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A Path Toward Race-Conscious Standards for Youth: Translating Adultification Bias Theory into Doctrinal Interventions in Criminal Court
Get PDFThis article demonstrates how advocates can leverage empirical literature regarding adultification bias to craft doctrinal interventions that recognize and remedy the disproportionately harsh treatment of Black youth in the juvenile and adult criminal legal system. Through case examples, all of which I litigated in the Civil Rights Clinic at Seattle University School of Law, I demonstrate how adultification bias was used to explain the racial disproportionality in the transfer of young people to adult court for prosecution, as well as the harshness of the sentences received by young people in both juvenile and adult court. These cases provide roadmaps for clinicians and advocates to educate criminal legal system stakeholders about the risk of adultification bias and other forms of implicit bias, either as amicus or in direct service to clients. The briefs proposed new legal standards in cases that require criminal legal system stakeholders to account for adultification bias. These litigation strategies are designed to obtain outcomes for clients that account for one way that race plays a role in prosecutorial and judicial decision-making, a problem which is clear in the aggregate but has historically evaded remedy in individual cases. These proposals also provide a concrete example of how law school clinics can put theory into practice and produce doctrinal interventions that advance racial justice
Unprecedented: Asian Americans, Harvard, the University of North Carolina, and the Supreme Court’s Striking Down of Affirmative Action
Get PDFIn response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., Petitioner v. University of North Carolina, et al. (“SFFA v. Harvard”),1 author Harvey Gee urges his fellow Asian Americans––the star plaintiffs in the case and depicted as the main beneficiaries of its holdings–– to fight back to preserve affirmative action. Part I explores how the Court’s approach to affirmative action changed from the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement through many of the pivotal affirmative action cases prior to the 2010s. Part II then seeks to contextualize the struggle over the role of affirmative action within the Asian American community. It delves into two core mythologies that haunt these discussions––the Perpetual Foreigner Myth and the Model Minority Myth. Readers need a basic understanding of these mythologies because Part III focuses on Fisher v. University of Texas: a case that illustrates how activists and one dubiously sympathetic Justice would later tokenize Asian Americans in their efforts to dismantle affirmative action. Part IV dives into SFFA v. Harvard itself to show how the Court discarded affirmative action precedent and the arguments the dissenting Justices deployed to point out the decision’s weaknesses. Finally, the article ends by advocating for interracial solidatry to resist further attacks on the hallmark achievements of the Civil Rights Movement
Politicians the Founders Warned You About
Get PDFMany articles have explored the Founders’ intentions regarding the constitutional text. Much less attention has focused on the Founders’ ideas regarding the traits needed of the leaders in a constitutional republic. The Constitution focuses on governing structures, many of which relate to the electoral process. The Constitution does not spell out the ideal traits of the leaders elected pursuant to those processes. Nonetheless, the Founders possessed clear views about the virtues and qualifications that ideal political leaders required. Indeed, the Founders issued warnings about certain archetypal political figures who, because of their flagrant disregard of the ideal virtues and qualifications, threatened the nation’s political health. This article examines the warnings issued by the Founders about four types of political figures who threatened the integrity of our republic: partisans, demagogues, ambitious, and tyrants. After exploring the Founders’ warnings about these dangerous leadership traits, this article looks at contemporary political culture and actors to consider how those very archetypes are manifesting. Finally, the article turns to a consideration of how ignoring the Founders’ warnings to allow these dangerous archetypes to take root can undermine the health of the American republic
The Disproportionate Burden on Vulnerable Communities in the Trade of Plastic Waste: How Environmental Justice Should be Integrated into the United Nations Treaty on Plastic Pollution
Get PDFThe United Nations Environment Assembly passed a resolution to end plastic pollution with a legally binding treaty in response to growing international concern over the destruction of the environment and human health from plastic pollution. Plastic waste disposal is currently regulated under the Plastic Waste Amendments of the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal (Basel Convention), which subjects it to prior informed consent (PIC) and the environmentally sound management of waste (ESM). Unfortunately, the increasing amount of plastic production and limited number of recycling facilities around the world have rendered the Basel Convention ineffective in limiting the environmental harms caused by plastic pollution. Environmental justice communities suffer disproportionate burdens caused by the improper disposal of plastic waste. In 2018, China closed its borders to receiving plastic waste, which used to account for more than half the world’s plastic waste disposal. This action led to an influx of plastic waste into Global South countries which lack the technical and financial resources to accept such waste. As a result, more than 70 percent of plastic waste ends up in landfills or open-burning pits, which are often located in the communities of the poor and people of color. The United Nations’ proposed binding treaty is premised on the need to address the full life-cycle of plastic and a call to curb the overall production of plastic. It also reinforces some of the key principles of the Basel Convention. However, environmental justice is not mentioned explicitly in the resolution, nor are any recommendations to provide remediation measures to communities in damage. This Article first provides a background on the disproportionate burden of plastic waste disposal on environmental justice communities, principles of environmental justice, and how they are reflected in international law. Then, it provides an overview of how the Basel Convention regulates plastic waste and analyzes how it fails environmental justice communities. Finally, this Article recommends how the United Nations’ new binding treaty must integrate environmental justice by including binding targets on plastic production, mitigation and enforcement measures for illegal waste disposal, and effective capacity building for developing economies. These Associate changes can help environmental justice communities by both addressing current harms being suffered, and by offering a roadmap for protecting them in the future
False Conscience: Sustainability and Smart Evolution—Between Law and Power
Get PDFThe contribution describes the legal phenomenon as a playing field characterized by a progressive regression of the law, understood as a sovereign will from top to bottom, both in the vision of formalist legal positivisms in continental Europe and in realist terms, in the United States. Soft law represents the main strategy to subordinate the law to the interests of the economy, elasticizing environmental law, making it favorable to the market, reducing ecology to the simplistic metric of CO2 emissions. The consequence is a retreat of the statist vertical normativity of law which is not replaced by a de facto power granted to those who control the technology, built by design to close spaces for pluralism and democratic action, in the interest of surveillance and concentrated power in private and government oligopolies. The author concludes by advocating the urgency for genuinely innovative categories, particularly in the legal education, such as the commons, capable of including sustainability into a “new ecological jurisprudence committed to inclusion and solidarity rather than exclusion and struggle”
A One-State Solution to the Arab- Israeli/Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Recommendation Supported by a Review of the Historical Record and Current Context
Get PDFThis article examines the legal underpinning of the creation of the state of Israel and historical documents to note that despite calls for a two-state solution at the UN, a one-state solution to the conflict is not necessarily precluded. It then identifies why both the status quo and the proposed two state solution are problematic and untenable. Lastly, it looks to the example of South Africa because of similarities between South Africa and modern day Israel/Palestine. It concludes that the creation of a single state, following the example of post-apartheid South Africa, is the only solution to the conflict that will create a comprehensive, just, durable, and lasting peace for Palestinians and Israelis
