Toward a Jurisprudence of the Civil Rights Acts

Robin L. West, Frederick Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy at Georgetown University, will present “Toward a Jurisprudence of the Civil Rights Acts” as the University of Georgia School of Law’s 110th Sibley Lecturer Oct. 23 at 3:30 p.m. in the Hatton Lovejoy Courtroom of Hirsch Hall. The event is free and open to the public. West, who specializes in constitutional law, contracts, interdisciplinary law, jurisprudence and philosophy, will discuss the meaning of the civil rights protected by the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act, as well as the meaning of “civil rights” more generally, contrasting both with constitutional rights developed over the last half century. West has served for more than 20 years as a law professor at Georgetown, where she is also the faculty director of the Georgetown Center for Law and Humanities. She teaches in the areas of torts and contracts and leads seminars on feminist legal theory, legal justice, jurisprudence, contemporary legal scholarship, law and humanities, and law and literature. Her scholarship has appeared in journals such as the Boston University Law Review, the Harvard Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and the Yale Law Journal. In addition, West has authored “Normative Jurisprudence: An Introduction,” which was published by Cambridge University Press, and she is currently authoring and co-editing the forthcoming books “Teaching Law” and “Common Ground in the Abortion Debates,” respectively. West has served on the editorial boards of several interdisciplinary journals including The Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law and has served on the Law and Society Association Board of Advisors. She has been recognized with numerous awards throughout her career, including the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities 2009 James Boyd White Lifetime Achievement Award. She earned her bachelor of arts and her Juris Doctor from the University of Maryland and her master of science of laws from Stanford University. The Sibley Lecture Series, established in 1964 by the Charles Loridans Foundation of Atlanta in tribute to the late John A. Sibley, is designed to attract outstanding legal scholars of national prominence to Georgia Law. Sibley was a 1911 graduate of the law school

Tragic Rights: The Rights Critique in the Age of Obama

This article discusses the absence of the Rights Critique in the modern era, and its impact on the current formulation of rights in America. The three-pronged rights critique-–that U.S. constitutional rights politically insulate and valorize subordination, legitimate and thus perpetrate greater injustices than they address, and socially alienate us from community--was nearly ubiquitous in the 1980s. Since that time, it has largely disappeared, which in this author’s view is an unfortunate development. The rights critique continues to be relevant today, because Obama-era rights continue to subordinate, legitimate, and alienate. However, these rights do more than just exaggerate the pathologies of rights about which the rights critiques have complained. For one, Obama-era rights are more lethal than the original rights targeted by the rights critique. But most importantly, several Obama-era rights are best described as defensive rights, which allow the holder to withdraw from the social compact with a failed or failing state. Recent court decisions have recognized the right of citizens to withdraw from the bonds of citizenship, because the state has proven to be incapable of performing its most basic functions, such as providing for the poor, providing children with an adequate education, or preventing violence against its citizens. Finally, the article argues that the proper response is not to withdraw from the social compact through the courts, but to engage the citizenry in rebuilding the state so that the state is capable of performing its essential functions

Are There Nothing but Texts in this Class? Interpreting the Interpretive Turns in Legal Thought

This Article examines the impact of the twenty-year-old turn toward interpretation in legal and constitutional scholarship. In part, because of the impact of Hans-Georg Gadamer\u27s work, scores of critical legal scholars, including some of those writing for this Symposium, now think of adjudication and legal discourse generally as primarily interpretive, rather than economic or political or distinctively legal enterprises. This turn toward interpretation has opened the way for new insights and ways of thinking, but it has also come with costs. It has, for example, diverted attention from the ways in which constitutional law might be appropriately criticized by reference to values drawn from somewhere other than competing texts. This Article assesses those costs, and in light of them, urges a partial return to noninterpretive or preinterpretive ways of thinking about law and its consequences

Intentional Procreation

Dov Fox’s book Birth Rights and Wrongs makes the case for the development, through judicial decision-making, of various torts that would respond to the disruption of intentional conception, contraception, gestation and childbirth, where those intentions are thwarted because of the negligence of professionals employed to assist or guide consumers of their services in reaching their reproductive goals

Assessing compliance: Active versus inactive trainees in a memory intervention

Extensive research on memory interventions has confirmed their success with older adults, but the individual difference factors that predict successful training outcomes remain relatively unexplored. In the current intervention, trainees were identified as active (compliant with training regimens) or inactive using trainer ratings based on attendance, homework completion, and class participation. The active group showed significantly greater training-related gains than the inactive group and the control group on most measures. Compliance was predicted by health, education, and self-efficacy. Specifically, active trainees were more likely to have advanced degrees and somewhat higher self-efficacy, and to have higher vitality and fewer functional limitations than the inactive trainees. This research may assist future investigators to target interventions to those who will show the most benefit

MOOSE CONSERVATION IN THE NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE SYSTEM, USA

The National Wildlife Refuge System in the United States includes about 150 million acres of lands and waters within 550 refuges managed for conservation. A variety of laws, regulations, and management polices help ensure these areas will be preserved for future generations. In a web-based survey, 35 refuges reported having established populations of moose (Alces alces) within their boundaries with nearly 40 million acres of moose habitat, 99% in Alaska. The 4 recognized subspeciesof moose in North America were represented on refuges found in 12 states. Approximately 39,000 moose were reported inhabiting refuges in the USA; about 38,000 in Alaska. Only 9 refuges used management practices specifically to benefit moose, primarily prescribed or wildland fire. Moose populations on refuges varied greatly and refuge managers reported numerous concerns including climate change, illegal harvest, habitat loss or degradation, parasites, disturbance, moose-vehicle collisions, predators, and both recreational and subsistence hunting. Future management implications of these issues are discussed