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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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> | 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. | | | | |
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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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> | 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. | | | | |
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> | 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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> | 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.
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