Mitchell Hamline School of Law
Not a member yet
3445 research outputs found
Sort by
The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life
Get PDFFurtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being (“Furtive Blackness”) and The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life (“Strict Scrutiny”) take a fresh approach to both criminal law and constitutional law; particularly as they apply to African descended peoples in the United States. This is an intervention as to the description of the terms of Blackness in light of the social order but, also, an exposure of the failures and gaps of law. This is why the categories as we have them are inefficient to account for Black life. The way legal scholars have encountered and understood the language of law has been wholly insufficient to understand how law encounters human life. These articles are about the hermeneutics of law. While I center case history and Black letter law, I am also arguing explicitly that the law has a dynamic life beyond the courtroom, a life of constructing and dissembling Black life. Together, these essays and exercises in legal philosophy are pointing toward a new method of thinking about law, a method that makes central the material reality of the Black in black letter law.
They examine the semiotic relationships between race, gender, sexuality, and the law. While Furtive Blackness is primarily concerned with regimes of policing—both by badged officers and deputized citizens—Strict Scrutiny examines how the reconstruction amendments have been deployed and redeployed to strictly scrutinize Black presence and appeals to justice and make them unintelligible, irrelevant claims without justiciable and therefore outside of law the concern of law. Strict Scrutiny is a riff on the phrase of judicial review that is primarily concerned with the Court’s inversion of the term to tightly regulate and foreclose Black access to legal redress, as well as the police practice of strictly scrutinizing Black presence and movement in public and private places. In essence, the ascription of furtivity makes way for strict scrutinization; while the Black interior strategy of furtivity and refusal creates a survival praxis that allows for a reprieve in the wake of these indignities.
These articles are an interpretation of the law as a tool of anti-blackness and an exposition of Black thought and deed in response to anti Blackness, both in black letter law and day to day life. Both articles are descriptive, interdisciplinary and rooted in traditional law and accented by Black queer and feminist theory, critical race studies, performance studies and literary analysis
A Siri-Ous Societal Issue: Should Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Receive Patent or Copyright Protection?
Get PDF
Criminal Law: The Dangers of Incomplete Statutory Interpretation and the Unfortunate Equal Protection Implications that Follow– Heilman v. Courtney, 926 N.W.2d 387 (Minn. 2019)
Get PDFPreventing Sexual Violence: Alternatives To Worrying About Recidivism
Get PDFHow can it be that in the era in which almost one million Americans are on sex offender registries—most of whom are publicly stigmatized on websites, banished from their homes, shunned from their jobs, prevented from uniting with their families and traveling internationally, forced into homelessness, all of which increases their risk for suicide, and shames their spouses and children, even if their offenses occurred long in the past—that the #MeToo movement would explode, revealing widespread sexual misconduct against women, by powerful men, protected by iconic institutions? How can we have had three decades of the most aggressive, “spare-no-expense” laws ostensibly designed to prevent sexual violence and, at the same time, observe the widespread failure of law enforcement agencies to take the simple step of analyzing sexual assault kits, as a first step in the investigation of allegations of sexual abuse? How can these phenomena co-exist?
This Article argues that this incongruity is not an ironic coincidence, but rather a flaw that goes to the heart of our contemporary approach to sexual violence prevention. This flaw has, at its core, an almost obsessive focus on recidivistic sexual violence. Understanding this central characteristic will illuminate a framework for an alternative approach to our public policy on sexual violence, one in which the prevention of recidivism plays but a small role in a more comprehensive approach to sexual violence and its place in our culture
The flaws in the regulatory intervention policies are not an accidental characteristic, but arise from, and in turn support and protect, the very phenomena underlying #MeToo and the SAK revelations: the cultural attitudes, values and practices that allow sexual violence against women to flourish.
Indeed, the thesis is that our aggressive policies are, in a perverse way, designed precisely to protect this aspect of our society—what feminists might call “the patriarchy”—from taking full accountability and responsibility for its role in sexual violence. In this sense, we can say that #MeToo and SAK backlogs persist not in spite of, but in significant measure because of the nature of the aggressive regulatory policies addressed to sexual recidivism
