Searching For Justice

The Honourable Fred Kaufman has been a distinguished figure in Canadian law for a half century. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in mid-1920s Vienna, Kaufman escaped to England on the eve of the Second World War. In 1940, he was interned as an 'enemy alien' and sent to Canada. Released in 1942, Kaufman stayed in Canada where he went on to university and law school in Montreal. Kaufman was called to the Bar of Quebec in 1955 and practiced criminal law for eighteen years, taking part in many of the famous cases of that period. In 1960, he secured the release of a young Pierre Elliott Trudeau from prison, and in 1973, Trudeau returned the favour by personally informing Kaufman of his appointment to the Quebec Court of Appeal, where he served for eighteen years, including one as Acting Chief Justice of Quebec. Since his retirement in 1991, Kaufman has led numerous commissions and inquiries, most notably the investigation into the wrongful conviction of Guy Paul Morin and the two-year reassessment of the Steven Truscott case. Searching for Justice is Kaufman's remarkable story in his own words. It is the tale of adversity overcome in a crucial period of Canadian legal history.

In 1996, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, a grassroots advocacy organization, won a historic legal victory against the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. The resulting consent decree forced the MTA for a period of ten years to essentially reorient the mass transit system to better serve the city’s poorest residents. A stunning reversal of conventional governance and planning in urban America, which almost always favors wealthier residents, this decision is also, for renowned urban theorist Edward W. Soja, a concrete example of spatial justice in action. In Seeking Spatial Justice, Soja argues that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right. Building on current concerns in critical geography and the new spatial consciousness, Soja interweaves theory and practice, offering new ways of understanding and changing the unjust geographies in which we live. After tracing the evolution of spatial justice and the closely related notion of the right to the city in the influential work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and others, he demonstrates how these ideas are now being applied through a series of case studies in Los Angeles, the city at the forefront of this movement. Soja focuses on such innovative labor–community coalitions as Justice for Janitors, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and the Right to the City Alliance; on struggles for rent control and environmental justice; and on the role that faculty and students in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning have played in both developing the theory of spatial justice and putting it into practice. Effectively locating spatial justice as a theoretical concept, a mode of empirical analysis, and a strategy for social and political action, this book makes a significant contribution to the contemporary debates about justice, space, and the city.

The fact that this book was even written attests to the monumental courage of the author. Norbert Schlegel recounts, in meticulous detail, the brutal murder of his own daughter at the hands of his son-in-law and his unfailing commitment to see justice done. The reader becomes privy to events that occurred, dialogue that was actually spoken, and anguish that was real and is now shared. Ultimately, one man's search for justice becomes a testament to his determination and love for his daughter.

For twelve years Robert Blecker, a criminal law professor, wandered freely inside Lorton Central Prison, armed only with cigarettes and a tape recorder. The Death of Punishment tests legal philosophy against the reality and wisdom of street criminals and their guards. Some killers' poignant circumstances should lead us to mercy; others show clearly why they should die. After thousands of hours over twenty-five years inside maximum security prisons and on death rows in seven states, the history and philosophy professor exposes the perversity of justice: Inside prison, ironically, it's nobody's job to punish. Thus the worst criminals often live the best lives. The Death of Punishment challenges the reader to refine deeply held beliefs on life and death as punishment that flare up with every news story of a heinous crime. It argues that society must redesign life and death in prison to make the punishment more nearly fit the crime. It closes with the final irony: If we make prison the punishment it should be, we may well abolish the very death penalty justice now requires.

The Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia research project (coordinated by Zubaan and supported by the International Development Research Centre) brings together, for the first time in the region, a vast body of knowledge on this important - yet silenced - subject. Six country volumes (one each on Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and two on India, as well as two standalone volumes) comprising over fifty research papers and two book-length studies, detail the histories of sexual violence and look at the systemic, institutional, societal, individual and community structures that work together to perpetuate impunity for perpetrators. The essays in this volume examine history and contemporary politics to understand the root causes of sexual violence in Sri Lanka. They look at the polarization created around ethnic and linguistic identities during the three-decades of ethnic conflict, but also scrutinize the routine violence of communities towards their own women in daily life. The authors argue that in this transitional post-war phase, Sri Lankan women must not only be treated as victims, but as agents of change. The writers highlight a hitherto unaddressed aspect of sexual violence: that of the structures that enable impunity on the part of perpetrators, be they security personnel and paramilitary forces, members of armed rebel groups, gangs, local politicians and police or ordinary citizens including close family members. They demonstrate how impunity for perpetrators is both a failure of the formal justice process and a product of individual, community and social conditions and indeed the choices that victims and families make that promote silence over truth. At the end of more than a quarter century of conflict that has left some 100,000 dead, 50,000 women-headed households struggling to survive, as well as countless victims and survivors of sexual violence, the calls for justice can no longer be ignored.

Identity, power, and positionality play crucial roles in designing and implementing research critically and ethically across marginalized cultures and communities. Through four unique case studies, this book highlights the dilemmas faced by researchers in the field of education, demonstrating how they grapple with the ethics of research and with their role in the process. Re-searching Margins: Ethics, Social Justice and Education attends to research in four specific marginalized communities, whilst also engaging in a wider dialogue about the complex theories, methodologies and practices of ethical research in communities of difference. This book examines ethical research with cultures and communities as an exchange in which both the researcher and the researched bring complex contextual and biographical factors shaped by their histories, identities, and experiences. Drawing on the lives and research of four renowned scholars, this book will be of interest to researchers and policy makers in education who seek to engage ethically and justly with marginalized communities.

Today human rights represent a primary concern of the international legal system. The international community’s commitment to the protection and promotion of human rights, however, does not always produce the results hoped for by the advocates of a more justice-oriented system of international law. Indeed international law is often criticised for, inter alia, its enduring imperial character, incapacity to minimize inequalities and failure to take human suffering seriously. Against this background, the central question that this book aims to answer is whether the adoption of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples points to the existence of an international law that promises to provide valid responses to the demands for justice of disempowered and vulnerable groups. At one level, the book assesses whether international law has responded fairly and adequately to the human rights claims of indigenous peoples. At another level, it explores the relationship between this response and some distinctive features of the indigenous peoples’ struggle for justice, reflecting on the extent to which the latter have influenced and shaped the former. The book draws important conclusions as to the reasons behind international law’s positive recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights, shedding some light on the potential and limits of international law as an instrument of justice. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of public international law, human rights and social movements.

You watched The People v. O.J. Simpson. Now read the explosive inside story in this behind-the-scenes account of the trial. From June 13, 1994, to October 3, 1995, Robert Shapiro stood in the middle of a drama that held millions of Americans in thrall. In this book, the architect of the defense strategy tells the inside story of the O.J. Simpson trial from the beginning. With candor, wit, and compassion, the man who assembled the "dream team" brings to light the details of what has been called "the trial of the century," giving us revealing glimpses of the defendant and the others whose names have become so familiar: Johnnie Cochran, F. Lee Bailey, Marcia Clark, Judge Lance Ito, Chris Darden. Search for Justice deepens our understanding of the role and duty of a defense attorney, the "reasonable doubt" conclusion of the jury, and the place this story occupies in our culture.