When Justice Is Not Served: The Lack of Rape Kit Testing and Insufficiency of Accountability for Victims
Across the country, there is a little-noticed but pervasive and egregious delay happening in government crime labs. Over 100,000 known sexual assault forensic evidence specimens, also known as rape kits, are currently sitting on shelves untested across the United States, some of which have remained there for decades. [1] Despite the fact that this DNA evidence could be used to find perpetrators and press charges, there is an alarming lack of due process when it comes to the justice system’s failure to test so many rape kits, leading some advocates to argue for reform on constitutional grounds. Ultimately, it is essential to eliminate the statutes of limitations on felony sex crimes and institute a new law requiring that rape kits are tested within a reasonable amount of time as determined by the courts.
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Who’s Representing Who?: SEC vs. Covington and the Sixth Amendment
For the United States, a nation deeply embedded in individualism and liberal rights, the trade-off between crime prevention and personal privacy has always been a contentious balance to strike. With the advent of emergent technologies, the battle over right-to-data between the state and the individual has continued to dominate legal theory. Can governmental and regulatory agencies legitimately demand that private firms provide information based on concerns of national security or suspicions of criminal offense? In 2020, the preeminent multinational law firm Covington & Burling LLP was subjected to a cyberattack carried out by hackers associated with Halfnium, an organization suspected of having Chinese state backing. Many of Covington’s high-profile clients – including two hundred ninety-eight publicly traded companies – were victims of this leakage. Due to the weight of these companies in the financial market, the Securities Exchange Commission filed suit against Covington in a D.C. federal court order to enforce a subpoena issued in March 2022 that would compel Covington to provide the names of the affected clients. Covington’s representative lawyer has preliminarily invoked attorney-client privileges as a defensive strategy. [1] SEC’s order to enforce the subpoena for disclosure of the clients’ names is not entirely consistent with precedent. Furthermore, Covington & Burling’s wide variety of legal strategies, mostly predicated on the attorney-client privileges established by the Sixth Amendment and other related cases and legal frameworks, are highly capable of shielding them from this intrusive and overreaching lawsuit.
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The Implications of Citizens United: The Threat of Corruption in Campaign Politics in United States vs. Householder
In the case United States vs. Householder (2023), the Ohio District Court determined that former Governor of Ohio Larry Householder engaged in racketeering when he took an illegal sixty million dollar bribe from nonprofit groups to support his and his peers’ political campaigns. [1] This case is consequential as it may have addressed the implications of Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission (FEC) (2010), which gave corporations, nonprofit groups, labor unions, and other organizations the right to free speech, including political endeavors, under the First Amendment. In particular, United States vs. Householder tested this decision by revealing two important implications through its finding: the presence of bribery within campaign politics and the influence of dark money, both of which Citizens United failed to account for due to its vague nature. If relying on legal precedent from FEC vs. MA Citizens for Life and McConnell vs. FEC in the final decision and sentencing, United States vs. Householder could dramatically change the landscape of campaign finance politics, as well as fix the loopholes created by the Citizens United decision. This is crucial for protecting the voting rights of the American people, as it removes harmful influences from elections such as racketeering (the act of obtaining money by an illegal enterprise, usually involving intimidation) and bribery.
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The Right to Housing & Forced Institutionalization of Unhoused Populations in New York City
In late 2022, New York City Mayor Eric Adams issued a new directive that would allow police officers to commit an unhoused person to a hospital against their will if they are perceived to be mentally ill or dangerous to themselves or others. Mayor Adams’ efforts, a stark change from previous policies that required further evaluation before institutionalization, have faced significant backlash. Some responded by calling for a temporary restraining order to prevent this policy from going into effect, citing concerns for further discrimination and criminalization of the already economically and racially marginalized populations. Others argued that the new directive violated the constitutional rights of New Yorkers. These legislative reforms, although done in the name of caring for unhoused populations, often result in their mistreatment, begging the question: how have new policies diverted policymakers from upholding constitutional and international standards for housing rights?
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Procedural Fairness as Prerequisite: The UK-Rwanda Asylum Relocation Deal and the Right to Non-Refoulement
As Hannah Arendt predicted nearly a century ago, the refugee crisis is the greatest test of the human rights paradigm. An estimated 103 million people have been forcibly displaced worldwide. In response to increased “small-boat” refugees, the United Kingdom entered a deal with Rwanda in April 2022 to allow the British Home Office, the state immigration and security department, to relocate asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda. An emergency injunction from the European Court of Human Rights in June halted the first round of deportations, leading to a class-action lawsuit, R. v Secretary of State (2022), that challenged the policy. The Divisional Court subsequently ruled against the challenge in December, and individual appeals are currently underway. The case is complicated by complex refugee law, but procedural fairness during the asylum process underpins the key legal issues at stake as the prerequisite to upholding all other fundamental human rights. Under this framework, the Home Office can be held in breach of the asylum seekers’ right to non refoulement by failing to fulfill relevant procedural obligations and violating asylees’ due process rights.
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Evidencing the Implicit Identity: Dangerous Ambiguities in Queer Asylum Law
The LGBTQ+ community has endured a complicated history of discrimination in United States courts of immigration. Under U.S. law, a refugee is legally defined as one who can "demonstrate that they were persecuted or fear persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group." "Particular social group" suggests an intentionally ambiguous, theoretically "all-encompassing" category. While its ambiguity may be used for purposes of inclusion, one may discern that such language risks bias infiltration and foster far more exclusionary practices. The history of queer exclusion is a long one: In the 1950s, queer immigrants—denoted as "psychopathic personalities''—were specifically forbidden from becoming U.S. citizens; the 1965 Immigration Reform Act referred to homosexuality as "sexual deviation;" the ban on HIV-positive immigrants endured until 2010. But in the early 2000s, the legal paradigm began a subtle shift for the better: under the category of "particular social groups'' of those seeking asylum, U.S. immigration increasingly began to recognize those who listed their LGBTQ+ identity as potentially belonging to a persecuted group that was qualified for refugee status. However, proving one's past or future persecutory risks on account of belonging to such a broad social category—a task known as the "Nexus" dilemma—invites discretion in what can constitute proof of membership to the queer community.
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Liberating the Nazis’ “Last Prisoners of War”: How Citizenship Considerations Can Challenge Recent Supreme Court Decisions on Holocaust Restitution
In February 2021, the Supreme Court decided two cases that threaten to narrow the avenues available to Holocaust survivors looking to obtain restitution for property stolen from them as a part of the larger Nazi genocide. The cases were remanded and are currently being heard by lower courts, where, if argued persuasively, the claimants can salvage a vulnerable avenue of restitution for their stolen property — the “last prisoners of war.” With every tick of the clock, the world is left with fewer living survivors and refugees of the Holocaust who can demand justice from the countries that deprived them of their humanity, rights, and loved ones.
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The Simultaneous Destruction of First Amendment and LGBTQ+ Rights in America
The American dream is nonexistent for an abundance of individuals within the LGBTQ+ community whose rights have been rapidly curtailed. March 28, 2022 marked the beginning of a particularly discriminatory period as a result of Ron Desantis’ signing of the “Parental Rights in Education” Law, now more widely known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law. This law is one among more than a dozen others, including the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act,” which prohibit federally-funded schools from teaching material related to sexuality. Together, these bills intend to outlaw discussion of sexuality and gender identity in elementary school classrooms and thereby infringe upon the rights of teachers. The passing of “Don’t Say Gay” has evoked an abundance of social controversy and multiple lawsuits that accuse the law’s wording of being incredibly vague which could lead to dangerously broad applications. Ultimately, the aforementioned bills and laws violate the First Amendment by widely censoring teachers and are therefore unconstitutional.
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Examining Chile’s Constitutional Pathways Toward Political Decentralization
Chile’s ongoing effort to write a new constitution has created an opportunity for the country to create a more democratic, cohesive, and equal society. These core values guided the design behind each section of the proposed Chilean Constitution, from civil rights to government structure. The timing of this new constitution coincided with the decades-long legal movement to restructure power between the federal and regional governments; until then, Chile’s decentralization process had unfolded gradually through patchwork revisions to the current Constitution. [1] If ratified, the recently proposed constitution would have reconfigured the relationship between the federal and regional governments, distributing power locally through newly created political bodies that would have the resources to carry out their constitutional responsibilities. Even though the proposed constitution was rejected by Chileans in the 2022 plebiscite, understanding how its language would have changed power-sharing arrangements throughout the country allows us to visualize innovative legal methods for fostering and protecting local autonomy while still respecting the national political framework.
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