Law Commons^™

Dignity Restoration And The Chicago Police Torture Reparations Ordinance, Andrew S. Baer

Chicago-Kent Law Review

A recent municipal ordinance giving reparations to survivors of police torture in Chicago represents an unprecedented effort by a city government to repair damage wrought by decades of police violence. Between 1972 and 1991, white detectives under Commander Jon Burge tortured confessions from over 118 black criminal suspects on the city’s South and West Sides. Responding to the needs of affected communities, a coalition of torture survivors, their families, civil rights attorneys, and community activists pushed the reparations bill through the City Council on May 6, 2015. Representing the holistic approach favored by survivors, the $5 million reparations package awarded …

Sound Recordings And Dignity Takings: Reflections On The Racialization Of Migrants In Contemporary Italy, Gianpaolo Chiriacò

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In the field of ethnomusicology, it is possible to consider musical collaborations—such as traditional fieldwork or joint musical projects between artists of different background—as spaces where different individuals and subjectivities share their own artistic practices and products, as well as the musical cultures of which they are representative or bearers. Such collaborations raise an array of methodological questions with implications to social justice and power relations. The aim of this contribution is to use the notion of dignity takings and dignity restoration to tackle some of these questions. While relying strongly on my own fieldwork in Rome and Chicago, I …

Dignity Takings In Gangland’S Suburban Frontier, Lua Kamál Yuille

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This paper engages the evolving dignity takings framework, first developed by Bernadette Atuahene, in the context of contemporary American street gangs (e.g. Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings, etc.). Contrary to most popular accounts, it starts with a reimagined and complicated notion of street gangs that emphasizes not their secondary or tertiary violence and criminality but their primary function as corporate institutions engaged in the sustained, transgressive creation of alternative markets for the creation of the types of property interests that scholars have associated with the development and pursuit of identity and “personhood.” From this perspective, the paper applies the dignity takings …

Beyond Trademark: The Washington Redskins Case And The Search For Dignity, Victoria F. Phillips

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In her pioneering book, We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program, Professor Bernadette Atuahene employs a detailed ethnographic study of South Africa’s land restitution program to develop the concept of a dignity taking. This article extends the application of Atuahene’s theory to the taking of intangible property arguing that the misappropriation of cultural identity and imagery for use as a federal trademark can also constitute a dignity taking in certain cases. Perhaps no effort has received more public attention than the longstanding battle over the Washington NFL football team’s name and its federally registered “Redskins” …

Dignity Takings, Dignity Restoration: A Tort Law Perspective, Valerie P. Hans

Chicago-Kent Law Review

No abstract provided.

Dignity Takings And Dehumanization: A Social Neuroscience Perspective, Lasana T. Harris

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Dehumanization is an important element of legal theorizing about property confiscation by state or governmental authorities that result in dignity takings. Psychologists have theorized about dehumanization for decades, yet have only been able to subject the topic to empirical examination over the last 15 years or so. Moving the topic from the armchair to the laboratory has revealed a number of surprises to lay theories about dehumanization. First, everyone is capable of dehumanizing another person. Second, the social context determines when dehumanization takes place. Third, dehumanization does not always lead to negative behavior. Fourth, dehumanization is functional, allowing the completion …

Dignity Takings In The Criminal Law Of Seventeenth-Century England And The Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Felipe Acevedo

Chicago-Kent Law Review

When does a punishment for crime cross from being a legitimate goal of the state to a dignity taking? From the Norman Conquest until the middle of the eighteenth-century, the Common Law provided that in addition to execution, the property of convicted felons or traitors was forfeited to the crown and their blood corrupted so that their heirs could not inherit. I argue this is a clear instance of dignity takings. The colonists who traveled to Massachusetts Bay wanted a fresh start and so sought to create a model society based on Biblical law. Using around 6,000 criminal cases from …

No Place To Call Home: The Iraqi Kurds Under The Ba’Ath, Saddam Hussein, And Isis, Craig Douglas Albert Ph.D.

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The Kurds are the world’s largest ethnonational group without their own state. They have often been the target of ethnic strife and discrimination. Even within their semi-autonomous territory, Iraqi Kurds have faced humiliation and oppression. This essay argues that the Kurds in Iraq have been deprived of their property and dignity and hence have been subjected to “dignity takings.” This occurred in three distinct phases: the 1970s under “Ba’athification,” the 1980s under Saddam Hussein, and at present under the Islamic State (ISIS). During each phase, the Kurds have suffered involuntary property loss through forced relocations and the destruction of homes …

Access Denied—Using Procedure To Restrict Tort Litigation: The Israeli-Palestinian Experience, Gilat J. Bachar

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Procedural barriers which limit individuals’ ability to bring lawsuits—like conditioning litigation upon the provision of a bond—are a subtle way to reduce the volume of tort litigation. The use of such procedural doctrines often spares legislatures from the need to debate the substance of legal rights, especially when those rights are politically controversial. This Article presents a case study of this phenomenon which has escaped scholarly attention, in the intriguing context of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. On the books, a unique mechanism enables non-Israeli citizen Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to bring civil actions for damages against Israel …

Dignity Takings And Dignity Restoration: A Case Study Of The Colombian Land Restitution Program, Diana Esther Guzmán-Rodríguez

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Over the past 50 years, Colombia has experienced intense socio-political violence associated with its internal armed conflict. As a result of this violence, long and complicated processes of land dispossession have taken place throughout the country, and more than seven million people have been internally displaced. Currently, the Colombian state is implementing a Land Restitution Program, which aims to restitute the dispossessed lands and to transform deep inequalities associated with massive forced displacement. This case study on both the complexities of the land takings in Colombia and the Land Restitution Program’s ambitious goals contributes to strengthening the socio-legal concepts of …

Unconscionable: Tax Delinquency Sales As A Form Of Dignity Taking, Andrew W. Kahrl

Chicago-Kent Law Review

No abstract provided.

Dignity Takings And “Trailer Trash”: The Case Of Mobile Home Park Mass Evictions, Esther Sullivan

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Mobile homes are a primary source of shelter for America’s poor and working classes. A large share of the nation’s mobile home stock is found in mobile home parks where residents own their homes but lease the land under their homes from private landlords. Urban growth has put pressure on park landlords to sell and redevelop mobile home parks. When parks are redeveloped mobile home residents are evicted and entire communities are destroyed. Residents lose their homes and home equity as they struggle to relocate their homes to different parks or are forced to abandon them. Through two continuous years …

Fucking With Dignity: Public Sex, Queer Intimate Kinship, And How The Aids Epidemic Bathhouse Closures Constituted A Dignity Taking, Stephen M. Engel, Timothy S. Lyle

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In the name of public health, authorities in San Francisco and New York City pursued the closure of gay bathhouses in 1984 and 1985, respectively. We challenge the dominant historical narrative that justified these closings, and through that challenge, we argue that these closures constituted a dignity taking against gay and queer-identified men. Bathhouses were not simply dens of impersonal anonymous sex. They were critical sites of community development and queer kinship. Many governing authorities neither considered the value of these institutions nor grappled with queer understandings of space, contact, intimacy, and belonging. The debates and the closures that followed …

Urban Renewal And Sacramento’S Lost Japantown, Thomas W. Joo

Chicago-Kent Law Review

No abstract provided.

The State Giveth And Taketh Away: Race, Class, And Urban Hospital Closings, Shaun Ossei-Owusu

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This essay uses concepts from Bernadette Atuahene’s book We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program to examine the trend of urban hospital closings. It does so by focusing specifically on the history of Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital, a charitable hospital in South Los Angeles, California that emerged after the Watts riots in 1965. The essay illustrates how Professor Atuahene’s framework can generate unique questions about the closing of urban hospitals, and public bureaucracies more generally. The essay also demonstrates how Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital’s trajectory hones some of Atuahene’s concepts in ways …

Creating The Urban Educational Desert Through School Closures And Dignity Taking, Matthew Patrick Shaw

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Closures of urban open-enrollment neighborhood schools that primarily serve students of color are intensely controversial. Districts seeking to economize often justify closures by pointing to population shifts in historically densely populated urban areas. They argue that net reductions in a neighborhood’s school-aged population result in underutilized schools, which do a disservice to students at higher cost to districts. Students and their families and communities counter, pointing to histories of district neglect of their schools and recent school expansions in more affluent neighborhoods of similar population density as belying district claims of utility-based downsizing. In this article, I use a critical …

Dignity Takings In Communist Poland: Collectivization And Slave Soldiers, Ewa Kozerska, Piotr Stec

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Poland’s history in the 20th century could be a swell script of a movie. A country that had lost its independence in the 18th century regained it in 1918 only to fall prey to Nazi Germany twenty years later. After World War II Poland was under Communist rule that ended in 1989 with the fall of the Iron Curtain. In this paper we deal with dignity takings as defined by Professor Bernadette Atuahene that took place mostly in the early phase of the Communist era.

Creation of the Communist “brave new world” required total transformation of the society, sometimes referred …

Dignity Contradictions: Reconstruction As Restoration, Taja-Nia Y. Henderson

Chicago-Kent Law Review

No abstract provided.