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This chapter explores the relationship between disability identity, civil rights, and the law. Twenty-five years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the question remains why disability rights legislation does not go far enough toward addressing access, stigma, and discrimination issues. People with disabilities have found empowerment from disability rights laws, but these laws are also restrictive because they define people in relation to medical aspects of their disabilities and narrowly define society’s obligation for inclusion. The successes and failures of disability rights laws are an important contribution to the study of conceptions of difference.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the world is experiencing the greatest refugee crisis in recorded history alongside increasingly restrictive limits on asylum seekers and refugees. In 2020, the US administration established a ceiling for refugees of 18,000 people, the lowest number on record, and only 11,814 refugees were admitted to the United States. The Biden administration has expressed commitments to building a coherent asylum and refugee system and quickly reversing recent detrimental policies. But the administration has cautioned how quickly change might occur, given how “agencies and processes…have been so gutted.”¹

2016 to 2020 included an overwhelming series of changes to laws and policies affecting asylum seekers, often with little documented planning or communication, wreaking severe effects on conditions for asylum seekers at the US–Mexico border. These changes had significant consequences for human rights, most notably the linchpin right of access to information. At the US–Mexico border, must the right “to seek, receive and impart information” be fulfilled in order to fulfill the right to asylum?

While information professionals are not expected to be experts in law, they are experts in understanding the link between access to information and the realization of justice and human rights. This chapter investigates the role of the information professional in the fulfillment of the right to asylum, particularly in the context of contemporary asylum seekers at the US–Mexico border, volatile information landscapes, and the legal and historical framework in the United States for seeking asylum.

Purpose – This chapter explores the use of music and celebrity endorsements in political campaigns of the United States. It focuses on two aspects: (1) the legality of a political campaign’s use of music at rallies and in advertisements without authorization from the owner of the musical work and (2) a review of the literature on the potential effect of the use of music in political campaigns on voter behavior.

Design/methodology/approach – A brief history of the use of music in political campaigns precedes an examination of the expansion of copyright law protection for music and the legal claims musicians may raise against the unauthorized use of music by political campaigns. The chapter then reviews the potential effect of political campaigns’ use of music and celebrity endorsements on voter behavior.

Findings – A musician’s primary legal protection falls under copyright law, but the courts disagree on whether the unauthorized use of music at political rallies and in political campaign advertisements results in copyright infringement. Social research suggests music and celebrity endorsements affect voter behavior with a likely greater effect on first-time voters.

Originality/value of chapter – This chapter introduces the complicated application of copyright law to the unauthorized use of musical works by political campaigns. Additionally, it notes the limited research on the effect of music and celebrity endorsements on voter behavior even as political campaigns increasingly target niche demographics with specific music selections to motivate voters to vote.

In this chapter, Arendt’s reflections on the question of personal responsibility are taken as a discussion of ‘interrupting the legal person’. Examining trials that took place after World War II, Arendt observes in ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, ‘What the courts demand … is that the defendants should not have participated’ (pp. 33–34). Following Arendt, the author argues that thinking could have enabled possible perpetrators of great evil to meet this demand, for when a person stops to think, whatever they are doing is interrupted. What is more, the person who stops to think is themselves interrupted by thinking. In brief, becoming aware of the possibility that they exist as a person in a mode other than what Ngaire Naffine calls ‘the responsible subject’, thinking disrupts the legal person. A discussion of thinking as interrupting the legal person thus illuminates not only what may turn a person away from participation in the life of a criminal state, but also what that turn means for responsibility.

The criterion differentiating “protective labor legislation” and “industrial relations legislation” is not whether they are for or against the interest of labor. The interest is that of the general public, as is the case with all legislation. The basic difference concerns the parties to two types of labor contracts. Protective labor legislation concerns the individual contract and labor relations legislation concerns the contract between the specific groups in the field.

This chapter on terrorism prevention provides the reader with an overview of the various terrorist prevention organizations within the United States at the federal, state, and local levels. It is divided into two different sections, the first providing a detailed description of various federal agencies involved in terrorism prevention and an overview of how state and local agencies fit within the federal framework. The second section of this chapter describes various efforts to integrate these disparate organizations into a cohesive effort to prevent terrorism activities. This chapter concludes with some suggestions for future consideration to help with the overall terrorism prevention effort.

Private foundations in the United States are powerful actors in contemporary society. Their influence stems in part from their lack of accountability – they operate free from market pressures or finding sources of funding, and they are not subject to formal democratic systems of checks and balances such as elections or mandatory community oversight. In recent decades, foundations have become increasingly influential in shaping public policy governing core social services. In US education policy, for example, the influence of private foundations has reached an unprecedented scope and scale. Although economic and electoral accountability mechanisms are absent, foundations are aware that their elite status is rooted in a wider acceptance of their image as promoters of the public good. They are incentivized to maintain their role as “white hat” actors and, in balancing their policy goals with the desire to avoid social sanctions, the ways in which they exert influence are shaped and limited by institutional processes. Drawing on rare elite interview data and archival analyses from five leading education funders, we observe that foundations seek to sustain their credibility by complying with legal regulations and by drawing on cultural norms of participation and science to legitimize their policy activities.