Legal Interpretations of Trauma: The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Gender-Based Asylum Claims

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper deals with an important and timely topic.  Unfortunately, there are several issues with it that will, as it stands, likely discourage a wide readership.  First, it makes for very dense and repetitive reading which, in addition to being needless, becomes almost mind numbing with the impossibility of keeping track of all the names of and numbers of cases.  This is seemingly made unnecessary since there is a summary table containing all the same information.  For example, the Results section says in narrative form only what this lengthy preceding table has already said.  In sum, the paper reads more like a legal manual written for a very narrow and specialized audience.  And, again, this is unfortunate. 

Second, the paper is almost exclusively limited to description – as opposed to comparison or explanation.  For example, although the author says the paper will examine “variation among US circuit courts,” there is no comparative examination across courts as to such things as in which courts were cases likely to be granted or denied, which kinds of cases, etc. 

Third, what would make the paper most attractive to a wide audience, as well as readable, would be to focus on an in-depth treatment of illustrative individual cases.  This gets away from the numbers and shows that “real” people are involved who have suffered real harm.  There is a little of this in some discussion of precedent cases here, but I think much more of this is needed, along with much less of the technical stuff.

Author Response

Please see attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This is such an important topic and I commend the author for their work on it. Where this article currently has problems is two-fold - the extensive descriptive summaries and the concomitant lack of argument. As a reader I struggled with the long lists (much of which could have been better summarised in tables) and the lack of discussion of significance and argument from what is an applaudable dataset.  To make this ready for publication, the author should focus on:

* bringing to light the patterns in the data in a way the reader can understand

* the underpinning argument of what the data is telling us.

Author Response

Please see attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper is much improved over the original version.  A further suggestion I would make to additionally improve reader comprehension is to more clearly breakout the headings, subheadings and sub-sub headings in Table 2.  These are already there, but would benefit from a more clear delineation.

Author Response

Thank you for your helpful comments. I updated Table 2 by eliminating the column for Circuit Court (that information was moved into the other data about each case) and organized the cases by the Trauma Code within the types of gender-based persecution. Hopefully, this provides more organizational clarity of the findings. 

Reviewer 2 Report

The edits made here have made this a much stronger paper with a clear and interesting argument. Thank you for responding so positively to the review comments.

Author Response

Thank you for your helpful comments. I updated Table 2 by eliminating the column for Circuit Court (that information was moved into the other data about each case) and organized the cases by the Trauma Code within the types of gender-based persecution. Hopefully, this provides more organizational clarity of the findings.