The Torture of Children and Adolescents Living and Dying in Guatemala’s Institutions

In this article, Professor Madeleine Plasencia examines the legal context of treatment of disabled children in Guatemala living in institutionalized environments. The article explores evidence that children confined in orphanages and other public care facilities in Guatemala endure conditions that violate the provisions against torture and other cruel or degrading treatment or punishment provided under various international instruments, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The article discusses the growing world-wide desperation from poverty and food scarcity that drives families to place their children with and without disabilities in state-supported institutions. The article argues that foreign funding and volunteer-tourism and international adoption networks contribute to the separation, institutionalization and subsequent commodification of children in an international market

Who’s Afraid of Humpty Dumpty: Deconstructionist References in Judicial Opinions

This Article examines the treatment of deconstruction in United States judicial opinions.\u27 A handful of cases have directly referred to the French philosopher and literary theorist, Jacques Derrida.2 In each of these cases, the court has rejected Derrida\u27s philosophy, apparently out of a fear that recognition of any legitimacy of Derrida\u27s thoughts would lead to the self-destruction of the legal world. These courts have misunderstood that consideration or recognition of Derrida\u27s philosophy in the legal context would not unavoidably lead to the end of all meaningful legal discourse in the United States. A discussion of these cases will serve as a springboard for an examination of traditional methods of legal interpretation, and how these methods interact with deconstruction. Derrida\u27s philosophy, which gave rise to the philosophy known as deconstruction, contends that in Western culture our conception of the world depends upon a logocentric view. One of Derrida\u27s examples of this logocentrism involves the favoring of written communication over verbal communication. The hallmark of Derrida is his discussion of the internal contradictions of language which, undermine any contention that language is capable of uniform meaning. The question of why judges are concerned with justifying or defending their decisions from the followers of Derrida?, is posed in this Article both generally, as a matter of legal interpretation, and specifically, within the context of the issue(s) presented in the examined cases. By examining the concerns articulated by the judges in these cases and then referring back to the writings of Derrida, this Article describes the likely outcome if Derrida\u27s views of (legal)interpretation are in fact applied in judicial opinion-making. In Parts II and III, this Article introduces the reader to important concepts in Derridean deconstruction. These concepts include notions of privileging, iterability, and the free play of text. Derrida\u27s work is presented generally and is examined in light of his writings concerning law, justice, and authority. In Part IV, this Article demonstrates the protean nature of law3 by an examination of contract law. Part V examines the relationship of statutory law and common law as a doubling of the difficulties of applying law uniformly and coherently. As this Article demonstrates, the intent of the legislative body in enacting law is thwarted by individual judges\u27 reading and writing of the law in the conjugation of caselaw. Finally, this Article demonstrates that the inherent difficulties in interpreting and applying laws lie in the relationship between the ultimate arbiter of law and the text of the law itself

Disabling Fascism: A Struggle for the Last Laugh in Trump’s America

Six years before the start of the Second World War and seven months after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany, the German government instituted the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases.” The moral depravity that started as a sterilization program targeting “useless eaters” and lives “unworthy of life” degenerated into a “euthanasia” program that murdered at least 250,000 people with mental and physical dis/abilities as an “open secret” until 1941, when the Bishop of Munster, Clemens August Count von Galen, delivered a sermon protesting the killing of “unproductive people.”2 Although the Trump Administration has not yet driven the United States to implement systematic killings of undesirables, informed reflection cautions that the cultural and legal shifts we are witnessing in the era of Trump arc back to pre-World War II Germany. In order to understand how and why that disturbed time resonates with our own, it is necessary but not sufficient to reflect on images and stories served up by the 24/7 news cycles of major cable networks or by the glitter of our contemporary art markets.3 Understanding the present requires understanding the past precisely because repetition is taking place. The Trump Administration’s policies target people with dis/abilities, veterans, the poor, the foreign and displaced—for exclusion and dispossession in ways that reveal the elements of a resurgent fascism. In this essay, I probe evidence linking the emergence of fascism to the treatment of these vulnerable groups and reflect on the implications of Trump’s current day policies for the future of Latinx peoples, both within the United States and beyond its borders. The linkages connecting the era of Trump to the period in Germany just before the rise of Hitler include the debasement of public discourse about vulnerable groups, the aggressive promotion of spectacular militarism, vilification of otherness and polarization of difference, as well as the use of state legislative and administrative power to exacerbate, rather than combat or remedy, the further dispossession and exclusion of political scapegoats targeted to distract and confuse a national majority disoriented by the consequences of military defeat and economic crisi

Internet Sexual Predators: Protecting Children in the Global Community

The Internet, serving as the largest network of computers in the world, has provided the horizontal parallax over which all can participate in communication and transaction, education and entertainment4 It also serves a community of participants and beneficiaries whose goals are not always shared or legal. The rise of this advanced technology has led to a new red light district. Unlike the physical spaces available for the distribution of pornography and sexual favors for money, the Internet, with its lack of structure, has led to an unimaginable amount of pornography available for any on-line spectator.\u27 Information necessary for consummation of transactions in the sex economy worldwide is more easily available than ever before. Moreover, children worldwide are now at greater risk than ever before. In Part II of this Article, I discuss how the Internet puts children at greater risk. Part III is an examination of cases arising out of Internet use that led to abuse of children. Part IV explores the Internet and the mail-order bride business as it affects children outside the United States. In Part V, I discuss crimes involving what is termed virtual abuse. Part VI covers legislative responses to the problem. In Part VII, I examine jurisdictional problems encountered with crimes involving cyberspace. Finally, Part VIII provides my conclusions and a caveat

Telecommunications in the Twenty-First Century: Global Perspectives on Community and Diaspora Among Netcitizens

The Internet brings heady communications opportunities to those who have access to the Internet. Yet, mounting evidence has proven that a gap or divide exists on Internet usage and access. The divide exists within the United States and, increasingly, on a global basis. Part I of this Article introduces the term digital divide and explores the deployment of advanced telecommunications in the United States. Part II traces patterns of access to the Internet based on race and income and subordinates the statistical evidence to the realities of lack of access, and lends a human face to contextualize the real losses at the most practical level of living without access to advanced technologies. Part III focuses on the telecommunications industry\u27s presence worldwide. With this information, this Article concludes that serious consideration of global gaps by U.S. businesses should be addressed and remedied to promote social and economic stability among all netcitizens

No Right to Lie, Cheat, or Steal: Public Good v. Private Order

In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle takes up the task of examining the meaning of “equity and what is equitable — about how equity is related to justice, and what is equitable to what is just.” In this Article, Professor Plasencia takes up Aristotle’s account of the completing role of equity as a lens through which to examine the concepts that inform the legal repudiation of fraud and deceit in three cases at the intersection of torts and contracts. The three cases — though taken from the different substantive areas of marital relations, business mergers, and real estate transactions — are shown in this Article to occupy a common field of meaning in which law repeatedly has been called upon to deal with the injuries caused by fraud and deception. Across different states, different countries, indeed even different centuries, these three cases show how law has chosen to take such injuries as a serious challenge both to do justice between the parties and to prioritize the public good over the inequities of private order. The author argues that excavating the understandings that inform the legal repudiation of fraud and deceit is a timely and pressing project precisely because America appears, at this time, to be struggling under the burden of an increasingly pervasive tolerance for lies and deception in our private and public affairs. This apparent tolerance is evident in the contours of the Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence and further exacerbated by the pervasive circulation of what the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt has aptly called “bullshit.”At a surface level, each case appears to concern a very different area of law. Part II takes up the case of Moore v. Moore, in which the State of Texas court system was called upon to interpret the requirement of voluntariness in a Texas statute establishing the conditions for prenuptial agreements to be valid in the State, raising a debate as old as Aristotle as to the remedies that ought to be available for fraud in such agreements. Part III takes up the case of ABRY Partners V, L.P. v. F&W Acquisition LLC in order to examine how fraud and deceit are handled in the context of a stock purchase agreement negotiated between two private equity firms. Though contract law is said to maximize the realm of freedom by holding parties to the terms of their agreements, the author argues that in this case the Court of Chancery’s decision to prioritize the public interest over the private order of the party’s contract is fully justified, not only because giving the fraudster the benefit of judicial enforcement makes the court an accomplice in effectuating unfairness between the parties, but also because judicial enforcement in such instances would operate to unravel the Idea of a contract — what it is and what it needs to be in order to perform the functions the legal form was invented to perform. In Part IV, the author takes up the seventeenth-century Earl of Oxford’s Case, in which the English Court of Chancery declared the independence and the primacy of equity over common law courts. The court’s reasoning provides occasion to reflect on the fact that our understandings of the way law should deal with the injury caused by fraud and deception have deep roots in the struggle to reconcile law and ethics. In the Earl of Oxford’s Case, that struggle is mediated through the question of the place of equity, understood generally as fairness and justice and specifically as a body of doctrine, in the formal structure of law — a question dating, once again, at least as far back as Aristotle.All three cases, by their refusal to allow a liar to profit from his fraud, underscore the law’s repudiation of fraud and deception as more than “mere bullshit” for which there is said to be no legal remedy. Beyond the questions of private order versus public interest, this Article examines how the legal treatment of fraud and deception also implicates the relationship between common law and equity. Like contract and tort law, common law and equity establish two very different ways of understanding how our social relations are and should be configured. From this perspective, the choice is whether to ground social order on inflexible laws of general application or to adjudicate it through case-specific and fact-sensitive determinations that aim to effectuate the requirements of justice as between the parties. Through her reading of the cases, the author argues that equitable concerns and equity itself are an unavoidable and desirable, and specifically not a dangerous supplement to law because equity plays a completing role to law

Covid-19, Lying, Mask-less Exposures and Disability During a Pandemic

This article focuses on disability law in the context of COVID-19. In dealing with this pandemic, businesses, schools and other covered entities have to navigate and manage (at least) three different categories of people congregating. First are those who act as if there were no pandemic at all; they simply do not care if they are contagious and insist upon not complying with safety precautions, such as mask-wearing and social distancing; second are people who have medical conditions that make them especially vulnerable and at high-risk for severe symptoms associated with the infection; third are people who have already contracted COVID-19, and are currently experiencing symptoms, or have recovered from COVID. The point of this article is to discuss law that protects the second and third groups, especially against the first group. In part I, I identify the special pandemic-focused problems that arise when these groups interact. In part II, I discuss the global and local statistics related to the spread of the virus, especially as they relate to the housing needs and demographics in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Miami, Florida is exemplary because it is the fourth-largest urban area in the United States (U.S.), with a population of approximately 5.5 million, and a density of nearly 4,500 persons per square mile. With daily nonstop flights between Miami International Airport and Paris, Warsaw, Morocco and London, Miami -Dade County is a world-class hot spot for coronavirus, ranking fourth in the U.S. for highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases. Thus, Miami is a site where we see the three categories of people—mask-less individuals, those who are medically vulnerable to COVID-19, and those who have currently or previously tested positive for COVID—have come unwittingly together, explosively challenging the legal frameworks. In part III, I revisit significant pre-COVID-19 contagion cases for a discussion of historical and recurring problems of discrimination and containment. In part IV, I discuss the role of the state in protecting vulnerable persons against the mask-less. Part V addresses the emerging U.S. Supreme Court COVID-19 jurisprudence in the context of religious freedom, which I argue are arguably contagion non-containment cases. Part VI concludes that state “contagion law” and federal disability law can be understood to work together to keep everyone safe, especially during a pandemic

Employment at Will: The French Experience as a Basis for Reform

Roughly one-quarter of the workers in the United States are represented by unions, leaving three-quarters subject to the vicissitudes of the employment-at-will doctrine.\u27 At-will employees, as a general matter, lack protection against dismissal without cause.2 That is, an employer may dismiss an at will employee without notice, for good reason, bad reason or no reason at all, so long as the proffered reasons for dismissal do not violate random whistle-blowing provisions or federal and state anti-discrimination statutes.\u27 The mirror image of the employer\u27s right to dismiss at will is the right of an employee who was hired to perform work for an indefinite period of time to terminate the employment relationship for any reason at any time. By contrast, union employees enjoy the benefit of the collective bargaining agreement which, in a written contract between the employer and the union, expressly creates mutual rights and obligations.\u27 The collective agreement lays down nearly all of the terms and conditions of employment of the employees in the bargaining unit.6 One of the terms present in nearly all collective agreements is a term limiting the employer\u27s power of discharge to cases in which just cause exists.7 Nonunionized employees, however, remain subject to the traditional doctrine of at-will employment. State courts have recognized some exceptions to this doctrine in the past two decades.\u27 For the most part, however, these are narrow exceptions, based on public policy concerns. Some observers have argued that the continuing judicial erosion of the employment-at-will doctrine will move closer the date of true statutory reform of dismissal law. The purpose of this Comment is to explore the feasibility of modeling either a federal or a uniform state statute governing dismissal law after statutes that now exist in a few states. 2 A look at other countries\u27 statutory development may also be instructive. 3 France provides one such model. Part One of this Comment focuses on the French approach to the dismissal law. Part Two of the Comment examines France\u27s restrictions on the employer\u27s right to dismiss through the development of the judicial doctrine of a bus de droit. I4 Part Two also analyzes the underlying purposes of the early dismissal legislation in France and explores the mechanics and judicial application of the French dismissal statute. Part Three examines the historical development of the employment-at-will doctrine in the United States and its judicial and legislative erosion. Part Four suggests a way to incorporate both the French model and the existing International Labor Organization unfair dismissal standards into our state statutory systems. The Comment concludes that adoption of unfair dismissal legislation on a state-by-state basis in the United States is not only timely and feasible but also desirable

Fungal inoculation effect on post-harvest sugarcane residue decomposition under field conditions

Fungal inoculation effect on post-harvest sugarcane residue (SCR) decomposition in field conditions was studied. In vitro interaction between selected fungi was determined by direct confrontation. Mycelial growth response to different concentrations of herbicides and urea was also assessed. Fungal combinations did not show inhibitory effects. Bjerkandera sp. Y-HHM2 and Myrothecium sp. S-3.20 growth decreased in 2.4-D agar plates. However, Pleurotus sp. Y- RN3 showed a stimulation in 10 ppm 2.4-D agar plates. The biggest growth in ametrine supplemented cultures was observed in Pleurotus sp. Y-RN3. Evaluation of increasing urea concentrations on mycelial growth showed that 5,000 ppm significantly inhibits mycelial growth. The field assay under rainfed condition showed that post-harvest SCR decomposition rate significantly increases in Y-HHM2, Y-RN3 and Y-HHM2/Y-RN3/S-3.20 treatments. This is the first report on the capability of Bjerkandera sp. Y-HHM2 and Pleurotus sp. Y-RN3 to accelerate post-harvest SCR decomposition in rainfed conditions at field scale, suggesting that these fungi might be useful tools in the sugarcane crop system.Fil: Maza, Marianela. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria. Centro de Investigaciones Agropecuarias. Instituto de Investigación Animal del Chaco Semiárido; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. Facultad de Agronomía y Zootecnia. Sanidad Vegetal. Cátedra Fitopatología; ArgentinaFil: Medina, M.. Gobierno de Tucumán. Ministerio de Desarrollo Productivo. Estación Experimental Agroindustrial Obispo Colombres; ArgentinaFil: Plasencia, Adriana María. Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. Facultad de Agronomía y Zootecnia; ArgentinaFil: Amoroso, Maria Julia del R.. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tucumán. Planta Piloto de Procesos Industriales Microbiológicos; ArgentinaFil: Yasem, Marta Graciela. Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. Facultad de Agronomía y Zootecnia. Sanidad Vegetal. Cátedra Fitopatología; Argentin

Evaluación del porcentaje de material núcleo en conductos radiculares obturados con puntas de gutapercha y de Real Seal de distintas conicidades

Objetivo. El objetivo del presente estudio fue evaluar el porcentaje de aterial núcleo en conductos radiculares de dientes monorradiculares obturados mediante compactación lateral y puntas de gutapercha o de Real Seal de conicidades 2% y 4% junto con un sellador. Material y métodos. Se emplearon 40 conductos de dientes maxilares anteriores. Se prepararon los conductos mediante rotación horaria continua hasta un calibre 30/.04. Se obturaron mediante compactación lateral en frío. Se formaron al azar cuatro grupos de diez especimenes cada uno: Grupo A (punta de gutapercha conicidad 2% y Topseal); Grupo B (punta de gutapercha conicidad 4% y Topseal); Grupo C (puntas de Real Seal conicidad 2% y su cemento); Grupo D (puntas de Real Seal conicidad 4% y su cemento). Transcurridas 48 horas se efectuaron cortes transversales de las raíces a 2, 4 y 6 mm del ápice. Se observaron mediante un estereomicroscopio, efectuando fotografías de cada corte, se digitalizaron y mediante un programa informático se evaluó el porcentaje que ocupaba el material núcleo respecto al área total de la sección del conducto. Resultados. No se observaron diferencias significativas entre todos los grupos, solo en las comparaciones de dos a dos en tres subgrupos. Conclusiones. Bajo las condiciones de nuestro estudio, no hallamos diferencias significativas en cuanto al porcentaje de material núcleo respecto al total del área de la sección de conductos radiculares obturados mediante puntas de gutapercha o Real Seal de conicidades 2% y 4%