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Reparations for Project One Hundred Thousand
Get PDFDuring the Vietnam War, the U.S. Department of Defense (“DOD”) created a new program that targeted marginalized communities, resulting in thousands of deaths and adversely impacting the lives of more than one hundred thousand others. This Article—which draws on original archival research from obscure DOD files—uncovers the origins and effects of the program called “Project One Hundred Thousand.” This research reveals that the program drafted members of impoverished communities to serve in the place of more privileged men, who received draft exemptions. The program enabled the U.S. government to continue the war at scale without incurring an unacceptable loss of political support for the war from middle-class voters.
Project One Hundred Thousand achieved the goal of drafting and inducting more service members by revising the mental aptitude and physical military entrance standards, admitting service members who were previously ineligible to serve in the armed forces. Then–Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara justified the program to the American public, saying it would “uplift” underprivileged men. Instead, the program sent more than half of these men, called “New Standards Men,” to a combat zone and thousands of them to their deaths. The U.S. military issued over one hundred thousand surviving New Standards Men less than honorable discharges—potentially resulting in lifelong exclusion from benefits at the Department of Veterans Affairs, imposing severe economic, social, and psychological costs to these service members.
This Article makes two distinct contributions. First, it spotlights an example of how a “system” of systemic racism gets built and draws attention to how systemic racism tangibly impacts the armed forces. Second, it offers a way for the U.S. government to address the injustices it inflicted by suggesting presumptive discharge relief, meaning the DOD would presume the discharge was unjust. The proposed remedy is modeled after the remedy afforded to victims of the military’s past discriminatory policies based on sexual orientation. Informed by this Author’s professional experience representing New Standards Men, this proposal offers a way for the U.S. government to make reparations for the harm it inflicted on marginalized communities
Slowing the Burn: Incentivizing Safer Development through Wildfire Hazard Mapping
Get PDFClimate change has accelerated the frequency and severity of natural disasters globally and wildfires are no exception. In part, wildfires have intensified due to climate change, short-sighted fire suppression policies, and the rapid influx of people and development in hazardous regions. Like other natural disasters, wildfires will continue to pose an ever-increasing threat to communities nationally. And the federal government\u27s default approach of providing aid after disaster strikes will only continue to become more unsustainable as climate change worsens. Yet, proactive measures that exist to mitigate risk—such as hazard mapping and financial assistance to support adaptation and resilience at the local level—are often underfunded or, increasingly, nonexistent. This Note argues that federal aid should prophylactically prioritize risk reduction. By helping local and state governments identify at-risk regions through hazard mapping and conditioning future aid on proactive resilience efforts, Congress can ensure that federal spending reduces, rather than reacts to, the damage that future natural disasters will cause
Structure and Legitimation in Capitalism: Law, Power, and Justice in Market Society
Get PDFThis article introduces a new institutional political economy of capitalism that explains the distinctive dynamics that drive sustained productivity growth, recurring social dislocation, and persistent patterns of exploitation in modern market societies. It then analyzes the role of law in structuring social relations of production in capitalism and legitimating those structures so as to stabilize the asymmetric social relations they create. Law structures social relations of production by allocating control over labor, knowledge, natural resources, and technology, as used for purposes of both subsistence and market-oriented production, as well coordination and cooperation in labor and investment processes, access to means of payment and credit, and the allocation of risk and uncertainty attendant to production. It also differentially constrains access to labor roles, training, and credit along lines of gender and race, leveraging gendered and racialized class relations for profit and reinforcing atavistic status subordination under a veil of juridical equality. Law in capitalism legitimates these relations through the social role of the legal profession as a distinct social formation within the professional and managerial class, one that is produced through training and practice-based habituation and asserts specialized knowledge acquired through this socialization process. The legal profession produces internal profession-wide acceptance of legal decisions by adhering to internal professional modes of reasoning that have recurred since the 17th century as the primary modes of legal argument and legitimation. It produces broad elite and public acceptance by communicating that acceptance as its members operate transversely in profit-seeking, political-military, and meaning-making social formations. The article ends with implications of this new institutional political economy and its relation to law in capitalism for the design and justification of a post-neoliberal regime
Justice on the Home Front: Domestic Prosecution of Foreign Combatants During Wartime
Get PDFRussia\u27s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine produced a shock to the world order. The conflict has led to immense suffering for the Ukrainian people, many of whom have fled their homes or are directly involved in the fighting. In some instances, the use of improper tactics by both sides exacerbates the devastation, even amounting to war crimes. Although the war rages on, justice efforts have already begun. International tribunals and foreign countries’ domestic courts have initiated investigations into alleged violations of international law and prosecutions of the perpetrators. The most significant effort, though, has been within Ukraine’s own courts. These domestic war-crimes trials of Russian combatants are occurring on an unprecedented scale despite the difficulty of ensuring fair trials during wartime. This Note examines Ukrainian war-crimes prosecutions through a human-rights-based lens, concluding that their procedural shortcomings undermine substantive and symbolic benefits. It then offers several recommendations for a better path forward. Determining the appropriate framework for wartime justice in Ukraine is critical because it will likely serve as a model for transnational conflicts to come
Shortburst: Biosecurity
No full textSpeaker: Ms. Lala R. Qadir, Senior Director for Technology Security and AI Policy, Microsoft, formerly Chief of Staff to the National Security Division at the White House Office of Science and Technolog
