CategoryCivil & Human Rights

Regulation, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Legal Frameworks for Governance: Addressing Racial Bias and Inequality in Business

September 10, 2020

7 Min Read

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By Edward Jung (PO ’22) Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an increasingly dominant player in the field of marketability within business. A self-regulating business model first explored by business professor Archie B. Carroll in his article “The Pyramid of Corporate Social Responsibility,” CSR aimed to assist executives in understanding their firms’ responsibilities to society, in...

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How Police Get Away With It: An Evaluation of Police Contracts, Internal Investigations, Qualified Immunity, and Indemnification

July 7, 2020

28 Min Read

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By Haidee Clauer (PO ’22) Racism and anti-Blackness have played a long and persistent role in the history of the United States, from its founding to the present. The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery—among countless others—as well as the national movement in response, demand our attention. This article is part of a series that seeks to explore and...

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Chinese Exclusion Act in the Age of COVID-19

May 7, 2020

7 Min Read

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By: Calla Li (PO ’22) May 6, 2020; marks the 138-year-anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the only piece of immigration legislation in American history to exclude an ethnic group by name. At the time, economic anxiety ran high due to the increasingly fierce competition to find gold in Northern California, causing rising animosity against Chinese laborers for taking White American...

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Xenophobia: An American tradition amidst the coronavirus

May 4, 2020

6 Min Read

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By Aditya Bhalla (PO ’23) Over the last few months, the coronavirus pandemic has caused a marked increase in racially motivated attacks and xenophobic sentiment, particularly towards the Asian-American community. As early as January, when the threat of the virus began to seep into media outlets around the world, anti-Asian rhetoric began filtering into the global psyche. French newspaper...

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Why the “Gay Panic Defense” is Discriminatory

March 24, 2020

5 Min Read

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Kelsey Braford (PO ’22) Many people are unaware of the existence of a discriminatory legal strategy dubbed the “gay panic defense.” Uncommon and widely criticized, it is a tactic that asks “a jury to find that a victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity/expression is to blame for a defendant’s violent reaction,” according to the LGBT Bar Association. It is used to strengthen a defense...

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Echoes of Reconstruction’s Demise

January 23, 2020

8 Min Read

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Rowan McGarry-Williams (PO ’21) It is comforting to think of progress as linear and inevitable, with the present a constant process of improvement over the past. However, the truth of history is that it is full of contingencies and reversals, fits and starts. In the United States, the clearest example of history’s impartiality towards progress is that of Reconstruction’s demise in the late 1800s...

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Government Surveillance: The Utilitarian Cost of Security Theater

December 3, 2019

6 Min Read

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By Izzy Davis (PO ’22) Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who infamously leaked classified information about the NSA’s illegal spying tactics in 2013, outlined the utilitarian perspective in regards to government surveillance: “We’d do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn’t defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have...

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Does the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protect from discrimination based on sexual orientation?

November 11, 2019

6 Min Read

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Conducted by Rafael Santa Maria (PO ’20) It may come as a surprise to advocates and allies of the LGBTQ+ community that this question has not been resolved yet. Despite the considerable progress made in the continuing battle for equality over the last few decades, it seems hard to believe that sexual orientation remains unrecognized as a protected class at the federal level. As an unprotected...

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OPINION: A Recent Rule Change to Title X Will Harm Patients

October 3, 2019

7 Min Read

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Maggie Bynum (SC ‘20) On March 3rd, 2019 the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) submitted a final rule to the National Register that will have a detrimental effect on reproductive health services in the United States. The rule outlines several changes to Title X, also known as the Family Planning Program.  Since its establishment in 1970, Title X has been the only source of...

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Have You Any Decency? Bucklew v. Precythe and the Future of the Eighth Amendment

April 25, 2019

12 Min Read

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By Alex Simard (PO’22) Content Warning: This article, as it centers on the death penalty and a man condemned to it, contains depictions of gun violence, murder, and domestic and sexual violence, including rape. It also contains graphic depictions of petitioner’s medical condition and brief depictions of 17th- and 18th-century modes of punishment, including torture. In 1944, Albert Trop, a...

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