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In the article, the author proposes the creation of the Commission on Recognition and Reconstruction (CRR) through an executive order to address the challenges to racial justice in the U.S. Other topics include how the CRR could affect social and economic relations in the country, including reparations and other forms of compensation and redress, and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a model mechanism for the CRR.

The article discusses the possibility of restitution-based reparations for systemic racial wealth disparities in the U.S. Topics explored include the social contract breaches which may be linked to racial allocation of resources particularly during a crisis, the racial disparities in terms of health and wealth observed during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and the private law remedy to actions that contributed to the racial wealth gap.

But the shared obligation of the users of the commons to bring into existence a group agent capable of assuming responsibility for its well-being pre-exists the group itself and the obligations it acquires as an agent.[6] And the obligation to ensure the existence and persistence of a group agent capable of fulfilling obligations can survive the demise of a particular group agent, requiring its former members (perhaps along with others) to construct another group agent or to transfer the obligation that belonged to the former group agent to another of which they are now members. I will first explain why the commonly used analogy between natural persons and group agents causes difficulties when agents and their responsibilities are intergenerational. They may also require members to re-organize their group and their roles in it so that it can carry out duties that it ought to accept (42).[5] Membership obligations, as Collins conceives them, are duties of members in respect to the group agents to which they belong. Since a newly created group agent is a different agent from previous group agents, we can explain, with the help of the natural person analogy, why it bears no responsibility, legal or moral, for what previously existing group agents have decided or done. [Extracted from the article]

Conventional arguments understand history-related disputes between Japan and China to be a result of identity politics that revolve around very different interpretations over the historical legacies of WW II. This article challenges these conventional arguments. It shows that history-related disputes between the two sides have less to do with identity politics than with efforts by the Chinese government to deflect domestic discontent over its 1972 decision to waive reparations claims against Japan in return for the Japanese government apologizing for Japan's actions in WW II. But this tacit arrangement, "the 1972 System," began to fall apart in the early 1980s. This is because it failed to establish a clear institutional framework that could provide historical justice to Chinese citizens for the actions of the Japanese military in China, embroiled the Chinese government in a chronic legitimacy deficit that can only be mitigated if Japan keeps apologizing, and perpetuated Japan's victimizer identity, which the Japanese public has found emotionally unacceptable. The result is the transformation of what originally was a domestic controversy in China over historical justice into a diplomatic dispute with Japan over historical understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When discussing the issue of climate reparations, for example, Táíwò suggests that the connection between the climate crisis and trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism "is largely contingent" (p158). Calls for reparations for slavery and colonialism have become insistent in recent years. While sympathetic to the general contours of Táíwò's philosophical argument for reparations, I suggest that he fails to account adequately for the I global i histories of colonialism and slavery. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the theories of tort law put forward by Professors, John Goldberg, Benjamin Zipursky, and Catherine Sharkey. It argues that tort law operates on two levels: the private side focused on wrongs and redress, and the public side concerned with preventing harms and regulatory needs of society. It further emphasize that both aspects are crucial to understand tort law fully.

In Recognizing Wrongs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2020), John C. P. Goldberg and Benjamin C. Zipursky develop and defend "civil recourse theory," according to which torts are injurious wrongs that give rise to a claim of redress. My discussion extends beyond tort law to explore the ethics of reparations for historical injustice, in particular, regarding the case of Black Americans. I begin by relating the notion of wrongdoing that figures prominently in civil recourse theory to morality. Then I explore the idea that the relevant sort of wrongdoing is relational and injurious, and how this claim applies to historical injustice. Finally, I take up the idea that a redress claim is one a victim is entitled but not obligated to make in order to think about whether the discretionary nature of tort action is empowering to persons who have been wrongfully injured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the dual responsibility of state authorities to repair past abuses and guarantee economic and social rights after episodes of widespread violence according to the jurisprudence of African human rights bodies. Two alternative frameworks underlying the practice of African bodies and human rights law more broadly are discussed. The first portrays the state as a threat to the individual, responsible for redressing the consequences of violations in breach of duties to respect and protect rights. The second understands the state as an active guarantor of rights in the aftermath of widespread abuses, responsible for improving the well-being of people affected and not affected by violence. In light of the possibilities and limitations that arise from both approaches in the African context, the article advocates the second. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demands calling for reparations for historical injustices—injustices whose original victims and perpetrators are now dead—constitute an important component of contemporary struggles for social and transnational justice. Reparations are only one way in which the unjust past is salient in contemporary politics. In my book, Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress, I put forward a framework to conceptualise the normative significance of the unjust past. In this article, I will engage with the insightful comments and try to address the concerns of the contributors to the symposium on my book. I will discuss (i) whether and in what sense my framework incorporates past-regarding duties, (ii) how it is different from causal interpretations of the relationship between past and present injustice, (iii) whether it can carve out a greater place for blame in our thinking about responsibility for (historical) structural injustice, (iv) whether such a responsibility needs to hinge upon an account of solidarity, and (v) how de-temporalising injustice can cast new light on immigration politics. In particular, I will stress and further clarify the importance that the notion of 'structural debt', which my book develops to reflect on historical responsibility, can play in thinking about what is owed to an unjust history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alasia Nuti's recent book Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress puts forward a compelling vision of contemporary duties to redress past wrongdoing, grounded in the idea of "historical-structural-injustice", constituted by the "structural reproduction of an unjust history over time and through changes". Such an approach promises to transcend the familiar scholarly divide between "backward-looking" and "forward-looking" models, and allow for a reparative approach that focuses specifically on those past wrongs that impact the present, while retaining a significant focus on the historical. While Nuti's work is perhaps the most sophisticated treatment of structural injustice to date, this paper argues that an exclusive concentration on historical-structural-injustices neglects some aspects and some acts of wrongdoing that call out for present-day redress. What is needed, therefore, is a pluralist theory that can accept the pressing force in the present of historical-structural-injustices, whilst also making room for past-regarding duties that either do not fit, or are not best conceptualized in terms of, this approach, without being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of historic injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Nuti's accounts of structural injustice and historical injustice in the light of a political dilemma that confronted Young's work on structure injustice. The dilemma emerges from a paradox that can be stated simply: justly addressing structural injustice would require that those subject to structural injustice enjoy the kind of privileged position of decision-making power that their being subject to structural injustice denies them. The dilemma thus concerns how to justly address structural injustice. I argue that Nuti's account is currently unable to provide an adequate theorization of how to address this dilemma because it lacks an account of political solidarity, but also that her account provides important resources for dissolving a dispute between two competing theories of solidarity in a way that facilitates the articulation of an account of political solidarity that is adequate to addressing the political dilemma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some claim that a commitment to egalitarianism is in tension with support for reparations for historical injustice. This tension appears to arise insofar as egalitarianism is a forward-looking approach to justice: an approach that tells us what kind of world we should aim to build, where that world is not defined in terms of the decisions or actions of previous generations. Some have claimed that egalitarianism thereby renders reparations redundant (what I will refer to as the redundancy thesis). One popular option for egalitarians who aim to reject this thesis is to insist that historical injustices demand reparations when they have caused present-day inequality (the causal approach). A promising alternative, skilfully defended by Alasia Nuti in Injustice and the Reproduction of History, is to argue that historical injustices stand in need of repair when they are reproduced into the present-day, such that some past and present injustices are in fact the same injustice. In this paper, I assess these egalitarian responses to the redundancy thesis. I find that Nuti's account is equipped to reject this thesis, but that the same lines of reply can be adopted by proponents of the causal approach. I suggest that both approaches therefore be viewed as potential ways to conceptualise the relationship between historical injustice and our present normative circumstances; and that in choosing between them, we should understand ourselves to be engaged in an ameliorative project – a project that is guided by, and designed to help us to achieve, our legitimate purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article forwards an analysis about Israel/Palestine in relation to race in global context, through the case study of the UN World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) process (2001–2011). Although the WCAR has been widely framed as "antisemitic" we demonstrate this interpretation is unfounded, through highlighting legitimate claims for Palestinian human rights and other oppressed and racialized groups – in particular African-descended peoples seeking reparations for Atlantic slavery. The argument draws on 25 interviews undertaken with civil society delegates from Canada, the US and Israel/Palestine who participated in the WCAR process. Extending the work of Charles Mills we conceptualize an Israel/Palestine Racial Contract, and argue the WCAR process can serve as a microcosm to demonstrate suppression of Palestinian claims, the resistance to this suppression, as well as the potential of civil society alliances that identify Palestinian claims in a consistent and solidaristic anti-racist framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Winthrop Bell's analysis of the idea of Canada, a pioneering account of Canadian philosophy written during World War I, Canada's essence involves intercultural interpretation. In terms familiar to the phenomenology and pragmatism in which he was trained, Bell shows how Canada, by creating a new culture founded upon intercultural respect, could replace monocultural imperialism and materialism with something better: a culturally diverse nation, serving wisdom from a unique conversation among Canadian peoples, but that is for all people. In this article, we describe Bell's philosophy of Canada as interpretation and further apply it to the idea, practice, and end of reparations to Canada's Indigenous peoples as an expression of loyalty to Canadian philosophy today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on racially marginalized communities has again raised the issue of what justice in healthcare looks like. Indeed, it is impossible to analyze the meaning of the word justice in the medical context without first discussing the central role of racism in the American scientific and healthcare systems. In summary, we argue that physicians and scientists were the architects and imagination of the racial taxonomy and oppressive machinations upon which this country was founded. This oppressive racial taxonomy reinforced and outlined the myth of biological superiority, which laid the foundation for the political, economic, and systemic power of Whiteness. Therefore, in order to achieve universal racial justice, the nation must first address science and medicine's historical role in scaffolding the structure of racism we bear witness of today. To achieve this objective, one of the first steps, we believe, is for there to be health reparations. More specifically, health reparations should be a central part of establishing racial justice in the United States and not relegated to a secondary status. While other scholars have focused on ways to alleviate healthcare inequities, few have addressed the need for health reparations and the forms they might take. This piece offers the ethical grounds for health reparations and various justice-focused solutions.

Over the last two decades, legal scholarship has been catching up with the more than century old calls by black Americans for reparations. Tax scholar Boris Bittker (in)famously launched the viability of black reparations into legal scholarship with his now classic monograph, The Case for Black Reparations. However, it would take more than twenty years for mainstream legal scholarship to take up the robust and wide-ranging set of questions raised by the possibility of reparations for American slavery. In the late 1990s private law scholars leapt into the debate, discussing unjust enrichment and torts-based models of black reparations. While these scholars made a variety of distinct arguments, collectively, their model rested on the contention that America had wrongfully expropriated the labor of generations of enslaved African Americans and the result had been systemic unjust enrichment, or a species of mass torts. Grounded in various conceptions of corrective justice, these models conceive black reparations as a set of claims that would be litigated through the courts. Over the ensuing two decades, the private law model has become somewhat of an outlier in reparations discussions, largely set aside in favor of broader, more explicitly political approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some normative theorists believe that there is a principled moral reason not to retain benefits realized by injustice or wrongdoing. However, critics have argued that this idea is implausible. One purported problem is that the idea lacks an obvious rationale and that attempts to provide one have been unconvincing. This paper articulates and defends the idea that the principled reason in question has an expressive quality: it gets its reason-giving force from the symbolic aptness of such an act as an expressive response to wrongdoing. The paper thus argues that at least in a certain subset of cases, renouncing benefits realized by injustice amounts to a powerful and uniquely apt expression of protest against the disrespect for the victim that is implied by the wrongdoer's actions. The paper shows how this idea can inform the question of reparations for slavery and its aftermath in the United States. Lastly it develops an important objection to the argument presented and gives an account of how this objection can be met. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her postface Françoise Vergès reminds us that "Césaire is not without his flaws" to introduce her own analysis of the 1946 law of departmentalization (p. 48). Aimé Césaire, I Resolutely Black: Conversations with Françoise Vergès i , trans. Matthew B. Smith, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2020, 120 pages, ISBN 9781509537143. The book begins with a translation note by Smith, followed by Vergès's original preface to the 2005 French-language version of the book that contextualizes the conversations that are central to the book. Vergès's postface demonstrates the conflict between Césaire's radical influence in Afro-diasporic and anticolonial literatures and social movements and the ways that he has been recently reclaimed and positioned in the French canon and pantheon (pp. 45-50). [Extracted from the article]

In southeastern Louisiana, many plantations still stand along River Road, a stretch of the route lining the Mississippi River that connects the former slave ports and presentday cities of New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Black communities along River Road have long experienced these plantations as sites of racialized harm. This Note constructs a normative framework for local reparations that centers these descendant communities and explores the use of eminent domain to break up the landholdings of current plantation owners to make those lands available to descendants. Beyond the descendants in Louisiana's river parishes, this Note is aimed at inspiring a discussion about reparations in other local contexts--across institutions, cities, and states--that are also sites of historical and continued subjugation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an interview with speakers such as Anthony Bateza, Maria Erling, and Linda Thomas. Topics include thoughts on the defunding churchwide movement for raising funds for reparations; adding to the process of review by police and communities dealing with killings of black persons; and reinforcing the patterns of whiteness and racism.

From Harry Truman to Barack Obama, both Republican and Democratic presidents have recognized the injustice suffered by Japanese Americans incarcerated under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, offering apologies and redress, including the 1988 Civil Liberties Act signed by Ronald Reagan. This article contextualizes the vast gulf between Donald Trump's use of this contested history and all postwar presidents before him and finds that Trump embodies a changed Republican Party that refuses to honor and learn from the injustice of Japanese American incarceration during the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]