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Full-Text Articles in Law
An Argument Against Unbounded Arrest Power: The Expressive Fourth Amendment And Protesting While Black, Karen Pita Loor
An Argument Against Unbounded Arrest Power: The Expressive Fourth Amendment And Protesting While Black, Karen Pita Loor
Faculty Scholarship
Protesting is supposed to be revered in our democracy, considered “as American as apple pie” in our nation’s mythology. But the actual experiences of the 2020 racial justice protesters showed that this supposed reverence for political dissent and protest is more akin to American folklore than reality on the streets. The images from those streets depicted police officers clad in riot gear and armed with shields, batons, and “less than” lethal weapons aggressively arresting protesters, often en masse. In the first week of the George Floyd protests, police arrested roughly 10,000 people, and approximately 78 percent of those arrests were …
Of Afrofuturism, Of Algorithms, Ngozi Okidegbe
Of Afrofuturism, Of Algorithms, Ngozi Okidegbe
Faculty Scholarship
Algorithms are proliferating in criminal legal structures. The predictions produced by these algorithms inform life-altering decisions around surveillance and incarceration. Their continued use poses a challenge to ongoing racial justice efforts. Contesting how algorithms of today maintain the racial status quo requires a fundamental rethinking of the algorithm project. This essay explores how Afrofuturism can facilitate such a rethinking. It imagines how applying an Afrofuturist paradigm to the adoption, construction, implementation, and oversight of algorithms could radically change the kind of algorithms developed and the purposes for which they are developed. Tapping into this potential offers the chance for members …
Othering Across Borders, Steven Arrigg Koh
Othering Across Borders, Steven Arrigg Koh
Faculty Scholarship
Our contemporary moment of reckoning presents an opportunity to evaluate racial subordination and structural inequality throughout our three-tiered domestic, transnational, and international criminal law system. In particular, this Essay exposes a pernicious racial dynamic in contemporary U.S. global criminal justice policy, which I call othering across borders. First, this othering may occur when race emboldens political and prosecutorial actors to prosecute foreign defendants. Second, racial animus may undermine U.S. engagement with international criminal legal institutions, specifically the International Criminal Court. This Essay concludes with measures to mitigate such othering.
When They Hear Us: Race, Algorithms And The Practice Of Criminal Law, Ngozi Okidegbe
When They Hear Us: Race, Algorithms And The Practice Of Criminal Law, Ngozi Okidegbe
Faculty Scholarship
We are in the midst of a fraught debate in criminal justice reform circles about the merits of using algorithms. Proponents claim that these algorithms offer an objective path towards substantially lowering high rates of incarceration and racial and socioeconomic disparities without endangering community safety. On the other hand, racial justice scholars argue that these algorithms threaten to entrench racial inequity within the system because they utilize risk factors that correlate with historic racial inequities, and in so doing, reproduce the same racial status quo, but under the guise of scientific objectivity.
This symposium keynote address discusses the challenge that …
Adjudicating Risk: Aids, Crime, And Culpability, Aziza Ahmed
Adjudicating Risk: Aids, Crime, And Culpability, Aziza Ahmed
Faculty Scholarship
The AIDS epidemic continues to pose significant public health challenges, especially given that the spread of the virus outpaces the AIDS response.1 Importantly, HIV continues to disproportionately impact socially and economically marginalized communities. In countries with concentrated epidemics,2 it is racial minorities, sex workers, men who have sex with men, and drug users who face the brunt of the epidemic.3 In the United States, the data is startling4 : 44% of new infections were among African-Americans, and among African-Americans contracting HIV, 57% were among gay and bisexual men.5 In 2016, the CDC found that one …