Human Rights Law

In the summer of 2008 Kimberley Motley quit her job as a Criminal Defence Attorney in Milwaukee to join a program to help train lawyers in war-torn Afghanistan. She was 32 years old at the time, a former Mrs Wisconsin (she'd entered the contest on a dare) and a mother of three who had never travelled outside the United States.

In the long history of warfare and cultural and ethnic violence, the 20th century was exceptional for producing institutions charged with seeking accountability or redress for violent offenses and human rights abuses across the globe, often forcing nations to confront the consequences of past atrocities. The Holocaust ended with trials at Nuremberg, apartheid in South Africa concluded with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the Gacaca courts continue to strive for closure in the wake of the Rwandan genocide.

Corridors of Contagion brings to light the experiences of five people incarcerated across the United States as they navigate the onset of the pandemic-and the many months, stretched into years, that followed. Journalist Victoria Law combines this storytelling with a trenchant analysis of the structural failures of the US carceral system: failures that made prisons uniquely vulnerable to COVID-19 outbreaks, from overcrowding to solitary confinement, from insufficient healthcare to life sentences.

With this volume, Roe v. Dobbs: The Past, Present and Future of a Constitutional Right of Abortion, we confront the remarkable beginning and end-once again, after a half-century-of the landmark Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, shockingly overruled by the Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The goal of this book is to bring together some of our nation's experts to share their views on whether there should be a constitutional right to abortion, and what the consequences of Dobbs might be.

A constant yet oftentimes concealed practice in war has been the use of informers and collaborators by parties to an armed conflict. Despite the prevalence of such activity, and the serious and at times fatal consequences that befall those who collaborate with an enemy, international law applicable in times of armed conflict does not squarely address the phenomenon. The recruitment, use, and treatment of informers and other collaborators is addressed only partially and at times indirectly by international humanitarian law.