Mugen's Public Library
Law and Human Rights
The Rohingya & Islamophobia: A Dire Situation
On August 31st, 2017, the lifeless husks of 9 women and 10 Rohingya refugees washed ashore the sands of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.1 Under dictatorial rule of the Myanmar army between 1962 and 2011, the Rohingya people of the Rakhine State have been handed a predicament of institutionalized oppression on the grounds of religious and ethnic discrimination. While these acts of terror are often justified by the supposed targeting of extremist subsets within the population, the scale and scope of these acts can only be regarded as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” says United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein. 2...
On the Dynamics of Law and Politics
To state that the “law is inherently political” is to propose a confounding moral dilemma. The law must be grounded in neutrality and impartiality, while politics, on the other hand, aims to be a more flexible and adaptable societal force. The convergence of these two spheres presents a volatile yet necessary moral hazard. In Sartre’s dirty hands problem he poses an interesting notion, that of the necessity of immoral actions when assuming a political role, especially when aiming to serve a greater good. What happens when this interjection of political ideologies and individually perceived “greater goods” hides behind the guise of legal neutrality and objectivity? Is the politicization of the law an unnatural phenomenon or a natural one? Is it an impermissible wrong or does it hold instrumental value? It’s no question that in times of war what we deem permissible for the protection of peace expands, but at what point does this permissibility halt?
The Immovable Olive Tree and the Unstoppable Force: The Obstacles to Deliberation Between Palestine and Israel
This paper examines the challenges to deliberation between Palestinians and Israelis under the Arendtian and Habbermasian conceptions of ideal communication. It draws on Palestinian and Israeli sources to determine a historically consistent account of the area’s factual reality. In doing so, the paper considers the asymmetric power relations between the two states and the impacts of occupation on Palestine’s embryonic constitution. By calling on legal critical race theorists and canadian indigenous law as the product of a completed colonial campaign, this paper tracks the genesis of Palestinian property law and situates it in an international legal framework. After developing an account of the contentious political and legal topography of modern day Palestine and Israel, this paper considers the phenomenological impacts of colonization on Palestinian’s experiences of time, statehood and history. In its concluding remarks, a Kantian model for cosmopolitan revolution is utilized for broadening the scope of ideal communication between Palestinians and Israelis in a globalizing world.
Accountability in Cyberworld: A Corporate Legal Theory of Platform Corporations
The internet was born out of the United State’s cold war efforts to defend against a Soviet nuclear threat. Despite being a child of war, cyberworld represented a hopeful new age for a global community of peace. The promise of a borderless digital world free from the clutches of state tyranny, would remind its citizens that we are all members of the same human race. While most western states deceivingly promised to allow the people of the digital sphere to govern themselves, Klonick uncovers the real corporate governors of these platforms. Social media corporations have pervaded the privacy and free speech rights of the users they commidify as resources to be mined for data. Under our current liberal legal models, the brute dichotomy between the private and public spheres have afforded these corporations the rights of private actors to govern without liability to the social order. These powers haven’t seen the light of day in the private sphere since 17th century corporations like the East India Company charged with the colonial, political and economic projects of the United Kingdom. This paper considers the legislative treatment of platform coorporations under a political theory of the firm, as well as proposes the need for a constitution for the internet as a naturally emergent intra-national corporation based on the germanic models of association.
Indigenous Cultures & Animal Rights
The contemporary animal rights movement has two chief missions. The first is to engage with pre-existing systems of animal exploitation and debase their underlying moral justifications which often take the shape of consent, necessity, or tradition. The second is to construct a framework that absorbs non-human animals into the constitutional considerations of the state through a political theory that places them within the same ecological and social ecosystem as humans (Donaldson and Kymlicka 163). In order to do so, the AR movement faces a significant legal hurdle, redefining animals as persons within our legislative schemes rather than property as they are chiefly considered (Donaldson and Kymlicka 161). Doing so would not only disrupt the human-animal binary which is “so deeply embedded in liberal legal orders” as Marie Fox posits (477), but would also disrupt the cultural and religious practices of groups that place the killing or mistreatment of animals at the center of their traditions. One such group is the Canadian Inuits which Kazez argues would face a “radically altered culture” if their traditional means of sustenance through hunting would be disrupted by the naturalization of animals as citizens (Donaldson and Kymlicka 183).
P.S: We should probably be more worried with mass consumption farms than indiginous hunting pratices
General Incorporation Acts in the 1800s
(also why corporations rule the world)
The widespread adoption of laws of general incorporations in the 1800s saw a dramatic shift in the number and monopolized power of legally privileged private corporations in the Western Hemisphere. Prior to the US Act of General Incorporation, corporations relied on federal and legislative charters in order to establish their organization as a legally empowered entity. Despite tremendous constitutional hurdles, this act was passed, giving way to mysteries surrounding a theory with sufficient explanatory power to bridge what seems like a contentious political matter surveying the friction of corporations’ special legal privilege and the democratic tenets of equal opportunity, as well as a shift that seems to be guarded by gatekeeping elites whose interests lie in the protection of this privileged access to markets and the capacity to restrict competition. Was this widespread adoption an implication of the rising tide of democracy, or would a results-based explanation underscored by shifts in economic ideologies moved by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations complement the phenomenon better? I argue that both these explanations provide a convincing model for the adoption of open access incorporations.
