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\u3cem\u3eJam v. International Finance Corporation:\u3c/em\u3eThe End of Absolute International Organizational Sovereign Immunity and the Argument for a Functional Immunity Regime
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Disposable Lives: COVID-19, Vaccines, and the Uprising
Get PDFTwo French doctors appeared on television and publicly discussed potentially utilizing African subjects in experimental trials for a tuberculosis vaccine as an antidote to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), denounced these kinds of racist remarks as a “hangover from ‘colonial mentality’” and maintained that “Africa can’t and won’t be a testing ground for any vaccine.” The fallout on social media was similarly swift, with Samuel Eto’o, a Cameroonian football legend, referring to the doctors as “[d]es assasins” and several others questioning the motives behind testing a vaccine on the African continent. The dialogue between the doctors and the strong reactions to their statements reopen the wounds of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color’s lives being treated as disposable.
This Piece connects how racialized notions regarding which lives are disposable are reflected widely in the areas of health and human rights. The presumed expendability of Black lives is made manifest from systemic police violence, to the devastating racially disproportionate impact of COVID-19, to historic and ongoing medical experimentation, and to inequitable vaccine access. The twin pandemics of systemic racism and COVID-19 have heightened the visibility of the disposability with which society views the lives of people of color. The cumulative effect of this disposability furthers the devaluation of subordinated groups. Through exploring the theme of disposability, this Piece clarifies the roles of international human rights law, global public health, and international intellectual property law in either advancing racial justice efforts or contributing toward racial subordination. This period of racial reckoning and reform creates an opening to challenge the racial status quo in these areas and beyond
Artificial Intelligence & Algorithmic Bias: The Issues With Technology Reflecting History & Humans
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Measuring Environmental Justice: Analysis of Progress Under Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump
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Criminalization and Normalization: Some Thoughts About Offenders with Serious Mental Illness
Get PDFResponse to Professor E. Lea Johnston, Reconceptualizing Criminal Justice Reform for Offenders with Serious Mental Illness
Abstract
While Professor Johnston is persuasive that clinical factors such as diagnosis and treatment history are not, in most cases, predictive by themselves of criminal behavior, her concession that those clinical factors are associated with a constellation of risks and needs that are predictive of criminal system involvement complicates her efforts to maintain a clear boundary between the criminalization theory and the normalization thesis. Indeed, Professor Johnston’s article contains a brief section in which she identifies “possible justifications” for the specialized programs that are the target of her critique. These justifications deserve more attention, precisely because they suggest that the normalization thesis, while powerful, may not entirely displace the criminalization theory upon which those specialized programs rest. Moreover, even if the criminalization theory and the normalization theory are at least partially reconcilable, important questions remain regarding the proper allocation of limited resources both within the criminal legal system and the public mental health system. These questions, in turn, press focus on additional questions with respect to the underlying purposes of criminal system coercion more generally.
The complex associations between serious mental illness and several of the key risk factors for criminal system involvement—most notably substance misuse—impact the design of effective programs intended to reduce reoffending. Given the practical difficulty of disentangling the treatment of mental disabilities from the provision of effective interventions to interrupt patterns of criminal behavior in offenders who have significant mental illness, some specialized attention to clinical mental health needs is warranted in correctional rehabilitation programs. These integrated programs are resource intensive, however, and should be reserved for offenders with serious mental illness who present the highest risk of reoffending. Others, who are lower risk, are strong candidates for diversion from the criminal system altogether, assuming that appropriate services in the community can be made available on a consistent basis