Welcome
Dedicated to interdisciplinary and critical dialogue on human rights, the Rapoport Center’s Working Paper Series (WPS) publishes innovative papers by established and early-career researchers as well as practitioners. The goal is to provide a productive environment for debate about human rights among academics, policymakers, activists, practitioners, and the public.
Authors from all disciplines and institutions are welcome to submit papers. We publish papers on a variety of human rights and social justice topics, and we particularly welcome papers focusing on issues and topics affecting the Global South. We are especially interested in the following: reproductive justice and sexual rights; environmental justice and climate justice; peace and nuclear disarmament; inequality; and the future of work.
Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis and evaluated by the WPS interdisciplinary editorial committee, which includes graduate and professional students from across the University of Texas. The WPS committee provides comments and feedback to authors before the paper is published online. Publication in the WPS does not preclude future publication elsewhere; in fact, many of our working papers have since been published in academic journals and edited volumes.
Each year, the WPS publishes the winning paper from the Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights and the Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature, and Justice.
Our Latest Posts:
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Access to Counsel: A Corollary to “The Production of Precarity” within the US Immigration System
By Elizabeth Schmelzel Leah Rodriguez’s work, “The Production of Precarity: How US Immigration ‘Status’ Affects Work in Central Texas” offers a comprehensive breakdown of the relationship between immigration law and precarity for immigrants in the United States, drawing on cases from Central Texas to illustrate those dynamics. Rodriguez points out that “[t]o the extent that
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Digital Privacy: Smart Technology and the Naive Consumer
By Leonel Mata Recent reports concerning the extent to which companies, such as Facebook, have been acquiring and disseminating information of individuals across the world have highlighted the fact that privacy issues do not only concern how governments make use of personal information, but how private companies have been making use of it as well.
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Afghanistan’s new Penal Code: Whether or Not to codify Hudud and Qisas
by Murtaza Rahimi Afghanistan, in an attempt to modernize and unify the statutes regulating crimes and their punishments, enacted a new Penal Code in May 2017.[1] Problematically, article 2 of the new Code permits judges to rule on certain Islamic crimes and decide the punishments of such crimes in accordance with Hanafi jurisprudence of the
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Economic Sanctions: Effective Enforcement Method for Labor Standards?
by Julie Wilson 1 FEB 2018 Although including labor standards in international trade agreements has had some effect on recognizing and enforcing fair labor practices, such provisions fail to significantly improve these practices on a global scale. Labor standards are included in trade agreements because they are considered a barrier to free trade. Currently, existing
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Child Labor and the Mountain that Eats Men
by Sofia Bonilla 12 JAN 2018 The town of Potosí in Bolivia rests at the bottom of a soaring, 15,800-foot mountain called Cerro Rico. The mountain provides the primary, and nearly only, source of income for the town of 240,000 inhabitants. During their 16th-century conquest of Latin America, the Spanish enslaved the indigenous people there,
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Sierra Leone’s Experience with In-Country Outsourcing
by Francis Kaifala 23 DEC 2017 In 2007, I was in my first year as a lawyer working for a firm in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The managing partner of the firm forwarded an email from some foreign clients and instructed me to provide a well-researched, comprehensive response to the clients’ inquiries. The questions on “doing
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Unequal and Under Threat: Economic Inequality and the Dangers to Environmental & Human Rights Defenders
by Scott Squires Read/download here. Abstract In many countries with large endowments of natural resource wealth, resource extraction is considered to be the primary driver of economic development and a major contributor to GDP. Often, however, natural resource extraction is environmentally degenerative and engenders backlash among indigenous communities, conservationists, outspoken members of the human rights community,
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