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STOLEN HUMANITY ON DISPLAY: LACKING LEGISLATION FOR HUMAN REMAINS IN U.S. MUSEUMS
Get PDFIn 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
Barlow v. Washington: Judicial Hesitancy and Sexual Violence at Universities
Get PDFSexual violence among university students—most frequently, violence against women—is a well-known and pernicious problem. But the liability of universities for failing to prevent such violence is exceedingly rare. Courts remain hesitant to impose a duty on universities to prevent sexual violence, even in situations where they are in by far the best position to do so. This Article examines that judicial hesitancy in the context of a claim by Madeleine Barlow, who sued Washington State University (WSU) after she was raped at an off-campus party in her first week of college by a student with a record of past sexual misconduct. Barlow argued that WSU’s failure to take steps to prevent the rape violated both Title IX and Washington common law. Both claims failed. This Article critiques judicial hesitancy in the face of student sexual assault
BEYOND DATA DELETION: ADDRESSING ANTICOMPETITIVE CONDUCT IN THE ERA OF MACHINE LEARNING
Get PDFLike a hamster wheel, the “virtuous cycle” of data collection, collation, and computation spins to create algorithms to assist modern business operations. Companies accumulate data by the terabyte with hopes that their army of data scientists can make sense of all the noise using machine learning. Potential profits encourage companies to seek out data—sometimes unlawfully through collusion. The use of unlawfully collected data in algorithms harms competition. Such data provides a competitive edge that is not accessible to all marketplace participants. Antitrust laws can police unlawful data sharing, but existing remedies are not effective for restoring competition.
Merely deleting ill-gotten data does not eliminate competitive harm. Generated algorithmic outputs are derived from the training data used to create the model. Algorithmic deletion, or compelled deletion of an algorithm, is a necessary remedy. By being forced to delete an algorithm, companies cannot benefit from unlawful conduct. Algorithmic deletion also provides a simple remedy to a complicated technological problem. The FTC’s recent consumer protection enforcement has successfully used algorithmic deletion in recent years and should now be a consideration when dealing with antitrust violations. This Article will argue for why algorithmic deletion is an appropriate remedy as artificial intelligence becomes embedded in the economy
Legal Writing and Analysis in a Nutshell, 6th Edition
No full textThis book provides a five-step guide to clear, precise, and effective legal writing and analysis for law students, other legal writers, and experienced lawyers. The guide includes keys to writing legal memoranda and briefs, organizing analysis, crafting clear and concise sentences, using legal language accurately, using grammar and punctuation properly, and writing persuasively using classical rhetorical techniques. The book describes a method for analyzing and improving individual writing style. It also includes new material on using inclusive language and how to effectively and appropriately use the assistance of Artificial Intelligence for legal documents and new sample legal documents in the Appendix to illustrate effective writing techniques.https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/faculty-books/1103/thumbnail.jp
Making Youth Matter
No full textGun violence is the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the United States. The harm caused by this public health crisis falls disproportionately on Black and Brown youth. While it is broadly accepted that children are less blameworthy than adults for their criminal behavior, what does this mean when they have access to and use guns? The Supreme Court held that youth matters when juveniles face life without parole sentences because children are different from adults—they fail to appreciate risks and consequences; are more impulsive; more susceptible to peer and family influence; less able to remove themselves from dysfunctional home environments; less able to deal with police and prosecutors and assist their own attorneys; and more capable of change. Do these differences matter when juveniles face lengthy adult prison sentences for crimes involving guns? How? Based on decisions and resentencing data gathered in Washington State resulting from the extension of Miller v. Alabama to all juveniles facing adult sentences, this Article explores the challenges of making youth matter in a criminal legal system where participants have grown accustomed to addressing the public health crisis of gun violence through extreme prison terms for mostly Black and Brown youth. This Article makes recommendations for how the “Miller factors” can be applied to make youth matter in cases of gun violence. Children who have and use guns are less culpable than adults, not just because they are developmentally different from adults, but because they are dependent on adults to keep them safe from guns. Making youth matter requires acknowledging our society’s culpability for failing to protect children from guns, including the children who use them
