The Cultural Defense

Publisher's description: In a trial in California, Navajo defendants argue that using the hallucinogen peyote to achieve spiritual exaltation is protected by the Constitution's free exercise of religion clause, trumping the states' right to regulate them. An Ibo man from Nigeria sues Pan American World Airways for transporting his mother's corpse in a cloth sack. Her arrival for the funeral face down in a burlap bag signifies death by suicide according to the customs of her Ibo kin, and brings great shame to the son. In Los Angeles, two Cambodian men are prosecuted for attempting to eat a four month-old puppy. The immigrants' lawyers argue that the men were following their own "national customs" and do not realize their conduct is offensive to "American sensibilities." What is the just decision in each case? When cultural practices come into conflict with the law is it legitimate to take culture into account? Is there room in modern legal systems for a cultural defense? In this remarkable book, Alison Dundes Renteln amasses hundreds of cases from the U.S. and around the world in which cultural issues take center stage-from the mundane to the bizarre, from drugs to death. Though cultural practices vary dramatically, Renteln demonstrates that there are discernible patterns to the cultural arguments used in the courtroom. The regularities she uncovers offer judges a starting point for creating a body of law that takes culture into account. Renteln contends that a systematic treatment of culture in law is not only possible, but ultimately more equitable. A just pluralistic society requires a legal system that can assess diverse motivations and can recognize the key role that culture plays in influencing human behavior. The inclusion of evidence of cultural background is necessary for the fair hearing of a case.

Addressing one of the greatest challenges facing liberalism today, this book asks if is it legally and morally defensible for a liberal state to restrict immigration in order to preserve the cultural rights of majority groups. Orgad proposes a liberal approach to this dilemma and explores its dimensions, justifications, and limitations.

American legal scholars have debated for some time the need for a cultural defense in criminal proceedings where minority cultural information seems perti nent to a finding of criminal responsibility in situations where a minority cultural defendant has violated a valid criminal statute. This work presents a systematic analysis of this issue. Drawing from sociological, anthropological, and philosophical materials, as well as traditional legal discussions, the authors develop a scheme that indicates when cultural factors can be used as the basis for such a defense and when they are irrelevant to a finding of criminal responsibility. The argument moves from general concerns of social justice that apply under conditions of social and cultural pluralism to practical policy recommendations for the operation of American criminal justice. It thus connects more theoretical materials with the practical concerns of jurisprudence. The justification for legal recognition of a cultural defense in American criminal law is anchored firmly in American constitutional law.

Cultural defences, i.e. claims that certain aspects of a defendant's cultural background should be taken into consideration by courts when adjudicating on their guilt or innocence, have been raised before domestic courts in a variety of jurisdictions. This has been a very sensitive and controversial issue. However, the issue of cultural defences at international tribunals is one that has not yet been fully explored. The main objective of this book is to analyse if the International Criminal Court can, and should, accommodate cultural defences as answers to legal charges, or if the Court should accommodate cultural considerations in other ways.

“I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century,” an eighty-five-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1953, revisiting his famous claim from fifty years earlier. But the “greater problem,” he now believed, was that war had “become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.” Empire of Defense reveals how that greater problem emerged and grew from the formation of the Department of Defense in the late 1940s to the long wars of the twenty-first century. When the Truman administration dissolved the Department of War, a cabinet-level department since 1789, and formed the DOD, it did not, Joseph Darda argues, end war but rather establish new racial criteria for who could wage it, for which lives deserved defending. Historians have long studied “perpetual war.” Critical race theorists have long confronted “the permanence of racism.” Empire of Defense shows––through an investigation of state documents, fiction, film, memorials, and news media––how the two converged and endure through national defense. Amid the rise of anticolonial and antiracist movements the world over, defense secured the future of war and white supremacy.

The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology is a ground-breaking collection of essays that provides an original and internationally framed conception of the historical, theoretical, and ethnographic interconnections of law and anthropology. Each of the chapters in the Handbook provides a survey of the current state of scholarly debate and an argument about the future direction of research in this dynamic and interdisciplinary field. The structure of the Handbook is animated by an overarching collective narrative about how law and anthropology have and should relate to each other as intersecting domains of inquiry that address such fundamental questions as dispute resolution, normative ordering, social organization, and legal, political, and social identity. The need for such a comprehensive project has become even more pressing as lawyers and anthropologists work together in an ever-increasing number of areas, including immigration and asylum processes, international justice forums, cultural heritage certification and monitoring, and the writing of new national constitutions, among many others. The Handbook takes critical stock of these various points of intersection in order to identify and conceptualize the most promising areas of innovation and sociolegal relevance, as well as to acknowledge the points of tension, open questions, and areas for future development.

Since the public unveiling of SDI in 1983, discussion has focused on the technical and strategic aspects of the project. This book takes a new look, examining the cultural repercussions of SDI. Illustrated.

This pioneering book explores the intersections of law and culture at the International Criminal Court (ICC), offering insights into how notions of culture affect the Court’s legal foundations, functioning and legitimacy, both in theory and in practice.