Reports

Why and how has the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated pre-existing social, political, and racial inequalities? The following case studies on COVID-19 “hotspots” are the culmination of a joint research project in the summer of 2020, co-sponsored by the Rapoport Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Harvard Law School, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and Northeastern Law School.

The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin released a report titled “COVID-19, Structural Inequality, and the Past and Future of Low-Income Latinx Construction Workers in Austin, Texas.” The report puts into legal and political context the disproportionate COVID-19 risk experienced by Latinx construction workers.

This timely report traces legal battles over mining in South Africa at the levels of international, domestic, and customary law. It outlines the tensions between competing conceptions of property rights, arguing that the very definition of property—not just the distribution of its entitlements—is at the heart of contemporary struggles. The report is part of larger project examining natural resource governance, law, and the production of economic inequality.

This paper details the proceedings and debates that emerged from a two-day workshop in South Africa, entitled “Towards a Constitutional Political Economy – Transition and Transformation.” The workshop was held at the Kramer Law School at the University of Cape Town on May 20-21, 2017, and convened a group of heterodox economic thinkers with prominent social and economic rights advocates and policymakers to explore the prospect of reconstructing the South African political economy.

This report is the result of two half-day summits that sought to catalyze new ideas and innovative collaborations, both inside and outside the University of Texas, that might contribute to the future of Austin and Travis County as model health (and healthy) communities.

This report, prepared for the working group on electronic evidence organized by the Center for Research Libraries Global Resources Network, reviews the experience of international tribunals and legal actors in using such evidence of human rights violations in judicial settings and investigations.

This report by the Human Rights Clinic at Texas Law documents the Argentine government's repeated failures in dealing with the environmental and health crises in Abra Pampa, Argentina, a poor and largely indigenous mining community near the Bolivian border.

As part of a multi-year project on Afro-descendant and indigenous land rights in Latin America, the Rapoport Center sent fact-finding delegations of professors and students to Colombia, Brazil, and Ecuador to assess local land rights situations and write reports about their findings.