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Full-Text Articles in Law

Recognizing Victimhood, Christine Wilke Jan 2006

Recognizing Victimhood, Christine Wilke

Studio for Law and Culture

The category of victimhood resonates deeply with many contemporary struggles for recognition without, however, receiving similar attention by political theories of recognition. Many “struggles for recognition” are fought with explicit reference to massive injustice that have ceased without having been publicly recognized as injustices. The state responses to claims for the recognition of victimhood mirror, I will argue, the state’s dominant conceptions of justice and injustice. In many cases, the state affirms its conceptions of injustice and moral innocence through the selective recognition of victims. For example, the U.S. government has granted Japanese-Americans interned during the Second World War an …


The Limits Of Courage And Principle, Jedediah S. Purdy Jan 2006

The Limits Of Courage And Principle, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Michael Ignatieff, the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, is not a lawyer. His work, however, treats issues of core concern to lawyers: nation-building, human rights, the ethics of warfare, and now, in his latest book, the proper relationship between liberty and security. The Lesser Evil is, in part, a book a legal scholar might have written: a normative framework for lawmaking in the face of the terror threat. It is also something more unusual: an exercise in an older type of jurisprudence. Ignatieff discusses law in the light of moral psychology …


Legislating Racial Fairness In Criminal Justice, Olatunde C.A. Johnson Jan 2006

Legislating Racial Fairness In Criminal Justice, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Twenty years ago, in McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court rejected a capital defendant's claim that statistical evidence of racial discrimination in the administration of Georgia's death penalty system constituted a violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Yet, even as McCleskey effectively bars constitutional challenges to racial disparities in the criminal justice system where invidious bias is difficult to establish, the Court invites advocates to pursue legislation as a remedy to racial disparities. Indeed, the McCleskey Court offers as a rationale for its ruling the judiciary's institutional incompetence to remedy these disparities, holding that "McCleskey's arguments are best …