This thesis’ goal is to examine the way the term and concept of white privilege has been created in contemporary American society. The argument of the thesis will be that before and directly after discrimination was made illegal in the United States by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, scholars and activists implemented the term white privilege to describe structural and governmentally perpetuated privilege in the United States that had been consciously given to whites. This privilege allowed whites to obtain legal advantages over minorities across the nation. Years after the legislation was passed, however, discrimination was still an issue in the country. White privilege’s definition shifted in order to explain the reason for that reality; White privilege was not perpetuated by conscious and explicit efforts, but by white citizen’s subconscious. This thesis will show how that shift occurred, using scholarly and non-academic writer’s usage of the term white privilege.

Since English lawyers started writing text books about the law of evidence, they have denied that religious confession privilege exists at common law. However, that statement of the law surprises those who recognise confessional secrecy dating back into the first millennium AD. It is also counter-intuitive in Federal Australia since the one human freedom which the Constitution has guaranteed since 1901 is the “free exercise of any religion”. This thesis analyses the legal conclusion that there is no religious confession privilege at common law against available historical materials. Those materials include the origin of confessional secrecy in Christian practice and the entrenchment of that practice in canon law; the recognition and even the reception of canonical practices in the custom that became the common law; and all the English common law cases that have affirmed or denied religious confession privilege whether in passing or in an arguably precedential way. The reason why clear evidence of the existence of the privilege even seventy years after the English Reformation has been ignored by the text writers is traced to an uncorrected interpretive error made by the text writer Peake in 1801. His error has been uncritically followed and affirmed by later commentators and judges. However, until Gavan Duffy J decided Cook v Carroll in Ireland in 1945 and the Supreme Court of Canada decided R v Gruenke in 1991, there was no reported decision on religious confession privilege anywhere in the British Commonwealth. All else that had been written was at best obiter dicta. The factors that influenced those two courts to recognise not a narrow religious confession privilege but a more encompassing confidential religious communications privilege are then measured against Australian jurisprudence to suggest whether the High Court of Australia would come to a similar conclusion.

This thesis focuses on perceptions of butch privilege in the undergraduate student body at Georgia State University. Butch privilege is similar to traditional definitions of privilege, whether male, white or heterosexual. I define it as the unearned and unacknowledged privilege experienced by a butch lesbian (perceived or self-identified) due to her occupation of masculinity. In order to investigate this topic, an exploratory quantitative analysis of how perceptions of masculinity and status are associated with butch privilege was conducted. A survey consisting of questions regarding participants’ perceptions of how differential privileges are extended to masculine and feminine looking women were presented to undergraduate students during introductory sociology classes. I found that the privileges traditionally reserved for white males in society are perceived to be extended to white butch lesbians due to their occupation of masculinity.

Parliamentary privilege encompasses certain special rights and immunities deemed necessary to protect legislatures and members from undue interference so that they can effectively carry out their functions of inquiring, debating and legislating. The doctrine has engendered conflicts that have never been wholly resolved between courts and legislatures, and between individual rights and parliamentary privileges. The advent of modern human rights and emphasis on democratic values such as accountability and transparency has brought a new urgency to this problem. The current passive and defensive approach of Canadian legislatures is unsustainable, as is the approach taken by the SCC in recent jurisprudence. The paper argues against expanding the scope of judicial review of privilege claims as a solution, and in favour of open modernization processes led by parliamentarians, and involving public participation. Further, the paper advocates for the application of a “relational approach” versus the traditional “contest approach” to parliamentary privilege.

Parliamentary privilege encompasses certain special rights and immunities deemed necessary to protect legislatures and members from undue interference so that they can effectively carry out their functions of inquiring, debating and legislating. The doctrine has engendered conflicts that have never been wholly resolved between courts and legislatures, and between individual rights and parliamentary privileges. The advent of modern human rights and emphasis on democratic values such as accountability and transparency has brought a new urgency to this problem. The current passive and defensive approach of Canadian legislatures is unsustainable, as is the approach taken by the SCC in recent jurisprudence. The paper argues against expanding the scope of judicial review of privilege claims as a solution, and in favour of open modernization processes led by parliamentarians, and involving public participation. Further, the paper advocates for the application of a “relational approach” versus the traditional “contest approach” to parliamentary privilege.

In 1977, a Seattle judge, exasperated at having to make life-altering decisions for children with little information, founded the Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program. In 2010, 75,000 people in 49 states volunteered their time to advocate for a child or sibling set in foster care. This project is aimed at understanding the issues of voice and advocacy imbedded within the organization Advocates For Kids and within the foster care system at large through critical ethnography. Further, this dissertation aspires to illuminate the complex ethics at play in the foster care system. This dissertation seeks to reveal the complicated ways in which the law is enacted by individuals such as foster parents, judges, and lawyers. Specifically, the dissertation provides an in-depth examination of the role of the Court Appointed Special Advocate. CASAs are volunteers trained by the nonprofit organization, Advocates For Kids, who advocate on behalf of children in foster care. I collected data via interviews, observation, document examination, and reflexivity to present a crystallized account of the issues of voice and advocacy in the work of Advocates For Kids. Based on the data, I expound three categories of voice at play in the work of VFC: Imagined Voice, Monitored Voice, and Stifled Voice. I also argue that volunteers intentionally perform privilege in order to ethically advocate for the children with whom they work. The dissertation concludes with a performative script based on the project designed to represent the complexity of the foster care system.

Inaug.-diss.--Halle-Wittenberg. / Lebenslauf. "Literatur": p. [115]-116.

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

The purpose of this study is to explore potential links between intersectional identities (race, sex, sexuality, and religion) and clinical outcomes such as symptoms of psychological distress and quality of life. Based on previous research, it was hypothesized that privileged identities (White, Male, Heterosexual, Christian) would relate to positive clinically relevant outcomes; it was predicted that more accumulated privileged identities would be associated with better outcomes. Data was analyzed from a self-report study from 2015; participants consist of Midwestern American undergraduate students enrolled in an introduction to psychology course (N = 779). SPSS analyses were performed in two steps. First, a MANOVA was performed with binary demographic variables as well as symptoms and quality of life. Second, a regression was performed with intersectionality as a continuous independent variable on a 0-4 scale, which was converted from demographic questionnaire scores, with the same dependent variables. Findings show some support for hypotheses. Main effects with both dependent variables were found for all independent variables except for race. No significant interactions were found at the two-way level; thus, no further interactions were analyzed. Lastly, increases in accumulated privileged identities were associated with lower psychological distress and higher quality of life. The results of this study have significant implications for culturally competent research and practice within the field of clinical psychology.

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1987.