Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Law and Human RIghts: Recent Publications by CSW Faculty Affiliates in the UCLA School of Law

Bryant, Taimie
American Law: Legal Recognition of Animals’ Capacity to Experience Pain, in Animal Suffering: From Science to Law, 259-273 (Thomson Reuters Canada, 2013).

Virtue Ethics and Animal Law, 16(1) Between the Species 105-141 (2013).

Crenshaw, Kimberlé
Keeping Up With Jim Jones: Pioneer, Taskmaster, Architect, Trailblazer, Wisconsin Law Review 703 (2013).

From Private Violence to Mass Incarceration: Thinking Intersectionally About Women, Race, and Social Control, 59 UCLA Law Review 1418 (2012).

Shiffrin, Seana
The Story of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (with Vincent Blasi), in First Amendment Stories (Foundation Press, 2012). 

Harm and Its Moral Significance, 18 Legal Theory 1-42 (2012).

Are Contracts Promises?,  Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Law (Routledge, 2012).

Stemple, Lara
The Sexual Victimization of Men in America: New Data Challenge Old Assumptions (with Ilan H. Meyer), 104(6) American Journal of Public Health e19-e26 (2014).

Zatz, Noah
Seeing Work, Envisioning Citizenship (with Eileen Boris), 18 Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal 95 (2014).

Putting Intent in Its Place: A New Direction for Title VII, 28(4) California Labor & Employment Law Review 8 (2014).

Introduction: Working Group on the Future of Systemic Disparate Treatment Law, 32 Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law 387 (2012).

Poverty Unmodified?: Critical Reflections on the Deserving/Undeserving Distinction, 59 UCLA Law Review 550 (2012).

Law and Human RIghts: Tzili Mor


Tzili Mor, a Visiting Jurist and Adjunct Faculty in the Health & Human Rights Law Project in the UCLA School of Law, examines the intersecting effects of human rights, gender, and the impact of rule of law reform on lived realities in the Transnational Feminist Reform and National Legal Order project. She draws on her international practice experience to bring applied feminist legal solutions to shape discourse and reform agendas on gender and women’s human rights.  A forthcoming publication tackles Feminist Legal Reform and the Health Impact of Legal Systems Premised on Notions of Women as Communal Gauges of Honor. In that piece she draws on Jordan as a case study to critique the short-sighted and perhaps harmful “technical” feminist law reform efforts of calling for repeal of isolated provisions related to sensational “honor killings.” Her research explores new framing of a feminist rule of law agenda that moves from a technical strategy of isolated amendments to a reform agenda rooted in holistic legal analysis and data on the toll of health and human rights violations and that aims to dismantle patterns of abuse entrenched in law and adverse gender-based stereotypes.  


She highlights positive emerging legal tools in addressing gendered violence in her chapter for The State of the World’s Girls 2014  publication by Plan International. Students in Mor’s seminar on International and Comparative Women’s Human Rights contribute legal research and analysis to organizations promoting women’s economic and social rights, including access to reproductive health services and alleviating the gendered impact of austerity measures, and U.S. obligations to tackle rape in detention. 

An international human rights expert in advocacy, law reform, and litigation focused on gender justice and women’s human rights, Mor was previously acting director and clinical fellow at Georgetown Law’s International Women’s Human Rights Clinic, a global coordinator on human rights defenders with Amnesty International, and a human rights and gender specialist with the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative, based in the Middle East and Central Asia.  She served as a Gender Justice Adviser in Afghanistan working with the country’s first special prosecution Unit on Violence Against Women.  She holds a BA from UCLA, a Master of Science degree focused on International Development from Georgetown University, and JD and LLM degrees in advocacy and international human rights law from Georgetown Law.

Law and Human Rights: Lara Stemple

Human rights, global health, gender, sexuality, HIV/AIDS, and incarceration have long been the focus of Lara Stemple’s research. In addition to overseeing the LL.M. and S.J.D. degree programs as Director of Graduate Studies at UCLA School of Law, she co-directs UCLA Law-Sonke Health & Human Rights Fellowship program and directs the Health and Human Rights Law Project, which seeks to improve global health by using a framework grounded in international human rights law. Through research, training, and mentorship, the Project helps develop future leaders in the field. She currently serves on the Advisory Board of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women, and she is the Deputy Co-Director of the UC Global Health Institute’s Center of Expertise on Women’s Health and Empowerment.


UCLA Law-Sonke Health & Human Rights Fellows, 2014-15

Launched in 2011, the UCLA Law – Sonke Health & Human Rights Fellowship provides specialized training to top graduates from Southern African law schools for careers as impact-oriented lawyers in the areas of health, human rights, HIV prevention and gender equality. “UCLA has a lot to contribute toward this.” says Stemple. “Our goal is to motivate and train local lawyers and then launch their public interest careers back home."

The fellows undertake in-depth research and coursework related to health and human rights. Some specialize in Public Interest Law and Policy, others in Law and Sexuality, and some take a wide range of courses, including some at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health. Upon completion of the LL.M. degree, fellows have the opportunity to apply for a yearlong paid placement with Sonke Gender Justice Network in South Africa, where they undertake cutting-edge legal research addressing the gender inequality dynamics driving the spread of HIV and in advocacy that engages men and boys as stakeholders in gender equity. This year’s fellows are Portia Karegeya and Ariane Nevin.

 Portia Karegeya earned a postgraduate LL.B. degree from the University of Cape Town in 2011, where she also graduated with a Bachelor of Economics and Law. In 2013, Karegeya obtained a Master of Laws from McGill University. Her primary academic focus has been pharmaceutical patents and access to affordable medicines. Karegeya is committed to the ideals of human rights and social justice and ultimately plans to pursue these ideals through a career in public interest law.



Ariane Nevin completed a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, Politics and History and subsequently pursued her interest in human rights by earning a postgraduate degree in Law at the University of Cape Town. During her time at UCT, she participated in student activism and community outreach and became a member of Students for Law and Social Justice, a national student movement dedicated to protecting human rights, preventing discrimination and promoting the rule of law. In 2013 Nevin joined SECTION27 as a fellow, where she worked on issues relating to the right to education. After completing her fellowship, she remained at SECTION27 as a junior researcher and expanded her portfolio to include access to healthcare. Nevin plans to pursue a career in public interest law, and hopes to focus on issues relating to healthcare access. 

Health & Human Rights Law Project

The Health and Human Rights Law Project at UCLA School of Law seeks to improve global health by using a framework grounded in international human rights law. Through multi-disciplinary research, training and mentorship, the Project aims to examine the relationship between health and human rights and to foster the next generation of leaders working in this area. With an emphasis on sexuality, gender, and HIV/AIDS, the Project focuses on health issues around which rights-claiming has particular salience. 

Some of the recent projects include “Orientations and Identities: Sexuality and Human Rights on the Global Stage,” an invitation-only workshop on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity that examined how best to respond to political divisions concerning SOGI-related health and rights, by bringing together leading scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of sexuality, health, human rights, international relations, and development, and “UCGHI Women’s Health & Empowerment 3rd Annual Summer Institute in Nairobi, Kenya,” an intensive course—for NGO staff, graduate students, junior faculty, lawyers, health professionals, and government officials—that teaches skills that prioritize women’s empowerment in health-related endeavors, leading to more efficacious health programs and policies. Another project was a fellowship program to train a diverse group of UCLA and UCSF fellows to conduct innovative, interdisciplinary research and build partnerships throughout the University of California and around the world to improve women’s health. One of the fellows, Emily Nagisa Keehn, who received her J.D. at UCLA, recently published “Uneven and Still Insufficient: South African Police Services' Station-Level Compliance with Sexual Offences Laws” (Feminist Criminology 87: 9 [2014]).


Challenging Assumptions About the Sexual Victimization of Men

One of Stemple’s recent publications is “The Sexual Victimization of Men in America: New Data Challenge Old Assumptions”(American Journal of Public Health: June 2014, Vol. 104, No. 6, pp. e19-e26). For the study, Stemple and co-author Ilan H. Meyer “assessed 12-month prevalence and incidence data on sexual victimization in 5 federal surveys that the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted independently in 2010 through 2012.” Using this data to examine a common assumption that men rarely experience sexual victimization, they show that the data revealed “a high prevalence of sexual victimization among men—in many circumstances similar to the prevalence found among women.” “Regressive gender assumptions,” they conclude, can harm both women and men. 

SOURCES

Health & Human Rights Law Project, UCLA School of Law, https://www.law.ucla.edu/centers/international-law-and-human-rights/health-and-human-rights-law-project/about/

“The Sexual Victimization of Men in America: New Data Challenge Old Assumptions,” Lara Stemple and Ilan H. Meyer, American Journal of Public Health, June 2014, Vol. 104, No. 6, pp. e19-e26), http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2014.301946?journalCode=ajph

Sonke Health & Human Rights Fellowship, https://www.law.ucla.edu/llm-sjd/llm-program/sonke-health-and-human-rights-fellowship/http://www.ucghi.universityofcalifornia.edu/news-events/spotlight/sonke-health-and-human-rights-fellowship.aspx

Uneven and Still Insufficient: South African Police Services' Station-Level Compliance with Sexual Offences Laws, Emily Keehn, Lara Stemple, Cherith Sanger, and Dean Peacock, Feminist Criminology 87: 9 (2014), http://fcx.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/11/22/1557085113501220.abstract?rss=1