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The Buffalo Model: An Approach to ABA Standard 303(c)\u27s Exploration of Bias, Cross Cultural Competency, and Antiracism in Clinical & Experiential Law
Full text linkThis Article offers an early analysis of ABA Standard 303(c) following its recent adoption in 2022. ABA Standard 303(c) requires that law schools “shall provide education law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism.” The Author suggests that 303(c) formalizes what many clinical educators have already been teaching: inclusion, justice, and belonging. Following the 2020 shootings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, many law schools have revisited their diversity, equity, and inclusion programming and implemented various new initiatives and training. Despite current efforts, the Author notes that planning and resources will need to be allocated toward compliance efforts in order to fully meet the commands of 303(c). The Article highlights the “Buffalo Model”, a Clinical Legal Education Program at the University of Buffalo School of Law for its approach to teaching Antiracism, Cultural Humility, and Belonging. The Buffalo Model requires the completion of an asynchronous course component for all clinic students which focuses on cultural awareness and reflection on injustices impacting the practice of law. The Author advocates for legal educators to fully embrace 303(c) and explore new opportunities for deploying the intent of 303(c) through clinical and experiential legal education
Disaster Risk in the Carceral State
Full text linkThe overlap between prisoner vulnerability and disasters in the United States is undeniable. During 2020 and 2021, the United States endured a series of natural hazards such as wildfires, floods, and hurricanes, many of which exposed the country’s 2.1 million inmates to additional risks and compounded the danger posed by COVID-19. Yet policymakers and scholars are only beginning to appreciate the centrality and magnitude of disaster risk management for the millions of people currently held in penal institutions around the country. Unsurprisingly, the production of “lessons learned” documents that follow in the aftermath of disasters overlook how prisoner vulnerability is legally produced and inequitably distributed beyond individual disasters affecting individual prisons.
In this paper, we propose that these vulnerabilities and actual harm were neither accidental nor unforeseeable; rather, we argue that inmates are victims of interwoven “normal” rules, policies, and institutions, as well as long-standing, cultural narratives surrounding natural hazards and carceral processes. Our paper is unique in that we analyze problems of law, cultural narratives, policy, and practice as problems of “risk thinking” in the United States. Specifically, we focus on the development of, and relationship between, risk thinking in U.S. criminal justice and disaster management frameworks over the last 80 years.
Using this research, we argue that: (a) in the discourses and practices of criminal justice, prisoners fall in the cracks between scattered conceptions of risk and vulnerability on the one hand and the narrow and inelastic notions of risk and vulnerability on the other; (b) disaster-risk in prisons should not be studied in isolation from conceptions of disaster-risk applicable to “free” society; (c) prisoners have special vulnerabilities that require more and distinct protections than the rest of society; and (d) this goal is frustrated by the very structure of risk management described in (a).
We attempt this feat in two ways: first, we chart how officials, experts, legislation, and cultural narratives have shaped risk thinking in relation to crime and natural hazards. Second, we show how risk thinking in these areas, and the associated governance of prisons and disasters, ignores and thereby deepens vulnerabilities to hazards for prisoners, as well as correctional staff and communities. Given the nationwide mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, our paper offers timely insights into the plight of incarcerated peoples caught between these regimes. It also suggests that, despite the unique dangers of carceral life and the popular belief that prisoners exist outside of society, social vulnerability beyond prison walls often hinges on our ability to transform vulnerability within them
Infrostructure(s): Administering Information
Full text linkThis Article, Infrostructure(s): Administering Information, considers how authoritative entities generate, manage, and produce informational structures, facilities, and architectures that support market creation and creative economy decision-making between private parties and entities. The term infrostructure, as opposed to other terms, such as infostructure and infosphere, suggests that infrostructures play vital roles in modern democratic life including producing new information resources, facilitating private transactions between private parties, and building the administrative state.
This Article is divided into two parts. Part I discusses how information regulation is mediated through information forms and information systems with a focus on the materialities of information forms and systems. Part I then turns to how the infrostructure is built through three legal acts: (1) the act of instantiation, in which law culls certain information from a broader universe of social information to produce authoritative information; (2) the act of relation, in which law produces and reproduces social relations in information; and (3) the act of meaning, in which law considers the legal effects of instantiation and representation.
Part II will demonstrate how the project of infrostructure helps us to present a new story of administrative legitimation, by re-reading diverse areas including administrative law, intellectual property law and constitutional law. Specifically, Part II examines how infrostructure supports three different accounts of administrative legitimation: structural legitimation, expertise legitimation, and cultural legitimation
Patriarchal Violence
Full text linkFor over a century, feminist theorists and activists have sought equality for women. They have aimed their efforts at the many distinct and related causes of women’s inequality, among them gendered violence, sexual violence, domestic violence, and violence against women. Recognizing the need to understand problems in order to solve them, feminist theorists have devoted decades to conceptualizing various manifestations of such violence, ranging from private acts, such as sexual assault and intimate partner abuse, to public acts, such as the incarceration of mothers and the criminalization of pregnancy. In this article, I argue in favor of conceptualizing the many discrete types of violence that subjugate girls, women, and all gender-oppressed people as part of one comprehensive system of “patriarchal violence.” Further, I introduce an organizational framework that will allow scholars, teachers, and activists to more effectively and efficiently theorize, teach, and eradicate patriarchal violence. Through this framework, various manifestations of patriarchal violence can be better identified, organized, and understood at micro and macro levels.
My patriarchal violence framework is modeled upon the violence framework established by the World Health Organization and it is grounded in, and inspired by, the work of feminist theorists who have been naming and theorizing various forms of patriarchal violence for over a century. It allows for the organization of all patriarchal violence according to two important considerations: (1) the nature of the relationship between the perpetrator and victim; and (2) the identity of the perpetrator.
At a micro level, the framework provides a means of understanding how individual victims experience cycles of patriarchal violence by identifying a particular act of patriarchal violence and then tracing each and every related preceding and subsequent manifestation. At a macro level, it serves as a tool to illuminate the many connections between seemingly isolated acts of violence so as to easily reveal the larger ideologically-driven phenomenon that perpetuates the systemic oppression of women.
Application of this framework to the patriarchal violence experienced by girls, women, and other gender-oppressed people will assist scholars, teachers, and activists in: (1) characterizing, naming, organizing, and understanding discrete manifestations of patriarchal violence; (2) recognizing and demonstrating how seemingly discrete manifestations of patriarchal violence merge in a single victim’s experience to create a cycle of patriarchal violence; (3) realizing the depth and interconnectedness of the harms experienced by patriarchal violence victims; (4) acknowledging the powerful role played by intersecting social, legal, and governmental forces in perpetuating patriarchal violence; and (5) understanding the ubiquitous nature of patriarchal violence. This article is the first in a series of articles. It provides the historical and theoretical foundation for forthcoming articles that will apply the patriarchal violence framework to the many discrete and interconnected manifestations of patriarchal violence perpetrated and experienced by victims