Indigenous European Justice and Other Indigenous Justices

All human beings are indigenous because everyone originates somewhere and is therefore indigenous there. However, the imperialist reason of Europe refuses to be confined geographically, making global claims to universalism in its knowledge-power axes even while remaining peculiar, especially from the points of view of the rest of us who wonder where to place the emphasis in Eurocentric criminal justice systems. This papyrus will remind us of the old African saying that no palm is big enough to hide the sky and so even the good qualities of European empires of law would never be enough to meet the needs of the entire world. The papyrus will emphasize what the world could learn by rejecting Eurocentrism and by bending down low to learn what others know, as Bob Marley called for. The papyrus will conclude with emphasis on lessons from Africa-centered philosophies of justice that run the risk of being lost due to the onslaught of white supremacy in jurisprudence

Black Lives Matter Otherwise All Lives Do Not Matter

Long before three African American women registered the twitter handle, #BlackLivesMatter, and started sending out tweets that helped to mobilize the spontaneous outrage against the impunity that followed the killings of unarmed black people by police officers and by vigilante in the US, there was always a rich history of resistance against criminal justice oppression by people of African descent and their allies. Apologists for white supremacist violence tend to reject the truism that Black Lives Matter by countering with All Lives Matter as if the later could hold if the former is rejected. In other words, since All Lives Matter, it follows that Black Lives Matter too and if by any logic Black Lives do not Matter, then All Lives do not Matter. The reason why it is even necessary to state what should be obvious, that Black Lives Matter, is exactly because there are still people who believe that certain lives belong to the homo sacer and are disposable to be taken without any consequences. This editorial complicates this issue by demonstrating the theory of Martin Luther King Jr. that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. By treating Black Lives as if they do not Matter, the lives of human beings everywhere are threatened and so all should rally in support of Black Lives in the interest of humanity. It is not an act of charity when others support Black Lives Matter

‘Obama’s Presidency of the Harvard Law Review Board and his US Presidency’

This paper attempts a discourse analysis of the 1990 issues of the Harvard Law Review edited by Obama as the first black President of the Law Review. Although Politico.com1 and The New York Times2 have reported on the significance of Obama’s previous presidency for his subsequent or current one, legal scholars are yet to explore what the discourse in Obama’s editorials says about his discourse as the first black president of the US. The task is made difficult because Obama did not sign any article for the Harvard Law Review during his presidency and does not dwell a lot on that period in his published memoirs. This conference presentation will therefore dwell mainly on his choice of authors for each issue of the journal, the articles that he selected along with the other editors and what they say about public issues, the article on Constitutional Physics that he was acknowledged as having helped Professor Tribe to write (Professor Tribe acknowledged his assistance and those of a few others in the paper), and possibly other unsigned articles that are attributable to him as well, starting with volume 102 when he was a freshman, continuing with volume 103 when he joined the editorial board and concluding with volume 104 which he presided over. Finally, I will try to show if there are any parallels and or contradictions between the two Obama presidencies

Editorial: Foreign Women in Prison

The imprisonment of women worldwide has always been a controversial issue. This is partly because women do not end up in prison as frequently as men and so discussions of prison populations most often focus on the experiences of male prisoners. Therefore, any attempt to focus attention on the experiences of female prisoners raises questions in the minds of most scholars as to whether the conditions of women in prison are harsh enough compared to male prisons and whether we should not be focusing on the more severe conditions in male prisons? However, the rate of increase of female prisoners far outstrips the rate of growth of male prisoners partly because of the relatively small number upon which the increases are calculated and partly because of increasing attempts by criminal justice officials to grant women equality with a vengeance. If we move beyond this numbers game and look at the incarceration of foreign women in prisons around the world, we could be in a position to consider the nature of prisons in general and the imprisonment of women in particular and question their relative essentialisms