Abstract When abolitionists discuss remedies for past and present injustices, they are frequently met with apparently pragmatic objections to the viability of such bold remedies in U.S. legislatures and courts held captive by reactionary forces. Previous movements have seen their lesser reforms dashed by the white supremacist capitalist order that retains its grip on power in America. While such...
An Abolitionist Critique of Quality-of-Life Policing
Abstract Policing “disability in public” refers to the ways in which coerced compliance with norms for appearing, walking, talking, thinking, or otherwise existing, render disabled people more vulnerable to citation, arrests, or imprisonment even where such conduct is linked to, or caused by, disabilities. Disabled people have been suspected of criminal activity, arrested, jailed, and even killed...
Diversifying K–12 Public Schools: A Federal Court Finds Admission Plan Unconstitutional
Introduction In 2021, it was reported that there were only eight Black students enrolled in a class of 749 ninth graders at New York City’s most selective public high school, Stuyvesant.[1] In the same year, a group of public school students brought a lawsuit challenging admissions programs at selective New York City public schools, arguing that these schools are racially segregated as a result...
The Racialized History of Vice Policing
Abstract Vice policing targets the consumption and commercialization of certain pleasures that have been criminalized in the United States—such as the purchase of narcotics and sexual services. One might assume that vice policing is concerned with eliminating these vices. However, in reality, this form of policing has not been centered on protecting and preserving the moral integrity of the...
Building a World Without Police
About the Author Sandy Hudson is a recent graduate from UCLA Law where she specialized in Critical Race Theory. Sandy founded Black Lives Matter - Canada, and also co-founded the Black Legal Action Centre, a specialty legal aid clinic in Ontario, Canada. A multidisciplinary creative, Sandy also co-founded the Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism, co-hosts the Sandy & Nora Talk Politics...
Abolition and Environmental Justice
Abstract During the coronavirus pandemic, movements for penal abolition and racial justice achieved dramatic growth and increased visibility. While much public discussion of abolition has centered on the call to divest from criminal law enforcement, contemporary abolitionists also understand public safety in terms of building new life-sustaining institutions and collective structures that improve...
Continuing Post-Brown Retrenchment: The Chilling Effect of PICS on a School District Seeking to Combat Rapid Resegregation
Abstract Nashville, Tennessee was once heralded as a desegregation success story. Three decades after the United States Supreme Court’s seminal decision in Brown v. Board of Education, schools in Nashville were, in a statistical sense, desegregated. Since then, Nashville schools have returned to a far more segregated state, mirroring many cities across the United States where desegregation...
Countering Epistemic Injustice in the Law: Centering an Indigenous Relationship Toward Land
Abstract This paper argues that Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada are subject to epistemic injustice in the law, particularly with regard to many Indigenous groups’ worldviews and relationship to land. Many Indigenous cultures share a sacred connection to the traditional homelands they lived on and with, sometimes for thousands of years before colonization interrupted this...