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Symposium Introduction: Walking With Destiny, Roy L. Brooks

San Diego Law Review

During the Enlightenment, the poet Robert Burns lamented, “Man’s inhumanity to man [m]akes countless thousands mourn.” Burns was looking back over centuries of human injustices—atrocities—as the empirical basis for his mournful reflection. But even now, long after the Enlightenment, we have not been able to curb our proclivity for committing atrocities. What we have been able to do after all these centuries, however, is enlarge the human capacity for redressing—repairing—the damage wrought by our atrocities. As atrocities do not appear to be ending, redress has become our destiny.

California is attempting to walk with this destiny. Our most populous state …