In this holy day season of Light, Hope, and “good will toward all humanity,” we join together to trumpet our support for the proposal put forth by Professor Doug Colbert’s University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law students in their op-ed piece in the Baltimore Sun (“Unwarranted Warrants in Baltimore,” Thursday, December 10, 2015). The idea of a “Warrant Forgiveness Program,” that allows for the one-time re-scheduling of court appearances for failure to appear may not solve all the problems of our criminal justice system, but can serve as a spark of light and hope for some who must navigate the system. This program will serve the guiding principle of “harm reduction,” rooted in our values of justice and forgiveness, and will allow offenders to meet their… Continue »
This year’s ClassCrits meeting will be at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, November 15-16. The deadline for abstracts and panel proposals is fast approaching: March 20, 2013. The call follows, and you can get more details here. Send proposals to classcrits@gmail.com. The theme of this year’s workshop–the sixth meeting of ClassCrits–is debt, austerity and the possibilities of the political. The economic crisis of 2008 was a referendum on the failures of deregulation and neoliberal ideology all over the world. Far from being a sophisticated mechanism to absorb and diffuse systemic economic risk, the crisis exposed a fragile global financial system characterized by dysfunctional imbalances of increasingly precarious and largely unregulated risk societies. In the United States, the social contract of class mobility and the “American Dream” financed with “easy”… Continue »
By Benjamin G. Davis, Associate Professor of Law, University of Toledo College of Law (Update: Other than Romney and Obama, I am avoiding using names of others here to respect their privacy. I sent a copy of this post to some of my old HBS classmates and one has pointed me to another article on Romney that, unlike the bio on his campaign site, points out that Romney was a Baker Scholar (alone an extraordinary achievement) at HBS and, while not Harvard Law Review like Obama, he graduated with honors from HLS (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/us/politics/how-harvard-shaped-mitt-romney.html?pagewanted=all). So he superfits the mold of the person my high-school classmate described who was hired at Bain. Also, have found that in the 1979-1981 period, at least one African-American worked at Bain as an consultant. He came to Bain… Continue »
By Benjamin G. Davis This commentary first appeared in the Toledo Blade on June 17, 2012. On Sept. 11, 2001, I lost a friend from high school who had gone to the World Trade Center in New York City that day to make a speech. I cannot imagine the depth of the pain suffered by the families of the 9/11 victims. I share their frustration with the delays in bringing the alleged perpetrators of the attacks to justice. Most recently, those delays have afflicted the military commission at Guantanomo Bay, Cuba, that is trying the reputed mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and four associates for war crimes. Both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations and Congress bear much of the blame for these delays. Starting just five… Continue »
Congratulations to SALT board member Doug Colbert of 