Does foreign aid exacerbate human rights violations by recipient governments? A growing body of literature has cast an increasingly skeptical eye on development assistance ﾖ at best, the hundreds of billions of dollars of overseas development assistance has done little to alleviate poverty in...

Gay and lesbian activists have, across the last decade in particular, made claims to enlarge the scope of civil marriage to include same-sex partners, with some limited success. The expansion of civil marriage to same-sex couples is widely regarded as a necessary, positive step toward...

The promotion of human rights has been an important component of U.S. foreign policy for several decades. However, the specific content of U.S. human rights policy, as well as its place among foreign policy priorities more generally, has varied considerably over the years The present study...

This paper examines how the Supreme Court has helped to shape the extensive regulatory regime that constitutes the American civil rights state. By "civil rights state" I mean not just the abstract rights and policies announced by the courts, Congress, and federal agencies, but the dense...

This paper examines the debate between the justices over the universality of rights within the context of the U.S. Supreme Court's jurisprudence on the constitutionality of the death penalty. While constitutional rights cases most immediately address concrete political and legal questions with...

In Bush v. Gore (2000), the U.S. Supreme Court stopped Florida's recount process as a violation of the Equal Protection clause, resulting in a victory for Texas Governor George W. Bush. The Court's legal reasoning did not deter the public's sense that our right to vote - at least in the sense of...

Human rights are predicated on one's status as a human being rather than on one's membership or political status in any nation-state. Increasingly restrictive immigration control policies and the harsh treatment of irregular migrants and other noncitizens have, however, revealed what some have...