Law and Society Commons^™

The Apostrophic Impasse: Diacritical Remarks On The Stories Of International Law, Legal Decolonial Genealogy And Antony Anghie’S Historiography, Britt L.A.Q. (Haadiya) Hendrix

Theses and Dissertations

The (hi)stories of international law have strengthened the tentacles of coloniality in the legal regime as they continue to taunt the precarious lifeworlds of people, our planet and social imaginaries of an otherwise. The flow of coloniality has similarly rematerialized in decolonial legal theories and the postcolonial historiographical accounts of international law. I intend to demonstrate this colonial revival in the groundbreaking text of Antony Anghie Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Creation of International Law (2005) which challenged the (hi)stories of traditional jurisprudence. The latter was not necessarily a rejection nor negation of Western thought, because I argue that postcolonial historiography …

Legislating Against Liberties: Congress And The Constitution In The Aftermath Of War, Harry Blain

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How far can a democracy go to protect itself without jeopardizing the liberties upon which democracy depends? This dissertation examines why wartime restrictions on civil liberties outlive their original justifications. Through a comparative historical analysis of five major American wars, it illustrates the decisive role of the U.S. Congress in preserving these restrictions during peacetime. This argument challenges the prevailing consensus in the literature, which identifies wartime executive power as the main threat to postwar freedoms. It also reveals broader narratives of American constitutional development, including the rise and fall of intrusive congressional investigations, the decline of sedition legislation since …

Remarks, Andrea Dennis

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Over the course of one week, the Michigan Journal of Law Reform presented its annual Symposium, this year titled Reimagining Police Surveillance: Protecting Activism and Ending Technologies of Oppression. During this week, the Journal explored complicated questions surrounding the expansion of police surveillance technologies, including how police and federal agencies utilize their extensive resources to identify and surveil public protest, the ways in which technology employed by police is often flawed and disparately impacts people of color, and potential reforms of police surveillance technology. Before delving into these complicated questions, I presented remarks on the history of police surveillance …

Disposable Immigrants: The Reality Of Sexual Assault In Immigration Detention Centers, Valerie Gisel Zarate

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming.

The Role Of Non-Governmental Organizations (Ngos) In Improving Human Rights In Iraq, Naser A. Yahya

Department of Political Science: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Iraq has had a long history of human rights violations since its inception as a modern state in 1921. This is true especially under the personalistic dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Under his regime, the Iraqi people suffered a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including political imprisonment, torture, and summary and arbitrary executions. This regime used a variety of mechanisms to squelch political dissent, including house-to-house searches; arbitrary arrests, often in large numbers; surveillance; harassment and questioning of family members; detention of targeted individuals, such as those returning to Iraq pursuant to amnesties, at unknown locations; …

Redressing The Past To Repair The Present: The Role Of Property Law In Creating And Exacerbating Racial Disparities In Wealth And Poverty In Nova Scotia, Melissa Marsman

LLM Theses

For over 200 years African Nova Scotians have been fighting to confirm legal title to the land on which their ancestors were settled. In 2020, the Nova Scotia Supreme Court remarked “the lack of clear title and the segregated nature of their land triggered a cycle of poverty for black families that persisted for generations.” Nova Scotia has a long history of obscure land titles; however, the ensuing cycle of poverty appears to have disproportionately impacted African Nova Scotians. This thesis reframes the African Nova Scotian land titles discourse into a broader understanding about systemic anti-Black racism and White supremacist …

The Future Of The Allen Charge In The New Millennium, Caleb Epperson

Arkansas Law Review

"In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same." Following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, social and political movements grew rapidly nationwide to combat the prevalence of police brutality against African-American communities. The impact of the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement has been observed in both cities across the United States and in related movements internationally. This movement highlights the necessity for police reform and catalyzes the public’s growing call for greater criminal justice reform. To achieve the goals …

Identity Documents For Transgender Texans: A Proposal For A Uniform System For Correcting Gender Markers In Texas, Lydia R. Harris

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Texas’s lack of a codified gender correction process is unjust, illegal, and against public policy. This comment highlights the injustice faced by transgender Texans without gender concordant identity documents. These injustices include discrimination based on gender stereotypes, violation of the transgender individual’s right to privacy, and violations of public policy. This comment explores possible solutions to the injustices faced by transgender Texans due to the lack of a codified uniform way to correct gender markers in Texas modeled on other jurisdictions’ approaches to this problem.

First, this comment traces the history of the recognition of transgender people and transgender rights …

Sexual Profiling & Blaqueer Furtivity: Blaqueers On The Run, T. Anansi Wilson

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

This article has taken some time to recollect. I have been struggling to find the grammar to communicate a phenomenon that is both central to BlaQueer life and beyond BlaQueer living. This difficulty, the silences, the gaps, the nonsensical and agrammatical nature of this phenomena—that of BlaQueer furtivity, the strict scrutiny of Black life and sexual profiling—are central features not only of this project but of the legal, extralegal and social logics and powers that mark, make and remake BlaQueer folks as always, already furtive, subject to strict scrutiny and necessarily sexual profiling. I have been struggling with whether to …

The Declaration Of Independence, Constitution, And Slavery, Johnny B. Davis

Helm's School of Government Conference - 2021-2024

The paper address the nature of the principles of the Declaration and the Declaration's relationship to the Constitution and how these related to slavery. The argument is that the Declaration did stand for universal equality of the individual before God and the law and therefore its principles condemned slavery. The Constitution did not embrace slavery even though it failed to ban slavery but did set the foundation for the end of slavery.

Truth And Reconciliation: The Ku Klux Klan Hearings Of 1871 And The Genesis Of Section 1983, Tiffany R. Wright, Ciarra N. Carr, Jade W.P. Gasek

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Over the course of seven months in 1871, Congress did something extraordinary for the time: It listened to Black people. At hearings in Washington, D.C. and throughout the former Confederate states, Black women and men—who just six years earlier were enslaved and barred from testifying in Southern courts—appeared before Congress to tell their stories. The stories were heartbreaking. After experiencing the joy of Emancipation and the initial hope of Reconstruction, they had been subjected to unspeakable horror at the hands of white terrorists. They had been raped and sexually humiliated. Their children and spouses murdered. They had been savagely beaten …

The Original Meaning Of “Due Process Of Law” In The Fifth Amendment, Max Crema, Lawrence B. Solum

Faculty Scholarship

The modern understanding of the Fifth Amendment Due Process of Law Clause is dramatically different from the original meaning of the constitutional text. The Supreme Court has embraced both substantive due process—a jurisprudence of unenumerated rights—and procedural due process—a grab bag of doctrines that touch upon almost every aspect of administrative and judicial procedures. We demonstrate that the original meaning of the Clause is much narrower. In 1791, “due process of law” had a narrow and technical meaning: the original sense of the word “process” was close to the modern sense that the word has when used in the phrase …

Law Dean’S Letter Urges Confirmation Of Biden’S Historic Scotus Pick, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Shorter Faculty Works

In a letter citing Black women’s underrepresentation on the federal bench, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, dean of the BU School of Law, and more than 200 other Black women law deans and professors urged the US Senate on Friday to confirm President Joe Biden’s nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the nation’s highest court “swiftly and with bipartisan support.”

Yom Ha’Shoah In An Even More Special Context, Richard Weisberg

Online Publications

This always precious day of mournful memory is linked in 2022 to the 80^th anniversary of the event that gave birth to all that unutterable sadness: the Wannsee Conference of 1942. In an otherwise innocuous building you can visit anytime you are in Berlin, a handful of men, over cakes and liqueur, devised the “Final Solution”. It took them around two days, well heated and protected from the ice and snow outdoors, to list mechanically their estimates of how many Jews lived in Europe’s various countries and how these Jews might be – though their written minutes never use …

Tech And Authoritarianism: How The People’S Republic Of China Is Using Data To Control Hong Kong And Why The U.S. Is Vulnerable, Bryce Neary

Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental, & Innovation Law

The aim of this article is to analyze and compare current events in the People's Republic of China and the United States to discuss the moral dilemmas that arise when establishing the boundary between national security interests and individual privacy rights. As we continue to intertwine our lives with technology, it has become increasingly important to establish clear privacy rights. The question then becomes: at what point should individuals sacrifice their rights for what the government considers the "greater good" of the country?

Further, this article analyzes the development of U.S. privacy law and its relationship to national security, technology, …

Chief Loophole Officer Or Chief Legal Officer: Inside Lehman Brothers—A Film Case Study About Corporate And Legal Ethics, Garrick Apollon

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

This Article discusses the continuing legal education (CLE) visual advocacy documentary-style program, which Garrick Apollon (author of this Article) researched and developed. The case study for this CLE documentary-style program is the film Inside Lehman Brothers—a documentary film by Jennifer Deschamps which chronicles the story of the Lehman whistleblowers. The film presents Mathew Lee, former senior vice president overseeing Lehman’s global balance sheet; Oliver Budde, former in-house counsel (associate general counsel) of the Lehman Brothers; and the racialized female mid-tier manager whistleblowers, who all paid a steep price in the 2008 American subprime mortgage crisis, while many of the …

The War On Drugs And Its Legal Effects On Black Americans, Alexia L. Howard-Mullins

2022 Symposium

The differences in treatment between Black and white Americans in the past fifty years has been a topic of thought in the minds of political and sociological scholars since the inception of the War on Drugs in 1971. These differences in treatment may lead to discrimination legally, resulting in longer prison sentences and a higher proportion of Black Americans in prison. This study analyzes the results of the War on Drugs that led to disproportionate imprisonment of Black Americans, including mandatory sentencing laws, drug classifications, and discrimination within law enforcement and the legal system. This study will use primary sources …

Foreword, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Foreward

Keynote Address, Justin Hansford

Seattle University Law Review

Keynote Address by Justin Hansford

The Lost Cause Of Free Speech, Mary Anne Franks

Articles

No abstract provided.

Originalism And Personal Jurisdiction: Several Questions And A Few Answers, Lawrence B. Solum, Max Crema

Faculty Scholarship

The modern constitutional law of personal jurisdiction is largely the product of living constitutionalism. International Shoe's minimum-contacts and fairness standard was not derived from the constitutional text, and it cannot be supported by the original meaning of the Due Process of Law Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. This Article explores the implications of that fact for the constitutional law of personal jurisdiction, with a focus on the federal courts.

The Article proceeds in six steps. First, it lays out the theoretical framework provided by Public Meaning Originalism, including the Fixation Thesis, the Constraint Principle, and the interpretation-construction …

Mysterious Ways, Lawrence M. Friedman

FIU Law Review

The “mystery” or “detective” novel originated in the first half of the 19th century, and quickly became extremely popular. Its origins betray changes in English and American society—the same changes that led to innovations in criminal justice, especially the creation of detective squads in the big cities. The goal of the detective was to expose secret crime—crimes committed by confidence men, and others who worked in the shadows. Thousands and thousands of detective novels have been written; they are extremely varied; but they tend to share one common trait: they turn on the problem of hidden personal identities, which the …

Whiteness As Contract, Marissa Jackson Sow

Faculty Publications

2020 forced scholars, policymakers, and activists alike to grapple with the impact of “twin pandemics”—the COVID-19 pandemic, which has devastated Black and Indigenous communities, and the scourge of structural and physical state violence against those same communities—on American society. As atrocious acts of anti-Black violence and harassment by law enforcement officers and white civilians are captured on recording devices, the gap between Black people’s human and civil rights and their living conditions has become readily apparent. Less visible human rights abuses camouflaged as private commercial matters, and thus out of the reach of the state, are also increasingly exposed as …

Willard Hurst, Technological Changes, And The Transformation Of American Public Law, William J. Novak

Articles

As Sociobiologist E.O. Wilson once famously framed the “problem of humanity”: “We have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.” America’s greatest philosopher John Dewey similarly placed this yawning gap between rapidly expanding technological change and slowly evolving human emotions and institutions at the heart of what he called The Public and Its Problems. Indeed, Dewey traced the origins of the modern American state as well as what he termed “the Great Society” to the new and modern technologies in production and commerce and steam and electricity that “resulted in a social revolution.” Without warning, Dewey argued, traditional local communities …

Chapter Eight - Technology And The Law: The Automobile (By James Willard Hurst), Bj Ard, William J. Novak

Articles

In this chapter we are going to talk about some of the automobile effects that it has had. Upon the law, and some of the effects that the law has had upon the automobile. We could undoubtedly open up some worthwhile lines of thought, if we talked about the automobile in relation to, certain brooder problems of which it is a part: for example, the effects of the internal combustion the growth engine, or of all types of communication. But we shall have enough on our hands if we stick to the automobile, and even so in the limits of …

Law School News: Rwu Law Remembers Sarah Weddington 12/30/2021, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Dead Men Tell No Tales: Arkansas’S Grave Failure To Honor Its Constituents’ Postmortem Quasi-Property Right, Mckenna Moore

Arkansas Law Review

It is doubtful that Hulon Rupert Austin woke up on the day of March 7, 1986 and expected it to be his last. March 7 was a typical day—a workday—that started with a simple drive to a job site with his co-worker. A day that began so unremarkably ended with his co-worker looking up from where he was working to see “Austin lying on the ground.”

Constance Baker Motley’S Forgotten Housing Legacy, Donovan J. Stone

Utah Law Review

Constance Baker Motley led the legal assault on Jim Crow and became the first Black woman appointed to the federal bench. She spent two decades with the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, assisting Thurgood Marshall in Brown v. Board of Education. Afterward, she desegregated the South’s public schools and universities and argued ten cases before the Supreme Court, winning nine. Motley also represented countless protestors jailed for their activism, including Martin Luther King, Jr.

Despite Motley’s achievements, scholars have largely overlooked her career. And those who have examined Motley’s work have generally focused on her efforts to dismantle school …

The Public Meaning Thesis: An Originalist Theory Of Constitutional Meaning, Lawrence B. Solum

Faculty Scholarship

Public Meaning Originalism is the predominant form of constitutional originalism. What makes Public Meaning Originalism distinctive is the Public Meaning Thesis—the claim that the best understanding of constitutional meaning focuses on the meaning communicated by the constitutional text to the public at the time each constitutional provision was framed and ratified. This Article provides a precise formulation of the Public Meaning Thesis, supplies reasons for affirming the thesis, and answers objections. The constitutional record strongly supports the claim that the constitutional text was intended to communicate to the public. The Constitution begins with “We the People” and the ratification process …

High Time For A Change: How The Relationship Between Signatory Countries And The United Nations Conventions Governing Narcotic Drugs Must Adapt To Foster A Global Shift In Cannabis Law, Alexander Clementi

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Since the early 1970’s, the inclusion of cannabis and its byproducts in the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs has mandated a strict prohibition on cultivation and use of the substance, which has led to a largely global practice of criminalization and imprisonment of anyone found to be in its possession. Yet recently, mostly in response to growing public health concerns, countries like Uruguay, Portugal, The Netherlands, Canada, and the United States have enacted laws which seek to decriminalize or even legalize cannabis use and possession. Yet, cannabis remains classified as a Schedule IV narcotic under the Single Convention, …