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THREAD: Law schools play a central role in the normalization of mass human caging. A few thoughts: https://twitter.com/YaleLJournal/status/1350080294934732800
Yesterday, the Yale Law Journal celebrated the greatest human caging force in modern world history. The DOJ is the leading prosecutor in a society that cages Black people at six times the rate of South Africa at the height of Apartheid. No critical voice was allowed. (2)
Holder pioneered the pretextual stop so that cops can stop Black people because they are Black so long as they give a different reason. Holder also authorized one of the most grotesque mass injustices you've never heard of: (3) https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/opinion/president-obamas-department-of-injustice.html
After 39 years on the bench, a circuit judge and WWII veteran described the DOJ's efforts to keep 1000s of Black men in cages despite illegal sentences as a system of "gulags." Every person should read the dissent in Gilbert, page 102 here: (4) https://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/200912513op2.pdf
Many ordinary lawyers, young and old, worked for the DOJ in the Gilbert and Blewitt cases, resulting in tens of thousands of Black families separated because of drug sentences that all of those lawyers knew were illegal. Great atrocities are committed by nice people. (5)
There is much more to say, but a note about Dreeben: before cashing out to corporate law, he argued many of the key criminal cases for prosecutors in the sup ct for decades. It is bone chilling to think about the world we would live in if he had won them all. Authoritarian. (6)
Throughout the country, in rooms paid for by corporate law firms and named after rich white men, law schools build an architecture of indifference and rationalization for the unspeakable: racism, colonialism, exploitation, enclosure, poverty, family separation, etc... (7)
The goal of law school is to get students "thinking like a lawyer." Which, to powerful people, means getting students to stop being shocked by things that should shock them to the core. (8)
In this alternate reality, working for a gov. bureaucracy that cages people and separates them from their families, disproportionately targeting Black people and with no evidence that it confers any social benefit, is seen as "prestigious." DOJ jobs are highly coveted. (9)
This new Yale DOJ celebration is a representative example of the whitewashing of history. Here's some of the *real* history of the DOJ that a few courageous Yale students helped me publish in 2019 and that I expand on in my book Usual Cruelty: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-punishment-bureaucracy
