The international community has long recognized the principle that countries should share responsibility for hosting and supporting refugees. The 2018 Global Compact on Refugees’ recognition of an “urgent need” for greater responsibility sharing across borders reflects widespread agreement that the existing distribution of responsibility among countries is unjust and unworkable. A number of low- and middle-income countries in the Global South are the primary hosts of refugees, while wealthier countries, such as Australia, many European countries, and the United States, deliberately prevent arrivals and strictly limit their acceptance of refugees. The resulting distribution of responsibility tracks the proximity to the countries from which refugees flee, and parallels neither the capacities of states to support refugees, nor the extent of their moral duties to do so.
Principles for Responsibility Sharing: Proximity, Culpability, Moral Accountability, and Capability
Responsibility sharing was a central commitment in the 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants.[1] It was also a key commitment in the preamble to the landmark 1951 Refugee Convention, in which countries of first asylum were promised “international cooperation” in return for providing refuge—though the Convention did not specify what this cooperation encompassed. And, just as the 1951 Refugee Convention failed to define what international cooperation meant, the New York Declaration was long on principles but short on specific commitments.
Lemonade: A Racial Justice Reframing of The Roberts Court’s Criminal Jurisprudence
The saying goes, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When it comes to the Supreme Court’s criminal jurisprudence and its relationship to racial (in)equity, progressive scholars often focus on the tartness of the lemons. In particular, they have studied how the Court often ignores race in its criminal decisions, a move that in turn […]
Housing the Decarcerated: Covid-19, Abolition, and the Right to Housing
The coronavirus pandemic revealed the need to advance the right to housing and abolition movements. The need for advancements in both spaces was no more painfully apparent than among the recently decarcerated population. Securing housing for the recently decarcerated is particularly difficult due to the “culture of exclusion” that has long pervaded subsidized housing policy, […]
He Said. She Said. The iPhone Said. The Use of Secret Recordings in Domestic Violence Litigation
This Note explores the use of secret recordings in domestic violence litigation. It is particularly concerned with how the criminalization of domestic violence influences the laws governing the creation and use of secret recordings in this context. Secret recordings can provide determinative evidence of domestic violence. However, a domestic violence survivor who makes a secret recording is criminally and civilly liable under California’s Anti-Eavesdropping Statute (CEPA). CEPA also renders secret recordings inadmissible as evidence.
Instruments of Evasion: The Global Dispersion of Rights-Restricting Migration Policies
This Essay traces the global spread of legal techniques that strive, as official government policy documents explain, to “push the border out” as far away from the actual territorial border as possible. This concept, enthusiastically embraced by governments worldwide, involves screening people “at the source” or origin of their journey, not the destination, and then again at every possible checkpoint along the way. My study is devoted to tracing the core countries and actors that have facilitated the adoption of such policies. I show that desired destination countries systematically learn from, and emulate, each other’s innovations in asylum-denying laws and policies. The lens of diffusion, which guides the analysis, emphasizes processes of inter-jurisdictional learning and emulation. It invites us to ask how and why “ideas travel” across jurisdictions and to trace the complex ways in which states are interacting with one another in shaping their own border control policies.
Protect and Serve
There exists a substantial body of literature on racism and brutality in policing, police reform and abolition, the militarization of the police, and the relationship of the police to the State and its citizenry. Many theories abound with respect to the relationship between the police and Black people in the United States, and most of […]
The Pathological Whiteness of Prosecution
Criminal law scholarship suffers from a Whiteness problem. While scholars appear to be increasingly concerned with the racial disparities within the criminal legal system, the scholarship’s focus tends to be on the marginalized communities and the various discriminatory outcomes they experience as a result of the system. Scholars frequently mention racial bias in the criminal […]
The Dysgenic State: Environmental Injustice and Disability-Selective Abortion Bans
Disability-selective abortion bans are laws that prohibit individuals from terminating a pregnancy because the fetus has been diagnosed with a health impairment. Many environmental toxins—to which low-income people and people of color disproportionately are exposed—are known to cause impairments in fetuses. When the fact of environmental injustice is read together with disability-selective abortion bans, we see that in one moment, the state fails to protect its citizens from toxins that impair fetal health, while in another moment, that same government compels its citizens to give birth to health-impaired fetuses. This Article identifies these two moments as the dysgenic state. Whereas the eugenic state of the early twentieth century sought to remove impairments from the population, the dysgenic state of the early twenty-first century seems committed to producing an impaired citizenry.
A Proposed Future for the Progressive Realization of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in California
As the country’s most populous state and the world’s fifth largest economy, California has often been characterized as a “nation-state,” historically independent in its governing priorities. Yet even as the state’s political identity coalesces in favor of recognizing greater social welfare provisions for its inhabitants, formal enactment in policy often falls short. This hesitancy persists […]