At the dawn of a new decade, Rutgers Today challenged university scholars across half a dozen disciplines – economics, American studies, history, political science, law, science, and sociology – to predict what the next few years hold in store. Based on the opening years of the new millennium, we asked, what trends do you see evolving, and what might life look like when this newly hatched decade draws to a close? In this article, we interview Roger S. Clark of the School of Law–Camden.
An authority in the field of international criminal law, Clark believes the next decade will see more robust American interaction with the global community, particularly in the dual fields of nuclear disarmament and environmental activism.
“This will be a period of re-engagement. On the environment, the U.S. will give real leadership, as demonstrated at the Copenhagen meeting,” Clark says of December’s worldwide summit on warming and climate change. “Even if we didn’t get a treaty out of it, we got a framework to move the issue along, and we saw leadership by President Obama.”
A similar dynamic is driving nuclear disarmament, the legal scholar says. “We are moving in the direction of reducing numbers,” Clark notes, pointing to statements the newly elected president and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, have issued in the past year. “I’m hopeful we will move a little more than we did under the previous administration.”
On the domestic front, he believes the next hot topic for the U.S. Supreme Court will be imprisonment without the chance of parole, which ties in with the justices’ overall re-examination of criminal-sentencing policies. “The Court is starting to pick up on this question, particularly in the context of juveniles,” Clark says, adding that more than 2,000 offenders are serving life sentences for crimes they committed when they were younger than 18.
While he doesn’t foresee the ultimate overturn of Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 High Court ruling on the legality of abortion, Clark does believe the Roberts Court will continue chipping away at reproductive rights, perhaps through upholding stronger parental-notification laws or other measures designed to limit women’s access to abortion.
On another hot-button issue, same-sex marriage, the law professor believes the country is moving toward acceptance, little by little, state by state. Despite a recent defeat of legislation by the New Jersey Senate, Clark envisions homosexual marriage becoming legal within the next 10 to 15 years. “Just like the abolition of capital punishment, it’s moving glacially, but it’s moving,” he says.
– Fredda Sacharow