|
|||
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
HRI Fellowship
2008-2009 Human Rights Institute Fellow Alexandra D. Lahav, UConn Law School Alexandra Lahav is an associate professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Prior to joining the law faculty she was a teaching fellow at Stanford Law School and litigated civil rights cases in New York City. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law School and Brown University. Her research has focused on procedural justice and access to justice in the United States. Her previous articles have approached access to justice issues through the lens of civil procedure, in particular the use of the class action and other multiparty litigation to vindicate collective and individual rights. Her published work in this area includes Bellwether Trials, 76 GEO. WASH. L. REV. __ (forthcoming 2008); Recovering the Social Value of Jurisdictional Redundancy, Symposium Issue, 82 TULANE L. REV. __ (forthcoming 2008); The Law and Large Numbers: Preserving Adjudication in Complex Litigation, 59 FLA. L. REV. 383 (2007); Fundamental Principles for Class Action Governance, 37 IND. L. REV. 65 (2003). Prof. Lahav’s current project concerns the role of the lawyer in perpetuating and resisting procedural injustice. The particular focus of her research is the role of lawyers in hearings before military commissions in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. These military commissions constitute a type of legal black hole within an otherwise liberal democratic regime which claims to adhere to the basic principles of the rule of law. Because lawyers are officers of the court and the first defense of the rule of law, participation in this system raises serious moral questions. Is the lawyer that participates in these or other unjust hearings a seeker of justice or enabler of injustice? During her fellowship at the Human Rights Institute, Prof. Lahav will conduct qualitative research in order to evaluate the justifications for and arguments against lawyer participation in unfair hearings. She will seek the answers to the following questions from lawyers involved in the military commission process: How do lawyers justify their participation? Are they concerned about complicity in the system? What factors should lawyers consider before choosing to participate in a system they think is unfair? Is there a principled stance that lawyers ought to take (such as that boycotts are categorically wrong because they leave potential clients without access to a lawyer)? Or should lawyer decisions to participate or refrain be contextual and pragmatic?
2007-2008 Human Rights Institute Fellow Shareen Hertel, Political Science and Human Rights Shareen Hertel is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, and holds a joint appointment with the University of Connecticut Human Rights Institute. She has also served as a consultant to foundations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and United Nations agencies in the United States, Latin America and South Asia; has written professionally on the UN’s role in economic and social development; and helped develop a standard for labor rights monitoring in global manufacturing (SA8000). She is the author of Unexpected Power: Conflict and Change Among Transnational Activists (Cornell 2006) and articles in journals such as Global Governance, Human Rights Review, the Journal of Latin American Studies, and International Studies Perspectives. During her fellowship with the HR Institute, Professor Hertel will develop a project on economic rights implementation – focusing, in particular, on public attitudes regarding ethical consumption. Are consumers willing to purchase goods and services created in a socially and environmentally responsible manner and if so, why? Is willingness to pay for “fair trade” coffee or “sweatshop free” clothing, for example, tied to popular conceptions of human rights or to related social movement activism? In November 2006, Hertel and colleagues at UConn carried out a pilot national public opinion survey (through the Center for Survey Research and Analysis) that revealed significant public awareness of the right to a minimum guaranteed standard of living as a human right – and even higher willingness to pay for ethically produced goods among that segment of the population. Nevertheless, much remains to be learned about why consumers do or do not prefer this type of products; how businesses vary in their response to such demands; and whether or not ethical consumption positively affects the implementation of economic rights or actually has negligible and/or unintended negative consequences for social welfare outcomes. Hertel plans to use her semester as an HRI Fellow to design and raise funds for a more in-depth national survey and an experimental component to advance this research agenda.
2006-2007 Human Rights Institute Fellow Professor Diana Meyers, Department of Philosophy Professor Diana Meyers website Diana Tietjens Meyers (CUNY) writes on ethics, feminist philosophy, and social and political philosophy and had been at the University of Connecticut since 1987. Her most recent monographs are Subjection and Subjectivity: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Moral Philosophy and Gender in the Mirror: Cultural Imagery and Women's Agency. In 2004 Rowman and Littlefield published a collection of her (mostly) previously published articles, Being Yourself: Essays on Identity, Action and Social Life. Her most recent publications are "Decentralizing Autonomy -- Five Faces of Selfhood," in Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism and "Who Acts? Reflections on Identity, Selfhood, and Autonomous Action" in Hypatia. She is the author of the article "G.E.M. Anscombe" that is to appear in the Encyclopedia of Women in World History. During her Fellowship with the Human Rights Institute, Professor Meyers worked on a project titled “Narrative and Legal Norms: Translating Victims’ Stories into Enforceable Human Rights”. She explains that project as follows: "A number of late 20th- early 21st century political and intellectual movements put a spotlight on the value of listening to silenced voices. In consciousness raising sessions, second wave feminists exchanged stories of their everyday lives and used these stories to construct theories of gender and to formulate political agendas. Soon women of color and lesbians in western as well as developing nations objected that middleclass white feminists had silenced them and consequently misrepresented womanhood and the needs of women as a group. Critical race theorists made the case that injecting personal stories of racial oppression into U.S. legal proceedings is indispensable to the eradication of white supremacy. Recent truth commissions in South Africa and Peru and war crimes tribunals in the Hague and Rwanda have reaffirmed the right to a voice of one's own. Picking up on these trends, philosophers have addressed a number of pertinent themes: respect, empathy, and credibility. Less thoroughly explored is the relation between victims' stories and normativity. My work explores how the stories of those who have been abused or oppressed can advance moral understanding, catalyze moral innovation, and guide social change. More specifically, I focus on narrative as a variegated form of representation, analyze the diverse forms that personal narratives of victimization take, and theorize the distinctive ways in which each type of story connects with human rights discourse.
About
the Fellowship:
|
2008-2009 Human Rights Institute Fellow 2007-2008 Human Rights Institute Fellow |
|
||||
|
|
| © 2003-2008 The Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut. All rights reserved. Design by Literae Interactive. |
|
