The Limits of Moral Intuitions for Human Rights Advocacy

The central ambition of human rights advocacy is to get people to care, who might otherwise not, about the suffering of others. To accomplish this, human rights advocates often appeal to moral intuitions by telling stories that evoke moral outrage, indignation, or guilt. Are these sorts of appeals a good way to promote human rights? The conventional wisdom suggests that they are. But perhaps the conventional wisdom is incomplete—perhaps human rights advocates should treat moral intuitions with skepticism rather than uncritical embrace. In this brief essay, I argue that appeals to moral intuitions are problematic because moral intuitions can lead people to make decisions that are suboptimal from the standpoint of the human rights regime’s goals. I attempt to show, in other words, that one of the great assets of the human rights regime—its ability to harness our strong intuitive reaction to the suffering of others—is also one of its great limitations. To make this argument, I draw from the mind sciences literature on moral decision-making. The latest research in this domain suggests that our moral intuitions are fallible. A number of studies have shown, for example, that moral outrage and indignation can cause people to make decisions that they would not defend under cooler conditions. I focus on three particular sorts of moral judgment biases and explore their implications for human rights advocacy. I then evaluate two different normative claims one might make about these moral judgment biases and offer several concluding thoughts

Data Beyond Borders: Mutual Legal Assistance in the Internet Era

The global nature of today’s Internet services presents a unique challenge to international law enforcement cooperation. On a daily basis, law enforcement agents in one country seek access to data that is beyond their jurisdictional reach; as one industry analyst put it, there has been, “an internationalization of evidence.” In order to gain lawful access to data that is subject to another state’s jurisdiction, law enforcement agents must request mutual legal assistance (MLA) from the country that can legally compel the data’s disclosure. But the MLA regime has not been updated to manage the enormous rise of requests for MLA. This report reviews existing MLA law and policy and proposes a number of reforms

Moral Judgments & International Crimes: The Disutility of Desert

The international criminal regime exhibits many retributive features, but scholars and practitioners rarely defend the regime in purely retributive terms—that is, by reference to the inherent value of punishing the guilty. Instead, they defend it on the consequentialist grounds that it produces the best policy outcomes, such as deterrence, conflict resolution, and reconciliation. These scholars and practitioners implicitly adopt a behavioral theory known as the utility of desert, a theory about the usefulness of appealing to people\u27s retributive intuitions. That theory has been critically examined in domestic criminal scholarship but practically ignored in international criminal law. This Article fills this gap and argues that whatever its merits in the domestic realm, there are special reasons to be skeptical about the utility of desert claim in the international context. Moral intuitions as heuristics for moral judgments are error-prone, and the international criminal regime has a number of extraordinary features that may increase the likelihood and cost of these errors. These features include the complexity of the crimes; the diversity of stakeholders who possess heterogeneous intuitions; and the regime\u27s multiple goals, some of which may be inhibited by moral condemnation. After examining these differences, the Article outlines the implications of the analysis for regime design. Some of these design implications accommodate the international criminal regime\u27s current retributive approach, and some are fundamentally incompatible with retributivism

The Transparency Tax

Transparency is critical to good governance, but it also imposes significant governance costs. Beyond a certain point, excess transparency acts as a kind of tax on the legal system. Others have noted the burdens of maximalist transparency policies on both budgets and regulatory efficiency, but they have largely ignored the deeper cost that transparency imposes: it constrains one’s ability to support the law while telling a self-serving story about what that support means. Transparency’s true tax on the law is the loss of expressive ambiguity. In order to understand this tax, this Article develops a taxonomy of transparency types. Typically, transparency means something like openness. But openness about what—the law’s obligations? The reasons for the obligations? The actors behind the law? And open to whom? These are different aspects of what we typically lump together and call “transparency,” and they present different tradeoffs. With these tradeoffs in mind, we can begin to make more informed choices about how to draw the line between maximal and minimal transparency. Of particular note is the finding that we can demand maximal transparency about the law’s obligations without incurring much of the transparency tax. This runs contrary to the soft law literature, which suggests that vagueness about obligation is less costly than the alternative. The Article concludes with a guide for thinking through future transparency tradeoffs

A Behavioral Approach to Human Rights

For the last sixty years, scholars and practitioners of international human rights have paid insufficient attention to the ground level social contexts in which human rights norms are imbued with or deprived of social meaning. During the same time period, social science insights have shown that social conditions can have a significant impact on human behavior. This Article is the first to investigate the far-ranging implications of behavioralism—especially behavioral insights about social influence—for the international human rights regime. It explores design implications for three broad components of the regime: the content, adjudication, and implementation of human rights. In addition, the Article addresses some of the advantages and limitations of the behavioral approach and outlines the rich but unexplored nexus of behavioralism, norms, and international law

Toward a Situational Model for Regulating International Crimes

The international criminal regime, as currently conceived, relies almost exclusively on the power of backward-looking criminal sanctions to deter future international crimes. This model reflects the dominant mid-century approach to crime control, which was essentially reactive. Since then, domestic criminal scholars and practitioners have developed and implemented new theories of crime control—theories notable for their promise of crime prevention through ex ante attention to community and environmental factors. Community policing crime prevention through environmental design, and related situational approaches to crime control have had a significant impact on the administration of domestic criminal law. This Article evaluates the implications of these approaches for the international criminal regime. Despite the significant distinctions between international and domestic crimes, there are important similarities—most notably, the finding that environmental factors play a key role in the commission of both sorts of crimes. This finding creates space for the situational turn at the international level. Applying this model to the international regime has implications for how we understand and design tactics aimed at preventing international crimes ex ante. It also has real and theoretical implications for ex post justice

Toward a Situational Model for Regulating International Crimes

The international criminal regime, as currently conceived, relies almost exclusively on the power of backward-looking criminal sanctions to deter future international crimes. This model reflects the dominant mid-century approach to crime control, which was essentially reactive. Since then, domestic criminal scholars and practitioners have developed and implemented new theories of crime control—theories notable for their promise of crime prevention through ex ante attention to community and environmental factors. Community policing crime prevention through environmental design, and related situational approaches to crime control have had a significant impact on the administration of domestic criminal law. This Article evaluates the implications of these approaches for the international criminal regime. Despite the significant distinctions between international and domestic crimes, there are important similarities—most notably, the finding that environmental factors play a key role in the commission of both sorts of crimes. This finding creates space for the situational turn at the international level. Applying this model to the international regime has implications for how we understand and design tactics aimed at preventing international crimes ex ante. It also has real and theoretical implications for ex post justice

Modified brinley plots: advantages and disadvantages

Accepted manuscrip

Aero-Heating of Shallow Cavities in Hypersonic Freestream Flow

The purpose of these experiments and analysis was to augment the heating database and tools used for assessment of impact-induced shallow-cavity damage to the thermal protection system of the Space Shuttle Orbiter. The effect of length and depth on the local heating disturbance of rectangular cavities tested at hypersonic freestream conditions has been globally assessed using the two-color phosphor thermography method. These rapid-response experiments were conducted in the Langley 31-Inch Mach 10 Tunnel and were initiated immediately prior to the launch of STS-114, the initial flight in the Space Shuttle Return-To-Flight Program, and continued during the first week of the mission. Previously-designed and numerically-characterized blunted-nose baseline flat plates were used as the test surfaces. Three-dimensional computational predictions of the entire model geometry were used as a check on the design process and the two-dimensional flow assumptions used for the data analysis. The experimental boundary layer state conditions were inferred using the measured heating distributions on a no-cavity test article. Two test plates were developed, each containing 4 equally-spaced spanwise-distributed cavities. The first test plate contained cavities with a constant length-to-depth ratio of 8 with design point depth-to-boundary-layer-thickness ratios of 0.1, 0.2, 0.35, and 0.5. The second test plate contained cavities with a constant design point depth-to-boundary-layer-thickness ratio of 0.35 with length-to-depth ratios of 8, 12, 16, and 20. Cavity design parameters and the test condition matrix were established using the computational predictions. Preliminary results indicate that the floor-averaged Bump Factor (local heating rate nondimensionalized by upstream reference) at the tested conditions is approximately 0.3 with a standard deviation of 0.04 for laminar-in/laminar-out conditions when the cavity length-to-boundary-layer thickness is between 2.5 and 10 and for cavities in the depth-to-boundary-layer-thickness range of 0.3 to 0.8. Over this same range of conditions and parameters, preliminary results also indicate that the maximum Bump Factor on the cavity centerline falls between 2.0 and 2.75, as long as the cavity-exit conditions remain laminar. Cavities with length-to-boundary-layer-thickness ratio less than 2.5 can not be easily classified with this approach and require further analysis

Performativity, fabrication and trust: exploring computer-mediated moderation

Based on research conducted in an English secondary school, this paper explores computer mediated moderation as a performative tool. The Module Assessment Meeting (MAM) was the moderation approach under investigation. I mobilise ethnographic data generated by a key informant, and triangulated with that from other actors in the setting, in order to examine some of the meanings underpinning moderation within a performative environment. Drawing on the work of Ball (2003), Lyotard (1979) and Foucault (1977, 1979), I argue that in this particular case performativity has become entrenched in teachers’ day-to-day practices, and not only affects those practices but also teachers’ sense of self. I suggest that MAM represented performative and fabricated conditions and (re)defined what the key participant experienced as a vital constituent of her educational identities - trust. From examining the case in point, I hope to have illustrated for those interested in teachers’ work some of the implications of the interface between technology and performativity