A contest launched 6 years ago by the entrepreneurial
New7Wonders Foundation has driven more than 4 million people to cast
28 million votes for humankind's 7 most wondrous feats of engineering or architecture (of the traditional 7 only 1, the
Pyramids, is still in existence). You've got just 60 days left
to choose among the 21 finalists, which range from Athens' Acropolis temple to Bavaria's Neuschwanstein castle, from the statue of Jesus in Rio to the Statute of Liberty in New York. If the spirit moves you,
vote here.
Or, help
IntLawGrrls put together a different list -- of the
World's 7 Legal Wonders. Post a comment or e-mail us at
intlawgrrls@gmail.com with your nominee. Names of persons, things, events, ideas all are fair game. And your nominee may be a "wonder" in the negative as well as the positive sense of the word.
My nominee?
The
13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Its ratification in December 1865 -- scant months af
ter the end of the bloody Civil War that made it possible -- marked the 1st time that a country constituted itself, in its written charter, to enforce an unqualified prohibition against the enslavement of any woman, child, or man by any other. This legal recognition of a common humanity is a fountainhead for humanitarian and human rights norms. As shown in "
The Thirteenth Amendment and Slavery in the Global Economy" by our colleague
Tobias Barrington Wolff (to cite 1 example of excellent scholarship on this subject), my nominee for World's Legal Wonder remains relevant to this day.
Your nominee?
for some time on certain principles regarding the treatment of detainees during times of war and the status and applicability of the protections of the Geneva Conventions. Recent events, largely centered on the policies and actions of the Bush administration, have led to a debate that has disrupted that consensus. For that reason, a set of principles about which there was probably little disagreement (and hence little political polarization) fifteen years ago are now the subject of active dispute. In that highly specific context, those seeking to preserve the prior consensus are termed "liberal" while those seeking to replace that prior consensus with a more aggressive view of executive power are termed "conservative." (The labels are inapt here, of course, since it is the "liberal" position that seeks to preserve the old arrangement.)
-- Our colleague, Professor Tobias Barrington Wolff (Penn Law) (right), using an example familiar to readers of our Guantánamo series in his contribution to an investigation into ideology and academia that another colleague, Professor Brian Leiter (Chicago Law), initiated at his Law School Reports blog.
