CLR Forum

Police departments often adopt new surveillance technologies that make mistakes, produce unintended effects, or harbor unforeseen problems. Sometimes the police try a new surveillance technology and later abandon it due to a lack of success, community resistance, or both. Critics have identified many problems with these tools: racial bias, privacy violations, opacity, secrecy, and undue corporate influence, to name a few. A different framework...

In the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, museums are in possession of cultural objects that were unethically taken from their countries and communities of origin under the auspices of colonialism. For many years, the art world considered such holdings unexceptional. Now, a longstanding movement to decolonize museums is gaining momentum, and some museums are reconsidering their collections. Presently, whether to return such looted cultural heritage...

In March 2024, police killed Ryan Gainer, a Black teenager with autism, in his California home after his family sought help during a behavioral crisis. Several months later, police killed Sonya Massey, a Black woman experiencing a mental health crisis, in her Illinois home. This Comment examines the failure of U.S. privacy law to protect disabled people of color in their homes, using the deaths of Ryan Gainer and Sonya Massey as case studies. Through...

Engaging with the sociocultural dimensions of race and racism across U.S. history is essential when creating, critiquing, and reforming the law. Building on Robin West’s exploration of the law and culture movement, this Piece introduces a novel “hermeneutic” project that reads Black American culture throughout U.S. history to gain critical insights into the nature and function of law in America. Black American culture, deeply rooted in the...

This Piece operates at the intersection of comparative environmental law and legal history. It introduces a novel distinction between two paradigms of technology-based pollution standards: the first, uniform across all places and environmental conditions, and the second, tailored to local environmental and economic circumstances. It then compares the air pollution regimes of the United States and the European Union with an eye to the relative place...

REGARDING THE OTHER DEATH PENALTY

Kempis Songster,* Terrell Carter,** & Rachel López***

Introduction In his compelling new book, Invisible Atrocities, Professor Randle DeFalco explores the function of the aesthetics of violence in international law. In particular, he questions international law’s preference for sanctioning spectacular demonstrations of violence rather than more banal, bureaucratic actions that cause massive scales of suffering and misery. The book resonated with us because […]