Amicus Blog
This Week in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
Welcome to This Week in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. SCOTUS will consider access to medical abortions, while the 11th Circuit ok’d Florida’s pay-to-vote system for people convicted of felonies. Three studies shed light on a host of inequities facing Illinois...
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School Policing was Designed to Criminalize Black Students. We Must Follow Black Voices Calling for its Abolition.
The recent uprisings in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black people by police have amplified decades-long efforts by Black students and activists to abolish school police. We must collectively follow these Black leaders to ensure that schools are redesigned to nurture their most vulnerable students.
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Welfare as Policing and Calls to the Defund the Police
The criminalization of welfare, then, is a reminder that calls to divest from police and reinvest in social services must also be accompanied by calls to address the surveillance and stigma that currently comes with receiving assistance. Welfare programs often mirror many of the tactics and organizing principles of policing. Through surveillance and an onslaught of bureaucratic hoops to jump through, one feels “the psychic weight of living their lives under the watchful eye of the state.”
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A Safe and Flourishing Future: One Law Student’s Case for Abolition
If you are new to abolition, I do not expect you to fully embrace these values. Rather, I again ask you to be courageously curious. When presented with new ideas, people project their own wants and needs onto them to make them familiar. Because abolition is borne from Black radical imagination, most people’s projections evoke fear. Black radical imagination is completely counter to the standard we are told to orient towards. Even with more people discussing race issues, we as a collective are still taught to fear and criminalize Blackness, especially in law school where the golden standard is white male “objectivity.”
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When We Say Defend Black Lives, We Mean Defend Black Homes Too
Photo Credit: Steve Richey/StockSnap The fight for Black lives is not a monolith. In fact, the past few months have made it abundantly clear that strategizing a sustainable movement for defending Black lives means that allies must remain cognizant of other systems...
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The Ostrich Rears its Head: America’s 2020 Racial Reckoning is a Victory and Opportunity
The recognition of the pain that so many Black people experience is bittersweet. While a hard-fought culture war victory, it reflects the tragic reality that acknowledgment of this anguish was culture war fodder at all. We live in a world where a 12-year-old playing in a park with a toy gun was shot within two seconds, but mass murderers who target children, synagogues, and churchgoers are apprehended alive to have their day in court.
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Why 8 Won’t Work: The Failings of the 8 Can’t Wait Campaign and the Obstacle Police Reform Efforts Pose to Police Abolition
Chants of “Black lives matter” and “no justice, no peace” have resounded in cities across the country and around the world in the few weeks since the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Americans have become increasingly intolerant of the pervasive...
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Why We Can’t Wait
A reflection on change nearly sixty years after Dr. King’s famous book “Why We Can’t Wait.”
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The COVID-19 Pandemic and the War on Women
Research is being conducted on the various ways that this COVID-19 pandemic is disproportionately impacting different pockets of society. What this research is showing is that the COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating many of the problems that women face in the United States and around the world today.
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“I’d Vote for a Woman, Just Not That Woman:” Barriers Faced by Women in Politics
Gender equality will not be achieved unless women are equally represented in politics and equally able to participate in lawmaking decisions. America needs to figure out how to make political careers more equitable so that we can have more women sitting at the table.
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“Reparative Therapy” is Legal for Adults. Here’s Why it Shouldn’t Be.
Permitting “reparative therapy” places LGBTQ+ people in danger just for existing, and hinders the progress that the LGBTQ+ community is making toward being accepted in society.
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AS GOVERNORS EMPLOY THEIR AUTHORITY TO MEET COVID-19 CHALLENGES, GREG ABBOTT STANDS OUT FOR HIS POLITICAL OPPORTUNISM
Photo credit: Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune The spread of coronavirus and the COVID-19 pandemic that came with it has raised countless problems in the areas of education, public health, economic policy, elections, and more. An additional issue overlaying all of these...
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The lives of Black victims do not matter nearly as much as those of white ones when it comes to the death penalty, a new study finds.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/us/racial-gap-death-penalty.html?referringSource=articleShare
Applications are open for article submissions for CR-CL 56.2. Please submit any articles that broadly touch on civil rights and civil liberties for publication. Details can be found here: https://harvardcrcl.org/submit/
Check out our newest blog post by Christina Coleburn about confronting racism! https://harvardcrcl.org/the-ostrich-rears-its-head-americas-2020-racial-reckoning-is-a-victory-and-opportunity/
Check out the second article in our series about racism and police brutality! Olivia Murray discusses prison abolition: https://harvardcrcl.org/why-8-wont-work/
Check out "Why We Can't Wait"—a powerful piece by Mo Light and the first in our new online series about racism and police brutality: https://harvardcrcl.org/why-we-cant-wait/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-we-cant-wait
As a journal, we stand with the student protestors HLS is attempting to discipline for exercising their free speech rights regarding prison divestment. Please sign the petition here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1TGkQyJlUPuvl9wqv5MAis8c7iec9A5JFzY92tj0Z_ns/viewform?edit_requested=true
We have 3 terrific pieces up on how progressives must reclaim the meaning of our Constitution.
Our contributors reflect back on progressives' priorities at the beginning of the Obama Administration and look forward to fights in 2021 and beyond.
https://harvardlpr.com/2020/04/02/online-symposium-the-future-of-progressive-constitutionalism/