Search Results

For some years now, the international community has recognised the need to recalibrate migration discourse and clarify the distinct, positive and necessary features of migration. To manage the complexities of global migration and not waste effort ‘reinventing the wheel’, it is crucial to build on existing law and policy frameworks in all efforts to address today’s global frenzy over migration, particularly the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 sustainable development goals. The challenge in connecting global migration with other processes, promoting linkages and avoiding overlap is one that must be deftly navigated. This chapter examines the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration as an avenue for maximising the efficiency of current regulatory frameworks, identifying gaps, promoting synergies, and utilising the connective capabilities of public and private international law to foster further integration in a highly diverse panoply of governance frameworks.

This chapter argues that the Bracero Program, begun as an international agreement between the US and Mexico to fill agricultural labor shortages during World War II, served as a way for agricultural interests in the rest of the nation to recreate the labor supply conditions enjoyed by the growers of South Texas. As a result, the Bracero Program mobilized large numbers of foreign workers, stripped of their basic rights of choice and mobility, for use all over the country. The Bracero Program ended in 1964, but its importance and effects have lasted much longer. This chapter also deals with the overwhelming importance of Texas as both a model and an obstacle to the smooth running of the system throughout its existence. From its inauguration in 1942 as a temporary wartime emergency measure until its quiet demise in 1964, the Bracero Program took the spirit of the deeply unequal labor relations of South Texas and spread them to the rest of the nation as a supposedly rational, necessary response to the exigencies of the agricultural labor market.

This chapter considers policy measures to increase the participation of SMEs in government procurement and their potential economic and social policy benefits. It considers the scale and importance of government procurement, and barriers to SME access to these markets. While some SME support policies are often considered to run counter to fundamental goals of government procurement (notably preference policies that may reduce competition and transparency), the chapter explains that many SME policies in fact support efficient and effective government procurement. It explores the synergies between such SME policies and measures designed to ensure cross-border access to government procurement markets. It considers relevant provisions in the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement and the UNCITRAL Model Law on Public Procurement, and concludes that their recent revisions to promote transparency and effectiveness in the pursuit of these policies are welcome, but that further work to ensure their effective application in practice is needed.

This chapter examines the development of teaching from the chair of Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations at the University of Edinburgh during the Scottish Enlightenment, with particular emphasis on the intellectual content of the classes and the politics of professorial appointments. For the first half-century, law teaching from the chair was intermittent. However, this does not mean that the holder was incapable or unlearned. When the holder of the chair did teach, the class was based on Hugo Grotius' De iure belli ac pacis libri tres. The chapter first provides an overview of legal education in Scottish universities before profiling the law professors who were appointed to the new chair between 1707 and 1831, including Charles Areskine, William Kirkpatrick, George Abercromby, Robert Bruce, James Balfour, Allan Maconochie, and Robert Hamilton. Robert Bruce was the last holder of the chair to teach Grotius' natural law.

This chapter analyzes the “new” set of regulations, beginning with the 1998 regulations on social organizations and the noncommercial institutions (min ban fei qiye danwei), and then moving to the 2004 foundation regulations. One of the critical questions is the extent to which the 1989 events in Tian'anmen Square hardened the attitude of the government against social organizations. Another significant event that caused many officials in the security apparatus to harden their attitude toward civil society was the surrounding of Zhongnanhai (where the high party officials live and work) by Falun Gong practitioners in 1999. This was, however, generally a period of “reform and opening up” for mainstream civil society itself, as open discussion with foreigners about the design of the regulatory framework for civil society organizations (CSOs) in China was encouraged. The chapter also considers the laws adopted during this era of legal change—the Public Welfare Donations Law and the Trust Law, which governs charitable trusts.

Christian Thomasius’s natural law works are usually interpreted as providing a philosophical theory for his positive public law treatises on church and constitutional law. This chapter argues to the contrary that Thomasius’s public law writings are founded not in his natural law but in positive imperial public law as this was received in the state of Brandenburg-Prussia. In this context, the central role of his natural law was as a program for the pedagogical formation of law students.

Chapter 14: analyzes some of the possible elements of an international law approach to a multilateral framework for sovereign debt restructuring. The chapter draws extensively from the deliberations and publications of the UNCTAD Working Group. He proposes the creation of a “counter-framework” using soft-law instruments of a kind generated by various UN processes and institutions, including the International Law Commission (ILC), UNCITRAL, and UNCTAD. The “counter-framework” would offer different norms, fora, legal mechanisms, expertise and analyses to those that dominate the existing informal framework (IMF, Paris Club, US Treasury, financial industry associations, private law firms, creditors’ groups, etc.). It would offer alternatives for borrower-lender relationships and the restructuring of debt, alternatives which if the analysis of this chapter (and the other chapters of this book) is correct, would benefit both sovereign debtors and creditors. This proposal might be of particular interest to states that could be sources of new finance and do not want to keep with the existing informal framework (like perhaps China).

This chapter recounts how President Franklin Roosevelt signed Public Law (PL) 405 on July 1, 1944, which amended the Nationality Act of 1940 to allow U.S. citizens living in the United States to renounce their citizenship during wartime. Although not stated explicitly, the law was aimed at dissident Nisei. As Manzanar Project Director Ralph Merritt remarked of the statute, “This is the first time in the history of a civilized nation that a government has permitted a citizen, during a state of war, to renounce his citizenship.” Officials had several motives for favoring such a law. Some sought to have renunciants exchanged for U.S. citizens detained in Japan. Indeed, the chairman of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee, Samuel Dickstein, suggested that the law's provisions be publicized in the camps, to be followed by notices “calling for volunteers to go to Japan in trade for Americans.”

This chapter discusses issues relating to the globalization of the cotton industry. Topics covered include the passage of the Agricultural Trade Development Act, or Public Law 480 (PL 480) in 1954, which provided for the export sale of surplus commodities for foreign currencies rather than dollars; the National Cotton Council’s establishment of the Cotton Council International (CCI) in 1956, tasked with making contractual agreements with the USDA-FAS and foreign governments for marketing development; establishment of the International Institute for Cotton (IIC); shifts in world cotton trade; trading blocs; cotton and the WTO; and the implementation of NAFTA and CAFTA.

Chapter 4 traces CARE’s development during a period of recurring organizational crisis and economic instability. It analyses how CARE’s management and board of directors dealt with organizational overextension and the need to find both a new humanitarian mission and more sustainable business model. CARE began to apply for government-donated food surplus resulting from structural agricultural overproduction in the United States. By delivering agricultural abundance such as milk powder, butter oil and other food staples to people in the developing countries, CARE successfully occupied a humanitarian market niche and established itself as a (neither entirely private nor entirely public) provider of food aid.

This chapter examines how experiences of racial profiling and other kinds of intensive police attention intersect with gun carry to produce a distinct gun politics among men of color and open carriers. The chapter opens by situating the experiences of gun carriers of color within the broader context of racial profiling and then explores how unwanted police attention, even among white gun carriers, produces a version of pro-gun politics in which public law enforcement is viewed not only as inadequate protectors but also rights-violators. Attending to the meanings that guns take on in relation to the race and gender identities of their carriers, this chapter looks at how these gun carriers use firearms—sometimes in confrontation with police—to assert themselves as lawful citizens and to compel public law enforcement to recognize their rights as such.

By 1954, U.S. government-owned food stocks were expanding rapidly, the result of a broad failure in domestic agricultural policy. Not only had it been extremely costly for taxpayers to pay farmers for these unneeded commodities, but the surpluses threatened to destabilize agricultural markets. Congress determined that the subsidized sales of these commodities to overseas customers was a good way to reduce the size of domestic surpluses and passed legislation to sell them for local currencies, which would be reinvested in the recipient countries to spur growth, or to barter them for raw materials the United States needed. At the last minute, a grant program was added to the legislation providing food relief to undernourished people in the world’s poorer countries. President Eisenhower signed the bill in July 1954. This was the beginning of America’s modern international food aid programs.