Renee Nicole Souris

Florida Institute of Technology · School of Arts and Communication

Adrian Vermeule’s book Common Good Constitutionalism presents a profound challenge to the reigning schools of American legal thought in an effort to return to our classical roots. Vermeule describes his theory as methodologically Dworkinian in that he intends it to fit and justify American law, but unlike Dworkin’s judge-centered theory of law as i...

The international community first responded to child soldiering by embracing within law and policy a narrative that saw child soldiers largely as passive victims. Empirical work with child soldiers has since revealed a more complex picture of children's agency and actual experiences. From this work, a more recent narrative-which I call the politica...

My paper examines moral claims made by two international legal scholars, Margaret deGuzman and William Schabas, that support the view that the crime of using child soldiers is closer to a malum prohibitum than a malum in se crime. After critically examining deGuzman's legitimacy-based view, I then show that Schabas’ fundamental values view, which c...

This paper critically examines two formulations of the view that the crime of using child soldiers is less serious than other international crimes. The first formulation presents a sociological argument that using child soldiers is not as serious as other international crimes involving rape or murder, and the second formulation relies on deontologi...

Recent global efforts of the United States and England to withdraw from international institutions, along with recent challenges to human rights courts from Poland and Hungary, have been described as part of a growing global populist backlash against the liberal international order. Several scholars have even identified the recent threat of mass wi...

In this article, I contribute to the debate between two philosophical traditions—the Kantian and the Aristotelian—on the requirements of criminal responsibility and the grounds for excuse by taking this debate to a new context: international criminal law. After laying out broadly Kantian and Aristotelian conceptions of criminal responsibility, I de...

‘How can we tell what happened to us? There are no words to describe what we have witnessed. What we saw, what we heard, what we did, and how it changed our lives, is beyond measure. We were murdered, raped, amputated, tortured, mutilated, beaten, enslaved and forced to commit terrible crimes.’ (Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report for the Ch...

This paper explores panel dynamics for sex discrimination cases at the U.S. Circuit Courts. It offers an interdisciplinary approach to studying panel judicial decision-making on the U.S. Circuit Courts by drawing on mainstream legal theory, contemporary political science, and the empirical legal sciences. After situating the issue within a multi-fa...