Close readers of faculty lounge may have intuited that I am returning to writing about reparations after about a half dozen years away; and in many ways I feel like Rip Van Winkle returned to his much-changed village. There's been some scholarship that looks much more deeply at issues -- especially apologies and truth commissions -- than we had a decade ago. And also scholarship is looking at the case for reparations in different areas. John Marshall Law School Professor Kim Chanbonpin's article "'We don't want dollars, just change': Narrative Counter-Terrorism Strategy, an Inclusive Model for Social Healing, and the Truth About Torture Convention," in the Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy is an example of both of those trends. Here is Chanbonpin's abstract:
In 2007, Professor Eric K. Yamamoto acknowledged that reparations theory and practice had reached a crossroads and called for a new strategic framework that reparations advocates could utilize in working to achieve redress for social and historical wrongs. This Article attempts to answer Yamamoto's call. In it, I situate my proposal for a truth commission to redress the post-9/11 torture program in a new Inclusive Model for Social Healing. In the past, reparations advocates have relied on litigationa strategic model that excludes participants other than the named partiesto obtain redress. By increasing the number of stakeholders in a reparations scheme, the Inclusive Model for Social Healing has the potential to attract more widespread support from the public and is more resilient to criticism than exclusive litigation models.
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