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Legal Endearment: An Unmarked Barrier to Transforming Policing, Public Safety, and Security
No full textThe problems of racialized policing have come into renewed focus over the past decade. The advent of viral bystander videos has not only forced a popular confrontation with moments of both routine and extraordinary policing violence but also sparked protests, uprisings, and grassroots movements to challenge current practices in policing and determine what must be done to transform it. And yet, even after the mobilization of one of the largest racial justice movements in American history, transformative change remains elusive. This Article offers an answer to this puzzle by foregrounding White people’s collective relationship with policing and describing how this relationship colors current debates on how to best address policing’s racial disparities.
The Article asks: “How might we reconcile White people’s articulated commitments to racial equality with their continued acquiescence in and support for a system of policing that continues to produce such stark racial disparities?” I answer with the theory of legal endearment, which suggests that groups who benefit disproportionately from systems of legal power tend to develop critical attachments to the institutions that maintain such unequal arrangements. For White people, policing is one such institution. Their attachment to policing provides at least a partial explanation for why meaningful police reform has been difficult to achieve.
White people’s legal endearment results from four significant and interrelated aspects of their relationship to policing: the experiential, the symbolic, the structural, and the social. First, unlike many people of color, White people generally believe that police exist to “serve and protect” them because that is their general experience of policing. Second, whereas Black people and other people of color have had to worry about how policing positions them symbolically as criminally suspect and dangerous, White people generally have not. Instead, White people have largely benefited from their positive symbolic positioning as law-abiding and innocent. Third, policing responds to and reproduces a broader set of structural arrangements—including racially segregated spaces and social spheres—that have benefitted White people through the maintenance of White towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods, acting to racially circumscribe access to material resources. Finally, the multiple ways in which White people are socialized to ignore the material realities of race and to view race through the prism of colorblindness facilitates an affective relationship between White people and the police. By taking stock of these dimensions of White people’s relationship to policing and considering how these elements contribute to legal endearment with the police, we can begin to understand how legal endearment has operated as an unmarked barrier to achieving transformative police reforms
Evidence-Based Transitional Justice: Incorporating Public Opinion into the Field, with New Data from Iraq and Ukraine
No full textThe field of “transitional justice” refers to a range of processes and mechanisms for accountability, truth-seeking, and reconciliation that governments and communities pursue in the aftermath of major societal traumas, including civil war, mass atrocities, and authoritarianism. This relatively new field emerged in the 1980s as scholars, practitioners, and policymakers looked for guidance to support post-authoritarian and post-communist transitions to democracy in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Since then, the field has grown rapidly—so rapidly that it is outpacing its capacity to learn from past mistakes. Recent methodological advances in the study of public attitudes about transitional justice through quantitative surveys and qualitative interview methods provide unprecedented insights into how different mechanisms—including domestic and international prosecutions, truth commissions, amnesty laws, and compensation—are perceived by their intended beneficiaries. The results have been troubling. Numerous studies in diverse contexts found that some of the most well-known transitional justice mechanisms, including those employed in South Africa, Rwanda, and Cambodia, failed to achieve their objectives of peacebuilding and reconciliation. In some cases, these policies had harmful consequences for their intended beneficiaries, including retraumatization and perceived “justice gaps” between victims’ preferred remedies and their actual outcomes.
There is an urgent need for the field of transitional justice to learn from this growing body of empirical research to develop evidence-based policies and programs that achieve their intended objectives. This Feature critically reviews the intellectual development of the field, consolidating empirical findings of relevant studies across disciplines—law, political science, sociology, economics, public health, psychology, and anthropology—and identifying open debates and questions for future research. We focus on research about public attitudes toward transitional justice in the communities directly impacted by conflict. In addition to reviewing previous research, we present new data from original public opinion surveys in Iraq and Ukraine relevant to ongoing transitional justice efforts in those countries. We use this evidence to identify lessons learned, including mistakes, in the design and implementation of previous transitional justice processes. We conclude by discussing the normative and prescriptive implications of our findings for efforts to improve future transitional justice laws and policies
The Bank of the People, 1835-1840: Law and Money in Upper Canada
No full textIn Upper Canada, money and banking were viscerally political issues, considered central to the broader legal order. Faced with a chronic shortage of coin, the British flooded the colony with publicly issued bills to fund the War of 1812. By the 1830s, this monetary issue was fully redeemed and replaced with notes issued by the colony’s first three chartered banks. Upper Canada’s Reformers saw those banks as public agents, playing a public role, but without democratic accountability. After several failed attempts to modify that system, they turned to establishing their own institution, named the Bank of the People. In doing so, they saw themselves not as merely engaging in private commerce, but as directly contesting this fundamental public provision. This article provides a legal-political history of that early contest over Canadian money and sovereignty, and explores how the Reformers put forth a critique of bank-issued money that remains relevant today
Delaware State Sportsmens Association Inc v. Delaware Department of Safety and Homeland Securit
No full textUSDC for the District of Delawar
Daniel Salvatierra v. Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine
No full textUSDC for the Western District of Pennsylvani
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Curtis Smith,Jr.
No full textUSDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvani
