Libyan Rebel Fighters (Guardian UK)

This week promises a new start for Libya–a country racked by civil turmoil, unrest, and violence.  Qaddafi’s 42-year reign ended in humiliating demise.  Found in an abandoned drainage pipe, pleading for his life, the once boisterous tyrannical leader became the victim of rebel violence.

Cellphone video captures Qaddafi slammed against a car hood in one frame, and then later bloodied, battered, with bullet holes to the head.  Forensic experts suspect that the shots to Qaddafi’s head were fired at close range.

For a man not adept at displaying mercy, none was spared on his behalf. Despite official reports from the new government that a drone killed Qaddafi, evidence does not support the claim. Cellphone footage that became viral on the Internet paints a…

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A woman driver in Saudi Arabia. Image taken from a video by change.org. Photograph: AP

Two days after King Abdullah  of Saudi Arabia granted women the right to vote and run for local office (in 2015), a court sentenced Shaimaa Ghassaneya to be beaten. Her punishment, 10 lashes, is a response to driving, a banned activity for women. Violation of the law usually results in detention rather than flogging, but Ghassaneya’s case is symbolic and likely a warning to other women, particularly given the recent underground campaign ( Women2Drive ) in Saudi Arabia to promote getting women behind the wheel. To prosecutors, the case was probably quite simple—the law was broken, and for the judge, the punishment fit the crime. Likely, there have been far more severe punishments for women breaking the law. A…

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This week, former Obama administration official and consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren announced her candidacy for the United States Senate.  Warren, the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, took leave from her academic career to help build the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and advise President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.  Like other law professors whose government appointments got caught up in the political malaise, Warren never got the chance to direct the department she built from the ground up.  Instead, sensing gridlock, Obama appointed former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray.

Some critics site Warren’s jump into the political fray as an unmeasured response to the setback she experienced in Washington .  Maybe, but one thing is for sure—in the last two years of service she gave to the country, Warren had a front-row seat to…

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In May, 2008, the South Carolina Supreme Court reversed a 20-year prison sentence on a controversial drug charge.  Regina McKnight, an indigent black woman, was sentenced for “homicide by child abuse,” in 2003, and became the first woman to be prosecuted and convicted in the United States for giving birth to a stillborn baby. McKnight had no prior convictions, but her drug use during pregnancy violated a recently enacted South Carolina fetal drug law (FDL).

Prosecutors never proved that McKnight’s drug use actually caused the miscarriage.  In fact, she was arrested after seeking help at a local hospital.  The State simply proved that she miscarried.  South Carolina justified its interference with the pregnancy and subsequent prosecution based on an interest to protect fetuses from risks associated with drug exposure such as low birth weight.

Most states that pursue these …

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Lost amongst reports of a continually declining economy and the worst outlook for jobs in over 50 years, was a very telling report on U.S. spending on war that was issued last week.  The Commission on Wartime Contracting issued an exhaustive report that nevertheless was shuffled between news reports of the president’s announcement of an address to the public on jobs and a quick decision to change the date—as it conflicted with a national Republican debate.  The Report also paints a depressing portrait on jobs—only the mismanagement involves the employed.

The report, especially Chapter Three: Waste, Fraud, and Abuse, are worth our collective attention.   The commission estimates that in a recent period of three years between $31-billion and $60-billion cannot be properly accounted for, blaming fraud, mismanagement, and other inefficiencies as the culprits.

The bipartisan…

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As the “rebels” storm through Tripoli, pushing Gaddafi further from the seat of power that he held with a seemingly impenetrable grip for decades, predictable questions have arisen in the media about how long this leader on the run will hold out.  Pundits ponder whether Gaddafi’s demise will be similar to that of Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi leader tracked to a hole in the ground and ultimately hung by his own people, and how soon before oil from Libya will reach the global markets.  Important though they may be, these questions are less relevant, in my mind, than what type of leadership will replace Gaddafi and the other dethroned chiefs in the Middle East.

The Jasmine Spring has morphed into the Tumultuous Summer, with leaders defeated, rebels in streets, and youth experiencing the glory of conquest.  These transitions in the Jasmine Belt will not abate anytime soon,…

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The historic moment, on March 23, 2010, when President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) into law was quickly and definitively overshadowed by a vocal rush to repeal.   Now, with the most recent federal appeals court decision holding the most essential aspect of the law—the individual mandate to purchase health insurance or pay a fine—unconstitutional, there will surely be a trip to the Supreme Court to determine the constitutionality of the law.  There are many ironies in the vocal outcry against the law.  Americans spend a lot of money on private insurance, and the results aren’t so pretty when compared to other “first world” countries.

A Reuters’ article last year read: “Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality, less efficiency and have the least equitable system.”�…

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Courtesy of Afro-Europe Blog

A recent study published in the premier American Journal of Public Health estimates that over 1,000 women are raped in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) every day.  In the DRC, 48 women are raped every hour.  Rape, murder, kidnaps, and other forms of human torture have long been part of the DRC’s brutal history, dating back to Belgian colonialism.  Belgian King Leopold II persuaded Europeans to recognize his sovereignty over the DRC—under the guise of philanthropy. His lasting postcolonial imprint reveals a far more nefarious interest and tragic outcome. Between 1880 and 1920, it is estimated that the Congolese population declined from 20 million to 10 million due to deaths by starvation, torture, and disease.

The horrific images of Belgian involvement in the…

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A newly enacted law in the state of Washington now gives children conceived through donated ova and sperm (obtained from agencies and clinics in Washington) the right to access donor information and medical histories. There is an “opt out” provision, but more clinics are moving toward instituting similar measures. The demand to know who’s your daddy or mommy for that matter is huge and only likely to increase given the robust use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) in the United States and wide use of the Internet to track down everything, from rare memorabilia to parents.

The law dramatically departs from traditional ways of going about regulating assisted reproduction. For starters, there aren’t any regulations at the federal level, except that clinics must report their “success rates.” Even that reporting is a little dubious—after all knowing that a child…

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Forget about politically correct speech.  Or a good bit of it anyway, so that we can benefit from honest conversations.  And, yes, I did write about manners in my syllabus—but decorum is neither mutually exclusive nor conflicting with a broader principle of robust, honest dialogue.  So, yes, I lean toward a stronger view of the First Amendment—not as an originalist, but rather as a scholar committed to the ideal that law must not be shackled to formalism.  Law should be more elastic and responsive to an ever changing society.  An evolving commitment to justice, you might say.

That said, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this week on video-game sales to minors falls short analytically.  Yes, yes, despite my own First Amendment commitments, the opinion exposed characteristic inconsistencies within the broader scope of obscenity jurisprudence.  So, states can regulate the…

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At Wal-Mart, some of the women are referred to as “Little Janie Qs” by senior management.  That’s one way of ignoring an individual and treating her as part of a group.  At Wal-Mart, women, as a group, make up 70 percent of the employees and less than 35% of managers.    When a group of 1.5 million women (current and former employees), sued Wal-Mart in Dukes v Wal-Mart, claiming systemic discrimination and buttressing their claim with statistical data and accounts of retaliation and harassment in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, across 3400 stores and 50 states, the Supreme Court refused to allow the case to proceed.  According to Justice Scalia, there was little that connected these women other than their sex and the law suit.

The nine justices were in agreement on a narrow procedural point that the plaintiffs’ lawyer filed the case under the…

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This year, I will incorporate a manners section on my syllabi.    The time has come.  Silly so you say.  No, I don’t think so. This was the brainchild of my sixteen year-old, who, by the way, is named Sage.  The wise child thinks this will spare me the need to remind students to place appropriate greeting lines when they write to professors, judges, librarians, my assistant, or the clients they serve in internships and at the legal clinics.  After all, it is helpful to know to whom a missive is directed—and without a name, it could be for anyone.

At a recent conference of law professors, a colleague-Professor 1–at another law school informed me that she deletes emails received without a greeting line.   “That’s too hardcore,” claimed another—Professor 2–who admits that he and his students operate on the first name basis in and out of class.

Professor 1 told…

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This is the final installment in a three-part series devoted to organ and tissue donation.

Last week I began a three-part series on organ and tissue donation. It was an important pause from the silly antics of “Weinergate” and the replay of political sex scandals ranging from John Edwards’s  dalliance (and subsequent indictment) to major news networks recalling the downfalls of Jim McGreevey, Eliot Spitzer, John Ensign, and the notorious Kwame Kilpatrick, who claimed, “Detroit” set him up. Was it “Detroit,” and not the former mayor, who sent hundreds of sexually charged texts to a staffer? That’s a new spin on “the devil made me do it.”

The guys over at Freakonomics appreciated t my brainstorms, too. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner covered both installments one and two in their blog and encouraged their readers to vote on some of the policy recommendations I…

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This is the second installment in a three-part series devoted to organ and tissue donation.

Two days ago, I posted about allegations that a teenager in China sold his kidney for an iPad and other electronics. The story seems to have a life of its own—picked up by the Telegraph , BBC, Fox News, Reuters, and  CNN Money. Chinese news coverage can be found here for those readers who speak Mandarin.

Images of Little Zheng’s scar provide a troubling, but very real picture of black-market organ selling. The scar is long, jagged, and wide. It’s pink and fleshy-looking, as if it hasn’t quite fully healed. It does not resemble the small incisions made through laparoscopic kidney removal or even the newest, least-invasive technology—the single, small incision inside a navel. The aesthetics can be brushed off, particularly when more sophisticated technologies are not available in…

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This is the first installment in a three-part series by Michele Goodwin on organ transplantation.

Chinese media report that a 17-year-old boy, identified only as Little Zheng, has sold one of his kidneys on the black market in China, purchasing an iPad with the proceeds.  This sensational story may or may not be true.  The BBC picked up the report over the weekend, lending to its credibility.  Even if found to be a hoax, the story is a potent, horrific reminder of a very real international problem: black markets in organs have proliferated around the globe.

In the past five years, underground black-market networks have been tracked and thoroughly documented in Pakistan, India, Brazil, South Africa, and even in the United States.  Last year, a New York Rabbi, Levi Izhak Rosenbaum, was arrested for operating a multinational organ-selling business, which involved bringing Israelis…

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When men go to war, the women get injured.  Sad, but it is true.  Women and children have long been the collateral sexual victims of war.   The international criminal prosecution of General Ratko Mladic at the Hague should remind us about the victims off the battlefield.  Too often they are overlooked.

Remember Rwanda?  Humanitarian organizations reported that nearly half a million women were raped during the Rwandan genocide.  In remarking about the rapes in Rwanda, Judge Navanethem Pillay reminded the world that “from time immemorial, rape has been regarded as spoils of war.”  She and her fellow judges wanted to make clear, “rape is no longer a trophy of war.”  That bold condemnation of war rape caught my attention.

Rape is a crime against humanity, but such brutal sexual assaults only became recognized or prosecuted as such after the genocide in Rwanda and…

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