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In this chapter, the author outlines the historical, legal, and jurisdiction regarding incarceration rates of Native Americans. It examines reports and data in areas where problems of racial disparity continue to endure. As the smallest minority population in the United States, it raises questions as to the disparity of Native Americans. Native Americans are unique in their relationship with the federal government, and should be critically examined to distinguish what makes their involvement in the criminal justice system inimical.

The author examines the law enforcement, courts, and corrections data, through various reports; concerning causes of Native American criminality, incarceration rates, health disparities, jurisdictional schemes, human rights, and race. It is argued that federal governmental laws and various bureaucracies exacerbate conditions through overreaching policies which invalidates many of the positive aspects Native People bring to themselves.

Native Americans are overrepresented in the criminal justice system. As the smallest segment of the population, they have a higher incarceration rate per capita. It is without question that chronic underfunding of law enforcement, courts, and corrections in reservation communities continues. In light of Congressional claiming to want to alleviate problems in Indian country, little impact has been realized.

Native American societies are often considered a silent minority. Information pertaining to the many social issues enveloping Native communities often falls on deaf ears and political party leaders who are more interested in a larger constituency fail to lend their assistance in a manner deemed appropriate to truly grasp the larger problems.

This essay explores a radical shift in how the relationship between the power to punish and sovereignty has been conceived in modern American law; specifically focusing on the quiet death of comity as an operative principle in the exercise of criminal jurisdiction. While this essay attends to certain legal issues arising from historical intersections of federal, state and Indian sovereignty in the field of criminal law, this essay is not an attempt to directly evaluate the history of federal policies applied to Indian tribes or tribal lands. Nor is this essay in any strict sense a legal history of federal-tribal relations, or federal penal policy in relation to Indian tribes. Rather, I am concerned here with a series of liminal moments in the American legal tradition in which the power to punish came to be understood ever more one-sidedly, as an atomizing attribute of sovereignty rather than an identifying feature of community within a pluralistic legal framework.

Hybrid forms of international criminal justice have been lauded for combining the political and procedural legitimacy of international tribunals with increased attention to the local contexts where mass crimes occurred. This work critically examines the hybrid legal structure of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a novel post-conflict institution empowered to draw from both international and Sierra Leonean law. Although formally hybrid, the Court neglects domestic law in practice, suggesting that “hybridity” refers more to a rhetorical strategy aimed at legitimating its work than to its ontological status. By symbolically including and substantively excluding domestic law, the court's legal structure inadvertently resembles a colonial form of legal pluralism rather than a hybrid jurisdiction.

Domestic abuse presents significant challenges for legal systems around the world. In England and Wales, victims of domestic abuse sometimes find that they are pulled in different directions by multiple legal interventions in the criminal, civil, and family justice spheres. This is often due to inadequate information and evidence sharing but also inconsistent approaches and court orders. The “Harm Panel” report published in 2020 examined the approach of the family justice system in child arrangement cases involving allegations of domestic abuse. It found “silo working” was one of four structural barriers contributing to unsafe processes and outcomes. The Harm Panel provided renewed impetus for a policy to introduce integrated domestic abuse courts (IDACs) to address the problems of fragmented legal responses. There has previously been one unsuccessful attempt to introduce an IDAC in England Wales. This chapter will explore what went wrong and whether the evidence base for IDACs in other countries supports another attempt.

Pre-colonization, Tribes lived in ways that were well-adapted to natural hazards and stewarded the environment respectfully. Colonization and the federal reservation system have stuck Tribes in static, often hazard-prone, areas; removing their foundational capabilities for avoiding disaster and environmental hazard impacts. The premise of ceded lands and the reservation system was a trust responsibility of the federal government to provide resources for continuing self-governance of Tribal Nations. Fulfillment of the federal government’s trust responsibility to Tribal Nations in the realm of climate change and disasters is predicated on the provision of sufficient resources for the Tribal Nation itself to properly govern. The trust responsibility is not fulfilled through the federal government allowing applications to program-dictated grant opportunities or even consistent, yet insufficient, recurring funding for disaster management. Nor is the trust responsibility fulfilled through the preparation and resourcing of outside entities – local, state, and up to the federal government itself – to enact disaster management actions on sovereign lands. The ability of a nation to develop and administer governmental programs and services independent of outside interference is the very foundation of sovereignty and self-determination. The fulfillment of the trust responsibility for disaster management hinges, therefore, on the allocation of sufficient resources and legal space for self-governance for Tribal Nations to return to pre-colonization levels of capability and sovereignty for disaster management for their citizens and residents.

In the case of Poiret & Anor v Seychelles Pension Fund & Anor (2022), the Court of Appeal, the highest court in Seychelles, took judicial notice of the fact that “[c]ommon law relationships are more prevalent in our society than those between married persons.” In this chapter, the author discusses the law relating to common law marriages in Seychelles by focusing on the following issues: the right to form a family (as a background to understanding common law marriages); requirements for a valid common law marriage; and the rights of parties in a common law marriage. These rights include “court granted” rights and “statutory rights” such as property rights (parties invoking the claim of unjust enrichment in the 1979 Civil Code and property orders and succession under the 2021 Civil Code at the dissolution of common law marriages). I also deal with the remedy of unjust enrichment in the context of the 2021 Civil Code; marital privilege (in case where one of the parties in a common law relationship is accused of committing an offence); and termination of a common law marriage. The author demonstrates the measures taken by courts and the legislators to protect some of the rights of people in common law marriages. The author suggests ways in which courts can interpret the relevant provisions of the 2021 Civil Code. Where necessary, the author highlights how courts or legislators in some African countries such as Kenya, Mauritius, Malawi, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Zambia, South Africa, Namibia, Rwanda, and Uganda have approached some of the issues above.

This chapter critically evaluates the use of the so-called ‘rough sex defence’ in Australian rape cases. We argue that the ‘rough sex defence’ in this context is an example of ‘implied consent’, specifically in that it relies on evidence that the defendant and victim-survivor had engaged in (or had even simply discussed) ‘rough’ sexual activity on a previous occasion(s). This narrative of implied consent to rough sex is used to establish either of two things. The first is that the victim-survivor actually did consent to ‘rough’ sexual activity on the occasion in question. The second is that the defendant mistakenly believed in consent, since roughness had been a feature of previous sexual discussions or activities. We argue that the use of the rough sex defence in rape trials is problematic for at least two reasons. First, the defence allows defendants to rely upon false and harmful ‘rape myths’ to avoid accountability for their actions. Second, a reliance on the rough sex defence also contradicts moves to adopt an affirmative consent standard as part of Australian rape law. We conclude by recommending reforms to the legal framework that would help reduce the reliance on the argument that a rape allegation can be explained away as ‘rough sex gone wrong’.

Historians have long understood that transforming people into property was the defining characteristic of Atlantic World slavery. This chapter examines litigation in British colonial Vice Admiralty Courts in order to show how English legal categories and procedures facilitated this process of dehumanization. In colonies where people were classified as chattel property, litigants transformed local Vice Admiralty Courts into slave courts by analogizing human beings to ships and cargo. Doing so made sound economic sense from their perspective; it gave colonists instant access to an early modern English legal system that was centered on procedures and categories. But for people of African descent, it had decidedly negative consequences. Indeed, when colonists treated slaves as property, they helped to create a world in which Africans were not just like things, they were things. Through the very act of categorization, they rendered factual what had been a mere supposition: that Africans were less than human.