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SamHersheySecondPaper 5 - 15 May 2010 - Main.StephanieOduro
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| | | As Eben said many times, creative lawyering is difficult. I do not mean this paper to be a statement of surrender, but rather a question. As we as lawyers attempt to achieve justice, and as America advances domestically, is there anything meaningful that we can do to combat (what we perceive as) the greatest injustices that remain outside our borders? And on an even broader scale, how do we tackle problems as lawyers when there is very little law, if any, that deals with the problem? How do we deal with an issue the law may never have faced? In any area of law, domestic or foreign, this is the real work of creative lawyering, and while I may not know how yet, I hope that there are enough creative lawyers out there (myself included) who can do it. | |
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This comment is in reference to your first two paragraphs about the great injustices abroad as compared to here in the U.S. I wholly agree that so many of the problems faced abroad are so much larger than those that are domestic. And, contrary to popular belief, I don’t think there is anything wrong with admitting that.
For example, I’ve heard many Americans ask why people adopt from outside of the U.S. when there are so many children in the U.S. that need homes. This may be true but what worse: being in foster care in the U.S. or being out on the streets of a third-world country because there’s really no foster care system for unwanted children?
We should look at ourselves as a world community, where we try to not only help ourselves, but help others. The argument about tax revenues is a strong one that I, too, can understand. The government has a duty to protect their citizens first. But if individuals and corporations took more of a stand, they, too, could make a difference.
-- StephanieOduro - 15 May 2010 | | | |
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SamHersheySecondPaper 4 - 14 May 2010 - Main.RorySkaggs
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< | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | Concerns about the Limits of Creative Lawyering | | | Here vs. There | |
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< | While the health care bill was stirring controversy last month, I often found myself in a debate of a kind not found in newspapers and on television. The debate was not about whether the bill should pass—my friends and I agreed in our support. We did not even debate the events taking place in this country. I rather found myself telling them what I had witnessed in another country: the devastating, eye-opening time I had spent in Cambodia last year. There I witnessed not only the most abject poverty, but also its most horrific consequence: child prostitution. I could not even walk down the streets of Phnom Penh at night without being solicited to buy time with a young girl. The images stayed with me when I came home, and when the health care bill passed, I could not help thinking about them again. While it is hard not to be thrilled that thirty million Americans now have access to health care, I cannot help but realize that as our country progresses, the problems left for us to solve domestically, though certainly urgent and worthy, pale in comparison to the problems faced by so many abroad. And worse, I worry that creative lawyering cannot do much to help. | >
> | While the health care bill was stirring controversy last month, I couldn’t help but reflect on past experiences in my own life which influence my perception of problems in the world. Rather than debating the health care bill itself, touted as one of the most pressing issues we face, I found myself telling friends about the devastating, eye-opening time I spent in Cambodia last year. I witnessed not only the most abject poverty, but also its most horrific consequence: child prostitution. I could not even walk down the streets of Phnom Penh at night without being solicited to buy time with a young girl. The images stayed with me when I came home, and when the health care bill passed, I could not help but think about them again. While it is hard not to be thrilled that more Americans now have access to health care, I find it difficult to ignore that while the problems left for us to solve domestically are certainly urgent and worthy, they pale in comparison to the problems faced by so many abroad. And as I am becoming a lawyer, I worry that creative lawyering cannot do much to help. | | | The Broader Focus | |
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< | In my insistence that Americans need to take a broader focus to fight the greatest injustices, I was surprised to face a series of rebuttals. A common claim was that we have a heightened moral obligation to the people in our own country. But that claim never made sense to me. I do not see why lines on a map delineate moral responsibilities, nor do I think local duties can completely surmount the difference in magnitude between the injustices on one side of the line (say, Californaia) and on the other (say, Mexico). Some arguments looked past morality to practicality: help who you can where you can. I certainly see the value in a realistic approach, but I insisted, perhaps naively, that Americans can affect real change abroad. In light of what I now know about American efforts to combat the foreign child sex industry, I find myself doubting that proposition. | >
> | In my insistence that Americans need to focus more on fighting what I believe to be the greatest injustices, I was surprised at how much resistance I encountered. A common claim was that we have a heightened moral obligation to the people in our own country. But that claim never made sense to me—why do lines on a map delineate moral responsibilities? Should local duties on one side of the line (e.g., California) justify ignoring greater injustice on the other (e.g., Mexico)? Some arguments looked past morality to practicality: help who you can where you can. Also, there is probably some sense that our tax revenue should be spent on us first and foremost (while this to some extent may ignore the reality of the US budget, it has intuitive appeal). I certainly see the value in a realistic approach, but I insisted, perhaps naively, that Americans can (and should) affect real change abroad. In light of what I now know about American efforts to combat the foreign child sex industry, I find myself doubting that proposition. | | | Sweden's Approach, and Our Late Arrival | |
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< | Since 1962, Sweden has enforced extraterritorial laws that allow for the prosecution of Swedish citizens who have engaged in child prostitution anywhere in the world. Thus, if a Swedish citizen is caught with a child prostitute in Cambodia, he can stand trial in Sweden for the crime. The US was slow to keep pace with such policies, but in 1994, the Clinton Administration included an extraterritorial provision similar to that of Sweden in its Crime Bill. That provision, however, proved useless because its “intent requirement” required prosecutors to prove that Americans who had engaged in child prostitution abroad actually departed on their trips with exactly that purpose in mind. Congress eased this burden with the 2003 PROTECT Act, which removed the intent requirement. Nevertheless, the act has not done much good. Before the PROTECT Act, only five men had been prosecuted for engaging in child prostitution abroad. Since the act’s passing, the US has prosecuted only a dozen more. | >
> | Since 1962, Sweden has enforced extraterritorial laws that allow for the prosecution of Swedish citizens who have engaged in child prostitution anywhere in the world. The US was slow to catch up, but in 1994 the Clinton Administration included an extraterritorial provision similar to Sweden’s in its Crime Bill. While under the original bill prosecutions were exceedingly difficult, Congress eased this burden with the 2003 PROTECT Act. Both countries, however, have used these measures with only limited success. Stockholm University estimates that four to five thousand Swedish citizens travel abroad every year to buy sex with children, but the Swedish government has been able to bring only a few prosecutions. And in America, before the PROTECT Act, only five men had been prosecuted for engaging in child prostitution abroad. Since the act’s passing, the US has prosecuted only a dozen more. The problem with using domestic law to combat child prostitution abroad is enforcement. The governments of the host countries are at best indifferent and at worst complicit, not wanting to deter tourism of any kind. And while Sweden has stepped up its efforts even further recently, the outlook on this kind of approach being successful looks grim. | | | The Fundamental Problem | |
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< | While Sweden was far ahead of the US in addressing the problem of its citizens' traveling abroad to abuse children, it, too, has had small success with its laws: Stockholm University estimates that four to five thousand Swedish citizens travel abroad every year to buy sex with children, but the Swedish government has been able to bring only a few prosecutions. The problem with using domestic law to combat child prostitution abroad is that of enforcement. The governments of the host countries are at best indifferent and at worst complicit, not wanting to deter tourism of any kind. Again, Sweden is at the forefront of combating the problem. In 2009, Sweden initiated a program that would enable Swedish citizens to report to the police online any suspect activity they witnessed abroad. Moreover, Sweden has engaged in sting operations in Thailand and elsewhere to police child prostitution itself. While a recent Swedish sting operation brought two pedophiles to justice, the number of convictions compared with the number of estimated criminals at large remains depressingly low.
The Swedish experience testifies to the fact that even if America were willing to undertake similar initiatives, the ultimate problem of the apathy of the host countries will still remain to block our efforts. At a certain point, I wonder if the law can do anything to surmount that impediment. I can imagine using other means, such as diplomatic or economic pressure, but our legal efforts so far have accomplished very little, and I am left wondering if there is anything the law can do to end this tragedy. | >
> | There are some obvious impediments to success which prevent these laws from being effective. First, because the sanctions are criminal, only federal prosecutors can initiate a case, and prosecutors have such great discretion (and enormous caseloads) that it seems unlikely they would have the resources or the interest to tackle this problem. Even if they personally wanted to champion this cause, the aforementioned priority of domestic issues in popular consciousness combined with the internal and external political pressures prosecutors face would probably prevent them from doing so. | | | | |
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< | Futility?
As Eben has said many times, creative lawyering is difficult. So I wonder if extraterritorial problems, such as the foreign industry that caters to child sex tourism, can in fact be solved through the law or if, as the sad history indicates, attempts to use the law may be futile. I do not mean this paper to be a statement of surrender, but rather a question. As we as lawyers attempt to achieve justice, and as America advances domestically, is there anything meaningful that we can do to combat the greatest injustices that remain outside our borders? | >
> | Aside from prosecutorial discretion, international problems also involve complex and politically explosive policy, diplomacy and trade issues, which means often times some injustices go ignored to protect other priorities. As a young lawyer, is there anything I can do? I can obviously support NGOs which help the victims in host countries, either through volunteer work or financially. I can try to organize and put political pressure on those who hold the reins. I could maybe become a federal prosecutor, or a policy advisor to Congress or the executive, or even become a lawyer in the host country and learn what law they have in place to combat child prostitution, if any. But aside from these options, is there anything I, as a lawyer, can do with my practice to help? | | | | |
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< | I'm going to put some of my general comments here before I begin editing so Sam and everyone can look in the history to see my thought process. My first thought is that you spend a lot of time in the build-up and the explanation of the history and effectiveness of Swedish law, while not spending a lot of time on asking the questions that these problems create and what they mean. In particular, I thought there were two areas which could have been explored more: why people think domestic issues are more important, and what the limitations of the law are in this area and how to overcome them. As to the first, my personal intuition as to why people would care more about the US than anywhere else is taxes. If we are paying the money, we want it spent on ourselves. How do we justify spending it elsewhere, especially if we don't see any material benefit to us being returned? And especially if the host country won't even cooperate? As to the lawyering issue, a few things come to mind. First, how does a lawyer tackle a problem which does not have any law, or minimal law, to back it up? How can we use existing laws to further our goals when there isn't much that looks on point? Second, a major problem in this area would presumably be that because these are criminal statutes, only prosecutors can bring the cases, so there is only a subset of lawyers who could even do this if they wanted to. Given the political realities for most prosecutors, how do we move these types of cases further up in their agenda? And lastly, what if for the time being this really is just a political issue? How does a lawyer deal with that? And how do we get at the real problem (the pimps and organizers) if the host country won't? All these issues arise from your factual premise, and I intend to try to incorporate them in my rewrite.
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" on the next line: | >
> | Futility?
As Eben said many times, creative lawyering is difficult. I do not mean this paper to be a statement of surrender, but rather a question. As we as lawyers attempt to achieve justice, and as America advances domestically, is there anything meaningful that we can do to combat (what we perceive as) the greatest injustices that remain outside our borders? And on an even broader scale, how do we tackle problems as lawyers when there is very little law, if any, that deals with the problem? How do we deal with an issue the law may never have faced? In any area of law, domestic or foreign, this is the real work of creative lawyering, and while I may not know how yet, I hope that there are enough creative lawyers out there (myself included) who can do it. | | | | |
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< | Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of that line. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated list | | | \ No newline at end of file | |
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SamHersheySecondPaper 3 - 23 Apr 2010 - Main.RorySkaggs
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | Futility?
As Eben has said many times, creative lawyering is difficult. So I wonder if extraterritorial problems, such as the foreign industry that caters to child sex tourism, can in fact be solved through the law or if, as the sad history indicates, attempts to use the law may be futile. I do not mean this paper to be a statement of surrender, but rather a question. As we as lawyers attempt to achieve justice, and as America advances domestically, is there anything meaningful that we can do to combat the greatest injustices that remain outside our borders? | |
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> | I'm going to put some of my general comments here before I begin editing so Sam and everyone can look in the history to see my thought process. My first thought is that you spend a lot of time in the build-up and the explanation of the history and effectiveness of Swedish law, while not spending a lot of time on asking the questions that these problems create and what they mean. In particular, I thought there were two areas which could have been explored more: why people think domestic issues are more important, and what the limitations of the law are in this area and how to overcome them. As to the first, my personal intuition as to why people would care more about the US than anywhere else is taxes. If we are paying the money, we want it spent on ourselves. How do we justify spending it elsewhere, especially if we don't see any material benefit to us being returned? And especially if the host country won't even cooperate? As to the lawyering issue, a few things come to mind. First, how does a lawyer tackle a problem which does not have any law, or minimal law, to back it up? How can we use existing laws to further our goals when there isn't much that looks on point? Second, a major problem in this area would presumably be that because these are criminal statutes, only prosecutors can bring the cases, so there is only a subset of lawyers who could even do this if they wanted to. Given the political realities for most prosecutors, how do we move these types of cases further up in their agenda? And lastly, what if for the time being this really is just a political issue? How does a lawyer deal with that? And how do we get at the real problem (the pimps and organizers) if the host country won't? All these issues arise from your factual premise, and I intend to try to incorporate them in my rewrite. | | |
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" on the next line: |
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SamHersheySecondPaper 2 - 17 Apr 2010 - Main.SamHershey
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< | | | | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | |
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> | Concerns about the Limits of Creative Lawyering | | | -- By SamHershey - 16 Apr 2010 | |
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< | Section I
Subsection A
Subsub 1
Subsection B
Subsub 1 | >
> | Here vs. There | | | | |
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< | Subsub 2 | >
> | While the health care bill was stirring controversy last month, I often found myself in a debate of a kind not found in newspapers and on television. The debate was not about whether the bill should pass—my friends and I agreed in our support. We did not even debate the events taking place in this country. I rather found myself telling them what I had witnessed in another country: the devastating, eye-opening time I had spent in Cambodia last year. There I witnessed not only the most abject poverty, but also its most horrific consequence: child prostitution. I could not even walk down the streets of Phnom Penh at night without being solicited to buy time with a young girl. The images stayed with me when I came home, and when the health care bill passed, I could not help thinking about them again. While it is hard not to be thrilled that thirty million Americans now have access to health care, I cannot help but realize that as our country progresses, the problems left for us to solve domestically, though certainly urgent and worthy, pale in comparison to the problems faced by so many abroad. And worse, I worry that creative lawyering cannot do much to help. | | | | |
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> | The Broader Focus | | | | |
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> | In my insistence that Americans need to take a broader focus to fight the greatest injustices, I was surprised to face a series of rebuttals. A common claim was that we have a heightened moral obligation to the people in our own country. But that claim never made sense to me. I do not see why lines on a map delineate moral responsibilities, nor do I think local duties can completely surmount the difference in magnitude between the injustices on one side of the line (say, Californaia) and on the other (say, Mexico). Some arguments looked past morality to practicality: help who you can where you can. I certainly see the value in a realistic approach, but I insisted, perhaps naively, that Americans can affect real change abroad. In light of what I now know about American efforts to combat the foreign child sex industry, I find myself doubting that proposition. | | | | |
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< | Section II | >
> | Sweden's Approach, and Our Late Arrival
Since 1962, Sweden has enforced extraterritorial laws that allow for the prosecution of Swedish citizens who have engaged in child prostitution anywhere in the world. Thus, if a Swedish citizen is caught with a child prostitute in Cambodia, he can stand trial in Sweden for the crime. The US was slow to keep pace with such policies, but in 1994, the Clinton Administration included an extraterritorial provision similar to that of Sweden in its Crime Bill. That provision, however, proved useless because its “intent requirement” required prosecutors to prove that Americans who had engaged in child prostitution abroad actually departed on their trips with exactly that purpose in mind. Congress eased this burden with the 2003 PROTECT Act, which removed the intent requirement. Nevertheless, the act has not done much good. Before the PROTECT Act, only five men had been prosecuted for engaging in child prostitution abroad. Since the act’s passing, the US has prosecuted only a dozen more. | | | | |
<
< | Subsection A | >
> | The Fundamental Problem
While Sweden was far ahead of the US in addressing the problem of its citizens' traveling abroad to abuse children, it, too, has had small success with its laws: Stockholm University estimates that four to five thousand Swedish citizens travel abroad every year to buy sex with children, but the Swedish government has been able to bring only a few prosecutions. The problem with using domestic law to combat child prostitution abroad is that of enforcement. The governments of the host countries are at best indifferent and at worst complicit, not wanting to deter tourism of any kind. Again, Sweden is at the forefront of combating the problem. In 2009, Sweden initiated a program that would enable Swedish citizens to report to the police online any suspect activity they witnessed abroad. Moreover, Sweden has engaged in sting operations in Thailand and elsewhere to police child prostitution itself. While a recent Swedish sting operation brought two pedophiles to justice, the number of convictions compared with the number of estimated criminals at large remains depressingly low.
The Swedish experience testifies to the fact that even if America were willing to undertake similar initiatives, the ultimate problem of the apathy of the host countries will still remain to block our efforts. At a certain point, I wonder if the law can do anything to surmount that impediment. I can imagine using other means, such as diplomatic or economic pressure, but our legal efforts so far have accomplished very little, and I am left wondering if there is anything the law can do to end this tragedy. | | | | |
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< | Subsection B | | | | |
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> | Futility?
As Eben has said many times, creative lawyering is difficult. So I wonder if extraterritorial problems, such as the foreign industry that caters to child sex tourism, can in fact be solved through the law or if, as the sad history indicates, attempts to use the law may be futile. I do not mean this paper to be a statement of surrender, but rather a question. As we as lawyers attempt to achieve justice, and as America advances domestically, is there anything meaningful that we can do to combat the greatest injustices that remain outside our borders? | | |
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |
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SamHersheySecondPaper 1 - 16 Apr 2010 - Main.SamHershey
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
Paper Title
-- By SamHershey - 16 Apr 2010
Section I
Subsection A
Subsub 1
Subsection B
Subsub 1
Subsub 2
Section II
Subsection A
Subsection B
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" on the next line:
# * Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, SamHershey
Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of that line. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated list |
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