Refugees in a Time of “Unprecedented” Mobility

Global Reconfigurations, Constitutional Obligations, and Everyday Life is now available as an e-book, to download without charge. This 2018 volume is the seventh in the series of readings for Yale’s Global Constitutionalism Seminar, a part of the Gruber Program for Global Justice and Women’s Rights. This year’s materials are co-edited by Judith Resnik and Clare Ryan. Chapter I, Constituting the Family, considers how constitutional regulation of families has come to the fore in light of demographic shifts, popular mobilizations, gender roles, and reproductive technologies. This Chapter’s questions center on when and why constitutions oblige state recognition and protection of adult relationships (through marriages and civil unions) and of parental status and authority. Chapter II, Governing Sports, engages with how to conceptualize sports organizations, which are protective of their autonomy, but nevertheless influenced by constitutional norms of free expression and association, equality, non-discrimination, and due process. National and international laws increasingly permeate the governance of sports, as the tribunals within sports organizations interact with and adopt legal rules to respond to the problems of corruption, drug use, monopolistic practices, and governance failures. Chapter III, Refugees in a Time of “Unprecedented” Mobility, addresses the “unprecedented” numbers of persons seeking safe havens across borders—25.4 million people globally as of June 2018, according to the UN Refugee Agency. This Chapter takes up debates about who gains the status of “refugee” as contrasted with “migrant,” what international obligations flow, and why many countries are seeking to deter, block, or detain entrants seeking a safer haven. Chapter IV, Health, Medicines, and Constitutional Obligations, considers the role of courts in enforcing rights to medicine, and whether this arena of economic and social rights entails distinct or familiar questions of judicial enforcement. In recent years, courts in several countries have concluded that state failures to provide medicines violate constitutional rights to health and, moreover, that courts can and should order group-based or individual remedies. This Chapter addresses who decides—courts, legislatures, health administrators—what medicines are subsidized and accessible, as well as the distributional impacts of such rulings.