Kenyamarie Mahone (PO ’23) The final Presidential debate on Thursday at Nashville’s Belmont University brought unexpected levels of professionalism from both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. After the chaos that unfolded during the first debate, it was unclear whether this one would offer any substance on either candidates’ platforms or policy goals. Fortunately, with the…
By Faven Brook (Occidental ’21) Guest Contributor The police are killing Black women. However, while everyone seems to remember cases of Black men killed by the police, everyone seems to forget the names and stories of Black women, especially Black trans women, who face the same fate. Unfortunately, that is nothing new. Breonna Taylor’s unjust…
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…
Rya Jetha (PO ’23) 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…
By: Manisha Bhau (National Law University Delhi ’21) Guest Contributor Introduction: Preventive detention simply refers to the detention of a person without trial. It is based solely on the suspicion of the executive, as distinguished from punitive detention which is based on a judicial process and trial. It was through colonial hands that preventive detention…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…