactics produce false confessions, contribute to racial injustice, and undermine the legitimacy of the criminal process. Despite a documented need for better regulation, theU.S. Supreme Court has watered down constitutional protections in the interrogation room, signaling its intent to delegate most regulation of police interrogation practices to the states. Reformers and scholars must think about how best to push states to fill the void left by the absence of federal oversight. This Article catalogues four different state approaches to regulating confession law: procedural protections, substantive restrictions, rules of adjudication, and changes in police approaches to training. It then draws conclusions about the relative effectiveness of these different approaches in light of currently available empirical, psychological, and sociological research. It argues that substantive restrictions on interrogation practices through rules with robust remedies are the best way to promote lasting change and restore legitimacy to what is currently a broken system. Recognizing that policymakers in different states and localities face different political climates, the Article concludes by outlining a graduated set of reforms that permits policymakers to identify what would be most feasible and effective in their respective jurisdictions

Sparing The Gory Details: Legal And Social Inertia And The Refusal To Confront The Body In Pregnancy

Health, including pain, suffering, blood, and guts, has always played an outsized role in legal and public analysis of abortion. Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the health implications of forced childbirth have returned to the public’s attention, as evidenced by prevalent health exceptions to abortion bans, legal actions in regard to those bans and exceptions, public attention to those cases, and public opinion polling. Recent, highly publicized cases of medical emergencies associated with pregnancy could be expected to reinvigorate a public exploration of the health risks of pregnancy, but the public has consistently refused to acknowledge the full scope of those risks. This Article is an examination of press coverage of two of the most highly publicized health exception cases since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Content analysis of over 600 U.S. News articles shows that the public still avoids discussing the health implications of abortion, even in press directly related to health threats. This offers an example of the barriers and inertia to social and legal change that are created by accepted and unaccepted narratives; in this case, narratives of “good women,” “deserving women,” and “good mothers.