Volume 6, Spring 2009, Issue 2

THE LIFE CYCLE OF IMMIGRATION: A TALE OF TWO MIGRANTS

James M. Cooper, William J. Aceves, Alejandro González, & Pedro Egaña

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CONSCIENCE AND INTEREST: LAW, RIGHTS, AND POLITICS IN THE STRUGGLE TO CONFRONT CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE NEW POVERTY

Paul L. Joffe,

Herbert Hoover administered the American program providing food and other assistance to Europe in the wake of the First World War. From this experience, he said that “[i]t is impossible to discuss the peace of the world until adequate measures have been taken to alleviate the fear of hunger.” 

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CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: CURRENT STATUS AND FUTURE EVOLUTION

Joe W. (Chip) Pitts III

Whether or not those words were true when Kant penned them over two centuries ago, they are truer today than ever before in human history, and will resonate even more profoundly in the future. The current interrelated financial, economic, climate, energy, food, water, political, and security crises affecting the globe only highlight the historically unprecedented degree of interconnectivity and interdependence. Last year alone, the potent combination of social networking, mobile internet devices, location mapping, text messaging, video, and collaboration technologies more integrated with users’ lives have merged online and offline advocacy to inspire millions of people across the globe to protest against the Colombian revolutionaries, map the genocide in Darfur as well as the violence in Kenya, and organize strikes and civil disobedience in Egypt. The billions of cell phones in the world will increasingly be used to record, upload, forward, and display corporate and other abuses, whether of sweatshops employing child labor, pipeline leaks, trafficking of women and children, or corporate resources used to support crimes against humanity or genocide. People everywhere – even in the slums of Brazil or the jungles of Peru – can immediately see disparities in living and environmental conditions via smart phones, satellite television and internet. These new, powerful, ubiquitous, and interactive communications technologies help make possible efficient cross-border financial flows, just-in-time production, and economic globalization, to be sure; but they also empower rapid, bottom-up democratic “WikiAdvocacy” by individuals, “citizen journalist” bloggers, and self-organizing coalitions, while simultaneously allowing greater scrutiny and pressure from investors, consumers, communities, established NGOs, and other market monitors. WikiAdvocacy generally supports and works to extend existing corporate social responsibility (CSR) principles, monitoring and accountability mechanisms, and amounts to a powerful independent force on its own.

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“HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT” CHARGES AND THE ABA/AALS ACCREDITATION/MEMBERSHIP IMBROGLIO, POST- MODERNISM’S “NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN”: WHY DEFAMED LAW PROFESSORS SHOULD “NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT”

David A. Elder

With time the fury has subsided but the feelings from Chase’s own twenty-first century version of 1984 remain vivid – the shock and humiliation of being portrayed by the ABA and AALS as one of the group of male faculty creating a “pervasive hostile environment” is an experience I would wish on no one. How did this wretched scenario come about? During the prior almost quarter century, Chase law school had gone through an evolutionary metamorphosis with vigorous, occasionally contentious, but usually civil debates about myriad issues centering on the definition of self and the appropriate mix of faculty responsibilities in the teaching/scholarship/service triad. Needless to say, these encounters left some faculty with a history of perceived grievances. Added to this was Chase’s true political diversity – a wide range of viewpoints from conservative to liberal-left, with a median somewhat left-of- center and conservatives in a discrete (but arguably noisy) and dwindling minority. Of course, there is nothing unique about the latter. Recent definitive studies have demonstrated convincingly that law faculties are overwhelmingly liberal-left in political orientation. 

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