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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Technologies Of Race: Big Data, Privacy And The New Racial Bioethics, Christian Sundquist
The Technologies Of Race: Big Data, Privacy And The New Racial Bioethics, Christian Sundquist
Articles
Advancements in genetic technology have resurrected long discarded conceptualizations of “race” as a biological reality. The rise of modern biological race thinking – as evidenced in health disparity research, personal genomics, DNA criminal forensics, and bio-databanking - not only is scientifically unsound but portends the future normalization of racial inequality. This Article articulates a constitutional theory of shared humanity, rooted in the substantive due process doctrine and Ninth Amendment, to counter the socio-legal acceptance of modern genetic racial differentiation. It argues that state actions that rely on biological racial distinctions undermine the essential personhood of individuals subjected to such taxonomies, …
Sonic Jihad — Muslim Hip Hop In The Age Of Mass Incarceration, Spearit
Sonic Jihad — Muslim Hip Hop In The Age Of Mass Incarceration, Spearit
Articles
This essay examines hip hop music as a form of legal criticism. It focuses on the music as critical resistance and “new terrain” for understanding the law, and more specifically, focuses on what prisons mean to Muslim hip hop artists. Losing friends, family, and loved ones to the proverbial belly of the beast has inspired criticism of criminal justice from the earliest days of hip hop culture. In the music, prisons are known by a host of names like “pen,” “bing,” and “clink,” terms that are invoked throughout the lyrics. The most extreme expressions offer violent fantasies of revolution and …
Outsourcing Investigations, Elena Baylis
Outsourcing Investigations, Elena Baylis
Articles
This article addresses the International Criminal Court’s reliance on third-party investigations in the absence of its own international police force. In addition to cooperation from sometimes reluctant states, the ICC and other international criminal tribunals have come to rely on a network of NGOs and UN entities focused on postconflict justice work to provide critical evidence. This reliance raised problems in the ICC Office of the Prosecutor's first case against Thomas Lubanga. The use of third-party evidence raises questions regarding confidentiality and disclosure, the integrity of the evidence-gathering process, and the equality of arms between the prosecution and the defense. …
On Race Theory And Norms, Christian Sundquist
On Race Theory And Norms, Christian Sundquist
Articles
This article has been adapted from an address given at the Albany Law Review Symposium in Spring 2009. This article discusses the judicial acceptance of DNA random match estimates, which uses DNA analysis to estimate the likelihood that a criminal defendant is the source of genetic material that is found at a crime scene. Relying on race, these tests demonstrate how such a re-inscription of race as a biological entity threatens the modern conception of race as a social construction, and how those estimates should be rejected as inadmissible on a doctrinal level under the Federal Rules of Evidence.