Before September 11, 2001, few Americans had heard of immigration detention, but in fact a secret and repressive prison system run by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has existed in this country for more than two decades. In American Gulag, prisoners, jailers, and whistle-blowing federal officials come forward to describe the frightening reality inside these INS facilities. Journalist Mark Dow's on-the-ground reporting brings to light documented cases of illegal beatings and psychological torment, prolonged detention, racism, and inhumane conditions. Intelligent, impassioned, and unlike anything that has been written on the topic, this gripping work of investigative journalism should be read by all Americans. It is a book that will change the way we see our country. American Gulag takes us inside prisons such as the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, the Corrections Corporation of America's Houston Processing Center, and county jails around the country that profit from contracts to hold INS prisoners. It contains disturbing in-depth profiles of detainees, including Emmy Kutesa, a defector from the Ugandan army who was tortured and then escaped to the United States, where he was imprisoned in Queens, and then undertook a hunger strike in protest. To provide a framework for understanding stories like these, Dow gives a brief history of immigration laws and practices in the United States--including the repercussions of September 11 and present-day policies. His book reveals that current immigration detentions are best understood not as a well-intentioned response to terrorism but rather as part of the larger context of INS secrecy and excessive authority. American Gulag exposes the full story of a cruel prison system that is operating today with an astonishing lack of accountability.

The path from green card to U.S. citizenship can be a winding one -- and running into bureaucratic hassles is inevitable. But with Becoming a U.S. Citizen, you can shave years off the time it takes to become a citizen.

A distinguished international team of legal theorists examine the issue of constitutionalism and pose such foundational questions as: Why have a constitution? How do we know what the constitution of a country really is? How should a constitution be interpreted? The volume will be of particular importance to those in philosophy, law, political science and international relations interested in whether and what kinds of constitutions should be adopted in countries without them, and involved in debates about constitutional interpretation.

Who should have the last word on fundamental policy issues? This book analyzes the rise of two contenders - the people, through direct democracy, and the courts. Introduced in the U.S. during the Progressive Era and now available in nearly half the states, direct democracy has surged in recent decades. Through ballot measures, voters have slashed taxes, mandated government spending, imposed term limits on elected officials, enacted campaign finance reform, barred affirmative action, banned same-sex marriage, and adopted many other controversial laws. In several states, citizens now bypass legislatures to make the most important policy decisions. However, the "people's rule" is not absolute. This book demonstrates that courts have used an expanding power of judicial review to invalidate citizen-enacted laws at remarkably high rates. The resulting conflict between the people and the courts threatens to produce a popular backlash against judges and raises profound questions about the proper scope of popular sovereignty and judicial power in a constitutional system.

This book intervenes in contemporary debates about the threat posed to democratic life by political emergencies. Must emergency necessarily enhance and centralize top-down forms of sovereignty? Those who oppose executive branch enhancement often turn instead to law, insisting on the sovereignty of the rule of law or demanding that law rather than force be used to resolve conflicts with enemies. But are these the only options? Or are there more democratic ways to respond to invocations of emergency politics? Looking at how emergencies in the past and present have shaped the development of democracy, Bonnie Honig argues that democracies must resist emergency's pull to focus on life's necessities (food, security, and bare essentials) because these tend to privatize and isolate citizens rather than bring us together on behalf of hopeful futures. Emphasizing the connections between mere life and more life, emergence and emergency, Honig argues that emergencies call us to attend anew to a neglected paradox of democratic politics: that we need good citizens with aspirational ideals to make good politics while we need good politics to infuse citizens with idealism. Honig takes a broad approach to emergency, considering immigration politics, new rights claims, contemporary food politics and the infrastructure of consumption, and the limits of law during the Red Scare of the early twentieth century. Taking its bearings from Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Rosenzweig, and other Jewish thinkers, this is a major contribution to modern thought about the challenges and risks of democratic orientation and action in response to emergency.

According to the introduction, every nation has a constitution or a set of documents that serves as one. In each of these, the fundamental "rules" of the country--the defining principals of its government--are laid out in one form or another. It would be difficult to make any other generalizations concerning these documents and the information they contain. Each is unique in itself, while performing a similar function. The very nature of the material makes it challenging for a casual or inexperienced researcher to make comparisons. This set, in a sense, deconstructs these constitutions in a straightforward style. Entries for 194 countries are arranged A-Z. The articles for each country are signed and in many cases are written by scholars who specialize in the country they are writing about. The structure of each article follows a pattern designed to make it easy to compare information from one country to another. Each begins with a small collection of information about the country: name, capital, languages spoken, ethnic composition, type of government, and date of constitution, among others. A brief overview of the country is followed by standard subsections: "Constitutional History," "Form and Impact of the Constitution," "Basic Organizational Structure," "Leading Constitutional Principles," "Constitutional Bodies," and so on. Articles range from 4 to 13 pages in length, and each concludes with links to the text of the constitution in its original language (and, if needed, an English translation) and secondary sources for further reading. At the end of volume 3 are several useful appendixes. One gives the same kind of constitutional information for the European Union, and the second provides a list and description of "Special Territories" such as Antarctica, the Cook Islands, Guam, and the Isle of Man. The third is a glossary of terms.

There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct. The past provides many instances where the law refused to see a human being when it should have. . . . The challenge for future generations will be to define what is most essentially human. The extension of the Common Benefits Clause to acknowledge [same-sex couples] as Vermonters who seek nothing more, nor less, than legal protection and security for their avowed commitment to an intimate and lasting human relationship is simply, when all is said and done, a recognition of our common humanity.

Lawrence Lessig, “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era” (The New Yorker), masterfully argues that never before in human history has the power to control creative progress been so concentrated in the hands of the powerful few, the so-called Big Media. Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can’t do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine.

In the 225 years since the United States Constitution was first drafted, no single book has addressed the key questions of what constitutions are designed to do, how they are structured, and why they matter. In From Words to Worlds, constitutional scholar Beau Breslin corrects this glaring oversight, singling out the essential functions that a modern, written constitution must incorporate in order to serve as a nation's fundamental law. Breslin lays out and explains the basic functions of a modern constitution -- including creating a new citizenry, structuring the institutions of government, regulating conflict between layers and branches of government, and limiting the power of the sovereign. He also moves into the esoteric, discussing the theoretical concepts behind the fundamentals of written constitutions and examining in-depth some of the most important constitutional charters from around the world. In assaying how states put the structural ideas into practice, Breslin asks probing questions about why -- and if -- constitutions matter. His answer is a resounding yes. Solidly argued and engagingly written, this comparative study in constitutional thought demonstrates clearly the key components that a state's foundational document must address. In doing so, Breslin draws a critically important distinction between constitutional texts and constitutional practice.

This entertaining read is about the word "fuck", the law, and the taboo. Whether you shout it out in the street or whisper it in the bedroom, deliberately plan a protest, or spontaneously blurt it out, if you say "fuck," someone wants to silence you, either with a dirty look across the room or by making a rule that you cannot say the word. When it's the government trying to cleanse your language, though, you should worry. Words are ideas. If the government controls the words we use, it can control what we think. To protect this liberty, we must first understand why the law's treatment of "fuck" puts that freedom at risk. This book examines the law surrounding the word and reveals both inconsistencies in its treatment and tension with other identifiable legal rights that the law simply doesn't answer. The power of taboo provides the framework to understand these uncertainties. It also explains why attempts to curtail the use of "fuck" through law are doomed to fail. Fundamentally, it persists because it is taboo; not in spite of it.

The idea for this edited collection arose out of a series of interdisciplinary workshops entitled ‘Gender and Migration in 21st Century Europe’ hosted jointly by the Migration Unit and the Feminist Legal Research Unit at the University of Liverpool between October 2006 and April 2007. The same title is adopted for this collection which draws on the presentations and discussions that took place during the workshops coupled with additional invited contributions from notable scholars in the field. In referring to ‘gender’ the aim is to explore how social, economic, legal, political and cultural processes implied by migration govern and reinforce relations between the sexes – not just between men and women, but between female and male children, and between girls and women. Our interpretation of ‘migration’ is also broad to encompass a range of geographical, economic and personal trajectories into and within Europe as well as the emergence and effectiveness of new regulatory mechanisms to address issues of ‘forced’ migration (notably trafficking), cross-national family breakdown and employment migration in an expanding European Union.

This book is an introductory textbook on sexual politics and an original contribution to the reformulation of social and political theory. In a discussion of, among other issues, psychoanalysis, Marxism and feminist theories, the structure of gender relations, and working class feminism, the author has produced a work of synthesis and scholarship which should be of interest to students and professionals in sociology, politics, women's studies and to anyone interested in the field of sexual politics.

Liberal theories have long insisted that cultural diversity in democratic societies can be accommodated through classical liberal tools, in particular through individual rights, and they have often rejected the claims of cultural minorities for group rights as illiberal. Group Rights as Human Rights argues that such a rejection is misguided. Based on a thorough analysis of the concept of group rights, it proposes to overcome the dominant dichotomy between "individual" human rights and "collective" group rights by recognizing that group rights also serve individual interests. It also challenges the claim that group rights, so understood, conflict with the liberal principle of neutrality; on the contrary, these rights help realize the neutrality ideal as they counter cultural biases that exist in Western states. Group rights deserve to be classified as human rights because they respond to fundamental, and morally important, human interests. Reading the theories of Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor as complementary rather than opposed, Group Rights as Human Rights sees group rights as anchored both in the value of cultural belonging for the development of individual autonomy and in each person’s need for a recognition of her identity. This double foundation has important consequences for the scope of group rights: it highlights their potential not only in dealing with national minorities but also with immigrant groups; and it allows to determine how far such rights should also benefit illiberal groups. Participation, not intervention, should here be the guiding principle if group rights are to realize the liberal promise.

Although Parliament is constantly in the news and televised daily, much of its work remains a mystery to outsiders and is sometimes perplexing even to its own members. This book provides a unique insight into the work and daily life of Parliament. It sets out plainly and intelligibly what goes on and why things happen, but it also analyses the pressures within the institution, its strengths and weaknesses, and ways in which it might change. Covering every aspect of the work, membership, and structures of both Houses, this book also reflects the profound changes that have taken place in Parliament over the years.

This book analyzes the strategic framing of mass atrocity cases in US and UN policy arenas to build knowledge concerning whether and how the humanitarian and human rights norms embedded within those frames affected decision outcomes in each of three mass atrocity cases: Somalia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. By exploring strategic framing in relation to the interactive nature of decision-making logics that policy elites utilize in formulating responses to mass atrocity cases, especially complex policy decisions like humanitarian intervention, we can discern how human rights and humanitarian norms travel and compete with other prevailing norms in the policy-making process.

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