How do activist plaintiffs experience the process of human rights litigation under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS)? Answering this question is key to understanding the impact on transnational legal mobilization of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Shell, in which the US Supreme Court sharply limited the scope of the ATS. Yet socio-legal scholars know remarkably little about the experiences of ATS litigants, before or after Kiobel. This article describes how activist litigants in a landmark ATS class action against former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos faced a series of strategic dilemmas, and how disagreements over how to resolve those dilemmas played into divisions between activists and organizations on the Philippine left. The article develops an analytical framework focused on litigation dilemmas, to explain how and why activists who pursue ATS litigation as an opportunity for legal mobilization may also encounter strategic dilemmas that contribute to dissension within a social movement.
Over the past decade, scholars of law and geography have been foraging in America’s cities, hunting for the commons. Along the way, a new common sense has cropped up, which takes urban farms and community gardens as prototypical examples of the urban commons. Farm fields and garden plots produce not only vegetables, the argument goes, but also opportunities for residents to access and use land as a shared, decommodified resource. As both social practice and emergent institutional reality, such urban commons challenge and are challenged by the logics of public and private property that dominate our cities’ legal landscapes.This Article, rather than assuming that urban farms and gardens are examples of the urban commons, poses this as a question. Are they in fact cases of commons governance? And if so, how do people bring this about? I explore these questions from the ground up, through a socio-legal mapping of how people have gained access to and sought to govern land for a community garden and an urban farm in two neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side. This mapping suggests that we should conceive of urban farms and gardens as sites where people experiment with the rules, norms, and forms of property that govern urban land. Municipal policies can promote property experiments that seek to treat urban land as a shared community resource.
Over the past decade, scholars of law and geography have been foraging in America's cities, hunting for the commons. Along the way, a new common sense has cropped up, which takes urban farms and community gardens as prototypical examples of the urban commons. Farm fields and garden plots produce not only vegetables, the argument goes, but also opportunities for residents to access and use land as a shared, decommodified resource. As both social practice and emergent institutional reality, such urban commons challenge and are challenged by the logics of public and private property that dominate our cities' legal landscapes. This Article, rather than assuming that urban farms and gardens are examples of the urban commons, poses this as a question. Are they in fact cases of commons governance? And if so, how do people bring this about? I explore these questions from the ground up, through a socio-legal mapping of how people have gained access to and sought to govern land for a community garden and an urban farm in two neighborhoods on Chicago's South Side. This mapping suggests that we should conceive of urban farms and gardens as sites where people experiment with the rules, norms, and forms of property that govern urban land. Municipal policies can promote property experiments that seek to treat urban land as a shared community resource.
How do activist plaintiffs experience the process of human rights litigation under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS)? Answering this question is key to understanding the impact on transnational legal mobilization of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Shell, in which the US Supreme Court sharply limited the scope of the ATS. Yet socio-legal scholars know remarkably little about the experiences of ATS litigants, before or after Kiobel. This article describes how activist litigants in a landmark ATS class action against former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos faced a series of strategic dilemmas, and how disagreements over how to resolve those dilemmas played into divisions between activists and organizations on the Philippine left. The article develops an analytical framework focused on litigation dilemmas, to explain how and why activists who pursue ATS litigation as an opportunity for legal mobilization may also encounter strategic dilemmas that contribute to dissension within a social movement.
Use-based welfare achieves redistribution by reallocating rights to use and benefit from idle resources, rather than via tax and transfer. How and why has this form of welfare provision emerged as an urban institution, and what affects whether it endures? This article compares projects to grant poor and unemployed Chicagoans access to land for gardens and small farms between 1895 and 1935, explaining how this form of social support came about through experiments with rules, norms, and forms of property. While social policy is typically understood as emerging through the realization of rights to public support, use-based welfare turns instead on efforts to create a legal privilege for the needy to use idle resources. During the Progressive Era and the Great Depression, this form of relief was pitched as both an alternative and a complement to welfare based on tax and transfer. Yet efforts to establish it as a permanent institution repeatedly failed, due to implementation challenges, opposition from people committed to treating land and food as commodities, and the non-emergence of a social movement to defend land access. Recognizing the historical dynamics of use-based welfare offers a new perspective on the contemporary resurgence of urban farming as a strategy for addressing unemployment and poverty.
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