Cute Nude Women Being Fucked Vidoes
Melva Simons
- So I'm Lawrence Douglas, I teach in the Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought. And I'm one of the instructors in the progress question mark, first year seminar cluster. And this evening's event is the final in our falls Point/Counterpoint Series which has been organized by Professor Nishi Shah, Professor Alexander George, and by myself. And it's been made possible by a very generous gift from the members of the 50th reunion, class of 1970, and we'd also like to thank everyone who's helped put these events together, especially the Office of Communication Conferences and Special Events at Amherst and the provost office. The Point/Counterpoint Series, name notwithstanding, is not meant really as a forum for scoring points in an adversarial debate, rather, the idea is to provide the Amherst community with a series of open conversations about topics of importance and controversy, and hopefully to model the kind of robust critical inquiry that lies at the heart of liberal arts education. In the past, we've brought to Amherst the likes of Harvard's historian, Jill Lepore, New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, Yale Law professor, Stephen Carter, Pulitzer Prize winning author, Elizabeth Kolbert, and this semester, as many of you know already, we've been pleased to host Anthony Appiah, Adolph Reed and Geoffrey Stone, and now tonight we're delighted and honored to have Melissa Murray on campus for our concluding conversation. Professor Murray comes to us from NYU Law School where she's the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law. Educated at UVA and at the Yale Law School, Professor Murray clerked for Sonia Sotomayor, then on the second circuit, and before joining the faculty at NYU, Professor Murray taught at Berkeley Law School where she also acted for time as the interim dean of the school. She's won numerous Award, she has published widely in both legal journals and newspapers, she's made dozens of prominent media appearances, and is now widely regarded as one of the nation's most preeminent constitutional scholars, particularly in matters of reproductive rights and in the legal regulation of intimate associations. We'd be delighted to have Professor Murray with us at Amherst at any time, but we're particularly lucky to have her here tonight as tomorrow as many of you know, the Supreme Court will be hearing the oral arguments in the Dobbs v. Jackson's Women's Health Organization case, at issue being the constitutionality of a Mississippi statute that bans abortions after 15 weeks except in cases of medical emergencies and fetal abnormalities. So, with that said, please join me in welcoming Professor Murray to Amherst. And let me just mention at the outset that we will probably conduct a conversation for about 45 to 50 minutes and then hopefully open the floor up to questions. So we do hope that you will have be thinking about questions as you're listening to our exchange.
- Thank you for having me, it's really a delight to be here. This is my first time at Amherst, and I can say, I can tell it's a lot better than Williams. I haven't been to Williams either, but I've heard things. So thank you for having me and it's really been a delight to be with you all today with your faculty and of course with the students who have been incredibly incisive and fantastic so thank you.
- Yeah, well, it's a pleasure having you here. And just as a preliminary question is something I kind of often like asking speakers. So we have a number of students, many of them are first years, I wonder if you can kind of recall what it was like being a first semester student at UVA, and whether your career path was clear to you at the outset, did you know you're going to be a prominent scholar of constitutional law as an undergraduate?
- So my undergraduate experience began in 1993, obviously it's very different from how you all are starting college, I did not wear a mask. I have to say like right now that the whole act of being without a mask feels both dangerously thrilling and illicit, and also weird, I think we've been behind mask for so long. So that was one very big difference. I mean, we did not begin college in the midst of a global public health crisis. Although we did begin college in the middle of a massive economic downturn that made the prospect of a liberal arts education seem quite dicey. And I remember I went to college intending to be a history major. And in my very small town in Florida that was sort of like, why would anyone want to study history, especially when the prospect of a job seems so uncertain at the end of it, and why didn't I want to do something more practical like economics or business. And one of the things I learned and very much appreciated from my time at UVA, and UVA is a very different university or educational setting than Amherst, but it was one that prized a liberal arts education, and more importantly, the mission of undergraduate teaching even as a research university. And I had such fantastic instructors and such incredible mentorship and learned so much about what it meant to be a citizen in an intellectual community that by the time I graduated in 1997, the economic outlook was much rosier, people were hiring history majors to do all kinds of things including business, that was quite a shock to wind up at a corporation with a history degree. But what I learned there was just so fundamental and I think it's the bedrock of what you all are learning here at Amherst and in a program like this one, how to exchange ideas, how to be thoughtful listeners to other people, even when they don't share your perspectives, how to learn from each other in a way that is both thoughtful and incisive and probing and respectful. And I think more than anything, that is so necessary right now.
- So maybe turning matters in a legal direction. I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about issues about the racist origins of some laws and about the kind of the residue of history in these laws and to kind of maybe think about, why is it of relevance that a law has its origins in let's say a racist history if for example now it is applied in a neutral fashion? I mean, should we be concerned with the background of these laws, and if you can maybe even provide examples of something in which that does play a role?
- So this I think is a question that has occupied me over the last year, in part because I think there is no law in the United States that is completely divorced from a racist history. We are a country I think that has struggled with the stain of slavery, with the taint of segregation, and with the residue of a racist past for some time, whether we want to confront that or not, I think that has been our history. And I think you would be very hard pressed to find a law in the United States or some institution in the United States that was completely divorced from those underpinnings. And so this is not to say that every law because it has these underpinnings is per se problematic or per se unprincipled in some way, but it is to say that unless you are willing to reckon with that, you actually can't get to the bottom of whether the law is worth salvaging, whether it has been cleansed or redeemed in some way. And so there really does need to be a confrontation, a reckoning with that past in order to assess in a clear eyed way what it looks like to maintain that law or to go forward with it. And so this is something that I think the Supreme Court is currently engaged with, a project with which they are currently engaged, whether they want to acknowledge it as a project or not. In the October term, 2019, the court took up a challenge to Louisiana's rule that allowed criminal convictions to proceed from non-unanimous jury verdicts. And this was very much an outlier among the states, only two states in the nation had this that allowed for the prospect of a conviction on a non-unanimous jury verdict, Louisiana and Oregon, and Oregon had repealed its policy just a year earlier in 2018. The court in this case, Ramos v. Louisiana, had to deal with some new history that had come to light in some of the amicus briefs before the court. They had already previously entertained a challenge to the non-unanimous jury rule in the 1970s in a case called Apodaca v. Oregon. In Apodaca, the court basically split in a very fractured decision, but ultimately said it was okay for states to have non-unanimous jury verdicts that would lead to conviction, states can make their own decisions about that. They were now revisiting it in 2019 and now with this additional historical evidence that made clear that the non-unanimous jury rule had its roots in the post-Civil War reconstruction era where Louisiana in an effort to enshrine in it state's constitution protections for white supremacy, and that's what they called it, it was explicitly labeled a constitution in defense of the rights of white men, so is very explicit about what it was trying to do. But what Louisiana wanted to do vis-a-vis the jury now that the jury could contain newly freed African Americans was to dilute the power on the juries of African Americans by basically making it possible to secure a conviction even if those African American jurors would not consent to the verdict. So you could have a verdict proceed in the absence of unanimity. And so the court in the Ramos case is presented with this flood of historical evidence that in fact this rule isn't some neutral rule, but rather is rooted in this effort to diminish the power of black jurors and to maintain the status of white jurors and indeed, white supremacy in the state. And the court wrestles with it, it is a six to three decision in which Justices Alito, Chief Justice Roberts, and Justice Kagan are dissenters, so an unusual sort of combination, Justice Kagan is on the more liberal wing of the court, Justice Alito is very much on the conservative wing, Chief Justice Roberts is in the middle, even though the middle is really to the right at this point. And then you had six other justices, including Justice Thomas, Justice Gorsuch, Justice Sotomayor, Justice Ginsburg, Justice Breyer, so very odd melange of different ideological perspectives coming out to say that because of the racist roots that the Apodaca court in 1973 had not considered, the court now was in a better position to understand the full history of the non-unanimous jury rule, and indeed, to reconsider it, reconsider Apodaca and overrule ultimately. What was left out of this discussion was that in the intervening period between the postbellum constitution of Louisiana and 2019, was 1978, I believe, where Louisiana takes up the question of the non-unanimous jury rule, recognizes that it has some problematic roots, but says it's going to go forward and maintain it anyway because of what is essentially a non-racial racially-neutral policy rationale. And the court doesn't really wrestle with that. What happens if you have this kind of intervening moment where race is sort of swept away? And I think from the Ramos decision, you might get the impression that race is indelible, race is indelible, and maybe it can't ever be washed away. And there was a similar kind of question in another case from that term, this one was not about race per se, but about anti-Catholic fervor. So this case was called Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, and it was a question about whether states could provide assistance to secular schools, and if they did, did they also have to provide it to non-secular religious schools. And in Montana and a number of other western states, for a very long time, there have been what are known as Blaine amendments. And these amendments basically write into the state constitution a prohibition on the use of public funds for religious purposes, including religious schooling. And those Blaine amendments are rooted in anti-Catholic fervor from the early 1900s. And so in oral arguments, Justice Kavanaugh, who is a very staunch Catholic, raised this, like aren't these Blaine amendments all rooted in anti-Catholic fervor and that has to be wrestled with. What did not come up was the fact that in the 1980s, Montana and many other states, again, reiterate their commitment to secular public fund usage and not allowing public funds to be used for religious purposes, but do not link it in any way to anti-Catholic fervor, and in fact, it is done with the blessing of Catholics in the states. And so you have this kind of intervening moment, and the question is, can it supersede what has come before to sort of wipe the slate clean. And the Espinoza case is not as clear about this as the Ramos case is, but I think you get the impression from the court that racist roots or nativist roots are something that you can't ever overcome. And if that's the case, that is I think, deeply, deeply problematic for thinking about what we do as a society when we do confront the residue of our past because I think it is the case that most of our laws are going to have some kind of problematic backstory. There's all of this discussion now about the police force and being linked to the slave patrols of the antebellum period. The second amendment according to Professor Carol Anderson at Emory University has its roots not in the enfranchising of citizens with the right to bear arms, but rather with emboldening militias to put down slave rebellions. So there's just so much in our country that is inextricably intertwined with the residue of slavery and race that unless we can figure out what it means to scrub that clean, we're going to have few laws that aren't problematic. So that's a very long winded way to say that.
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