Race and the Law

Past efforts to “reimagine” national security in legal scholarship have largely avoided systematic engagement with the foundational assumptions and presumptions of the field. Challenging and critiquing those assumptions is, however, necessary to producing scholarly work that reimagines, rather than reproduces, status quo approaches to U.S. national security. This Article presents an agenda for reimagining national security through legal scholarship, which is premised on the view that challenging the national security status quo should be part of those efforts. In doing so, this agenda explores seven premises central to how U.S. national security is currently conceived of, practiced, and implemented. Moving beyond the law, the agenda presented in this Article examines the structural power dynamics and political economy of national security, demonstrating why these issues are important to reimagining and transforming how we approach the discipline of national security as legal academics and advocates.

National security and cultural heritage protection are connected in several ways. This Article explores how the real or perceived relationship between threatened cultural heritage and national security developed, how this relationship has changed U.S. foreign and cultural policy, and whether these changes are for the better or the worse from a broader policy perspective, particularly with respect to the goal of cultural heritage preservation.

This Article advances both legal and sociocultural explanations for the near absence of treason charges in the “war on terror” and the implications for addressing political violence. On the legal side, terrorism charges have replaced treason because they enable the government to do almost everything that it once sought to accomplish with treason charges: they impose extraordinary stigma, they reach speech and advocacy, and they trigger severe penalties. At the same time, terrorism charges face fewer limits than treason charges: they criminalize conduct far removed from actual plots, they require a lesser showing of intent, and they dispense with treason’s constitutionally imposed evidentiary restriction. This Article argues that reimagining national security requires vigilance regarding the shape-shifting nature of responses to political violence.

The balance of this Essay describes and analyzes originalism from a different point of view, centering the experiences of Black women and girls. It then argues that the Court's selective canvassing of history exposes a serious fault in the legitimacy, integrity, and character of not only Dobbs, but also its supposed application of originalist methodology.

Black male bodies have long been the subject of special attention from the state. This essay focuses on two government interventions in Black masculinity, dating from the 1960s, and their continuing consequences—including for the criminal justice system, and race and gender justice.