Law Commons^™

For Every Rat Killed, Etienne C. Toussaint

Faculty Publications

If my grandmother had survived the sickness of old age and were alive to witness the economic injustices wrought by capitalist culture, what would she think? If my grandmother were alive to observe familiar technologies for exterminating household pests—surveil-lance, capture, imprisonment, disposal—being increasingly aimed toward low-income Black communities, what would she believe? If my grandmother were alive to discover, in the palm of her hands, a digital platform for spreading information (and misinformation) to the masses and painting new futures into the minds of lawmakers and politicians, what would she say?

Studies have shown that low-income individuals are more likely …

It’S Not Complicated: Containing Criminal Law’S Influence On The Title Ix Process, Margaret B. Drew

Faculty Publications

Title IX processes that address campus sexual assault are undergoing dramatic changes in structure as well as in review. After receipt of the Department of Education’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, colleges and universities were impelled to review how their institutions were implementing Title IX. From website information through decision making on alleged violations, the ways in which higher education addresses federally guided changes is a matter of national conversation. This essay addresses change in light of campus sexual assault allegations, and does not explicitly address other forms of Title IX complaints, such as athletic funding and opportunities. This essay will …

The Legacy Of Stop And Frisk: Addressing The Vestiges Of A Violent Police Culture, Kami Chavis Simmons

Faculty Publications

For many years, the New York City Police Department ("NYPD") has engaged in a practice known as "Stop and Frisk." This policy allows officers, based on reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot, to engage in investigatory stops and to conduct a pat down of the outer clothing of the individual if there is reasonable suspicion that the suspect is armed.

While there is an abundance of analysis regarding the detrimental impact of the stop-and-frisk policy, particularly the allegations of racial discrimination, an under examined facet of this policy and its implementation is the inherently violent nature of these encounters. …

Intimate Terrorism And Technology: There's An App For That, Justine A. Dunlap

Faculty Publications

Technology enhances the ability of the domestic violence perpetrator. It also holds the promise of assisting domestic violence survivors in their quest for safety. This is true in practical, daily ways and is becoming increasingly true in the legal treatment of these cases. Perpetrators can use technology to stalk and find their victims; survivors can use it to access necessary information to get away from their batterers. Laws are being amended to take into account cyber-enhanced domestic violence techniques. Domestic or intimate terrorists are among the class of criminals targeted for use of GPS monitoring. This article discusses the way …

Collaboration And Coercion: Domestic Violence Meets Collaborative Law, Margaret B. Drew

Faculty Publications

‘Collaboration and Coercion’ addresses the systemic and individual concerns that arise when family members that have experienced abuse enter into the collaborative law process. A form of alternative dispute resolution, collaborative law is a method of resolving disputes without engagement of the legal system. The author addresses the structural and cultural difficulties that survivors of abuse encounter throughout the process as well as the ethical concerns that are raised when collaborative practitioners accept cases where the parties have a history of coercion within the intimate relationship.

Subject To Surveillance: Genocide Law As Epistemology Of The Object, Tawia Baidoe Ansah

Faculty Publications

This article analyzes the discourse on genocide from two angles: the legal genesis of the term in the 1940s and subsequent legal "capture" of the concept of genocide, and a recent socio-political critique of the legal meaning of genocide. The article suggests that a cross-disciplinary critique of genocidal violence not only describes the event and the victim, but also produces knowledge of them as discursive "objects." The key issue is the "surveillance" role of the outside observer, also produced as such in discursive relation to the object. At stake in this view of genocide law as epistemology is the capacity …

Sovereignty, Identity, And The Apparatus Of Death, Tawia Baidoe Ansah

Faculty Publications

Ten years after the genocide in Rwanda, the government issued broad new laws outlawing the use of ethnic categories, with a view to uniting all Rwandans under a single Rwandan identity. This self-erasure of ethnic identity is deployed primarily within the borders of the state, to enable reconciliation after the genocide in 1994. Outside the borders, the state deploys ethnic identity as one of the rationales for its cross-border wars (in the Democratic Republic of Congo).

Do Ask And Do Tell: Rethinking The Lawyer’S Duty To Warn In Domestic Violence Cases, Margaret B. Drew, Sarah Buel

Faculty Publications

Empirical data document that while domestic violence victims face high risk of recurring abuse, batterers’ lawyers may be privy to information that could avert further harm. Attorneys owe a duty of confidentiality to their clients that can be breached only in extraordinary circumstances, such as when counsel learns her client plans to commit a crime. To resolve the tension between client confidentiality and victim safety, this Article argues that, in the context of domestic violence cases, lawyers have an affirmative duty to (1) screen battering clients who have indicated a likelihood of harming others, (2) attempt to dissuade them from …

Genocide And The Eroticization Of Death: Law, Violence, And Moral Purity, Tawia Baidoe Ansah

Faculty Publications

In this article, I ask: What is the relationship between law and morality in response to mass violence and suffering abroad? How does law shape and determine our moral response to mass death and suffering? We repose in the law itself a desire to define the moral and the ethical parameters of legal-political action. Thus, when faced with mass violence and suffering abroad, law functions as a proxy for morality. The legal prohibition under the Genocide Convention defines morality, or cabins the variety of moral responses into a single and universally applicable ethical-legal norm of response to genocide. The moral …

Surprised By Sin: Human Rights And Universality, Tawia Baidoe Ansah

Faculty Publications

International human rights law's claim to universality, at the level of normative formation, has been shaped by conceptions of the self over time. The metaphysical reconfigurations of the self, from the Enlightenment to the present, have marked the human rights narrative in particular ways. This essay will suggest that since World War II, a conception of the self within a narrative of rights has been replaced, or at least countermanded, by a conception of sacral evil, with profound implications for the normative claim to universality of the human rights discourse. The essay begins with a synoptic analysis of the rise …