Summing Up the Past Two Weeks

Our mini-Symposium on George Floyd and racial violence generated an unprecedented level of interest and readership.  We offer this digest of the blog entries to aid folks who may want to draw these postings for teaching or other purposes:

We posted two official statements, one from Cornell Law School’s BLSA and another from the Washington State Supreme Court.  In addition, Amanda Lyons of the University of Minnesota provided a reflection from the human rights community there.  We also posted links to several on-line discussions of the issues.

A trio of blogs provided a perspective from Europe. Michael McEachrane, a visiting researcher at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and an expert on Afro-Nordic issues, offered a Love Letter to the Protesters. Gerard Quinn, a leading disability law scholar, looked to history for lessons on the way forward.  Morten Kjaerum, Director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, expressed the hope that events in the U.S. would encourage Europeans to confront their own racist history.

U.S.-based law professors offered their own perspectives. In Racism and the Asian American Divide, Margaret Woo reflected on the position of Asian Americans in current events.  In Dialogue Rather than Danger, Jeremiah Ho wrote about decades of racial violence and responses, calling for a move beyond superficial gestures to transformative change. Jeff Baker drew on international law norms to examine on George Floyd’s murder through a human rights lens.  Juneteenth was the subject of Justine Dunlap’s timely blog of the same date.  Margaret Drew remembered feminists’ call that men “get their feet off our necks,” a parallel to current calls for justice.   

Finally, Gay McDougall, a leading human rights activist and scholar, offered her own report and assessment of the UN’s response to George Floyd’s murder.

While our mini-Symposium is ending, this is not the end of our postings on these issues.  More is to come.