The Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report in 2007 finding that 4.5% (or 60,500) of more than 1.3 million inmates had been subjected to sexual abuse in the previous year alone—and many organizations believe the report greatly underestimates the reality. Prisoner victims of sexual abuse are often repeatedly abused over long periods of time, unable to escape their perpetrators. Inmates who are gay, transgender, young, mentally ill, or incarcerated for the first time (“fish”) are particularly vulnerable. The perpetrators often treat their victims like property, “selling” them to other inmates within the facility. Just Detention International advocates, working to stop sexual violence in prisons, treat it as an epidemic which shows “a serious, systemic failure to protect the basic human rights of inmates.”

T.J. Parsell, an activist committed to ending prison rape, wrote a powerful memoir detailing his own horrifying experience as a 17-year-old boy helplessly trying to survive repeated sexual assault during his four-year incarceration. His prison time began with a gang rape that landed him in the hospital ward, and throughout the book, he candidly details what it was like to always be the “property” of other inmates for his own protection.

For the past few decades, sex researchers have stressed a link between viewing porn and sexual violence toward women. But now, researchers argue that masturbation may actually have the power to displace the perpetrator’s urge to rape.

If pornography facilitates masturbation, does allowing pornography have the potential to deter sex crimes in prisons? The 10th Circuit doesn’t think so, at least according to its recent opinion in Sperry v. Werholtz. Kansas inmate Jeffrey Sperry challenged his state’s ban on access to sexually explicit material in prisons, contending it violated his First Amendment rights. The 10th Circuit ultimately agreed that the Kansas regulation was neutral and “rationally related to” its penal objective of maintaining security in prisons.

But is the ban on pornography really necessary to meet security concerns? If it were, does Kansas have safer prisons than other states that do not ban prisoner access sexually explicit material?

And what if some of these researchers are right in their prediction that access to pornography would actually make prison life safer for inmates vulnerable to sexual exploitation? As prison rape has become more and more pervasive in recent decades, the question—as uncomfortable as it may be—begs our attention.

Because the Costa Concordia crashed within twelve miles of the coast of Italy, Italy reserves jurisdiction over assigning culpability to the captain or the cruise line. When crimes occur on a ship outside of a coastal area, the law of the high seas governs, which confers jurisdiction to the flag of the vessel. This means that a passenger’s legal rights change—often multiple times—during the course of his or her journey.

Hopefully there will be real justice for the victims of Costa Concordia. Both the U.S. and Italy have stringent maritime laws and the resources to pursue the case vigorously. But what happens when cruise lines register ships in countries that are notorious for lenient maritime laws?

When Disney Wonder employee Rebecca Coriam, 24, disappeared while working on a cruise in March 2011, a single police officer from the Bahamas was assigned to investigate. The ship Coriam workedon had been registered in the Bahamas, and it did not matter that the ship had set sail from the United States towards Mexico, that the cruise line is based in Los Angeles, CA, that the cruise headquarters are in the UK, or that the missing passenger was of British citizenship. The police officer from the Bahamas flew to Los Angeles, where the ship had docked, and questioned only a few of the crewmembers and none of the 3,000 passengers. A few months later, an interested reporter booked the same cruise to dig deeper. One crewmember, when questioned about the disappearance of his former colleague, responded with: “I don’t know anything about it… It didn’t happen… You know that’s the answer I have to give.”

A man named Kendall Carver experienced a similarly frustrating lack of response when his daughter went missing from a cruise ship in August 2004. Carver’s testimony before a U.S. Senate Subcommittee describes the manner in which a Celebrity Cruise Ship, owned by Royal Caribbean, acted after his daughter’s disappearance:

Only after we contacted them did they make a report to the FBI one week later. This was five weeks after she disappeared. Moreover, we found out that the cruise line had previously disposed of her property without attempting to contact her family or the FBI… We had to hire private investigators, two law firms, take court action in two states and spend over $75,000 over 4 1/2 months in order to have our lawyers depose the steward—an effort that many families of victims would not have been able to make.

These are not exceptions to the rule. Several incidents of ineffective and untimely responses to crimes committed aboard cruise ships have come to the media’s attention, including the 2005 disappearance of George Smith, who vanished while on his honeymoon, and the 2005 disappearance of over $32,000 worth of items belonging to a woman named Connie Eagerton. Since 2000, there have been 175 reported disappearances across all cruise lines—a few have already been reported for 2012. One group has put together FBI reports to create a searchable database of over 363 incidents involving cruise ships from December 2007 to October 2008, ranging from theft to sexual assault to death. However, such information must be viewed in light of the fact that in 2008, cruise ships were not required to keep law enforcement on board, and there existed only a voluntary agreement to report crimes such as homicide and rape to the FBI.

An organization called International Cruise Victims, founded by Kendall Carver, has worked to promote better legal remedies to victims of crimes aboard cruises. So far, the organization has appeared before a congressional hearing, has introduced legislation requiring moreaccountability from cruise lines, and has solicited members from nine different countries in an attempt to establish better international standards for cruise passengers.

Congress responded in 2010 with the Cruise and Vessel Security and Safety Act, which requires ships to immediately report crimes that involve a U.S. national, take place on a U.S. vessel, or occur in U.S. waters, to the FBI. Regardless, problems remain. Cruise lines can avoid some liability by registering ships in countries that have lower standards for accountability for crimes. They can also refuse to cooperate in other ways—one Los Angeles lawyer who works on claims against cruise lines is uncertain whether or not the new law will change much, stating: “I’m still getting the same types of issues with the cruise lines refusing to hand things over. They always have some excuse—like the video was out that day, it got lost, or it was erased on accident.” Furthermore, Congress acknowledges that “obtaining reliable crime-related cruise data from governmental sources can be difficult because multiple countries are often involved when a crime occurs on the high seas, including the flag country for the vessel, the country of citizenship of particular passengers, and any countries having special or maritime jurisdiction.”

As a result, most passengers are still at the mercy of cruise lines—legal reform relies heavily on the (voluntary) timely reporting of crimes and the (voluntary) adherence to a particular country’s laws by individual, privately owned cruise lines. As California state Senator Joe Simitian described it, “When you climb on a cruise ship, you have alcohol, gambling, ambiguous jurisdiction, no law enforcement and a strong public relations incentive to deny the problem.”

The timing of Megaupload’s shutdown seems far from an accident, and in all likelihood it was a symbolic answer to the many online adversaries of SOPA and PIPA. The Justice Department charged Megaupload with getting rich off of copyrighted music and has records of all of it—evinced by its hefty 72-page indictment. The site’s founder, a rather infamous internet villain Kim Dotcom and other employees were arrested after police in New Zealand dramatically broke through electronic locks and into a mansion safe room. The fact that some of the site’s digital material was stored on a server in Virginia gave the DOJ the jurisdiction it needed to have Dotcom and other Megaupload employees arrested.

But in its rush to avenge the wildly successful SOPA protest on January 18, the DOJ may have shot itself in the foot. This is why: If the DOJ can completely shut down Megaupload all in a day’s work without SOPA and PIPA, why do they need Congress to take any action? Bear in mind, Megaupload was no small foe, nor was its prefix “mega” any sort of misnomer. The site was responsible for a whopping “4% of all traffic on the internet with 50 million daily visitors.”

As Giddle noted in his article, the DOJ is choking on irony: its “swift destruction of Megaupload sans SOPA proves how gratuitous the bill was in the first place.” Pushed through Congress by lobbyists from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Chamber of Commerce, the bills would ostensibly “broaden the DOJ’s justifications for seeking court orders, prevent advertisers from doing business with such sites, ban search engines from listing them, and force internet service providers (ISPs) to block the sites.”

Ben Popper of VentureBeat noted that the takedown of Megaupload actually highlights the efficacy of current anti-piracy laws. “By taking unilateral action against a rogue site who’s owners were scattered across the globe, the DOJ showed that it doesn’t need new legislation like SOPA or PIPA to handle piracy.” In fact, the DOJ relied on an already existent Act—the ProIP Act of 2008—to shut down Megaupload. Yet the site, which allegedly has cost Hollywood over $500 million in copyright violations, was itself cited as one of the key examples for why SOPA and PIPA required passage. If the DOJ was lawfully capable of swiftly taking down the behemoth website it terms the “Mega Conspiracy,” the DOJ has only succeeded in proving SOPA and PIPA were frivolous in the first place.

On this journal, a class of 50+ associates means that the Note Committee has no small number of notes to evaluate.  Sarah Hack, Senior Note Editor (SNE) for JLPP, provided some insight into a JLPP note’s progression, which is guided in part by the journal by-laws, as well as by protocol developed by the Notes Committee and Sarah herself.  For the first issue of JLPP’s three-per-year, the pool of submissions is comprised solely of the notes written by the current class of associates.  The outgoing Note Editors from the previous year recommend their top choices, and the incoming Note Committee evaluates them.  For the second and third issues of JLPP’s three, the Note Committee provides feedback to the authors that request it if their notes were not selected for publication the first time around.  The Committee evaluates these revised notes, as well as completely new submissions from other members of the CLS student body.

Sarah said that she was “drawn to notes that represented a unique student perspective, or a uniquely Cornell or upstate New York issue.”  Especially well-researched, creative, humorous, and readable notes also had a strong shot at publication.  Editing of the selected notes, from the initial sourcing and proving by the associates, to the Articles Editors, Managing Editors, and all the way up to the Editor-in-Chief, allows the student associates to gain valuable editing experience.  Despite the multiple hands involved at every stage of the process, the JLPP Note Committee still wants the authors of the published notes to be involved.

Sarah’s ideal goal would be for every student note written by a JLPP associate to be published somewhere—if not in JLPP, then in another journal at Cornell, in an outside journal (which might establish relationships with other leading public policy journals), or in less traditional or even non-legal periodicals.  But she understands that not all students want their notes published.  In fact, one of the motivating factors behind the blog was to offer a broader, more informal avenue for student writing and dissemination of ideas.

The note selection procedure is a bit different for Cornell’s International Law Journal (ILJ), as its Senior Note Editor Julia Copping explained.  The ILJ Notes Committee, consisting of the Senior Note Editor, Notes Editors, and Editor-in-Chief, hold a single meeting to select notes for publication.  The Committee uses several factors to evaluate the notes, including the topic’s originality, legal argument, the depth of research involved, the writing style, and international relevance.  The illustrious Sue Pado, administrative assistant for Cornell’s three print journals, solicits submissions related to international issues three weeks prior to the ILJ meeting, of which the Committee keeps a detailed record.  The ILJ SNE then meets with the chosen authors to discuss the comments and critiques offered by the Notes Committee.  According to Julia, the authors are generally happy to implement the suggestions.  The student author is then responsible for the initial sourcing and proving, after which the ILJ Article Editor, Managing Editors, author, and Editor-in-Chief further edit the note before publication.  Julia said that the ILJ note process is designed “both to provide a learning experience for ILJ members (improves research, writing, and bluebooking skills), and to recognize student work through publication.”  ILJ and JLPP both solicit notes broadly, but most submissions come from the Journals’ staff members and the CLS community.

According to Kerry Harnett, the Senior Note Editor for the Cornell Law Review (CLR), note selection and editing methods are, for the most part, similar to those of the other two journals, though there are some different practices in place.  After Sue Pado removes all identifying information from the notes and the SNE divides the submissions among the Notes Editors, each CLR Note Editor can select up to two notes to send to the final round, during which all the top-2s are reviewed by the Final Committee, comprised of the Note Editors and the Editor-in-Chief.  Kerry said that CLR selects for publication based on such criteria as the note’s novelty, depth of analysis, timeliness, and the amount of technical editing required.  The CLR associates do the initial technical editing and proving, fixing typos, Bluebooking errors, and formatting while ensuring that all of the citations are correct.  Next, Managing Editors review the note in its entirety—each note is reviewed by three CLR ME’s before publication.  Student authors have the final say, but they often defer to the ME’s suggestions.  Notes that are not published are returned with feedback so that the authors can revise them in order have a better chance at publication with resubmission.  Although Kerry devoted a lot of time and energy to CLR, she “wishes she worked harder on her note as an associate,” because she never “had time to make it what she wanted it to be.”

While the journey from initial idea all the way to published note varies from journal to journal, the life cycle of a note is never dull.  With scores of actors and numerous stops and procedures involved on the path to publication, there exists quite a bit of complexity behind the final product printed in a journal.

People who advocate animal rights^[3] have acclaimed the European legislation on animal testing in the cosmetics industry, but one should not be too quick to cry victory. Indeed, if the commonly named “Cosmetic Directive”^[4], a legislation originally designed to provide a uniform level of health protection in the member states, has, as early as in 1993, started taking animal welfare into account by way of a revolutionary provision foreseeing a complete ban on animal testing, its implementation has proved quite disappointing.

A brief overview of the European legal landscape appears necessary to the understanding of this critic of the ineffective application of an otherwise satisfactory piece of legislation. European legislation is the product of a co-decision procedure among the European Parliament, the European Council, and the European Commission, which respectively represent the interests of the European citizens, of the governments of the member states, and finally of the European Union itself. The upholders of animal rights have envied the European forward-looking state of mind, but the truth is that the Cosmetic Directive’s animal testing ban reflects the will of the European citizens, whereas it is not supported by all the European institutions, or by all national governments.

If most national governments complied willingly with the provisions of the Cosmetics Directive, France, which enjoys a leading position in the cosmetics industry as well as one of the highest levels of consumption of cosmetic products per habitant^[5], expressed its reluctance to accept the new European legislation, when it challenged its validity^[6]. France argued that the Directive lacked clarity, and that the goal of protection of the animals did not represent an interest sufficient to limit freedom to exercise a professional activity^[7], an attempt to annihilate a historic provision on animal welfare which was described as shameful and appalling^[8].

As far as the European Commission is concerned, it has tried, unsuccessfully, to limit the impact of the Directive, by ascertaining that the ban should only concern the ability to resort to animal experimentation within the European boundaries, to the exclusion of a marketing ban^[9]. But such a restriction would have rendered the testing ban useless since European cosmetic laboratories would have been able to relocate the animal testing outside the EU. Despite the Commission’s hinderance, a marketing as well as a testing ban came into effect in 2009, but this prohibition merely applies to specific tests for which alternative testing methods have already been validated. The tests that concern the most complex health effects (namely repeated dose toxicity, reproductive toxicity, toxicokinectics) will only be banned in 2013, a deadline that is unlikely to be respected by the Commission. As a result, in Europe, laboratories are still able to market some products that have been tested on animals, a situation that will probably endure.

Furthermore, one should remain mindful of the incessant critics addressed by the Parliament to the European Commission, which has constantly endeavored to delay the enforcement of the ban. Of course, the Directive itself provided for a possible delay of the prohibition^[10] in the event of a failure to develop alternative testing methods, but it seems that the Commission has abused its prerogative, as it has postponed the ban’s deadline once too many times. Originally, a complete prohibition should have been implemented in 1998, but it has been regularly delayed on the basis of the yearly reports of the Commission that kept repeating that some very good progress was made^[11], but full replacement of in vivo experimentation would not be available before the deadline. We are now in 2012, and the Commission recently asserted that for the scientific tests concerning the most complex health effects, a 2020 deadline was optimistic and even refused to establish a timeline^[12]. One can only join the European Parliament as it deplores and challenges the legality of these incessant postponements^[13], and “calls into question whether all reasonable endeavors have been made to develop and validate such alternatives”^[14].

Thus, the Commission is treating what was praised as a revolutionary ban on animal testing as if it were a mere application of the « Three Rs method » (which consists of the “Replacement” of animal testing by alternative methods whenever possible, the “Reduction” of the number of animals, and the “Refinement” of the testing methods in order to reduce the amount of pain inflicted). The use  of the Three R’s method is an acknowledgement that animals deserve the protection of the law, but is far from being an innovation, since it was developed in 1959 by Russel and Burch and has been a component of European law since … 1986. Indeed, the 86/609/EEC Directive, that was not limited to the cosmetics industry, already stated that “an experiment shall not be performed if another scientifically satisfactory method of obtaining the result sought, not entailing the use of an animal, is reasonably and practicably available.”^[15]

On May 22, 2011, the National Basketball Association (NBA) fined Chicago Bulls’ center Joakim Noah $50,000 for yelling a homophobic remark at a fan during a televised game broadcasted to 10.8 million viewers. Although Noah apologized and blamed the remark on his “frustration” with the fan, Noah’s remark is an example of a culture that exacerbates aggression and animosity towards the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community—particularly LGBT youth—through unequal treatment and the use of homophobic remarks. Ninety-seven percent of all high school students report that they regularly hear homophobic remarks from peers. The fear of harassment from these remarks, as well as physical violence, drives nearly one-third of LGBT students to drop out of high school. And of the 2.25 to 2.7 million LGBT youth, as many as one in three have attempted to commit suicide. It is beyond evident that schools must strive to create a safe environment for all students. Below Professor Susan Hazeldean discusses LGBT youth, bullying, and the need for educational reforms.

Professor Hazeldean joined the Cornell Law School faculty as an Associate Clinical Professor in July 2011 and created the LGBT clinic. Beginning in Spring 2012, students will work on projects that advance LGBT equality, and will represent LGBT persons in immigration and prisoners’ rights cases. Prior to joining the Cornell faculty, Professor Hazeldean taught at Yale Law School, where she supervised students representing immigrants and low-wage workers in civil rights actions, policy work, and community-based advocacy.

Just this past month, another young person took his life reportedly after enduring years of anti-gay bullying at the hands of his high school classmates. Jacob Rodgers was the latest in a long string of “bullycides” by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) young people who killed themselves after being taunted because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Anti-gay and transphobic harassment in schools is a public health crisis. The majority of LGBT young people report suffering homophobic or anti-transgender abuse at school; two-thirds of LGBT youth surveyed said they felt there.

Effective action is desperately needed to improve the lives of LGBT students in their schools. Unfortunately, schools acting to protect LGBT youth frequently exacerbate their social isolation and vulnerability rather than ameliorating it. Last month, Fort Collins High School in Colorado suspended Dionne Malikowski because she used the girls’ bathroom at her school. Ms. Malikowski is transgender; she identifies as female and lives as a girl but was designated male at birth. Because of Ms. Malikowski’s gender identity, school administrators prohibited her from using the bathroom with her peers and instead ordered her to use only a staff bathroom. Reportedly this measure was intended to protect Ms. Malikowski’s safety. But excluding her from the girls’ bathroom and punishing her when she used it did not protect her from harassment. Indeed it intensified the bullying Ms. Malikowski was already experiencing.

Similarly, fifteen-year old Sara Couvillon was told she would not be allowed to attend her Alabama High School wearing a T-shirt that said, “Gay? Fine by me.” Although Couvillon reports never to have experienced violence against her, Hoover High School claimed that banning the T-shirt was necessary to protect Sara from anti-gay bullying.

Let’s assume that Malikowski and Couvillon’s schools sincerely hoped to protect LGBT students from bullying. Presumably, Couvillon’s teachers believed that preventing its students from being identified as LGBT (or as an LGBT sympathizer) would protect them from homophobic harassment. Similarly, Ms. Malikowski’s teachers must have thought that keeping her away from her peers was the best way to stop them from bullying her in the bathroom. In reality, however, making support for LGBT people literally unspeakable or labeling a transgender girl unfit to use the same toilet as her peers does not prevent harassment, it encourages it. Such actions tell students that being LGBT is unacceptable, that LGBT identities are inferior, and that LGBT students do not deserve to participate openly at school. These are the very attitudes that fuel anti-gay and transphobic harassment.

If schools really want to improve the situation for LGBT students, they need to do the opposite of what Hoover High School and Fort Collins High School did. Instead of silencing LGBT identities, schools should encourage LGBT students and their supporters to openly express their identities with pride. LGBT students should have access not only to safe bathroom spaces that accord with their gender identity but also opportunities to occupy positions of leadership and prestige among their peers. The antidote to bullying is not silence and isolation, it is esteem and respect. If schools really want to ensure their students’ safety (and to avoid legal liability for failing to prevent bullying), they must ensure that LGBT students are full participants in the life of the school rather than excluding them for expressing their identities.

Shortly after I returned to the United States, Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which dramatically reduced the sentencing discrepancy between powder cocaine and crack cocaine violations. For the three decades preceding the Act’s passage, those arrested for crack cocaine offenses faced a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence for carrying only 10 grams of the drug, while a powder cocaine user would have to be caught with 1,000 grams to trigger the same penalty.

Congress was attempting to correct a policy that cut along racial lines: it was allowing white and Hispanic powder-cocaine users off the hook while locking up black crack-cocaine users. The U.S. Sentencing Commission released a statement noting that “perceived improper racial disparity fosters disrespect for and lack of confidence in the criminal justice system.” According to U.S. Senator Dick Durbin: “The sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine has contributed to the imprisonment of African Americans at six times the rate of whites and to the United States’ position as the world’s leader in incarcerations.”

While our domestic cocaine policy is now less overtly racist, it continues to rely on incarceration rather than rehabilitation. Rather than provide poor Americans with alternative means of income or help with addiction, it eerily mirrors what happened when America took its war on cocaine to the source: the coca farmers themselves.

When I first moved to South America, I lived in Ayacucho, Peru—the region where the vast majority of Peruvian cocaine is produced. There I learned about the ancient cultural ties between the Andean people and the coca leaf. It’s part of everyday Andean life and the leaf itself is considered sacred; it is most often chewed or used in tea. It became impossible for me to reconcile the image of an elderly Ayacuchan beggar chewing coca leaves against the image of a rich 20-something snorting lines of cocaine inside a VIP section in a Los Angeles club. Coca and cocaine seemed worlds apart, despite being of the same root.

Initially, I fully sympathized with the movement in favor of protecting the sacred coca leaf for the indigenous. It simply seemed unfair and even imperialistic to barge into a civilization that has chewed coca leaves for centuries and to burn all of the crops because U.S. citizens were getting too addicted to the powder form. In time, my opinions became tempered by some grim truths. In the region of Ayacucho, the ratio of coca for coca leaves to coca for cocaine is astonishing. I was told by a local that almost 95% percent of coca production goes directly to cocaine. At best, a meager 5% is used locally in coca leaf-based products. The demand simply isn’t as high for coca leaves as cocaine, yes—but the issue isn’t simply that. The issue is that if a farmer chooses to produce coca for cocaine instead of coca leaves, he will see his earnings multiply by the dozens. Moving from a macro to a more micro perspective, a lot of the drug production issues boil down to poverty issues—to one couple, their four children, their small home, and their ability to put food on the table.

I took the above photo upon entering the Chapare region of Cochabamba, Bolivia—home to a significant portion of the country’s coca production. The sign translates to “Villa Tunari, land free of USAID,” highlighting the region’s enduring pride at having survived the Reagan administration.

Coca production in Bolivia happens in two regions of the country: the Yungas in the north and Chapare in Cochabamba department. The Yungas coca leaves are primarily used for coca tea as the climate produces better quality leaves. That leaves hot, humid Chapare—a region hidden in cloud forest and jungle—as the prime location for producing coca for cocaine. Chapare, to Bolivians and perhaps US citizens who’ve followed the drug war, has been a major point of pressure from the DEA.

When the DEA entered Chapare in the 1980s, coca plantations were set ablaze and the farmers were given next to nothing to begin their rebuilding. Over the years, and in an effort to create a more sustainable form of “eradication,” USAID began implementing alternative-to-coca programs which offered seeds and funding for establishing alternative crops in the tropical region. However, much of this was a bureaucratic failure and proved catastrophic for local farmers. For example, coca farmers would stop their coca crop, and then were given seeds for orange trees. It takes years for orange trees to reach the size needed to begin producing oranges, and in those years, the former coca farmers were destined to have zero income. This was very problematic, not to mention disastrous for the farmers themselves.

Four years ago, USAID was kicked out of Chapare. Emboldened by Evo Morales, the country’s first fully-indigenous President in over 500 years and a coca farmer himself, the citizens of Chapare had had enough of the failed policies and strategies of USAID interfering with their lives. In a bold but unsurprising move, Evo Morales kicked the DEA out of Bolivia, believing the solutions could be much better coming from home.

Nevertheless, it is important to note that since Evo Morales became President, cocaine production has climbed to over 60% above its previous threshold in Bolivia. The USAID policy has not worked, and neither has Evo Morales’s strategy of pressuring coca farmers to create other products from coca leaves, such as traditional medicine, coca-scented products, and the like.

Where do we stand now? Domestic attempts to combat cocaine have resulted in increased incarceration and institutionalized racism. Our foreign attempts to nip cocaine in its literal bud have left behind a harrowing colonialist imprint on South Americans. Just last week, the Wall Street Journal explored the tattered state of Bolivian efforts to combat coca production at the seed.

Many critics of the drug war offer the answer that Bolivia, and the United States for that matter, should just legalize cocaine. The argument is appealing, but it is eons away from achieving any widespread traction in public opinion or legislatures. The trade will continue to cause bloody conflict because it will continue to be profitable, whether it is illicit or not. For the time being, American domestic and foreign policy must continue to rectify its legacy of making the poor poorer and minorities more marginalized.

Valerie Hans, Professor of Law at Cornell, is the author or editor of six books and approximately 100 articles. Professor Hans was originally trained as a social scientist at the University of Toronto where she received her PhD in 1978. Today she conducts empirical studies of law and is one of the country’s leading authorities on the jury system. In this post, Professor Hans discusses the importance of jury representativeness and how even with some of the best practices in the country, some New York counties have a wide discrepancy between the racial makeup of their communities and the racial makeup of those who actually serve on the jury. Professor Hans also analyzes two reports that offer evidence that New York has made great strides in increasing jury representation but that the state still falls short of reflecting New York’s diverse population.

As a jury researcher, I hear a lot of jokes about how to get out of jury duty. But two recent reports from New York State’s court system indicate that who’s serving and not serving on juries is no laughing matter. Two reports, the First Annual Report Pursuant to Section 528 of the Judiciary Law and Jury Representativeness: A Demographic Study of Juror Qualification and Summoning in Monroe County, offer new evidence of the ways in which juries in the state fall short of reflecting New York’s diverse population.^[1]

The Importance of Jury Representativeness

The principle that juries should be representative of the community is a sound one. Although there is no right to a petit jury that fully reflects the community, juries must be selected from a group that is a fair cross-section of the community, a principle upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court as “fundamental to the American system of justice.” Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 528-30 (1975). It is fundamental for good reasons: (1) Juries that include the full range of a community’s life experiences and social, economic, and political perspectives are better at fact finding and at incorporating community values; and (2) a representative jury is more likely to be seen as a legitimate decision maker by the community.

Recognizing its importance, New York and many other states and the federal government have made tremendous strides over the last few decades in increasing the representativeness of their jury pools. In the past, New York used a permanent list from which it drew potential jurors, updated it only infrequently, allowed a large number of exemptions from jury duty, sequestered juries during deliberations – in short, raised many obstacles to full participation. New York then introduced several changes including a one-day/one trial system where trial jurors appear for one day or for the duration of one trial to lessen the burden on individuals. The state eliminated exemptions so jury service would be spread more fairly. It also adopted a system that combines information from five different lists of state residents to create its master list, which is regularly updated. All these changes – recommended as ideal practices by the American Bar Association and the National Center for State Courts – should in theory produce representative cross-sections of the community.

Even so, New York community groups and lawyers representing minority clients have complained that jury pools still fall short of reflecting a fair cross-section the community. I joined several attorneys, state court officials, and community representatives to testify about the jury representativeness issue at a Public Hearing on Jury Diversity, held by the Assembly Standing Committee on Judiciary and Codes on April 30, 2009. To explore the extent of the problem, the New York legislature mandated in 2009 that prospective jurors who report for jury duty around the state be surveyed about their demographic characteristics.

The New York Reports on Jury Pool Representativeness

The new reports give us a comprehensive look, for the first time, at who serves on juries in New York State. One report is statewide; the other is an in-depth look at the different stages of jury selection in upstate Monroe County, where Rochester is located. (I served as a consultant on the Monroe County report). The reports provide some reassurance that many aspects of the system in place are working well, but also offer new evidence that specific groups of citizens are likely underrepresented.

The statewide report compared those who appeared in court and served as trial or grand jurors to available census figures for the 18+ population in all New York counties. This is not a perfect comparison, because New York State jurors must be US citizens and fluent in the English language; furthermore, those convicted of felonies who have not had their rights restored cannot serve. But it is a decent approximation, so long as we are mindful of the limitations. Statewide, there are no strong divergences between the proportions of specific racial and ethnic groups in the population and the proportions reporting for jury duty. For example, statewide, the 2010 census shows 16% identify themselves as of Hispanic origin, compared to 15% Hispanics in the jury pool. In the 2010 census, 15% identify themselves as black, as do 17% in jury pools. But the overall numbers mask some striking differences in specific jurisdictions. In Tompkins County, for example, where Cornell University is located, 83% of the census participants identify as white but 93% of the jury pool is white. In New York County, Hispanics constitute 23% of the census but 18% of the jury pool.

The counties show different patterns of representativeness. Some patterns could be due to jury-eligibility differences across racial and ethnic groups. For example, differences in English language ability or citizenship are particularly likely explanations for at least some of the apparent underrepresentation of Hispanic or Asian groups in some New York counties. But the differences warrant further examination at the county level.

The Monroe County report analyzed the different stages of jury pool selection, comparing census figures with the characteristics of people responding to qualification questionnaires and summonses, requesting excuses, and reporting to jury duty. In Monroe County, jury qualification questionnaires and jury summonses are mailed to a geographic cross‐section of the county, as intended. Gender and Hispanic ethnicity are well‐represented among those who respond. However, while the census figures estimate that blacks are about 12% of the Monroe County jury-eligible population, they constitute 9.7% of those who respond to jury qualification questionnaires, and 7.3% of those who appear for jury service. Why? Although the report cannot identify all the reasons, it shows that mailings to areas of the county with higher proportions of racial and ethnic minorities and poorer residents are more likely to be returned as undeliverable or do not produce responses. Blacks also request and are given temporary hardship excuses from serving, for example, for job or child care reasons, more frequently than members of other racial groups.

What’s Next?

Both reports confirm some apparent gaps in representation, and the Monroe County report goes further in identifying the stages in the summoning and jury service system where gaps emerge. These are important first steps, and I applaud New York for taking them, and for committing itself to making annual reports so we can gauge progress.

What should be next on the state’s agenda? Here, New York has fewer immediately obvious options than other states, because it already employs many of the best practices for jury pool selection, like following up with those who don’t respond to initial mailings, using the one day/one trial approach in most counties, and offering automatic one-time postponements.

The statewide report advocates community outreach and that is a good start. Meaningful, substantial outreach could help to identify barriers that members of underrepresented groups experience in receiving and responding to summonses and in serving as jurors. Are the qualification and summoning questionnaires clear and understandable? Are there ways to modify the conditions of jury service, by shifting trial hours, supplementing juror pay, or providing child care, to address the reasons some potential jurors ask for hardship excuses? Could sending additional mailings to zip codes with lower response rates to qualification questionnaires correct the problem of underrepresentation?

Jury service is a form of political participation. In the last few national elections, political activists have gotten creative about using insights from social science to encourage their voters to get to the polls. I would like to see some of that creativity applied to jury selection. Now that we have baseline numbers from these significant reports, New York can pilot test promising reforms and observe whether there are positive effects. Having fully representative juries will help ensure our juries benefit from diverse experiences and perspectives; their verdicts will be more legitimate. So, let’s stop joking about how to get out of jury duty and start working on how to get everyone in!

After an Ecuadorean appeals court upheld an $18 billion judgment against Chevron Corporation from February of last year, a New York federal judge last week refused to halt the plaintiffs’ collection on the judgment.  The case, Maria Aguinda v. Chevron, from the Superior Court of Nueva Loja, Lago Agrio, Ecuador, represents a two decade-old legal battle between the second-largest U.S. oil company and more than 30,000 residents of the Amazon.  Chevron can still appeal the ruling to Ecuador’s supreme court.

Texaco, the company originally accused of dumping toxic waste in and around the Ecuadorean town of Lago Agrio, was acquired by Chevron in 2001.  Texaco arrived in Ecuador in the 1970s, and started exporting oil, which not only doubled Ecuador’s per-capita GDP in a decade, but provided the bulk of the country’s public revenue.  However, according to the plaintiffs:

Rather tha[n] safely storing the toxic produced water that comes as a byproduct from drilling oil wells, Texaco simply dumped the fluid into vast pits.  The company allegedly left hundreds of pools of toxic sludge behind, resulting in what the plaintiffs of the lawsuit called a ‘rainforest Chernobyl.

Furthermore,

According to the [Amazon Defense Coalition], Texaco dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into Amazon waterways, abandoned more than 900 waste pits, burned millions of cubic meters of gases with no controls and spilled more than 17 million gallons of oil due to pipeline ruptures.

Defendant Chevron argues that, before acquisition, Texaco partnered with an Ecuadorean oil company, Petroecuador.  Chevron further claims that it spent about $40 million to clean up a third of the sites in which it worked, which reflects the 1/3 share of its agreement with Petroecuador.

The Maria Aguinda v. Chevron case was previously dismissed three years after it was filed in New York because Chevron successfully argued that Ecuador was the proper venue.  American lawyers working on behalf of the complaining residents of the Amazon then refiled the case in Ecuador in 2003.

Despite the recent $18 billion judgment, work is far from over for Pablo Fajardo, an Ecuadorean lawyer for the plaintiffs, who was recently distinguished as a “CNN Hero” for his work on this case.  Chevron now disputes the validity of Ecuadorean courts to hear a case, pointing to U.S. State Department documents summarizing corruption in Ecuador along with a video it released in which it found an Ecuadorean judge accepting bribes.  The judge was immediately reprimanded and was eventually removed from the case.

In 2009, a documentary, Crude, by filmmaker Joe Berlinger, depicted the devastating effects on the indigenous people who live in and near the city of Lago Agrio.  Things got even messier when Chevron argued that outtakes from the documentary revealed “improper interaction between lawyers for the Ecuadorean plaintiffs and a neutral court-appointed expert.”  After attempting to block the subpoena for outtakes, a Manhattan federal appeals court ruled that Berlinger must turn over some of the over 600 hours of unused footage in his film to Chevron. In some of the outtakes, a plaintiffs’ attorney Steve Donziger admits that Ecuadorean’s justice system is corrupt and discusses less-than-clean tactics of intimidation.  He even refers to some of the plaintiffs’ evidence of toxic contamination as “smoke and mirrors.”

Although Chevron still has the option of appealing the decision to Ecuador’s Supreme Court, doing so requires a hefty deposit, which legal analysts think Chevron will try to avoid.  Instead, Chevron, will likely look to other countries’ justice systems and argue that the Ecuadorean judgment should be deemed invalid and unenforceable. Considering that countries in which Chevron does retain assets, such as Angola or Nigeria, may be reluctant to threaten ties with Chevron, it seems like an uphill battle for the residents of Lago Agrio.  The plaintiffs’ attorney, Mr. Fajardo, said that it could take up to five years to get the ruling enforced.

At Cornell, Ms. Shelinsky was an excellent student who served first as an Associate and later as an Article Editor on the Journal of Law and Public Policy.  Her best friend, Stacey Kessler, remarked that Ms. Shelinsky won an award for achieving the highest grade in a course on youth advocacy.

Ms. Kessler, who described Ms. Shelinsky as someone “full of love, loyalty, and humor,” was so close with Ms. Shelinsky that they considered themselves sisters from their first meeting in high school biology.  Ms. Kessler fondly reminisced about the habit she and Ms. Shelinsky had of collapsing on the floor laughing. Even when others may have considered them crazy for their optimism, the two always tried to find the humor in life’s roughest patches.  At their summer camp, Ms. Kessler and Ms. Shelinsky discovered a water pipe and followed it all the way down the mountain, reasoning that the pipe was bringing water to the camp because there were no other facilities nearby.  They were the only pair to make it down unaided.  Ms. Shelinsky, must have been resourceful and pragmatic, in addition to having a sense of humor and adventure.

At Carter Ledyard & Milburn, she focused on intellectual property, condemnation, and real estate litigation.  Ms. Susan Kalib, a fellow attorney at Carter Ledyard, remembered that Ms. Shelinsky had a “flair for the dramatic” as well—she frequently updated the other associates on her latest exploits as a flyer in her trapeze class.  She was praised by clients, other associates and partners for her tireless work ethic, attention to detail, and fierce litigation strategies.  Another fellow attorney, Rose Auslander, describes hiring Ms. Shelinsky as akin to “hiring a comet,” knowing that the young attorney would go far.

Outside the office, Ms. Auslander and Diane Melnick, Ms. Shelinsky’s office neighbor, remember Ms. Shelinsky as a fascinating, multi-talented woman.  She was an excellent painter, a SCUBA instructor, and a world traveler who wove stories of her visits to South Africa, Bhutan, Thailand, Spain, New Orleans, and the Caribbean.  She had written scripts for MTV and rescued baby turtles; she was an avid art collector and member of MoMA. Ms. Auslander spoke of how Ms. Shelinsky always dressed in “the coolest fashions” with her high ponytail and “slicked back hair,” and how Ms. Shelinsky was really revitalizing the often drab and dreary practice of law.  Ms. Melnick will always miss the “big sister-little sister” dynamic she shared with Ms. Shelinsky. Ms. Shelinsky “had so much wisdom and confidence,” she recalled, “that she probably gave me more advice than I gave her.”

As a final note: one of the unexpected benefits of our new law journal blog is our greater online presence, allowing past members and others who would otherwise not have made the connection to contact the current staff.  In response, current members share the privilege of honoring past members such as Ms. Shelinsky.  Much journal work—and a lot of work in life for that matter—is thankless.  Article Editors (AEs) on JLPP, for example, have tremendous responsibility but are rarely acknowledged.  AEs are responsible for reviewing Associates’ sourcing and proving on articles; they compile and check all of the Associates’ work, score the Associates’ work, and send a rough draft of the article to the Managing Editor (ME) responsible for the article.  As current ME Ria Dutta said: “They are the first set of eyes on the entire article.  I know that I have found that the work done by AEs is essential to my work as an ME and the quality of their revisions will in many cases determine the quality of the final, published article.  AE feedback both helps Associates improve their revisions from article to article and their comments can be significant during elections.”

Here are some of the pieces Ms. Shelinsky edited as an AE for JLPP.  While of course we cannot pay individual tribute to every former member of the journal who has passed away, hopefully this will serve as a humble homage to others as well—those who have passed away too young, and also those on the journal past and present, who do tremendous amounts of work for little reward or recognition.