The (Re)Collection of Memory after Mass Atrocity and the Dilemma for Transitional Justice
When a government engages in the mass killing of its own citizens, how can the nation ever recover? These atrocities destroy the moral fabric which binds a nation. To recover, this fabric must be remade. Many social scientists and legal scholars believe that developing collective memory – an enduring and shared memory of the events that help to heal the wounds of a tattered national conscience and prevent the recurrence of mass atrocities – is essential to such reconstruction. However, the preservation of collective memory is in tension with another impulse after mass atrocity: the desire for justice. Because notions of individualism and autonomy heavily influence legal institutions worldwide, they risk the destruction of collective memory. This friction constitutes a central dilemma in facilitating transitional justice.In this article, I urge a fundamental reconceptualization of the law’s preference for individual memory in the context of transitional justice. I argue that the inclusion of collective memory will facilitate a better understanding of the collective harms that characterize mass atrocities and will serve the distinct goals of transitional justice, including reconciliation, the creation of a historical record, nation-building, and legal reform. I further argue that human rights lawyers should act as preservers and promoters of collective memory. In doing so, they may be able to help heal wounds outside traditional justice tribunals – while at the same time providing essential assistance to these tribunals if and when legal proceedings do finally occur.
Designing a Clinic Model for a Restorative Community Justice Partnership
In this Article, we (Professors Brooks and Lopez) discuss our efforts to embrace the core characteristics of community lawyering clinics during the development of a new Community Lawyering Clinic at Drexel University, Thomas R. Kline School of Law. Specifically, the Article outlines how we have begun to tackle two central questions in designing our clinic: first, how we ensure that our work reflects and incorporates the diverse desires and demands of “the community”; and second, how we facilitate an environment that encourages a community partnership characterized by equality, respect, empathy, compassion, and integrity. As designers of a new community lawyering clinic, we are grateful for the groundbreaking work of the pioneers in this field, and also for the contributions of our contemporaries. At the same time we appreciate that the present conditions in society, including the ever widening justice gap and other changes in the legal landscape, call upon us to think creatively about innovative models of lawyering and new roles for lawyers. Deliberative Democracy and Beloved Community are approaches that inspire us to reflect deeply about our choices, to invest in relationship-building, and to embrace processes that often seem indeterminate. By sharing some of our early experiences as well as our thinking, we hope we are contributing useful ideas that will help advance the work of other clinical law teachers and community lawyers.
La inseguridad jurídica en normas de contratación estatal
It is established by different studies that the issue of government procurement has been marred by several factors, the test objective to publicize these factors, we take as starting point the constant conflict between the branches of government to try and organize this subject; will collect and analyze diverse regulatory and case material in order to achieve evidence and demonstrate the different concepts of constant change that produces excessive regulation of the subject procurement and is in turn causing rapid changes that result in legal uncertainty for our law on the Contract Status.