Kim D. Chanbonpin

This volume surveys political and legal developments in international law during the year 2012. It compiles reports from various committees of the American Bar Association Section of International Law. Yet even a volume of this size cannot include every development, and the omission of a particular development should not be construed as meaning that it was not significant. Our committees work under extremely strict guidelines that limit the number of words that each committee has to roughly 7000 words, including footnotes. Within these constraints, committee members write articles to describe the most significant developments in that area of law or geographic region. In some cases, non-section members who have particular knowledge or expertise in an area may also have contributed to the articles. Committee chairs and committee editors solicited the contributing authors for each article. The heroic committee editors kept the collective contributions within our word count limits. An amazing team of Deputy Editors reviewed the articles as they were sent to us. Then we, as the overall editors for this volume, reviewed them again before sending them to the student editors at the Dedman School of Law at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Tim Springer served as the Managing Editor this year and supervised an outstanding editorial team, whose names you can read in the masthead for this volume. They checked the sources cited and reviewed each article line by line and word by word. Beverly C. Durdus served again as the Faculty Executive Editor for the Year in Review volume. We also received substantial assistance from Professor William B.T. Mock of The John Marshall Law School in Chicago, who serves the ABA Section of International Law this year as its Publications Officer. Because of all of the work that goes into producing this volume, the final product that you hold in your hands (or that you are viewing electronically) is a useful and reliable overview of the international law events from 2012. Readers interested in a particular area of law are also encouraged to read not only this year's summary but also those from earlier

This volume surveys political and legal developments in international law during the year 2012. It compiles reports from various committees of the American Bar Association Section of International Law. Yet even a volume of this size cannot include every development, and the omission of a particular development should not be construed as meaning that it was not significant. Our committees work under extremely strict guidelines that limit the number of words that each committee has to roughly 7000 words, including footnotes. Within these constraints, committee members write articles to describe the most significant developments in that area of law or geographic region. In some cases, non-section members who have particular knowledge or expertise in an area may also have contributed to the articles. Committee chairs and committee editors solicited the contributing authors for each article. The heroic committee editors kept the collective contributions within our word count limits. An amazing team of Deputy Editors reviewed the articles as they were sent to us. Then we, as the overall editors for this volume, reviewed them again before sending them to the student editors at the Dedman School of Law at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Tim Springer served as the Managing Editor this year and supervised an outstanding editorial team, whose names you can read in the masthead for this volume. They checked the sources cited and reviewed each article line by line and word by word. Beverly C. Durdus served again as the Faculty Executive Editor for the Year in Review volume. We also received substantial assistance from Professor William B.T. Mock of The John Marshall Law School in Chicago, who serves the ABA Section of International Law this year as its Publications Officer. Because of all of the work that goes into producing this volume, the final product that you hold in your hands (or that you are viewing electronically) is a useful and reliable overview of the international law events from 2012. Readers interested in a particular area of law are also encouraged to read not only this year's summary but also those from earlier

At a 2011 conference, Professor Athena D. Mutua challenged a room of scholar-activists to dream of a new vocabulary to capture the meaning of the word anti-subordination, without having to describe the principle in the negative (as in its current iteration). The word anti-subordination, or even post-subordination, acknowledges the problem of subordination, but in doing so, privileges the name of the problem without suggesting a solution. Instead, Mutua is searching for a word that precisely, but affirmatively, conveys a commitment to substantive equality and progressive social change. In the same way that the word "anti-essentialism" has been reformulated as "intersectionality" or "multi-dimensionality," Mutua asserted, so must we also reconstruct the notion of anti-subordination in a way that defines positively "what we are for" rather than what we are against. In her talk, Mutua considered the African concept of "ubuntu," which mea...

This is the first scholarly article to investigate the inner workings of the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission (TIRC). The TIRC was established by statute in 2009 to provide legal redress for victims of police torture. Prisoners who claim that their convictions were based on confessions coerced by police torture can utilize the procedures available at the TIRC to obtain judicial review of their cases. For those who have exhausted all appeals and post-conviction remedies, the TIRC represents the tantalizing promise of justice long denied. To be eligible for relief, however, the claimant must first meet the TIRC’s strict four-element test for credibility.This article argues that through its over-reliance on these credibility standards, the TIRC effectively inscribes and reproduces the dominant narrative of police torture, one that promotes a bad apples myth and ignores the contributing factors of broader-scale forces such as racism and inadequate police accountability mec...