A Domestic Right of Return?: Race, Rights, and Residency in New Orleans in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

This article begins with a critical account of what occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This critique serves as the backdrop for a discussion of whether there are international laws or norms that give poor, black Katrina victims the right to return to and resettle in New Orleans. In framing this discussion, this article first briefly explores some of the housing deprivations suffered by Katrina survivors that have led to widespread displacement and dispossession. The article then discusses two of the chief barriers to the return of poor blacks to New Orleans: the broad perception of a race-crime nexus and the general effect of the imposition of outsider status on poor, black people by dominant groups. Finally, the article explores the international law concept of the right of return and its expression as a domestic, internal norm via standards addressing internally displaced persons, and considers how such a domestic right of return might be applicable to the Katrina victims

(Un)Common Law and the Female Body

A dissonance frequently exists between explicit feminist approaches to law and the realities of a common law system that has often ignored and even at times exacerbated women’s legal disabilities. In The Common Law Inside the Fe-male Body, Anita Bernstein mounts a challenge to this story of division. There is, and has long been, she asserts, a substantial interrelation between the common law and feminist jurisprudential approaches to law. But Bernstein’s central argument, far from disrupting broad understandings of the common law, is in keeping with a claim that other legal scholars have long asserted: decisions according to precedent, and other aspects of the common law ideal, do not demand only certain narrow out-comes, or the expression of outcomes in specific language. Bernstein’s work suggests that the common law has always offered liberatory potential for women, and this potential grows from longstanding common jurisprudential attributes and understandings, not new or uncommon attributes

Other Spaces in Legal Pedagogy

There is an increasing focus upon the material and metaphoric spatial dimensions of various academic disciplines, including law. This essay considers the spatial dimensions of legal pedagogy, focusing on Critical Race Theory (CRT). The essay first explains the critical program in law and how CRT grows out of it. The essay then suggests that the critical program, and especially CRT, is as much a human geographic or spatial construct as it is a social, political or historic one, and briefly describes the nature of human geography and legal geography. It next considers how metaphors for understanding CRT\u27s position in legal pedagogy are found in some of Foucault\u27s work on geography. In Des Espaces Autres ( Other Spaces ), Foucault argues that there are three distinct social spaces in society: real spaces, utopias, and heterotopias. What unites them, Foucault suggests, is a space that includes elements of all of these spaces, a space that he calls the mirror. Applying this frame, this essay posits that CRT, both the explicit courses on the topic and the discipline itself, should be re-mapped , that is, barriers to its inclusion in the broader legal pedagogy should be eliminated. In this way, CRT can function as a Foucauldian mirror rather than a heterotopia in legal pedagogy

A Critical Legal Rhetoric Approach to In Re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation

In this paper I apply critical legal rhetoric to the judicial opinion rendered in response to the Defendants\u27 Motion to Dismiss Plaintiffs\u27 Second Amended and Consolidated Complaint in \u27In Re African American Slave Descendants\u27, a case concerning the efforts of a group of modern-day descendants of enslaved African-Americans to obtain redress for the harms of slavery. The chief methodological framework for performing critical legal rhetorical analysis comes from the work of Marouf Hasian, Jr. particularly his schema for analysis which he calls substantive units in critical legal rhetoric. Critical legal rhetoric is a potent tool for exposing the way in which the public ideologies of society and the private ideologies of jurists, legislators and other legal actors are manifested in legal and law-like pronouncements. After introducing this case, I briefly trace the evolution and meaning of the term rhetoric and examine the relationship between rhetoric and law. I next explore the connection between rhetoric and ideology, which is crystallized in the form of the ideograph and its use as a tool of what is known as critical rhetoric. Finally, I show how critical legal rhetoric is achieved by bringing critical rhetoric to law, and thereafter apply critical legal rhetoric to the case of \u27In Re African American Slave Descendants\u27

It\u27s About Bloody Time and Space

Time frames relationships of power, especially in the context of law. One of the clearest ways in which time is implicated in both law and society is via discourses about women’s biological functions. This Article is an introduction to a larger project that analyzes legal discourses regarding a crucial aspect of women’s calendrically-associated biological functions: women’s menstrual periods. Over the course of the project, I explore legal discourses about menstruation through the notion of what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin calls “chronotopes”—a connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships. Temporality, Bakhtin argues, is closely associated with certain paradigmatic spaces, and the combination of shapes, ideologies, and identities. Legal discussions of women’s menstrual bleeding are key sites for the discursive creation and maintenance of certain ideologies of womanhood. These discussions appear in a wide variety of contexts and in ways that either explicitly reference or implicitly index ideologies of female identity. All are characterized by efforts to mark them as narratives linked to other temporally prior or future moments, and are often indices of chronologically or spatially related stigmas and taboos. While legal discourses of menstruation do not give a complete account of the category “woman,” they provide cogent examples of how womanhood ideologies are constructed in legal contexts