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On Friday, March 31, 2017, the City University of New York Law Review will be hosting a Symposium entitled: Transformative Immigration Defense: Law in Support of an Intersectional Movement.
Below is more detailed information regarding the Symposium.
If you have additional questions please email us at: cunylr@mail.law.cuny.edu.
Jellisa Grant
Chris Kovalski
Executive Articles Editors
Anna Maria Goyzueta
Shaina Low
Public Interest Practitioner Section (PIPS) Editors
Zunira Elahi
Samara Yousif
Notes & Comments Editors
Princess Masilungan
Rafael Varela
Footnote Forum Editors
Maria Brinkmann
Special Events Editor
Randy Yang
Community Engagement Editor
Mackenzie Lew
JP Perry
Managing Articles Editors
Susannah Maltz
Managing Editor
Lovely Bonhomme
Editor-in-Chief
Erin Cloud, Rebecca Oyama & Lauren Teichner[1]
Click here for a recommended citation and to download a paginated PDF version of this article.
One hundred years from now, today’s child welfare system will surely be condemned as a racist institution—one that compounded the effects of discrimination on Black families by taking children from their parents, allowing them to languish in a damaging foster care system or to be adopted by more privileged people. School children will marvel that so many scholars and politicians defended this devastation of Black families in the name of protecting Black children. The color of America’s child welfare system is the reason Americans have tolerated its destructiveness.
― Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds (2012)
“Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)
Introduction[2]
All families have a constitutional right to be together, free from the unwarranted interference of third parties, particularly the state. This is an intrinsic human right that encompasses the right of parents to the “custody, care and nurture of [their] child[ren]”[3] and the parallel right of children to be raised by and live with their parents.[4] This fundamental right recognizes the inherent value in family ties, which provide a connection to culture and identity, and serve as a protective social bond. Of course, the government must be permitted to pursue measures to ensure the protection – and even the adoption – of children for whom it is ultimately deemed too unsafe to return home. But any such interference into the family structure, particularly the drastic step of taking children from their families, should be the exception to the rule and not the norm of child protective practices.
This spring, the CUNY Law Review will host a Symposium exploring the role of legal practitioners at the intersection of aggressive federal immigration enforcement and emerging people’s movements for racial, economic, and social justice. Responding to a dramatic expansion of the deportation and criminal enforcement infrastructure in the United States in recent decades, multiracial movements from #BlackLivesMatter to #Not1More continue to organize, march, and build toward a more just future.
Organizing and legal action have reached a fever pitch following executive actions by the Trump administration. As thousands of Americans take to the streets to combat these racist and xenophobic policies, this Symposium asks how members of the legal community can be part of an alternative vision for the future in which we can all be free.
By bringing together legal practitioners and organizers working on the front lines of multiple justice movements, this Symposium will explore what works (and what does not work) in past and current legal interventions. We will also ask how legal practitioners can best work in collaboration with intersectional movements for racial, gender, economic, and social justice towards a transformative and expansive vision for immigrant defense.
The Symposium is free and open to the public. Lunch and a concluding reception will be provided. Please RSVP here.
CLE credit available.
Come join us and toast to all of the hard work the outgoing 2015-2016 CUNY Law Review Board did this year and send well wishes to the incoming 2016-2017 CUNY Law Review Board!
Andrea Scozzaro*
Click here for a recommended citation and to download a paginated PDF version of this article.
Introduction
This article addresses the issues of unethical employment practices and lack of fair labor standards in developing countries. The discussion on such problems, although ongoing since the 1970s, is still of primary importance both within the scholarly community and the wider public. The fact that big, multinational enterprises of developed countries still engage in violations of workers’ rights is certainly stunning, yet not so surprising given the connections between such violations and the current structure of the global economy. In the wake of a nearly fifty-years-old process of globalization, the worldwide implementation of competition rules in the labor market stimulates “race to the bottom” outcomes, with millions of workers in developing countries suffering from slavery-like working conditions, wages below subsistence level, and inhumane treatments.
Despite the progress made in the field of labor protection thanks to private and governmental initiatives in the last several decades, the current legal tools used to avoid massive workers’ rights violations have been proven ineffective. This is due to the apparently unsolvable friction that exists between the huge economic power of enterprises and the desperate need for economic support of developing countries.
Ramy A. Ibrahim[1]
Click here for a recommended citation and to download a paginated PDF version of this article.
The 2003 Iraq War has left a long-lasting detrimental impact on the lives of Iraqis. Aside from the highly destructive sectarian divide, political instability, and stunted economic development, both the United States and the Iraqi Governments have failed to address the environmental contamination that resulted from the military munitions used during the war.[2] This article focuses on the effects of that contamination, the reaction both governmental systems have taken, how these actions constitute violations of various international treaties, and also calls for action.
Studies have linked the highly radioactive environmental contaminates left behind by the war to dramatically increasing rates of cancer, birth defects, and other illnesses—including respiratory and neurological ones—in all affected areas.[3] Iraqi women and children continue to live in these hazardous conditions and are constantly exposed to these left-over toxic munitions and carcinogenic waste.[4] The failure of the U.S. and Iraqi Governments to take sufficient measures to decontaminate the affected areas, and to provide healthcare services for affected persons constitutes a blatant violation of a number of international treaties, including, but not limited to: the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW),[5] the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD),[6] and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.[7]
