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Improving International Organization Accountability: A Proposal Based on the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement
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The Gambia v. Myanmar at the I.C.J.: Good Samaritans Testing State Responsibility for Atrocities on the Rohingya
Get PDFOn Beauty and Policing
Get PDFABSTRACT- To protect and serve is the motto of police departments from Los Angeles to Cape Town. When police officers deviate from the twin goals of protection and service, for example by using excessive force or by maintaining hostile relations with the community, scholars recommend more training, more oversight, or more resources in policing. However, police appear to be motivated by a superseding goal in the area of sex work policing. In some places, the policing of sex workers is connected to police officers\u27 perceptions of beauty, producing a hierarchy of desirable bodies as enforced by those sworn to protect and serve us all.
This Article examines how police preserve racial and gender subordination in South Africa, an instructive analog for the United States because of both nations\u27 shared histories of racial apartheid and valorization of whiteness. Drawing from extensive original data from a multiyear study, this Article exposes how police officers\u27 perceptions about sex workers\u27 beauty influenced their policing of different classes of sex workers in Johannesburg, South Africa. Police valuations about sex workers\u27 beauty resulted in benevolent surveillance of sex workers who were higher on the social hierarchy and decreased police protection for sex workers whom they viewed as less beautiful in more dangerous areas of the community. If community protection and service were the primary motivators for police conduct, police officers should have focused on the spaces that were more dangerous, which were those with sex workers police deemed less professionalized and less beautiful.
This act of assigning value to different bodies, through the subjective language of aesthetics and beauty, reinforced existing racial and sexual hierarchies. Beauty was a proxy for race. Police assigned higher values to whiter and more European bodies, and discounted blacker bodies as foreign and less beautiful. So blacker bodies, which were less valuable than whiter bodies in their eyes, were simultaneously neglected yet susceptible to more brutal forms of policing during their limited interactions with police. Whiter feminine bodies were both well-protected and subject to the constant gaze of the police. These whiter bodies were ignored when they challenged white masculinity, but prioritized over blacker bodies. Reinforcing the higher value of whiter bodies over blacker bodies took precedence over reducing crime, suggesting that police serve and protect racial hierarchies in countries that have a history of white supremacy before they serve and protect the people
Ch. 14 McCarty v. Pheasant Run, Inc., 826 F.2d 1554 (7th Cir. 1987)
No full textJudge Richard Posner’s opinion in McCarty v. Pheasant Run, Inc. exemplifies his use of a law and economics approach in tort cases. Applying the famous risk–utility test found in the “Hand formula,” Posner refused to impose negligence liability on a hotel in a case in which a woman was assaulted by an unknown assailant who gained access to her room through an unlocked door that opened into a courtyard. The rewritten feminist dissent by Hannah Brenner Johnson objects to the use of the risk–utility test in sexual violence cases where the “loss” being quantified (i.e., a deprivation of personal autonomy) is often undervalued and misunderstood. To eliminate the risk of victim-blaming, the feminist opinion would change the law to disallow a contributory negligence defense to limit a plaintiff’s recovery in cases of rape and sexual assault. The accompanying commentary discusses how Judge Posner’s rhetoric and his law and economic philosophy leads him to weigh the economic interests of businesses over women’s physical and emotional well-being
Criminal Justice and COVID-19
No full textThe Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) raised not only public health issues but many legal issues, including civil and criminal liability for transmission, criminal law issues related to COVID-19, and the early release of individuals from jails and prisons. This article presents a snapshot of some of the constantly evolving criminal justice issues in the United States relating to COVID-19