Speaker Series: 2024-26 Doctoral Fellows
To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.
Joshua Aiken: “The Public’s Safety: Gun Control, Career Criminals, and the Statutory Revolution in Arms (1961-1995)”
This talk examines the relationship between notions of public safety, new firearms regulations, and mass criminalization in the United States from 1961-1995. Synthesizing four case studies, I argue that the racialization of space, pathologizing of crime, and development of a new “gun rights” agenda shaped how Americans experienced an increasingly armed society. Based on archival research, I attend to how legal frameworks, political approaches, and influential actions of everyday people can index historical changes over time. First, I consider the drafting of the Gun Control Act of 1968, the first major federal firearms regulation since the 1930s. Second, I examine a network of armed black resistance, namely through the actions of the original Black Panther Party, that revealed the racial state’s role in structuring public space, defining who constitutes the public, and determining what it means to be safe. Third, I explore how a failed constitutional challenge of Washington D.C.’s 1975 firearm regulation law, led key figures in the “gun rights” movement to a statutes-first approach. Fourth, I foreground a suite of federal laws passed from 1984-1986—including the Armed Career Criminal Act—that criminalized people and pathologized blackness. By the 1990s, gun rights ideologues successfully used these laws to advance their distinct agenda through conventional legal arguments, favorable federal courts and bipartisan responses to “violent crime.” In conclusion, I consider how these events might challenge prevailing narratives regarding the relationship between race, gun laws, and American social life.
Joshua Aiken is the ABF Doctoral Fellow in Law & Inequality. He is currently a J.D./Ph.D. Candidate at Yale University (History and African American Studies).
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Ewurama Okai: “In Search of Equal Protection Futures: How Imagined Futures Shape Racial Justice Litigation in the Progressive Legal Movement”
Understanding what makes legal movements successful has long been a focus of social-scientific study. Existing literature identifies factors such as the available legal ‘stock,’ framing of social wrongs, resource access, and movement coherence. Recently, scholarship on constitutional change and conservative legal movements has highlighted an important yet underexplored factor: imagined futures. While scholars acknowledge that these futures shape legal landscapes, they often limit their analysis to predefined scenarios or trace current conditions back to pre-determined visions. This approach leaves a gap in understanding how legal movements actively construct, interpret, and legitimize these imagined futures, particularly in adverse litigation contexts. Ewurama Okai’s research addresses this gap by investigating how imagined futures influence litigation within the progressive legal movement, focusing on racial justice issues brought under the equal protection clause. Through in-depth interviews with civil rights lawyers and qualitative content analysis of legal scholarship, Okai examines the doctrinal and interpretive possibilities envisioned for the equal protection clause. Her work aims to illuminate how imagined futures serve as a mechanism in shaping legal movements, influenced by legal education and scholarship, and how they reflect the progressive movement’s potential to advance racial justice.
Ewurama Okai is the ABF/AccessLex Institute Doctoral Fellow in Legal & Higher Education. She is a J.D./Ph.D. Candidate at Northwestern University (Sociology).