Moderator:
Doug Rendleman, Washington and Lee University
Speakers:
- Roy Lavon Brooks, University of San Diego
- Hanoch Dagan, Professor, Tel Aviv University Law School,
Tel Aviv, Israel
- Emily L. Sherwin, University of San Diego
Commentators:- Robin Morris Collin, University of Oregon
- Peter Linzer, University of Houston
- Carol M. Swain, Vanderbilt University
A recent lawsuit claims reparations for slavery in the language of unjust enrichment and restitution. For Remedies teachers and other interested law professors, the assertion that corporations were unjustly enriched at the expense of slaves' descendents may be a novel one. And the plaintiff's claim that the corporations should provide restitution may be either innovative or unusual.
Examining slavery reparations via restitution requires law professors to look outside their narrow specialties and also to examine how the claim matches up with the technical rules of restitution. To survey these issues we have assembled an excellent panel.
Professor Brooks, the editor of the 1999 book, When Sorry Isn't Enough: The Controversy Over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, teaches a course on reparations. Professor Brooks will help us with an overview of the movement for reparations, focusing on two approaches, legislation and litigation.
Many Remedies instructors are familiar with Professor Dagan's groundbreaking Unjust Enrichment: A Study of Private Law and Public Values, published in 1997. Professor Dagan will discuss how/if old wrongs, such as slavery, fit into the normative underpinnings of the unjust enrichment doctrines.
Professor Sherwin, whose 2001 work, The Rule of Rules: Morality, Rules and the Dilemmas of Law (with Larry Alexander) places her among the best known of contemporary positivists, has also published major articles on restitution. Her latest is "Restitution and Equity: An Analysis of the Principle of Unjust Enrichment" in the Texas Law Review in 2001. Professor Sherwin will discuss reparations' place in (or perhaps not in) the doctrinal matrix of developing United States restitution law.
Three commentators will address our speakers' remarks. Professor Collin's most recent work has been on environmental racism and sustainability. Professor Linzer's Rough Justice: A Theory of Restitution and Reliance, Contracts and Torts, presents a fluid view of doctrinal categories applied to situations "that don't fit into a neat system of rules but nonetheless call out for a fair and just solution." Because of her 2002 book, The New White Nationalism in America: Its Threat to Integration, Professor Swain's views on reparations were widely quoted in the summer of 2002.
Business Meeting at Program Conclusion
January 2-5, 2003