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Abortion Ally or Abettor: Accomplice and Conspiracy Liability After Dobbs
Full text linkThe bristle of state laws criminalizing abortion after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization raises important questions about accomplice and conspiracy liability for helping people pursue reproductive freedoms out of state. Abortion funds, grassroots organizations, pilots, and other humanitarian volunteers are vital for people in need of abortions, who often are trapped by a lack of resources in abortion criminalization jurisdictions. Threats of prosecution are chilling and even shutting down assistance by abortion funds for travel to pursue reproductive freedoms. The liability questions after Dobbs arise against a backdrop of increasing prosecutions in Europe and the United States for crimes of compassion—providing aid to migrants across international borders.
This Article is the first to ground defenses to liability for helping people pursue reproductive and gender freedoms after Dobbs in anti-totalitarian theory and in light of how courts have curbed the criminalization of compassion to migrants. The Article offers a normative and theoretical frame for new questions about the criminalization of assistance after Dobbs, grounded in the tradition of anti-totalitarianism that protected against pervasive government control of movements, bodies, and information. Through the anti-totalitarian lens, the Article frames clusters of defenses grounded in freedom of speech, the right of interstate travel, and canons of statutory construction. Although the primary targets thus far have been in the abortion context, which is the Article’s focus, the Article’s insights also have wider impact as a growing number of states criminalize the provision of gender-affirming care to minors, raising important questions about liability for aiding the pursuit of gender-affirming as well as reproductive freedoms
STOLEN HUMANITY ON DISPLAY: LACKING LEGISLATION FOR HUMAN REMAINS IN U.S. MUSEUMS
Full text linkIn museums across the United States, displays of human remains are not rarities. Yet few attendees stop to consider the provenance behind those once-living parts of our ancestors. To do so, one would have to contend with an unpleasant history rife with scientific racism and graverobbing for the personal collections of society’s upper crust. Considering the origins of such displays reveals that the labels and names attached to human remains in museums often serve more to alienate them from their humanity than they do to connect or contextualize.
Legal regulations pertaining to displayed human remains are piecemeal. There are federal protections for Native American human remains (as well as sacred and funerary objects) through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, enacted in 1989 and most recently amended in January of 2024. However, these protections do not apply to the human remains belonging to non-Native communities of color. To state the obvious, taking human remains of any origin without consent is illegal. This is true in all fifty states. Yet through a combination of wealth, societal privilege, and racist ideologies, graves and mortuaries throughout the country were pillaged for human remains over decades, displayed first in private collections and research institutions and later donated to museums across the nation. Many of those remains are still housed in museums today, if not on active display, then behind the closed doors of institutional storage.
Decades later, the question of how to reconcile with stolen human remains looms largely unanswered. However, within the last five years, there has been international legislation and domestic legal precedent in support of reburial or repatriation of non-Native human remains. In 2023, France passed a law allowing the restitution of foreign human remains in public collections. In the United States, a 2023 decision by the Philadelphia Orphans’ Court granted legal consent to the reburial of certain non-Native human remains. Following that decision, the remains of over a dozen Black Philadelphians formerly held in the Penn Museum’s Morton Collection were buried and laid to rest. There has also been encouraging trends towards greater transparency with human remains databases. Legal repatriation, reburial, and restitution is possible for the wrongfully gathered human remains in United States museums
